Themes on Foucault's Discipline and Punishment and Histoty of Sexuality
Discpline and Punish (Summary and Commentary)
All throughout the Discipline and Punish Foucault constantly contrast the
two forms of power, the old sovereign power and the new disciplinary power. The
work started with the description of the old ritualistic form of governance through
a vivid and brutal account on the execution of Damiens because of regicide. Then
after the brutal account of the old sovereignty is also a detailed account of the
daily schedule of the House of Young Prisoners in Paris. Foucault has vividly
contrasted the two forms of penal system.
The first form of power is a kind of power-blockade. The sovereign king wants
to affirm his rule and authority by exercising a power that freezes people. But
Public torture soon turned against the sovereign. It made criminals heroes, the
executioners mobbed, and the throne questioned:
“The condemned man found himself transformed into a hero by the sheer extent
of his widely advertised crimes, and sometimes the affirmation of his related
repentance.” (DP, p. 67)
Inevitably, protests in the 18th century occurred against torture and
execution:
“And it is the breaking up of this solidarity that was becoming the aim of
penal and police repression. Yet out of the ceremony of the public execution,
out of that uncertain festival in which violence was instantaneously
reversible, it was this solidarity much more that the sovereign power that
was likely to emerge with redoubled strength. The reformers of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries were not to forget that, in the last resort, the
executions did not, in fact, frighten the people. One of their first cries
was to demand their abolition.” (DP, p. 63)
This gave rise to the prisons that curtails freedom equally deprived from
peoples who commit disorder.
What became evident is that power blockade is not that effective anymore.
The spectacular torture is just a display of power to vanquish. The display of
power is of excess and superiority, thus, creating an imbalance. It does not
establish justice but a power that freezes, one trapped in a utopia. A power that
only impedes and without any productive output:
“The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power.
Its ruthlessness, its spectacle, its physical violence, its unbalanced play of
forces, its meticulous ceremonial, its entire apparatus were inscribed in the
political functioning of the penal system.” (DP, p. 49)
It was replaced by a power in the form of a science of discipline. One of
the principles or mechanisms involved in here is spatialization. Spatialization
maximizes every resource that could be derived from the individual so as to obtain
a higher degree of productivity. Every centavo is important. Another principle
or characteristic of this disciplinary power is the diffusion of power to the
minutest details of activity. This was made manifest in the use of timetables,
and strict schedules which maximizes time to its every second. Disciplinary power
also forms its subjects through repetitive exercises in order to meet the standard
norm and it most efficient use in the society. Everything was being organized very
efficiently including the detailed hierarchies. Disciplinary power normalizes
judgments. It dictates which is normal from the abnormal. There is an average that
needs always to be respected. Moreover, disciplinary power does not only prevent
something bad as in the power blockade but it also specifies what has to be done.
The disciplinary power was brought together by the panopticon, an ingenious
(though simple) architectural innovation. The panopticon has become the model for
all institutions in using discipline. This is a structure with a tower in the center
that can supervise every prisoner in his/her cell. The panopticon is a structure
that conveys on its inhabitants a sense of incessant surveillance. The prisoners
are looked at but cannot themselves talk to the warden or to each other. The
prisoners don’t anymore tend to see their selves dissolving into the anonymity
of the inhabitants but rather continuously acts in caution. The power operation
in here is dissolved into omni-presence. The panopticon is also very tricky because
though the tower of surveillance is visible, its surveying power is unverifiable.
The panopticon is not just an architectural structure with the aim of promoting
aesthetics of infrastructures but of a structure promoting an ideal form of power,
a disciplinary power. It is an architectural design that intensifies power. In
this structure, there is an increase in the number of subjected individuals, and
decrease in the number of people needed for surveillance. If applied in business,
the structure minimizes the capital but maximizes the profit. The power is not
anymore confined within one individual but is dispersed for a more efficient
control. Because power is not only based on its visibility, it creates into the
peoples mind the idea of caution. 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 (DP 201).
