Michel Foucault, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Discipline is, at its most fundamental, a technique for making individuals — not discovering them, not liberating them, but producing them.1 The multitude of bodies that populated the workshops, schools, barracks, and hospitals of the eighteenth century were not yet individuals in any precise sense; they were a moving, confused mass. Discipline works on that mass by separating, analysing, differentiating, carrying its procedures of decomposition to the point of necessary and sufficient single units.1
What emerges from this operation is not the natural human being finally freed from constraint but something manufactured: the individual as both object and instrument of power. The chief function of disciplinary power is to train.2 Not to select and to levy in the manner of the old sovereign — though training serves levying well enough — but to bind forces together so as to multiply and use them rather than reduce them.2
This is a modest, suspicious power, not the majestic excess of sovereignty; it works through humble modalities, minor procedures.2 Three instruments carry this work: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement, and the examination — and their combination is what makes discipline effective.2 Surveillance is the first and most pervasive of these.
What I described in Discipline and Punish is a surveillance that is not an addition to disciplinary practice but inherent to it, inscribed at its heart, increasing its efficiency precisely by being internal to the mechanism.3 The power that results from this arrangement is not possessed by anyone as a thing; it functions like a piece of machinery, circulating through a network of relations from top to bottom and laterally, holding the whole together.3
Supervisors are perpetually supervised; the apparatus as a whole produces power and distributes individuals within a permanent and continuous field.3 It is absolutely indiscreet — everywhere, always alert, leaving no zone of shade — and absolutely discreet, functioning in silence.3 The panoptic form gives this arrangement its purest diagram. Bentham's inspection-house is not merely an architectural curiosity; it is a way of making power relations function inside a function, and making a function operate through power relations.4
It can be integrated into education, medical treatment, production, punishment — any institution whatever — and increases the efficiency of each by increasing its own points of contact with the processes it supervises.4 Power is not added from outside like a rigid constraint; it is so subtly present within the function as to become indistinguishable from it.4
What this produces, in the end, is a specific kind of individual: the disciplinary individual, who replaces both the body of the guilty man set against the body of the king and the juridical subject of an ideal contract.5 Modern penality no longer aims at the public execution — the infinite segmentation of the regicide's body, the most spectacular manifestation of sovereign power — but at an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation extended without limit, a judgement that is simultaneously the constitution of a file never closed.5 Is it surprising, then, that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?5
Discipline 'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise.Discipline and Punish, pp. 196–197
The chief function of the disciplinary power is to 'train', rather than to select and to levy... It does not link forces together in order to reduce them; it seeks to bind them together in such a way as to multiply and use them... The success of disciplinary power derives no doubt from the use of simple instruments; hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement and their combination in a procedure that is specific to it, the examination.Discipline and Punish, pp. 196–197
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... The power in the hierarchized surveillance of the disciplines is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery.Discipline and Punish, pp. 203–205
The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through these power relations.Discipline and Punish, pp. 236–237
What is now imposed on penal justice as its point of application, its 'useful' object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual... Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?Discipline and Punish, pp. 258–259