The panoptic prison’s methods of fixing and recording made examination-based human sciences possible.

Evidence

Its panoptic functioning enables it to play this double role. By virtue of its methods of fixing, dividing, recording, it has been one of the simplest, crudest, also most concrete, but perhaps most indispensable conditions for the development of this immense activity of examination that has objectified human behaviour. If, after the age of ‘inquisitorial’ justice, we have entered the age of ‘examinatory’ justice, if, in an even more general way, the method of examination has been able to spread so widely throughout society, and to give rise in part to the sciences of man, one of the great instruments for this has been the multiplicity and close overlapping of the various mechanisms of incarceration. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 465

Categorization

• DEFINE: Foucault names ‘examinatory justice’ as the successor to ‘inquisitorial justice’ — a core definition for the reader’s panopticon thesis.
• XREF: ‘Examination objectifying human behaviour’ directly connects to the reader’s existing panopticon work tying surveillance to knowledge formation.