Panopticism is the form governance that modern institutions have. The power
is not anymore centralized as in any utiopic form of society. It uses power that
does not anymore merely freezes nor is in an exceptionally enclosed space on the
edge of society. The panopticon made use of the subtlest power that function outside
the violent exercise of authority. The panopticon now made use of this disciplinary
mechanism that functions in a way that improves the exercise of power by making
it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society
to come. (DP, p. 209)
The Disciplinary or Panoptic society reverses the dungeon form of punishment
that deprives light. It now uses permanent visibility. So in this form of governance
there is a feeling of always being looked at. The only thing you are sure of is
that you are being watched even though you have doubts. Power in here is no longer
individualized but is disindividualized. This is manifested in the way they deliver
formation. It is not of whole-sale formation but of a “retail” one. They see the
individuality of a person. This is an important characteristic of a developing
technology. And without any doubt this is one of the solutions to the problem in
the way the old regime works. Power is diffused into all corners and no escape
is possible. There is always a constant surveillance.
As a technique of surveillance, examination proved to be very effective.
Not just examination of the famous people but more especially the little ones.
By means of writing people up, discipline could be implemented. Before only famous
people are written up; but now, because of the development of documentation, every
individual is a story; everyone is documented. Imagine this form of power operating
in the institutions; a very high degree of surveillance far more developed than
the old one. Surveillance is the key to success of the new regime.
Surveillance is the backbone of the disciplinary power:
“By means of such surveillance, disciplinary power became an ‘integrated’
system, linked from the inside to the economy and to the aims of the mechanism
in which it was practiced. It was organized as a multiple, automatic and
anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on the individuals, its
functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also
to a certain extent from bottom top literally; this network ‘holds’ the whole
together and traverses it in its entirety with effects of power that derive
from one another: supervisors perpetually supervised.” (DP, p. 176-175)
In this new system everybody is watching one another. SM for example, in the
cashier, two or three people are doing a systematic complicated work. It is a system
professionally run. There is excellent surveillance because there is a mutual
watching of each other. There are computers, manpower and good system.
Prison is a very good example of a panoptic institution. The prison became
not just a place of deprivation of liberty but also of instilling discipline in
the prisoners so as to make them less prone to crime and more prone to
productivity. The prisons worked on the souls of the prisoners so as to alter their
minds. The new regime makes punishment a venue of making useful appropriation of
bodies. Prisons now reforms prisoners by making them new individuals through the
strict schedules and repetitive activities. Proper work habits are then formed.
This is a constructive form of government that gave rise to the highly productive
and efficient modern day institutions. If successful the outcome of this
reformation is a docile person who does whatever was order of him by the society
without any question. In this sense, he is seen as normal, peace-loving and
productive citizen. But for those who can’t really conform to the ideologies of
these institutions, everything becomes a trap. The power now is too subtle and
elusive that what is only left for one to do is to accept the reality and conform
to the molding hands of the institutions in order to live less miserably (though
living in conformation with the encroaching power of the institutions is already
very miserable).
The transition clearly points out the evolution of a more effective form
of power, a power blockade to a disciplinary power. A transformation of power that
merely impedes to a power that produces. The panopticon has a role of amplification;
although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and
more effective, it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation
of threatened society; its aim is to strengthen the social forces – to increase
production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public
morality; to increase and multiply. (DP, 207-208)
The penal system has affected the whole society and its techniques have
expanded to every institution in the society. The governmental programs in
educating for example adopted the panoptical system of the prison. As in the
prisons, it created a society of docile bodies. The disciplinary techniques was
not only confined in the prison so eventually it decline in importance: “The second
process is the growth of the disciplinary networks, the multiplication of their
exchanges with the given penal apparatus, the ever more important powers that are
given them, the more massive the transference to them of judicial functions; now,
as medicine, psychology, education, public assistance, ‘social work’ assume an
ever greater share of the powers of supervision and assessment, the penal apparatus
will be able, in turn become medicalized, psychologized, educationalized; and by
the same token that turning-point represented by the prison becomes less useful...”
