Discipline and Punish
Part Two
Previously on Discipline and Punish
Discipline And Punish
Torture
A. The Body Of The Condemned [3-31]
B. The Spectacle Of The Scaffold [32-69]
II. Punishment (73-131)
A. Generalized Punishment (73-103)
B. The Gentle Way In Punishment (104-131)
III. Discipline
A. Docile Bodies
1) The Art Of Distribution
2) The Control Of Activity
3) The Organization Of Geneses
4) The Composition Of Forces
B. The Means Of Correct Training
1) Hierarchical Observation
2) Normalizing Judgements
3) The Examination
C. Panopticism
IV. Prison
A. Complete And Austere Institutions
B. Illegalities And Delinquency
C. The Carceral
• Vicious, graphic, visible torture
I.
• Display of sovereign’s power
• Body of offender as opportunity for
power’s display
• Spectacle. Social control “celebrations”
II. Punishment (73-131)
Discipline And Punish
Torture
A. The Body Of The Condemned [3-31]
B. The Spectacle Of The Scaffold [32-69]
II. Punishment (73-131)
A. Generalized Punishment (73-103)
B. The Gentle Way In Punishment (104-131)
III. Discipline
A. Docile Bodies
1) The Art Of Distribution
2) The Control Of Activity
3) The Organization Of Geneses
4) The Composition Of Forces
B. The Means Of Correct Training
1) Hierarchical Observation
2) Normalizing Judgements
3) The Examination
C. Panopticism
IV. Prison
A. Complete And Austere Institutions
B. Illegalities And Delinquency
C. The Carceral
I.
A. Generalized Punishment (73-103)
B. The Gentle Way In
Punishment (104-131)
Late 17th Century “Crisis of Penality”
Where is protest against public execution coming from?
Foucault saw three components:
Danger – current practices supported or dramatized
confrontation between
sovereign and violence of the people.
violence of
Excess – cruelty betrayed the tyrannical nature of the sovereign –
calls for
“measure”
Shamefulness – once question is opened and issue of limit
arises, “soul” is
transformed from what torture
has to reach to be effective into
what has to
be left intact out of respect – calls for “humanity.”
(74.4)
Foucault’s Question
How does humanity as measure
of punishment become attached
to leniency and the economy of
punishment? (74.9-75.1)
Methodology: How to find answer
• Don’t think about it in terms of a policy
maker thinking about it nor in terms of a
Machiavellian sovereign trying to hold on
to power.
• Rather, think about how a society or
culture “thinks” and how different forces
and perspectives can change how that
happens
Redefine the Problem
• The reaction was not just to excess but to
irregularity (78.4)
Evidence?
• Look at what people were saying, what
arguments justified “need for reform,” what
values were cited, how was old way
criticized, how was new way lauded, why
is the progressive progressive?
• In short, look at the layers of rhetorical
sediment that make up history, not just
main players or events.
Complaints
•
•
•
•
Overlapping and confusing jurisdictions
Inconsistent punishments
Conflicting rules
Too much power in some places, too little
in others
• Exaggerations and loopholes
Calls for a more regular,
effective, sensible, efficient
system.
What Reformers Saw
A poorly organized economy of power  “Paralysis of justice”
Sources of the Movement
“many different interests come together” in this “movement
New science of medicine
Anti-sovereign
Liberal Ideologies
Enlightened citizens
Philosophes
Utilitarians
Reform of punishment
What “reform” really was
A cleaning up of the system
“In short, 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.”
(81.6)
REFORM
• Rearrangement of power to punish, not
less, but better.
• severity but universality and necessity
Other Changes
• Emergence of bourgeois society and
“complexification” of organizational society
creates new advocate for social order
Second half 18th c. The
property of the bourgeoisie
increasingly what crime is
about
Corporate
property
could
not
tolerate
property illegality at all – in fact, it
needed guarantee of property to be able to
operate – need for certainty and risk
protection at the very heart of what it was
(85.6)
Everyday illegality had been
mundane aspect of life. Now it
annoys a rising class of actor
Less about annoying the king than about
interfering with the bourgeoisie
“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.” (87.8)
Power of
Sovereign
Tolerated
Illegalities
Penal Reform
In other words…
1. Absolute power of sovereign comes with host
of tolerated illegalities. Attack absolute power,
and you attack the system of illegalities.
2. In agreeing to respect the basic rights of the
prisoner as human, we reserve the right to
expect conformity of all. In other words, if we
stop punishment because this is one man
among many, we expect conformity from the
many of whom this is just one.
The right to punish has been
shifted from the vengeance of
the sovereign to the defense
of society (90.7).
III. Discipline
A. Docile Bodies
Discipline And Punish
Torture
A. The Body Of The Condemned [3-31]
B. The Spectacle Of The Scaffold [32-69]
II. Punishment (73-131)
A. Generalized Punishment (73-103)
B. The Gentle Way In Punishment (104-131)
III. Discipline
A. Docile Bodies
1) The Art Of Distribution
2) The Control Of Activity
3) The Organization Of Geneses
4) The Composition Of Forces
B. The Means Of Correct Training
1) Hierarchical Observation
2) Normalizing Judgements
3) The Examination
C. Panopticism
IV. Prison
A. Complete And Austere Institutions
B. Illegalities And Delinquency
C. The Carceral
I.
1) The Art Of Distribution
2) The Control Of Activity
3) The Organization Of Geneses
4) The Composition Of Forces
B. The Means Of Correct
Training
1) Hierarchical Observation
2) Normalizing Judgements
3) The Examination
C. Panopticism
Part III: Discipline
Let’s start with a consideration of the overall
structure of this part of the book.
