Modern disciplinary power works through detailed regulation, not severity of punishment

Evidence

It is not the severity or frequency of punishment that makes this different from anything preceding it. Indeed regulation was intended to remove the harsh abuse of power. The change was in the meticulous elaboration of task, surveillance, and penalty. Each separate act was stipulated and supervised, to coordinate every individual in a single economy of crops, money, and men. It was an attempt to achieve the new order of the barracks and the battlefield, with its hierarchy of signal, movement, and supervision, inscribed and enforced in the life of village and peasant. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 150 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property. The body, according to this penality, is caught up in a system of constraints and privations, obligations and prohibitions. Physical pain, the pain of the body itself, is no longer the constituent element of the penalty. From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 46 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Modern repression operates from strength through efficiency, not through terror — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 84; Disciplinary power produces individuals rather than suppressing them. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 264; Modern discipline operates internally to produce the individual, not externally to restrict it — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 26 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern discipline differs by fine-grained task specification, not by punishment severity #corroborates (0.92) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 150
• Subtler punishment masked sovereign power rather than making it more humane #complicates (0.74)
• Modern punishment targets liberty, not bodily pain #complicates (0.72) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 46