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work on institutions (Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline
and Punish) and his later work on sexuality and governmentality. In the early
work, Foucault sometimes gives a sense that power somehow inheres in
institutions themselves rather than in the individuals that make those institutions
function. Of course, what Foucault explores in those books is how the creation of
modern disciplines, with their principles of order and control, tends to
"disindividualize" power, making it seem as if power inheres in the prison, the
school, the factory, and so on. The Panopticon (see previous module) becomes
Foucault's model for the way other institutions function: the Panopticon "is an
important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has
its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of
bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms
produce the relation in which individuals are caught up" (Discipline 202). Indeed,
Bentham's goal was to create an architectural idea that, ultimately, could function
on its own: it did not matter who exactly operated the machine: "Any individual,
taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his
family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants" (Discipline 202). The idea of
discipline itself similarly functions as an abstraction of the idea of power from any
individual: "'Discipline' may be identified neither with an institution nor with an
apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set
of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a physics'
or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology" (Discipline 215). Bureaucracies, like
disciplines, contribute to the process of disindividuation since they promote the
facelessness of the bureaucrat ("I'm just doing my job"; "I'm just a cog in the
machine") and tend to continue functioning even after major revolutions. (After the
fall of Nazi Germany, for example, the general bureaucratic structure, and most of
its workers, remained in place.)