Discipline
and Punish
Michel Foucault (trans. Robert Hurley)
Part
One: Torture
1. The body of
the condemned
This first
section of Part One serves as an introduction to the entire book.
Examples of eighteenth-century torture provide Foucault with many
colorful episodes to relate in his account of how penality changed in
modernity. Foucault relates an explicit account of Damien’s
torture to introduce his subject (3-5) and compares that account of
penality to Faucher’s timetable for prisoners published in
approximately 1837 (6-7).
The period
separating these two accounts is a “new age for penal justice” in
Europe and the United States that saw changes in the following areas:
-- Economy of
punishment
-- Numerous
projects for reform
-- New theories
of law and crime
-- New moral and
political justifications of the right to punish
-- The
disappearance of old laws and customs (7).
In the span of
only a few decades between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
torture as public spectacle disappeared (7) as did “the body as the
major target of penal repression” (8). Two processes were at work
in this transformation:
(1)
Disappearance of punishment as spectacle (8); and
(2) Slackening
of the hold on the body (10)
Disappearance of
punishment as spectacle (8)
Punishment
becomes a hidden part of the penal process with several consequences:
(1) It leaves
the domain of everyday perception and enters that of abstract
consciousness;
(2) Its
effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its
visible intensity;
(3) It is the
certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public
punishment that must discourage crime;
(4) The
mechanics of punishment changes its mechanisms; thus, “justice no
longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up
with its practice . . .[and] is difficult to account for” (9).
Public spectacle
turned the tables, enveloping the executioner, judge, and other
associated parties in shame and often the subject of the public’s
violence. The change from punishment as public spectacle saw the
offender unequivocally marked with the negative sign; the publicity
shifted to the trial and justice dissociated itself from execution,
trusting autonomous others to do the job (9-10). E.g., in France,
prison administration duties were the responsibility of the Ministry of
the Interior, but responsibility for penal servitude in the convict
ships and penal settlements lay with the Ministry of the Navy or the
Ministry of the Colonies.
“Beyond this
distribution of roles operates a theoretical disavowal: do not imagine
that the sentences that we judges pass are activated by a desire to
punish; they are intended to correct, reclaim, ‘cure’; a technique of
improvement represses, in the penalty, the strict expiation of
evil-doing, and relieves the magistrates of the demeaning task of
punishing. In modern justice and on the part of those who
dispense it there is a shame in punishing, which does not always
preclude zeal” (10).
Slackening of
the hold on the body (10)
-- “One no
longer touched the body, or at least as little as possible, and then
only to reach something other than the body itself” (11).
-- “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” (11).
-- “From being
an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of
suspended rights” (11).
-- “The body and
pain are not the ultimate objects of [the law’s] punitive action,” thus
warders, doctors, chaplains, psychiatrists, psychologists, and
educationalists have taken over from the executioner (11).
-- “Impose
penalties free of all pain” (11).
-- “The
reduction of these ‘thousand deaths’ to strict capital punishment
defines a whole new morality concerning the act of punishing” (12).
-- “At the
beginning of the nineteenth century, then, the great spectacle of
physical punishment disappeared; the tortured body was avoided; the
theatrical representation of pain was excluded from punishment”
(14).
-- “By
1830-1848, public executions preceded by torture had almost entirely
disappeared,” though this change was not continuous (14).
-- “There
remains a trace of ‘torture’ in the modern mechanisms of criminal
justice – a trace that has not been entirely overcome, but which is
enveloped, increasingly, by the non-corporal nature of the penal
system” (16).
-- The body has
not been completely removed because of the implications of removing
freedom, e.g., food rationing, sexual deprivation, solitary confinement.
“If the penality
in its most severe forms no longer addresses itself to the body, on
what does it lay hold?” (16).
“There is a
substitution of objects: the quality, the nature, and the substance of
“crime” has changed in its sense as the substance of which the
punishable element is made (as opposed to its formal definition).
Judgment is passed on offenses as defined by law, but judgment is also
passed on passions, instincts, anomalies, infirmities, maladjustments,
effects of environment or heredity, aggressivity, perversions, drives,
and desires” (17).
“By solemnly
inscribing offences in the field of objects susceptible of scientific
knowledge, they provide the mechanisms of legal punishment with a
justifiable hold not only on offences, but on individuals; not only on
what they do, but also on what they are, will be, may be” (18).
“Within the very
judicial modality of judgment, other types of assessment have slipped
in, profoundly altering its rules of elaboration” (19).
Old
Question New Question
Has the act been
established and is it punishable? What is this act,
what is this act of violence or this murder? To what level or to
what field of reality does it belong? Is it a phantasy, a
psychotic reaction, a delusional episode, a perverse action?
Who committed
it? How can we assign the causal process that
produced it? Where did it originate in the author himself?
instinct, unconscious, environment, heredity?
What law
punishes this offence? What would be the most
appropriate measures to take? How do we see the future
development of the offender? What would be the best way of
rehabilitating him?
“A whole set of
assessing, diagnostic, prognostic, normative judgments concerning the
criminal have become lodged in the framework of penal judgment” (19).
“The reform of
1832, introducing attenuating circumstances, made it possible to modify
the sentence according to the supposed degrees of an illness or the
forms of a semi-insanity. And the practice of calling on
psychiatric expertise . . .means that the sentence, even if it is
always formulated in terms of legal punishment, implies . . .judgments
of normality, attributions of causality, assessments of possible
changes, anticipations as to the offender’s future” (20).
“The sentence
that condemns or acquits is not simply a judgment of guilt, a legal
decision that lays down punishment’ it bears within it an assessment of
normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization”
(21).
“The whole
machinery that has been developing for years around the implementation
of sentences and their adjustment to individuals creates a
proliferation of the authorities of judicial decision-making and
extends its powers of decision well beyond the sentence” (21).
“Let us examine
the three questions to which [psychiatric experts] have to address
themselves:
(1) Does the
convicted person represent a danger to society?
(2) Is he
susceptible to penal punishment?
(3) Is he
curable or readjustable?
“These questions
have nothing to do with article 64, nor with the possible insanity of
the convicted person at the moment of the act. They do not
concern ‘responsibility.’ They concern nothing but the
administration of the penalty, its necessity, its usefulness, its
possible effectiveness; they make it possible to show, in an almost
transparent vocabulary, whether the mental hospital would be a more
suitable place of confinement than the prison, whether this confinement
should be short or long, whether medical treatment of security measures
are called for. What, then, is the role of the psychiatrist in
penal matters? He is not an expert in responsibility, but an
adviser on punishment’ it is up to him to say whether the subject is
‘dangerous,’ in what way one should be protected from him, how one
should intervene to alter him, whether it would be better to try to
force him into submission or to treat him” (21-22).
“To sum up, ever
since the new penal system – that defined by the great codes of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – has been in operation, a general
process has led judges to judge something other than crimes; they have
been led in their sentences to do something other than judge; and the
power of judging has been transferred in part, to other authorities
than the judges of the offence. The whole penal operation has
taken on extra-juridical elements and personnel” (22).
“Today, criminal
justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference
to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in
non-juridical systems. Its fate is to be redefined by knowledge”
(22).
“A corpus of
knowledge, techniques, ‘scientific’ discourses is formed and becomes
entangled with the practice of the power to punish” (23).
Four guidelines
of Foucault’s study:
(1) Do not
concentrate the study of the punitive mechanisms on their ‘repressive’
effect alone, on their ‘punishment’ aspects alone, but situate them in
a whole series of their possible positive effects, even if these seem
marginal at first sight. As a consequence, regard punishment as a
complex social function.
(2) Analyse
punitive methods not simply as consequences of legislation or as
indicators of social structures, but as techniques possessing their own
specificity in the more general field of other ways of exercising
power. Regard punishment as a political tactic.
(3) Instead of
treating the history of penal law and the history of the human sciences
as two separate series whose overlapping appears to have had on one or
the other, or perhaps on both, a disturbing or useful effect, according
to one’s point of view, see whether there is not some common matrix or
whether they do not both derive from a single process of
‘epistemologico-juridical’ formation’ in short, make the technology of
power the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system
and of the knowledge of man.