– Docile Bodies
– The Means of Correct Training
– Panopticism
Docile bodies (135)
• What is the DOCILE BODY? At 136.6 we
read that it is one that may be subjected,
used, transformed, and improved.
• “Nature” and “nurture.”
• Are Xs born, or made?
The art of distributions (141)
One prime component of discipline, Foucault claims, is the
ordering, separation, and distribution of individuals in space.
You can think of this as discipline’s mistrust of amorphous
(shapeless), spontaneous, gatherings.
– Wedding reception vs. the cocktail party,
the parade vs. the riot,
organized school vs. the 1-room school house,
the regimented army vs. the lynch mob.
Communication and the Art of Distributions
power
Private connection separates
subjects from one another
power
Public connection facilitates solidarity
among subjects.
The Means of Correct Training
• Hierarchical observation
• Normalizing judgment
• The examination
Hierarchical observation
– Along side the development of telescope,
microscope we get new science of man
– Architecture that is not just about being seen
but also to permit internal observation
– bathroom stalls, smoked glass, etc.
– DJR: Coleman’s seedling planters
Normalizing Judgement
• “average” or “normal” as value laden terms?
• workshop, school, army subject to a micro-penality of time
(latenesses, absences, interruptions), activity (inattention,
negligence, lack of zeal), behavior (impoliteness,
disobedience), speech (idle chatter, insolence), the body
(incorrect attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness),
sexuality (impurity, indecency). (178.5)
• order as natural and observable – (DJR – eh?)
• to punish is to exercise (write 100 times “I must not…”)
• keeping record book of points, marks
The examination
– “The examination transformed the economy of
visibility into the exercise of power.” (187.5)
– “The examination also introduces individuality into the
field of documentation.” (189.4)
– Examination makes each individual a case. (191.5)
– ascending vs. descending individualization (193)
– “In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it
produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.”
(194.5)
Panopticism (195ff)
Foucault begins his discussion of
“panopticism” with a description of
the “plague mentality” or that style
of thinking that seems to spring
forth almost naturally when we are
faced with a plague situation…
… a plague situation…
What is the best thing to do in the
face of a plague? When a disease is
seen as potentially attacking anyone
and everyone, when it feels as if it
is “evil” among us, when any sense
that scapegoats might work has been
superseded by a realization that we
are up against something bigger than
that, what do we do?
Foucault’s answer is:
• First, we partition and separate. Families are to stay in their
homes. Each department is to keep to itself. The meat produced by
each plant is to be kept separate. Doors are closed. The prison is
placed under lock down with prisoners placed in their cells and no
mixing in the yard. Parents send all the children to their rooms.
Spaces are subdivided. In order to prevent the spread or to isolate
the problem or just to get a handle on things we have the urge to
reduce the amount of random mixing in the population. This is, for
example, how a curfew is designed to prevent rioting.
• Second, we subject everyone or everything to constant inspection.
Guards are posted. IDs are checked at every door.
• Third, the sick are registered (196.5). Recall the debates
throughout the AIDS epidemic on the wisdom and necessity of
maintaining a registry of HIV+ persons.
• The goal of all of these is to meet "mixture" with analysis (<= ana
- lysis -- to break up into parts), disorder with order (197.6).
The power of discipline is
analysis and order.
Plague mentality represents a global shift…
…in how society thinks about problems.
In the old system, the paradigmatic case is the leper. The leper is
treated by wearing a mark and by having to live outside the city walls or
in a lepers’ colony. The model demonstrated by this is that of pure
community – those who don’t fit in are simply ostracized.
Recall, in this connection, the reaction of the Puritans to their
community problems in the first decades of the Massachusetts Bay
Colony – they constantly tried to identify who belonged and who did not
and then tried to send those who didn’t out.
By contrast, the plague mentality sees the evil as “among us” and
responds to it by restructuring the community itself, segmenting it’s
members, putting people in boxes. Rather than mark the evil doer, the
whole society is broken down into categories and distributions.
Everyone has a proper position. This approach is based on the ideal of
the disciplined society, well ordered, clearly structured, etc.
leper
separation
mark
Plague stricken town
Pure community
plague
segmentation
Analysis
and
distribution
Perfectly
governed
City
Disciplined
society
“The plague as a form, at once real and imaginary,
of disorder has as its medical and political
correlative discipline.
Behind the disciplinary
mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of
‘contagions’, of the plague, of rebellions,
crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear
and disappear, live and die in disorder” (198.3).
The panopticon accomplishes a
marvelous transformation…
In the face of such disorder, The crowd or
“multiplicity” which is a compact mass of
interacting individuals becomes a collection
of separated individualities.
From the
guard’s
point
of
view,
a
crowd
is
transformed into a multiplicity that can be
numbered and supervised while from the
inmate’s point of view a crowd has become a
sequestered and observed solitude (201.3).
Hence the major effect of the Panopticon:
to induce in the inmate a state of
consciousness and permanent visibility
that assures the automatic functioning of
power.
So to arrange things that the
surveillance is permanent in its effects,
even if it is discontinuous in its action;
that the perfection of power should tend
to render its actual exercise unnecessary;
that this architectural apparatus should
be a machine for creating and sustaining a
power relation independent of the person
who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power
situation of which they themselves are the
bearers. (201.5)
What now?
For Bentham the idea of the panopticon was
that power should be visible but unverifiable.
For me, I am reminded that the point is to
create a form of social organization that has
properties of GOD -- cf. what they teach little
kids: knows everything, always watching,
you can't see him…. In other words…
…Unobtrusive Control Abounds
But it is not the whole story
Informal Control Still Dominates – we
control one another most of the time
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