Key Arguments

• After detailing school surveillance, Foucault generalizes: ‘We have here a sketch of an institution of the “mutual” type … A relation of surveillance, defined and regulated, is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching’.
• He then characterizes the broader phenomenon: ‘Hierarchized, continuous and functional surveillance may not be one of the great technical “inventions” of the eighteenth century, but its insidious extension owed its importance to the mechanisms of power that it brought with it.’
• He states that ‘By means of such surveillance, disciplinary power became an “integrated” system, linked from the inside to the economy and to the aims of the mechanism in which it was practised.’, emphasizing its structural embedding in institutional objectives and economic processes.
• He adds that disciplinary surveillance ‘was also organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain’—signalling that what matters is not individual watchers but the impersonal network they form.
• This formulation contrasts with sovereign power personified in the king; here, the anonymity and automaticity of the surveillance network are central to how disciplinary power operates.

Source Quotes

A relation of surveillance, defined and regulated, is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not as an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that is inherent to it and which increases its efficiency. Hierarchized, continuous and functional surveillance may not be one of the great technical ‘inventions’ of the eighteenth century, but its insidious extension owed its importance to the mechanisms of power that it brought with it. By means of such surveillance, disciplinary power became an ‘integrated’ system, linked from the inside to the economy and to the aims of the mechanism in which it was practised.

Hierarchized, continuous and functional surveillance may not be one of the great technical ‘inventions’ of the eighteenth century, but its insidious extension owed its importance to the mechanisms of power that it brought with it. By means of such surveillance, disciplinary power became an ‘integrated’ system, linked from the inside to the economy and to the aims of the mechanism in which it was practised. It was also organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain

By means of such surveillance, disciplinary power became an ‘integrated’ system, linked from the inside to the economy and to the aims of the mechanism in which it was practised. It was also organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain

Key Concepts

• Hierarchized, continuous and functional surveillance may not be one of the great technical ‘inventions’ of the eighteenth century, but its insidious extension owed its importance to the mechanisms of power that it brought with it.
• By means of such surveillance, disciplinary power became an ‘integrated’ system, linked from the inside to the economy and to the aims of the mechanism in which it was practised.
• It was also organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain

Context

Concluding sentences of ‘Hierarchical observation’ in this excerpt, where Foucault sums up the structural role of surveillance in disciplinary power, highlighting its integration with economic mechanisms and its anonymous, networked character.