(4) Try to
discover whether this entry of the soul onto the scene of penal
justice, and with it the insertion in legal practice of a whole corpus
of ‘scientific’ knowledge, is not the effect of a transformation of the
way in which the body itself is invested by power relations.
“In short, try
to study the metamorphosis of punitive methods on the basis of a
political technology of the body in which might be read a common
history of power relations and object relations. Thus, by an
analysis of penal leniency as a technique of power, one might
understand both how man, the soul, the normal or abnormal individual
have come to duplicate crime as objects of penal intervention; an din
what way a specific mode of subjection was able to give birth to man as
an object of knowledge for a discourse with a ‘scientific’ status” (24).
Foucault
references Rusche and Kirchheimer’s “great work”: Punishment and Social
Structures.
Introductory
summaries of how the body is used in the penal system
We must rid
ourselves of the illusion that penality is a means of reducing crime
and that it may be severe or lenient, tend towards expiation of
obtaining redress, towards the pursuit of individuals or the
attribution of collective responsibility (24).
-- We must
analyse the concrete systems of punishment as social phenomena that
cannot be accounted for by the juridical structure of society alone,
nor by its ethical choices.
-- We must
situate systems of punishment in their field of operation in which the
punishment of crime is not the sole element.
-- We must show
that punitive measures are not simply ‘negative’ mechanisms that make
it possible to repress, to prevent, to exclude, to eliminate, but that
they are linked to a whole series of positive and useful effects which
it is their task to support.
“In our
societies, the systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain
‘political economy’ of the body: . . .it is always the body that is at
issue – the body and its forces, their utility and their docility,
their distribution and their submission” (25).
“The body is
directly involved in a political field; power relations have an
immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it,
force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit
signs. This political investment of the body is bound up . .
.with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the
body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the
other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is
caught up in a system of subjection in which need is also a political
instrument meticulously prepared, calculated and used; the body becomes
a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected
body” (25-6).
“There may be a
‘knowledge’ of the body that is not exactly the science of its
functioning, and a mastery of its forces that is more than the ability
to conquer them: this knowledge and this mastery constitute what might
be called the political technology of the body. This technology
is diffuse, rarely formulated in continuous, systematic discourse, made
up of bits and pieces, implements a disparate set of tools or methods,
cannot be localized in a particular type of institution or state
apparatus” (26).
Power and the
body
-- The power
exercised on the body is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy;
-- Its effects
of domination are attributed not to ‘appropriation,’ but to
dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings;
-- One should
decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in tension, in
activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess;
-- One should
take as its model a perpetual battle rather than a contract.
-- This power is
exercised rather than possessed;
-- It is not the
‘privilege,’ acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the
overall effect of its strategic positions – an effect that is
manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are
dominated.
-- This power is
not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who ‘do
not have it’; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them;
it exerts pressure upon them, just as they themselves, in their
struggle against it, resist the grip it has on them. This means
that these relations go right down into the depths of society, that
they are not localized in the relations between the state and its
citizens or on the frontier between classes and that they do not merely
reproduce, at the level of individuals, bodies, gestures, and behavior,
the general form of the law or government; that, although there is
continuity, there is neither analogy nor homology, but a specificity of
mechanism and modality.
-- Lastly, they
are not univocal; they define innumerable points of confrontation,
focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of
struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion of the power
relations” (26-7).
“Power produces
knowledge . . .power and knowledge directly imply one another . .
.there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a
field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and
constitute at the same time power relations. These
‘power-knowledge relations’ are to be analysed [on the basis of] the
subject who knows, the objects to be known, and the modalities of
knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental
implications of power-knowledge and their historical transformations”
(28).
“It is not the
activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of
knowledge . . .but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that
traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and
possible domains of knowledge” (28).
The body
politic: a set of material elements and techniques that serve as
weapons, relays, communication routes and supports for the power and
knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by
turning them into objects of knowledge (28).
The “soul”
exists, has a reality, is produced permanently around, on, and within
the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those
punished, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen,
children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are stuck
at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives. This
soul is born of methods of punishment, supervision and
constraint. It is “the element in which are articulated the
effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type
of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a
possible corpus of knowledge and knowledge extends and reinforces the
effects of this power” (29).
“The soul is the
effect and instrument of a political anatomy” (30).
2. The spectacle
of the scaffold
“Torture is a
technique; it is not an extreme expression of lawless rage. To be
torture, punishment must obey three principal criteria:
(1) It must
produce a certain degree of pain.
(2) The
production of pain is regulated.
(3) Torture
forms part of a ritual [that] meets two demands. It must mark the
victim . . .[and] public torture and execution must be spectacular”
(33-4).
Eighteenth-century
judicial practices
Aspects of
judicial procedures:
-- “The secret
and written form of the [judicial] procedure reflects the principle
that in criminal matters the establishment of truth was the absolute
right and the exclusive power of the sovereign and his judges” (35).
-- “We have,
then, a penal arithmetic that is meticulous on many points, but which
still leaves a margin for a good deal of argument” (37).
-- “Written,
secret, subjected, in order to construct its proofs, to rigorous rules,
the penal investigation was a machine that might produce the truth in
the absence of the accused” (37).
-- The power of
the confession reduced the need for other evidence or argument with the
criminal’s acceptance of his own responsibility for his own crime (37-8)
-- Judicial
torture: the rule was that if the accused ‘held out’ and did not
confess, the magistrate was forced to drop the charges.
Investigation and punishment had become mixed (40-1).
Upon the
pronouncement of guilt
The guilty man
openly bore his condemnation and the truth of the crime he had
committed. His body served as the public support of a procedure
and had several aspects:
(1) It made the
guilty man the herald of his own condemnation
(2) It took up
again the scene of the confession
(3) It
established the relation between the crime and the torture
(4) Demonstrated
ultimate proof at the juncture of men’s judgment and God’s judgment
“From the
judicial torture to the execution, the body has produced and reproduced
the truth of the crime – or rather it constitutes the element which,
through a whole set of rituals and trials, confesses that the crime
took place, admits that the accused did indeed commit it, shows that he
bore it inscribed in himself and on himself, supports the operation of
punishment and manifests its effects in the most striking way.
The body, several times tortured, provides the synthesis of the reality
of the deeds and the truth of the investigation, of the documents of
the case and the statements of the criminal, of the crime and the
punishment. It is an essential element, therefore, in a penal
liturgy, in which it must serve as the partner of a procedure ordered
around the formidable rights of the sovereign, the prosecution and
secrecy” (47).
Public execution
as political ritual
The law
represents the will of the sovereign, thus transgression of the law
constitutes an attack on the sovereign.
Public execution:
-- restores the
total power of the sovereign;
-- is an
exercise of terror to make all aware of the unrestrained presence of
the sovereign;
-- reactivates
power;
-- is a triumph
of law.
The precise
function of torture, then, had judicial and political purposes:
-- It revealed
truth and showed the operation of power.
-- It assured
the articulation of the written on the oral, the secret on the public,
the procedure of investigation on the operation of the confession.
-- It made it
possible to reproduce the crime on the visible body of the criminal.
-- The crime had
to be manifested and annulled.
-- It made the
body of the condemned man the place where the vengeance of the
sovereign was applied, the anchoring point for a manifestation of
power, an opportunity of affirming the dissymmetry of forces.
“The people” and
the popularization (romanticization?) of crime
In a public
execution, “the people” played roles of audience, witness, participant,
and possible and indirect victim (68). In the history of public
execution, riots were an increasing possibility as the people disagreed
with the conviction. Thus, toward the end of this practice, “the
great spectacle of punishment ran the risk of being rejected by the
very people to whom it was addressed” (63)
“Never did the
people feel more threatened than by legal violence exercised without
moderation or restraint. The solidarity of a whole section of the
population with those we would call petty offenders . . .was constantly
expressed . . .it was the breaking up of this solidarity that was
becoming the aim of penal and police repression” (63).