(DP, p. 306)
Panopticism has been the primary means to push forth normalization which
is a very crucial social organization in any administrative life. The panopticon
has been the turning point in solving the problems on how one could see the minute
details in the era of spectacles. It was to the modern age, to its ever-growing
influence of the state, to its ever more profound intervention in all the details
and all the relations of social life, that was reserved the task of increasing
and perfecting its guarantees, by using and directing towards the great aim the
building and distribution of buildings intended to observe a great multitude of
men at the same time.” (Julius, DP, 216)
The modern society has been transformed into a panoptic one. It has been
a society of constant surveillance. Everyone has been constructed into this docile
soul that could render itself useful and productive to the society. A construct
that has no person at all. A construct that has lost its true identity. Our
identities are defined by mere papers and documents; by institutions. It is ironic
that the biographies abstracted by biographers and psychologists are not done by
individuals who are directly affected. The CV’s determined one’s identity; so once
a criminal you’ll always be a criminal. Foucault in my own understanding wanted
to open our eyes to the reality we thought to be true. Are what we think as good
or right in itself truth constants? Are the institutions making life better or
making us slaves and robots to do its every demand. We may be are trapped in this
huge prison of governmentality.
History of Sexuality (Summary and Commentary)
In his book History of Sexuality, Foucault wanted to understand what really
sexuality is; its birth and growth and it as being historically given. Foucault
questions the idea of a repressive sexuality; that sex is something to hide but
at the same time that which is most often talked about.
The repressive hypothesis informs us that for the past centuries there has
been a repression in our approach to “sex.” Sex, outside the purpose of means for
reproduction, has been associated with a taboo. In order to free ourselves in this
trap, the repressive hypothesis suggests that we must talk openly and freely about
sex; we must enjoy it.
But for Foucault sex has not really been repressed and silenced. Instead,
discourses about it have been intensified. The science of confession for example.
People thought that by confessing, they liberate them selves from sins as of
impurities. And this liberation must require them to “tell the truth” of their
selves to a priest, who is seen as superior in authority:
People are taught that their liberation requires them to “tell the truth,”
to confess it to someone who is more powerful (a priest, a psychoanalyst),
and this truth telling will somehow set them free (see, History of Sexuality,
58-65).
The confessions rendered to the Priests meticulously elaborate one’s sexual
desires. Modern society as a whole was a picture of this form of discourse on sex:
“What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned
sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking
of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.” (HS, p. 35)
What has occurred is the rise of the so-called bio-power. It is a form of
technology that places sex in a series of distinctions or binary systems: illicit
and licit. It is one of the means for normalisation:
“Power is essentially what dictates its law to sex.
Which means first of
all that sex is placed by power in a binary system: licit and illicit,
permitted and forbidden.” (HS, p.83).
As a political technology, bio-power has been used in categorising scientifically
human beings as in their gender, population, race, sex, etc. (This was manifested
in the science of confessions.) Moreover, many norms have been directed to the
sexual behaviours of men. It also became an important object of study for
demographic and statistical analysis. Sex has already been something administered
instead of just being judged. Sexual conduct has a big role in addressing the
economic and political issues of the country. Population management is determinant
of the government’s policing of sex so the state took an active interest in the
sexuality of the population. Abnormality and other simple deviations are took into
consideration for the reason that they could account to the degradation of marital
relations and families. Moreover, sanctions were imposed on even minor forms of
perversions and irregularities. These were already seen as metal illness or
abnormalities that needs to be combated. Examples of abnormalities of this kind
are marrying a close relative, to seduce a nun, engage in sadism, deceive ones
wife, to violate a cadaver:
“debauchery (extramarital relations), adultery, rape, spiritual or carnal
incest, but also sodomy, or mutual caress. As to the courts, they could
condemn homosexuality as well as infidelity, marriage without consent, or
bestiality.” (HS, p. 38)
Discourses on sex then expanded to married couples, to sexual perversions,
to child sexuality, homosexuality, bi-sexuality, etc. One’s character was
beginning to be measured by his/her sexuality. The discourses on sexuality was
fragmentary yet ubiquitous.
