Ron Burgundy, Foucault

In preparation for Thursday’s class we read an excerpt from Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish”. This article discussed two different sets of authoritarian mechanisms that demonstrated power over a society. The first one came from an order published in the 1600’s when the plague came to a town. It involved the disciplinary programme where “power is mobilized, it makes itself everywhere present and visible, it invents new mechanisms, it separates, it immobilizes, it partitions” (99). In essence, the people in the quarantined town where the plague was found would be confined to their houses, closely monitored, counted and reduced to conditions of existence daily, as completed by the syndics of the areas. In this disciplinary program, people were watched and people also watched what was going on around them from the confinements of their home. The second disciplinary programme explained in the article was based upon the building structure known as the Panopticon, or the “house of certainty” (99). This building could serve to house any sort of individual be it inmate, patient, madman, student, etc. and functioned upon the model that the individuals were separated into individual rooms, unable to communicate with others or see anything besides one window to the outside and one window to the central tower. In the central tower was the observer who could not by seen by the confined individuals because of blinds and other means, but who could see al the confined individuals. In this way, his power lied in the fact that those confined had no inclination of when or who was watching but a notion that someone always was. The function of the Panopticon therefore was "to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power". In discussing these two types of "disciplinary programmes" I could not help but connect these two forms of authority to Althusser's RSA's and ISA's. In my opinion, it seemed that Foucault's first system of authority, that of the town suffering from the plague, functioned as Althusser's RSA's; with public authority, and aggression (violence). The Panopticon on the other hand functioned as an ISA, using the ideology that someone was always watching to discipline those confined, it was most successful when no authority figure could be seen. Although both were effective in producing the desired results, they were two extremely different methods for the disciplinary structures.