At the same
time, more “crime literature” was being written that served to
heroicize criminals and their deeds (67).
Part
Two: Punishment
Generalized
punishment
In this section,
Foucault describes the changing approach toward not only punishment,
but of what constituted crime and the (class of) people considered
criminal.
The call of
eighteenth-century reformers: “Instead of taking revenge, criminal
justice should simply punish” (74). Changes in punishment marked
the end of the sovereign’s vengeance (74). “During this period,
crimes seemed to lose their violence while punishments lost some of
their intensity, but at the cost of greater intervention” (75).
“The shift from
a criminality of blood to a criminality of fraud from part of a whole
complex mechanism embracing the development of production, the increase
of wealth, a higher juridical and moral value placed on property
relations, stricter methods of surveillance, a tighter partitioning of
the population, more efficient techniques of locating and obtaining
information: the shift in illegal practices is correlative with an
extension and a refinement of punitive practices” (77).
“What was
emerging no doubt was not so much a new respect for the humanity of the
condemned – torture was still frequent in the execution of even minor
criminals – as a tendency towards a more finely tuned justice, towards
a closer penal mapping of the social body. Following a circular
process, the threshold of the passage to violent crimes rises,
intolerance to economic offences increases, controls become more
thorough, penal interventions at once more premature and more numerous”
(78).
Regulating
punishment and punishing “better”
The reformers
were attacking the excessive nature of punishments, but “an excess that
was bound up with an irregularity even more than with an abuse of the
power to punish” (78). “The criticism of the reformers was
directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority,
as at a bad economy of power” (79).
“The reform of
criminal law must be read as a strategy for the rearrangement of the
power to punish, according to modalities that render it more regular,
more effective, more constant and more detailed in its effects; in
short, which increase its effects while diminishing its economic cost
(that is to say, by dissociating it from the system of property, of
buying and selling, of corruption in obtaining not only offices, but
the decisions themselves) and its political cost (by dissociating it
from the arbitrariness of monarchical power)” (80-1).
“The power to
judge should no longer depend on the innumerable, discontinuous,
sometimes contradictory privileges of sovereignty, but on the
continuously distributed effects of public power” (81).
“ ‘Reform,’ in
the strict sense, as it was formulated in the theories of law or as it
was outlined in the various projects, was the political or
philosophical resumption of this strategy, with its primary objectives:
to make of the punishment and repression of illegalities a regular
function, coextensive with society; not to punish less, but to punish
better’ to punish with an attenuated severity perhaps, but in order to
punish with more universality and necessity’ to insert the power to
punish more deeply into the social body” (82).
“The illegality
of property was separated from the illegality of rights. This
distinction represents a class opposition because, on the one hand, the
illegality that was to be most accessible to the lower classes was that
of property – the violent transfer of ownership – and because, on the
other, the bourgeoisie was to reserve to itself the illegality of
rights: the possibility of getting round its own regulations and its
own laws, of ensuring for itself an immense sector of economic
circulation by a skillful manipulation of gaps in the law – gaps that
were foreseen by its silences, or opened up by de facto tolerance”
(87).
“And this great
redistribution of illegalities was even to be expressed through a
specialization of the legal circuits: for illegalities of property –
for theft – there were the ordinary courts and punishments; for the
illegalities of rights – fraud, tax evasion, irregular commercial
operations – special legal institutions applied with transactions,
accommodations, reduced fines, etc. The bourgeoisie reserved to
itself the fruitful domain of the illegality of rights. And at
the same time as this split was taking place, there emerged the need
for a constant policing concerned essentially with this illegality of
property. It became necessary to get rid of the old economy of
the power to punish, based on the principles of the confused and
inadequate multiplicity of authorities, the distribution and
concentration of the power correlative with actual inertia and
inevitable tolerance, punishments that were spectacular in their
manifestations and haphazard in their application. It became
necessary to define a strategy and techniques of punishment in which an
economy of continuity and permanence would replace that of expenditure
and excess. In short, penal reform was born at the point of
junction between the struggle against the super-power of the sovereign
and that against the infra[power of acquired and tolerated
illegalities. And if penal reform was anything more than the
temporary result of a purely circumstantial encounter, it was because,
between this super-power and this infra-power, a whole network of
relations was being formed” (87-8).
“Although
the new criminal legislation appears to be characterized by less severe
penalties, a clearer codification, a marked diminution of the
arbitrary, a more generally accepted consensus concerning the power to
punish (in the absence of a more real division in its exercise), it is
sustained in reality by an upheaval in the traditional economy of
illegalities and a rigorous application of force to maintain their new
adjustment. A penal system must be conceived as a mechanism
intended to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate
them all” (89).
The new theory
of punishment
The essential
raisons d’etre of penal reform in the eighteenth century:
-- Shift the
object and change the scale;
-- Define new
tactics in order to reach a target that is now more subtle but also
more widely spread in the social body;
-- Find new
techniques for adjusting punishment to it and for adapting its effects;
-- Lay down new
principles for regularizing, refining, universalizing the art of
punishing;
-- Homogenize
its application;
-- Reduce its
economic and political cost by increasing its effectiveness and by
multiplying its circuits;
-- In short,
constitute a new economy and a new technology of the power to punish
(89)
Punishment took
on a social contract model (89-90) where violations of the law violated
the contract of the society. “The right to punish has been
shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defence of society”
(90).
The major
function of punishment is to prevent future crime. “One must
punish exactly enough to prevent repetition” (93).
“In a penality
employing public torture and execution, example was the answer to the
crime; it had, by a sort of twin manifestation, to show the crime and
at the same time to show the sovereign power that mastered it; in a
penality calculated according to its own effects, example must refer
back to the crime, but in the most discreet way possible and with the
greatest possible economy indicate the intervention of power’ ideally,
too, it should prevent any subsequent reappearance of either” (93-4)
Five or six
major rules of punishment:
-- The rule of
minimum quantity (to create more interest in avoiding the penalty than
committing the crime)
-- The rule of
sufficient ideality (the idea of pain needs to be a sufficient
deterrent)
-- The rule of
lateral effects (punishment that has minimal effects for the criminal
and maximum effects on other members of society)
-- The rule of
perfect certainty (clearly define and publish offenses and their
punishments)
-- The rule of
common truth (reason will be applied to determine the truth of any
criminal matter)
-- The rule of
optimal specification (since punishment must prevent a repetition of
the offense, it must take into account the profound nature of the
criminal himself and individualize the penalty)
The new
political anatomy emerging in the eighteenth century has two
intersecting lines of objectification: that which rejects the criminal
from the side of a nature against nature; and that which seeks to
control delinquency by a calculated economy of punishments that results
in the supersession of the punitive semio-technique by a new political
of the body (103).
The gentle way
in punishment
“The art of
punishing must rest on a whole technology of representation” (104).
Characteristics
of obstacle-signs:
(1) Must be as
unarbitrary as possible, natural, the punishment must proceed from the
crime; the law must appear to be the necessity of things, and power
must act while concealing itself beneath the gentle force of nature
(2) Reduce the
desire that makes the crime attractive; increase the interest that
makes the penalty be feared; reverse the relation of intensities so
that the representation of the penalty and its disadvantages is more
lively than that of the crime and its pleasures
(3) Punishment
must be temporary and its duration must be integrated into the economy
of the penalty
(4) Punishment
must be seen as being in the individual’s best interest. There must be
no more secret, spectacular, or useless penalties. “Punishment
must be regarded as a retribution that the guilty man makes to each of
his fellow citizens for the crime that has wronged them all”
(109). “The convict pays twice: by the labour he provides and by
the signs that he produces. At the heart of socieyt, on the
public squares or highways, the convict is a focus of profit and
signification. Visibly, he is serving everyone; but at the same
time, he lets slip into the minds of all the crime-punishment sign: a
secondary, purely moral, but much more real utility” (109).
(5) “The example
is now based on the lesson, the discourse, the decipherable sign, the
representation of public morality” (110). “Each element of its
ritual must speak, repeat the crime, recall the law, show the need for
punishment and justify its degree. . .The publicity of punishment must
not have the physical effect of terror; it must open up a book to be
read” (111).
(6) The criminal
must not be glorified; the crime must be seen as a misfortune (112).
Each punishment
should teach a lesson; each punishment should be a fable (113).
Punishment as
imprisonment
“In under twenty
years, the principle so clearly formulated in the Constituent Assembly
of specific, appropriate, effective penalties, constituting, in each
case, a lesson for all, became the law of detention for every offence
of any importance, except those requiring the death penalty” (116).
How did models
of imprisonment come to be popular given all the reasons against
imprisonment?
Walnut Street
prison as an example prison:
“Work on the
prisoner’s soul must be carried out as often as possible. The
prison, though an administrative apparatus, will at the same time be a
machine for altering minds” (125).
“The most
important thing [in a prison] was that this control and transformation
of behaviour were accompanied – both as a condition and as a
consequence – by the development of a knowledge of the individuals”
(125). “This ever-growing knowledge of the individuals made it
possible to divide them up in the prison not so much according to their
crimes as according to the dispositions that they revealed. The
prison became a sort of permanent observatory that made it possible to
distribute the varieties of vice or weakness” (126).
Points of
convergence between common views of eighteenth-century prison reform
and the idea of imprisonment as punishment:
(1) There is a
difference in the temporal direction of punishment.
(2) One punishes
to transform a criminal.
(3) The system
must be open to individual variables.
Disparities
between common views of eighteenth-century prison reform and the idea
of imprisonment as punishment:
(1) Techniques
of individualizing correction.
(2) Imprisonment
relies not on representations, but on a studied manipulation of the
individual.
(3) Relation
between individual being punished and the individual doing the
punishing.
(4) Imprisonment
relies on secrecy.
“Punitive city
or coercive institution? On the one hand, a functioning of penal
power, distributed throughout the social space; present everywhere as
scene, spectacle, sign, discourse; legible like an open book; operating
by a permanent recodification of the mind of the citizens; eliminating
crime by those obstacles placed before the idea of crime; acting
invisibly and uselessly on the ‘soft fibres of the brain,’ as Servan
put it. A power to punish that ran the whole length of the social
network would act at each of its points, and in the end would no longer
be perceived as a power of certain individuals over others, but as an
immediate reaction of all in relation to the individual. On the
other hand, a compact functioning of the power to punish: a meticulous
assumption of responsibility for the body and the time of the convict,
a regulation of his movements and behaviour by a system of authority
and knowledge; a concerted orthopaedy applied to convicts in order to
reclaim them individually; an autonomous administration of this power
that is isolated both from the social body and from the judicial power
in the strict sense. The emergence of the prison marks the
institutionalization of the power to punish, or, to be more precise:
will the power to punish be better served by concealing itself beneath
a general social function, in the ‘punitive city,’ or by investing
itself in a coercive institution, in the enclosed space of the
‘reformatory’?” (129-30).
Part Three:
Discipline
Docile bodies
“In the course
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the disciplines became
general formulas of domination” (137):
-- Working the
body at the level of movements, gestures, attitudes: an infinitesimal
power over the active body
-- Object was
the efficiency of movements, their internal organization
--
Uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of the
activity rather than its result; exercised according to a codification
that partitions time, space, movement as closely as possible.
“Discipline
produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies.
Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of
utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of
obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the
one hand, it turns it into an ‘aptitude,’ a ‘capacity,’ which it seeks
to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy,
the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of
strict subjection. If economic exploitation separates the force
and the product of labour, let us say that disciplinary coercion
establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased
aptitude and an increased domination” (138).
“Small acts of
cunning endowed with a great power of diffusion, subtle arrangements,
apparently innocent, but profoundly suspicious, mechanisms that obeyed
economies too shameful to be acknowledged, or pursued petty forms of
coercion – it was nevertheless they that brought about the mutation of
the punitive system” (139).
“No detail is
unimportant, but not so much for the meaning that it conceals within it
as for the hold it provides for the power that wishes to seize it”
(140).
“A meticulous
observation of detail, and at the same time a political awareness of
these small things, for the control and use of men, emerge through the
classical age bearing with them a whole set of techniques, a whole
corpus of methods and knowledge, descriptions, plans, and data.
And from such trifles, no doubt, the man of modern humanism was born”
(141).
The art of
distributions
“Discipline
proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space,” which employs
the following techniques:
(1) Enclosure –
a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself, e.g.,
the monastery, army barracks, factories
(2) Partitioning
– each individual has his own place and each place its individual,
e.g., the monastic cell
(3) Functional
sites – space that allowed supervision, disabled communication between
individuals, and was useful
(4) Rank – the
place one occupies in a classification. One’s distribution and
circulation in relation to others.
The table: in
the form of disciplinary distribution, it distributes multiplicity and
derives as many effects from it as possible. Disciplinary tactics
are situated on the axis that links the singular and the
multiple. It allows the characterization of the individual as
individual and the ordering of a given multiplicity (149).
The control of
activity
(1) The
time-table (a general framework for activity, increasing partitioning
of time, attempt to insure the quality of time [eliminate distractions
and disturbances], how to constitute a totally useful time?)
(2) Temporal
elaboration of the act (a collective and obligatory rhythm, assures the
elaboration of the act itself, controls its development and its stages
from the inside. “The act is broken down into its elements; the
position of the body, limbs, articulations is defined; to each movement
are assigned a direction, an aptitude, a duration; their order of
succession is prescribed” [152])
(3) Correlation
of the body and the gesture (imposes the best relation between a
gesture and the overall position of the body, which is its condition of
efficiency and speech)
(4) Body-object
articulation (defines each of the relations that the body must have
with the object that it manipulates)
(5) Exhaustive
use (the question of extracting from time more available moments and
more useful forces)
The organization
of geneses
How can one
organize profitable durations? The disciplines, which analyse
space, break up and rearrange activities, must also be understood as
machinery for adding up and capitalizing time:
(1) Divide
duration into successive or parallel segments, each of which must end
at a specific time
(2) Organize
threads according to an analytical plan – successions of elements as
simple as possible, combining according to increasing complexity
(3) Finalize
these temporal segments, decide on how long each will last and conclude
it with an exam, which will have the triple function of showing whether
the subject has reached the level required, of guaranteeing that each
subject undergoes the same apprenticeship and of differentiating the
abilities of each individual.
(4) Draw up
series of series; lay down for each individual, according to his rank,
etc., the exercises that are suited to him.
This is an
exercise: the technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are
both repetitive and different, but always graduated. By bending
behaviour towards a terminal state, exercise makes possible a perpetual
characterization of the individual either in relation to this term, in
relation to other individuals, or in relation to a type of
itinerary. It thus assures, in the form of continuity and
constraint, a growth, an observation, a qualification.
“Exercise,
having become an element in the political technology of the body and of
duration, does not culminate in a beyond, but tends towards a
subjection that has never reached its limit” (162).
The composition
of forces
How to compose a
force greater than the sum of its parts? This demand is expressed
in the following ways:
(1) The body is
constituted as a part of a multisegmentary machine.
(2) The
chronological series that discipline must combine to form a composite
time are also pieces of machinery.
(3) The
combination of forces requires a precise system of command.
Forces must react to signals as triggers.
“Discipline
creates out of the bodies it controls . . .an individuality endowed
with four characteristics: it is cellular (by the play of spatial
distribution), organic (by the coding of activities), genetic (by the
accumulation of time), combinatory (by the composition of
forces). And in doing so, it operates four great techniques: it
draws up tables: it prescribes movements; it imposes exercises; lastly,
in order to obtain the combination of forces, it arranges ‘tactics’”
(167).
Part III, ch 2
Foucault begins
his discussion of the “coercion of bodies” (169) by informing us that
“[T]he chief function of the disciplinary power is to ‘train.”
“Instead of bending all its subjects into a single uniform mass, it
separates, analyzes, differentiates, carries its procedures of
decomposition to the point of necessary and sufficient single
units…Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a
power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of
its exercise.” This is the beginning of the invasion of the
“great forms” and mechanisms of the sovereign or state by disciplinary
power in the form of “humble modalities” Foucault considers
three “simple instruments” of disciplinary power:
“hierarchical
observation” (pp. 170-177)
“normalizing
judgement and” (pp. 177-184)
“the
examination” (pp. 184-192)
Hierarchical
Observation
“The exercise of
discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of
observation” (170). “[T]he means of coercion make those on whom
they are applied clearly visible,” and improvements on technology
increased the potential for observation (171). Foucault gives a
description of a military camp as both an example of “a power that acts
by means of general visibility” and as a model of principles “found in
urban development, in the construction of working-class housing
estates, hospitals, asylums, prisons, schools: the spatial ‘nesting’ of
hierarchized surveillance (171-72).
Structures of
this sort, including hospitals, were designed with at least as great a
concern for controlling the people and spaces it contained as for
external considerations (172). The Ecole Militaire, for instance,
was designed to allow for observation of students in their quarters,
during meals, and in the latrine. A more “continuous power” is
achieved through the establishment of “a perfect eye that nothing would
escape and a centre towards which all gazes would be turned,” as was
attempted in the Arc-et-Senans (173) with its circular structure.
Pyramid structures were found to be even more effective for their
ability to allow for “relays” and to 1: “form an uninterrupted
network” with “the possibility of multiplying its levels;”
2: “be discreet enough” to keep from preventing the operations of
the structure (174). As is the case in the industrial factory,
where, according to the reasoning of the powerful, any “dishonesty” is
apt to be multiplied and could “prove fatal” (175). Thus the
guild-style system of management by masters was replaced by management
by company “agents.” “Surveillance thus becomes a decisive
economic operator both as an internal part of the production machinery
and as a specific mechanism in the disciplinary power” (175).
Foucault continues on to elementary teaching where “the details of
surveillance were specified and it was integrated into the teaching
relationship (175) through careful monitoring, and, later, in the case
of Demia, the use of teaching assistants. Demia’s model is
presented as “an institution of the ‘mutual type’” in which Teaching
proper, the acquisition of knowledge,” and “observation” (176).
Foucault
comments here on the ability of power to operate as “an
‘integrated’ system (176) which allows for both hierarchical and
lateral practices of power that systemic and individual:
“Discipline makes possible the operation of a relational power that
sustains itself by its own mechanism and which, for the spectacle of
public events, substitutes the uninterrupted play of calculated
gazes…the hold over the body…is a power that seems all the less
‘corporal’ in that it is more subtly ‘physical’” (177).
Normalizing
Judgement (sic)
1. Here
Foucault presents us with the role of judgment in juvenile settings,
such as “the orphanage of the Chevalier Paulet,” where students held
morning tribunals to mete out punishments to their peers, at which
point he observes: “At the heart of all disciplinary systems
functions a small penal mechanism” (177). “The workshop, the
school, the army were subject to a whole micro-penality of time...of
activity…of behavior…of speech…of the body…of sexuality” (ellipses mark
parenthetical examples by Foucault) resulting in a state in which one
was always punishing and punishable.
2.
Foucault warns us here that the punishment of discipline was not just
that of a “small-scale model of the court” (178). Judgment was
passed on those, student or soldier, who did not achieve or perform to
the dictated level. These observable deficiencies resulted in
both punishment and public relegation, in the case of the student, to
“the bench of the ‘ignorant.’ In a disciplinary regime punishment
involves a double juridico-natural reference” (179).
3. Here
Foucault argues that “Disciplinary punishment,” ostensibly, “has the
function of reducing gaps.” It must therefore be essentially
corrective” (179): The demoted corporal must regain his rank, the
failing student, work and rework a lesson. “Disciplinary
punishment is, in the main, isomorphic with obligation itself,” as, “To
punish is to exercise” (180).
4.
Punishment here is seen as “only one element of a double system (of)
gratification-punishment” which “operates in the process of training
and correction” through the careful definition and bestowal of rewards
(180). Foucault uses a typically illustrative example of students
living in a “micro-economy of privileges and impositions in the
Christian Schools, where a “transposition of the system of indulgences”
(basically, you could get out of catechism exercises by building up
points) allowed for the continuous ranking of students between
poles of good and bad. Here judgment was passed on more than an
act. This “knowledge of individuals” judged/ranked the potential
and value of the child.
5. Here
Foucault exposes ranking and grading as means of punishment and reward
through the example of the “Ecole Militaire’s four (and sometimes five)
levels of achievement assessed by “officers, teachers, and their
assistants,” based on “’the moral qualities of the pupils’ and on
‘their universally recognized behavior,” and visually registered
through the use of various colors of epaulettes (and maybe sackcloth)
(181-182). The reasoning was, apparently, that the lowest, most
shamed, ranks “existed only to disappear” (182), that is, to work their
way up the epaulette-al hierarchy. This served the purpose of
both classifying and encouraging conformity, according to
Foucault. As he puts it: “the art of punishing, in the
regime of disciplinary power, is aimed neither at expiation, nor even
precisely at repression,” but at the following:
1.
“It refers individual actions to a whole that is at once a field of
comparison, a space of differentiation and the principle of a rule to
be followed”
2.
“It differentiates individuals from one another’
3.
“It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes in terms of value
the abilities, the level, the ‘nature’ of individuals”
4.
“It introduces…the constraint of a conformity that must be achieved.”
5.
It defines the “abnormal” (182-183)
“In short, it
normalizes” (183). Here Foucault contrasts the disciplinary to
the “judicial penality,” which referenced laws and binaries of
moralities not observed individuals and rankings. It is the
“penality of the norm” that brought about modern penality, not advent
of human sciences, etc (183). “The Normal” is perpetuated through
institutions and manages to both homogenize (through conformity)and
individualize (through ranks and assessments). Through
measurement , “the norm introduces…all the shading of individual
differences” in a homogenized setting (184).
The Examination
“The
examination,” according to Foucault, “combines the techniques of an
observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgment” (184).
After briefly lamenting the lack of pre-Foucault scholarship on this
concept, the author offers the examples of the hospital (pp. 185-186),
with its secularization and transformation into a place for
observation, and the school (pp. 186-187), with its transformation into
the pedagogical science of evaluating and ranking.
Foucault then
presents three linkages that examinations created between “a certain
type of the formation of knowledge” and “a certain from of the exercise
of power” (187):
1. “The
examination transformed the economy of visibility into the exercise of
power” (pp. 187-189)
Here, through
the example of Louis XIV’s “first military review,” Foucault reminds us
of the shift in visibility from the punisher to the punished and
explains that the examination is the “mechanism of objectification” in
which “disciplinary power manifests its potency, essentially, by
arranging objects.”
2. “The
examination also introduces individuality into the field of
documentation” (pp. 189-191)
“The examination
leaves behind it a whole meticulous archive,” through the act of “power
writing.” The transcription and fixing of norms allowed also for
the continuous analysis of the individual and the application of a
“comparative system” in which to place said individual.
3. “The
examination, surrounded by all its documentary techniques, makes each
individual a ‘case’” (pp. 191-192).
Disciplinary
power “lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of
this description a means of control and method of domination” whereby
the case is no longer “a set of circumstances” but a documented
individual.
Disciplines,
then, “mark the moment when the reversal of the political axis of
individualization…takes place” (192). Whereas in the “feudal
regime” the practice and display of power made the powerful individual
visible, in the “disciplinary regime…individualization is ‘descending:’
as power becomes more anonymous and more functional, those on whom it
is exercised tend to be more strongly individualized” (193). Here
Foucault makes the productive power of discipline explicit: “We
must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in
negative terms…[P]ower produces; it produces reality; it produces
domains of objects and rituals of truth,” in short, the “individual”
(194).
How, then, he
asks, could “such power (be derived) from the petty machinations of
discipline” (194)? The answer:
Part
III, ch 3: Panopticism
Foucault’s
discussion of the Panopticon proper is preceded by the legacies of the
plague and the leper (195-200). Plague control at the end of the
17th century prescribed the creation inspectors and the transformation
of the home into an “enclosed, segmented space, observed at every
point,” in which individuals were the objects of writing, observation,
and power. Thus, the plague, symbol of “all forms of confusion
and disorder,” was “met by order” and analytic power; those acts and
individuals that fell outside of this discipline were
“contagions.” Foucault contrasts the system of order established
by the plague to the exclusionary, binary principals that defined the
leper and the “clean” (my term). “All the mechanisms of power”
that the modern individual is subjected to “are composed of those two
forms from which they distantly derive.”
Bentham’s
Panopticon is the physical manifestation of these forms. In it
(visuals are widely available on the Web), the prisoner, who occupies
the periphery of the circular structure, is visible to the guards, and
invisible to the other prisoners. Foucault contrasts this to the
dungeon, which served “to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide”
(200). The exposed inmate is “is the object of information, never
a subject in communication” as one might be in a dungeon (200).
In all settings, panopticism replaces crowds, and their “collective
effect[s]” with “collection[s] of separated individualities”
(201). “Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce
in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that
assures the automatic functioning of power” so that the effects are
continuous and internalized, and the practice of surveillance always a
possibility (see p. 201 for more description and discussion).
This “machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad” can be operated
by anyone, increasing the likelihood of, and anxiety regarding,
observation (202). The “houses of security” were to be replaced
by this “house of certainty” (202). The Panopticon was “also a
laboratory” (203), “a privileged place from experiments on men, and for
analyzing with complete certainty the transformations that may be
obtained from them” (204).
Where the
“plague-stricken town” was simple model of mechanical control or
exclusion, the Panopticon “must be understood as a generalizable model
of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the
everyday life of men” applicable to “hospitals, workshops, schools, and
prisons” (205). It is numerically efficient, continuously
able to intervene yet never needing to, and “acts directly on
individuals” (206) regardless of scale. Lest we get too caught up
in his machine metaphor, Foucault warns us that the exercise of power
takes place within the machine; power the Panopticon “is a way of
making power relations function in a function, and of making a function
through these power relations (206-207). This interior/exterior
distinction gets a bit fuzzy when he goes on to discuss the Panopticon
as open to the outsiders who would take part in observation: “it
has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be
supervised by society as a whole” (207). This seeming
democratization of power is key to its being applied in the name of
“progress” (208).
This
transformation from the “discipline-blockade” to the “discipline
mechanism” was born in the rise of disciplinary thought in the
17th-18th centuries and concrete applications became models for entire
disciplines. The spread of “disciplinary institutions” is likened
to other “more profound processes,” of which this spread is an aspect:
1. “The
functional inversion of the disciplines.” (pp. 210-211)
Whereas the
roles of institutions were once defined in negative terms (neutralize,
fix, avoid), “disciplines function increasingly as techniques for
making useful individuals.” This utility led to their being associated
with the “most important, most central and most productive sectors of
society (education, training, war-making).
2. “The
swarming of disciplinary mechanisms.” (pp. 211-212)
The
methodologies of schools, hospitals, and other institutions came to be
applied by these institutions on the communities and individuals around
them. These institutions also became “centers of observations”
for the societies around them, subverting the traditional power of the
church.
3. “The
state control of the disciplinary mechanisms.” (pp. 213-217)
Here we are
warned that the secularization of power and its shift from monarchic
control, as with the police in Foucault’s example, is not a complete
shift of disciplinary functions to the “state apparatus,” as
“’Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an
apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise”
(215): “one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary
society…[n]ot because the disciplinary modality of power has replaced
all the others; but because it has infiltrated the others” (216).
Foucault sums-up the shift from the spectacle to the surveilled that is
made concrete in Bentham’s Panopticon in a lyrical discussion on pp.
216-217, where we are reminded that this has been a shift from persons
being “repressed” to individuals “fabricated” into a “social
order.”
On pages
218-228, Foucault locates “[t]he formulation of disciplinary society”
in the context of a “a number of broad historical processes” (roughly
three):
1.
Economic processes (pp. 218-221)
Disciplines “try
to define in relation to the (human) multiplicities a tactics of power
that fulfills three criteria:” lowest cost, maximized social power, and
linkage to “the output of the apparatuses … within which it is
exercised; in short to increase both the docility and the utility of
all the elements of the system” (218). In the 18th century, this
shift was concurrent with mobile populations and increased production
capacities. While the old “economy of power” was wont to use
violence to achieve control, discipline attempted to “adjust” people
and apparatuses in order to “counter the advantages of number” through
regimentation (219-220). This brings us to something of a
definition: “discipline is the unitary technique by which the
body is reduced as a ‘political’ force at the least cost and maximized
as a useful force.” Not surprisingly, Foucault ties the rise of
“a capitalist economy” to the proliferation of panoptic (?) power (221).
2.
“Juridico-political” processes (pp.221-224)
Panopticism is
neither an “extension” of, or independent of “juridico-political” power
(221-222). Panopticism works it coercive force on the
formal systems, even as the rise of the middle class attempted to
create a codified legal framework (222). Discipline acts as a
“counter-law” and, through the “minute disciplines, the panopticisms of
every day” works it subtle magic against the more obvious mechanisms of
the juridico-political (223). This why the “smallest
techniques of discipline” (those most associated with the body?) are
experienced or perceived as most “foundational” (223). The
prison’s power to punish has become the power to observe, selectively
prosecute, and train, not through the “universal consciousness of the
law in each juridical subject” but through “the infinitely minute web
of panoptic techniques” (224).
3.
Scientific processes (224-228)
By the 18th
century, these techniques achieved “a level at which the formation of
knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in
a circular process.” Within institutions, the growth of power
could give rise to new knowledge or methodologies for
control. Foucault refers to this as a “double process…an
epistemological thaw” (224). Foucault goes on to draw a parallel
between disciplinary examination and judicial inquisition or
investigation, noting the relationship between inquisition and the rise
of empirical methods (225-226). While investigation in the
empirical sciences have managed to “become detached from its
politico-juridical model,” the examination has not ( 227). Penal
justice today is both inquisitorial and disciplinary. Where the
justice of the (spectacular) Ancien Regime was at its “extreme”
in the “infinite segmentation of the body of the regicide…The ideal
point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline; an
interrogation without end…a procedure that would be…the permanent
measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic
movement that strives to meet in infinity (227). The final
sentence of Part III (p228) reads: “Is it surprising that prisons
resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble
prisons?”
Part
IV, ch 1. Complete and austere institutions
The turn of the
18th and 19th centuries saw the rise of detention as “the penalty par
excellence” (231). However, the “birth of the prison” was
marked by conjunction of a “justice that is supposed to be ‘equal’” and
“a legal machinery that is supposed to be ‘autonomous,’ but which
contains all the asymmetries of disciplinary subjection”
(231-232). Foucault laments that the concept of the prison has
since become so naturalized that alternatives seem unthinkable.
It even seems to be an egalitarian punishment in that time is assessed
as opposed to fine in reparation for an offense against society.
Foucault intends to further investigate the “transformative role” of
the prison, and he cautions us to remember that the prison has been,
from its beginnings in the 19th century, a means of both “deprivation
of liberty and the technical transformation of individuals” (233), and
he cites numerous sources to support the importance of the
latter. He also argues that prison “reform” has been around for
as long as prisons have, and that said reforms are a part of the penal
process, not an interruption of it (234-235), and that “in becoming a
legal punishment, (the prison) weighted the old juridico-political
question of the right to punish with all the problems, all the
agitations that have surrounded the corrective technologies of the
individual” (235).
Foucault draws
the chapter title, “complete and austere institutions,” from an “L.
Baltard” (pub. 1829; see “Bibliography”) in order to portray the
exhaustive, uninterrupted, and “despotic” disciplinary power of the
prison (235-236), which was to be applied to the re-education and
“recoding of existence” of the prisoner. This is contrasted with
simple detainment and “the simple mechanism of exempla imagined by the
reformers at the time of the idealogues” (236). He lays out the
principles of the disciplinary prison as follows:
1.
Isolation: He finds three primary reasons or functions for
isolation: to prevent collaboration and recidivism, to promote
reformatory practice, and to create a situation in which the words and
power of the imprisoning and reforming power will take on even greater
authority due to the relative silence of all others’ (236-237).
He then contrasts the Auburn and Pennsylvania models for prisons, which
posited limited interaction with other prisoners while working
(reproducing exterior labor conditions) and utter solitude,
respectively (237-239).
2.
Work: Through numerous citations, Foucault pursues the question
of the role of work in the prisons. Long-running debates in France
pitted those who considered prison labor to be a magnet for the
indigent and competition for the “free” laborer against a penal system
that argued that prison labor offered little to no competition and that
prisoners work and wages were their incentive for reform.
Foucault takes a third position: that prison labor was about “the
constitution of a power relation” (pp. 239-243).
3. “The
Declaration of Carceral Independence” (247): Prison “[became]
increasingly an instrument for the modulation of the penalty; and
apparatus which, through the execution of the sentence with which it is
entrusted, seems to have the right, in part at least, to assume its
principle” (244). In assuming the responsibility for the means
and extent of punishment and reform, the prison claims “the right to be
a power that not only possesses administrative autonomy, but is also a
part of punitive sovereignty” (247).
The above
techniques, to the extent that they exceed the state of detention,
then, are to be know as the “penitentiary” (248). The
penitentiary, Foucault argues, became a trap not only for prisoners,
but for “penal justice” and judges, “because it was able to introduce
criminal justice into relations of knowledge that have since become its
infinite labyrinth (249). The prisons observed not just for
immediate control, but also to create a body of knowledge regarding the
individual and his response to reformation in order “to exact
unceasingly form the inmate a body of knowledge that will make it
possible to transform the penal measure into penitentiary operations”
(251). As the “offender becomes an individual to
know,” a new character is created: that of the “delinquent,” who
is characterized less by his act” (offense) than by his life
(251). For the re-education of the prisoner to be complete,
the “penitentiary operation… must become the sum total existence of the
delinquent, making of the prison a sort of artificial and coercive
theatre in which his life will be examined from top to bottom”
(251-252). This “biographical” approach to understanding the
delinquent “establishes the ‘criminal’ as existing before the crime and
even outside it.” This psycho-social concept of the “dangerous
individual” is, according to Foucault, still with us today (252), and
came to be categorized and documented, ultimately a “biographical
unity, a kernel of danger, representing a type of anomaly” (254).
The dangerous individual, or delinquent, is an amalgamation of 18th
century prison objects: the extra-societal “monster” and the
“juridical subject rehabilitated by punishment” (255).
Part IV, ch
2. Illegalities and delinquency
Here Foucault
begins with a discussion of the change from “chain-gang” to “police
carriage” as “a symptom and a symbol” of the transition (or “mutation”)
from the public display of power to the penality of prison (257).
The chain gang of the turn of the century was a manifestation of both
detention and public torture (255). Foucault paints a vivid
picture of the dangerous, public applications of the chains and
processions in which crowds participated in the spectacle as if in a
festival or carnival, taunting and/or studying the condemned in what
Foucault describes as part game, part “ethnology of crime” (259), in
that the prisoner was the subject of speculation as much as
spectacle. The chain-gang of early 19th century France, like the
scaffold, was as dangerous as it was public however, and the crowd, as
well as the prisoner, were able to apply meanings to the sentence and
presence of the condemned that were not those intended or sanctioned by
the judges (259-263). This means of transportation was replaced,
in 1837, with “a mobile equivalent of the panopticon,” a cart in which
detainees of all varieties were sequestered into cells, observable by a
center corridor by hidden from the view of the public, and prevented
from interaction with one another, under constant surveillance and
punishment by warders, and restricted to self-corrective thoughts and
readings (263-264).
The years
1820-1845 also saw a critique of the prison, according to Foucault, who
cautions us against seeking to “pat” a timeline. He discusses
five major critiques, which, we are told, are “today repeated almost
unchanged” (265; as with previous discussions, Foucault cites 19th
century sources throughout):
1.
“Detention causes recidivism” (pp. 265-266): Foucault cites
numerous arguments and figures regarding recidivism rates in support of
his observation that prisons were producing delinquents, not “corrected
individuals.”
2. Prisons
produce delinquents “by the very conditions (they) impose upon (their)
inmates” (266-267): “Useless work,” “violent constraints,” and
various abuses of power are cited.
3. Prisons
bring together delinquents who then collaborate with one another
(267): Among his more memorable citations are references to
prisons as settings for “anti-social clubs” and “barracks of crime.”
4.
Ex-convict status and the markings and surveillance that come with it
promotes recidivism 267-268).
5. “[T]he
prison indirectly produces delinquents by throwing the inmate’s family
into destitution” (268).
The above
critiques, addressed by claiming either a “rudimentary” state of
corrective measures or that corrective measures detract from the
ability to punish, were/are always rectified by the continued
application of “penitentiary technique: “For a century and a half
the prison had always been offered as its own remedy” (268). In an
explicit reference to current (early nineteen-seventies) conditions, he
argues that there has been a continuous appeal to the “seven universal
maxims of the good ‘penitential condition’” (for above, see 268-269;
for items 1-7, pp. 269-270):
1. “Penal
detention must have as its essential function the transformation of the
individual’s behavior.”
2.
“Convicts must be isolated or at least distributed according to the
penal gravity of their act, but above all according to age, mental
attitude, the technique of correction to be used, the stages of their
transformation.”
3. “It
must be possible to alter the penalties according to the individuality
of the convicts, the results that have been obtained, progress or
relapses.
4. “Work must be
one of the essential elements in the transformation and progressive
socialization of convicts.”
5. “The
education of the prisoner is for the authorities both an indispensable
precaution in the interests of society and an obligation to the
prisoner.”
6. “The
Prison regime must, at least in part, be supervised and administered by
a specialized staff possessing the moral qualities and technical
abilities required of educators.”
7.
“Imprisonment must be followed by measures of supervision and
assistance until the rehabilitation of the former prisoner is complete.”
These
continuously resurfacing “propositions,” serve uphold Foucault’s
assertion that there is not a three-stage history of the prison, its
failure, and reform, but a “simultaneous system,” a “fourfold system”
made up of: the “super-power (of)…penitentiary
‘rationality;” “auxiliary knowledge” (or reproduction) of
criminality; “inverted efficiency; reform as “isomorphic…with the
disciplinary functioning of the prison – the element of utopian
duplication” (271). This “supposed failure” is, then, one of the
“effects of power…which may be grouped together under the name of
‘carceral system’” (271).
Having
established “the failure(s) of the prison” (272), Foucault moves on to
argue that they, and the effects (particularly of marking or
establishing the delinquent) have not been abandoned because “the
prison, and no doubt punishment in general, is not intended to
eliminate offences, but rather to distinguish them, to distribute them,
to use them;…they tend to assimilate the transgression of the laws in a
general tactics of subjection,” creating an “economy” of “illegalities”
(272).
In the late 18th
and early 19th centuries, “popular illegalities began to develop
according to new dimensions…introduced by movements which…linked
together social conflicts, the struggles against the political regimes,
the resistance to the movement of industrialization, the effects of
economic rises. The “development of the political dimension of
the popular illegalities” were based in local actions (273-274), the
“rejection of the law or other regulation” as struggle against those
who enacted them (274), and the increases in regulatory functions of
those wielding political or economic authority leading to an increase
in “the occasions of offences” by those who would otherwise have been
within the law (273-275). This increased politicization is tied
by Foucault t to the changing role of the ‘working-class” in 19th
century France and he cites numerous sources in support of the “class
dissymmetry” affecting the application of “law and justice”
(276). Delinquency, as a form of illegality, again becomes a
means by which to categorize, etc, on behalf of the “carceral system”
(277). Foucault sums up: “We have seen how the carceral
system substituted the ‘delinquent’ for the offender, and also
superimposed upon juridical practice a whole horizon of possible
knowledge” all of which “enables them to reinforce one another
perpetually, to objectify the delinquency behind the offence, to
solidify delinquency in the movement of illegalities” (277).
Why and how,
then, he asks, does penality invest certain practices “in a mechanism
of ‘punishment-reproduction?” His first assertion is that by
defining and controlling a criminal element, a more supervisable,
manipulable group diffuses the possibility for more disruptive
(political) illegalities (278-279). His second is that it is used as
form of “colonialism,” even domestically; for instance as a mechanism
for reaping the profits of prostitution and other illegalities
(279-280). His third, the political use of
delinquents as “thugs” or a “clandestine police force” in labor
struggles in particular, all of which is made possible by surveillance
and documentation in collaboration with the prison and judges
(280-282). On pages 282-285 explores the biographies of Vidocq,
cop and criminal who ended the “Shakespearian age when sovereignty
confronted abomination in a single character” (283) and Francois
Lacenaire, fallen bourgeois criminal and cause celèbre.
Foucault
describes the “production of delinquency” as a continuously shifting
process, as opposed to a “result,” in which the delinquents are
separated from and made to be demonized by the rest of the lower class
populations, particularly in relation to labor struggles. All of
which is described as “a whole tactic of confusion aimed at maintaining
a permanent state of conflict” (285-286). This was
supplemented by a “patient attempt” to portray the criminal as
ever-present and “everywhere to be feared” in the newspapers and novels
of the time. By the end of the nineteenth century, the worker’s
newspapers were actively campaigning “against penal labor”
(286-287). This position is modified a bit to recognize that
workers newspapers didn’t solely vilify the criminal, but blamed
societal conditions for forcing the criminal into desperate
measures. Foucault argues that even these observations fell short
of recognizing “delinquency from above...the source of misery and the
principle of revolt for the poor” (287). It is, apparently,
the increase in workers as political prisoners that leads the
“reappraisal of penal justice” and the tactic of the “counter-fait
divers,” which portrayed the decadent bourgeoisie as the ever-present
criminal (288).
Foucault cites
the Fourierists as “the first to elaborate a political theory
which...places a positive value on crime.” He argues that they
recognized “not a criminal nature, but a play of forces which,
according to the class to which individuals belong, will lead them to
power or to prison (289). This, then was a recognition of
penality as political tool and of the “play of opposing forces” in
which the prol’s were caught (289-290).
He moves then to
a third figure, a thirteen year old featured by La Phalange who
“opposed to the discourse of the law that made him delinquent... the
discourse of an illegality that remained resistant to these coercions
and which revealed indiscipline in a systematically ambiguous manner as
the disordered order of society and as the affirmation of inalienable
rights” (290). Through the boy’s dialogue with his sentencing
judge the paper, and Foucault, discussed the “violent split between the
accused and society,” between the society and system that renders “the
worker a slave.” This discourse, which Foucault notes may not be
representative of the discourse of the workers newspapers, as the
precursor of the recognition of “the political problem of delinquency”
and “the most militant rejection of the law” and the awareness of
the bourgeois system of “legality and illegality” (292).
Part
IV, ch 3. The carceral
Foucault chooses
January 22, 1840, “the date of the official opening of Mettray,” as the
“date of completion of the carceral system” (293). Mettray, a
prison for the underage, he explains, “is the disciplinary form at its
most extreme, the model in which are concentrated all the coercive
technologies of behavior:” the family, the army, the workshop, the
school, and the judicial model” (293-294). Here, “the
entire parapenal institution, which is created in order not to be a
prison, culminates in the cell, on the walls of which are written in
black letters: ‘God sees you” (294). The “chiefs and their
deputies at Mettray...were in a sense technicians of behavior:
engineers of conduct, orthopaedists of individuality” who produced
controllable bodies through their training (294-295). Foucault
explicitly argues that Mettray produced inmates who would then become
the technicians of control in “the first training college pure
discipline” (295).
At this time
power-knowledge, upheld by psychiatry and the “judicial apparatus,”
“(normalized) the power of normalization,” and made warders out of
prisoners (296). It was “the most famous of a whole series of
institutions which, well beyond the frontiers of criminal law,
constituted what one might call the carceral archipelago” (297).
This time,
minors were ostensibly being protected from the prison, then, is the
moment when, according to Foucault, penality escapes transcends the
boundaries of the prison proper: “The frontiers between
confinement, judicial punishment and institutions of discipline, where
were already blurred in the classical age, tended to disappear and to
constitute a great carceral continuum that diffused penitentiary
techniques into the most innocent disciplines” (297). The
carceral system came to include a wide variety of institutions that
were ostensibly charitable or intended for the shelter and protection
of the poor and the young, eventually, reaching “all the disciplinary
mechanisms that function throughout society” (297-298).
Foucault
summarizes: “We have seen that, in penal justice, the prison
transformed the punitive procedure into a penitentiary technique; the
carceral archipelago transported this technique from the penal
institution to the entire social body” (298). He then argues that
there have been six key results:
1.
Individuals “crimes,” “sins,” and “conduct” were no longer judged by
“separate criteria” and in relation to “separate criteria.”
Irregular behavior “was no longer the offence, the attack on the common
interest, it was the departure from the norm, the anomaly...the social
enemy was transformed into a deviant,” whose deviance was deemed
infectious. “The carceral network linked...the two long, multiple
series of the punitive and the abnormal” (pp. 298-300)
2. The
carceral “allows the recruitment of major ‘delinquents” and
“organizes...’disciplinary careers.” Penality and discipline in
the 19th century produced both docility and delinquency. In
panoptic society, there are no “outlaws,” only those held and
controlled by the law and its mechanisms. “The carceral
archipelago assures...the formation of delinquency on the basis of
subtle illegalities, the overlapping of the latter by the former and
the establishment of a specified criminality” (pp. 300-301).
3. The
carceral system “succeeds in making the power to punish natural and
legitimate, in lowering at least the threshold of tolerance to
penality.” It plays “the legal register of justice and the
extra-legal register of discipline...against one another,” masking the
true violence of penality. Society and the prison now differ only
in degree, and societal discipline (and the self policing it entails)
is accepted as proper, even when applied to the mildest transgressions
(pp. 301-303).
4.
The “carceral network” has a great normative function, and “the judges
of normality are present everywhere” (p. 304)
5. The
“real capture of the body and its perpetual observation” have created
the “knowable man,” “the object-effect of ...
domination-observation.” Foucault implies a relationship between
the rise of the human sciences and the penal process of
power-knowledge (pp. 304-305).
6. The
prison is deeply rooted in “mechanisms and strategies of power.”
However, the prison is neither indispensable or unalterable.
Foucault names two processes “capable of exercising considerable
restraint” and transformation on the prison: 1) processes which
“(reduce) the utility...of a delinquency accommodated as a specific
illegality, as when the “levy on sexual pleasure is carried out more
efficiently” through the market than through “the archaic hierarchy of
prostitution; 2) The spread of and growth of “mechanisms of
normalization” beyond the prison, which, Foucault argues, will soon
make “the specificity of the prison”
unnecessary. (pp. 305-306)
Foucault closes
with another passage from La Phalange, in relation to which he makes
the book’s final points about the carceral city:
1. “that at the
center of this city...is a multiple network of diverse elements;”
2. “that the
model of the carceral city is... a strategic distribution of elements
of different natures and levels”
3. “that it is
the court that is external and subordinate to the prison” (and not vice
versa)
4. that it is
“linked to a whole series of ‘carceral’ mechanisms”
5. that the
above mechanisms are applied to transgression of production not of a
“’central’ law”
6. “That
ultimately what presides over all these mechanisms is not the unitary
functioning of an apparatus or an institution, but the necessity of
combat and the rules of strategy.” (pp. 307-308)
Foucault asks
that we “hear the distant roar of battle” and begin our own “studies of
the power of normalization and the formation of knowledge in modern
society” for which he has provided a background (308).
Outline prepared
by Gretchen Haas and Brian Okstad
December 15, 2003