Sexuality, then, as opposed to the repressive hypothesis is not a force that
needs to be controlled or repressed. Nor it is a force that has to be normalized
by anyone in power. Rather, it is that by which power relations are made possible.
Our discourse and knowledge of it is the instrument or tool for power relations
to take place. In other words, Foucault would account to a history on sexuality
that has not really been silenced but has exploded discursively. Though one may
be policed in talking about sex, one continually speaks of it. Moreover, he saw
the shift from a moral concern to a definition of normal. Sex, furthermore, had
not just become a mere act, but an identity in itself. “The sodomite had been a
temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” (HS, p. 43) Foucault in
this context then is presenting a theory of identity, sexuality, and power.
Sex and power, undoubtedly, basing from the relations implicitly posed above are
directly connected. So in the modern day Western society Foucault made the
following observations on the relationship of sex and power:
“Nineteenth-century ‘bourgeois’ society-and it is doubtless still with
us-was a society of blatant and fragmented perversion. And this was not by
way of hypocrisy, for nothing was more manifest and more prolix, or more
manifestly taken over by discourses and institutions. Not because, having
tried to erect too rigid or too general a barrier against sexuality, society
succeeded only in giving rise to a whole perverse outbreak and a long
pathology of the sexual instinct. At issue, rather, is the type of power
it brought to bear on the body and on sex. In point of fact, this power had
neither the form of the law, nor the effects of the taboo. On the contrary,
it acted by multiplication of singular sexualities. It did not set boundaries
for sexuality; it extended the various forms of sexuality, pursuing them
according to lines of indefinite penetration. It did not exclude sexuality,
but included -it in the body as a mode of specification of individuals. It
did not seek to avoid it; it attracted its varieties by means of spirals
in which pleasure and power reinforced one another. It did not set up a
barrier; it provided places of maximum saturation. It produced and
determined the sexual mosaic. Modern society is perverse, not in spite of
its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is
in actual fact, and directly, perverse.” (HS, p. 47)
One of the instruments constructed to have access to the knowledge of man
is sex. It was a pivotal concept that latter became a political issue. It has been
tied to the discipline of bodies:
“It has been tied to the discipline of body: the harnessing, ntensification,
and distribution of forces, the adjustment and economy of energies.” (HS,
p. 145)
Aside from this, sex as a developer of the political technology of life
because of it being used, as was always reiterated in the paper, in regulating
population, it has made far-reaching effects in its activity. Because of this
political implications of sex, it became a very powerful tool in controlling the
minutest to the most comprehensive elements of the society:
“It fitted in both categories at once, giving rise to infinitesimal
surveillances, permanent controls, extremely meticulous ordering of space,
indeterminate
micro-power
medical
concerned
or
with
psychological
the
body.
examinations,
But
it
gave
to
rise
an
as
entire
well
to
comprehensive measures, statistical assessments, and interventions aimed
at the entire social body or at groups taken as a whole. Sex was a means
of access both to life of the body and the life of the species.” (HS, 145-146)
It seems that man is constructed in a society through deployments of
sexuality and power relations. Has man really lost his identity in this new form
of society? It is evident that the modern man is defined not by his own self but
by the institutions where he is in. He is seen in terms of his bio-data, the family
he came from, the school he graduated from, etc. These institutions presuppose
the formation or the construction which the scientists has made on him. And in
this line, Foucault has given his idea of aesthetics of life. He wanted to open
our minds to the idea of the “aesthetics of existence”. This idea states that one
must turn his life into a work of art and not just being based on the definitive
institutions that mold it. In the ancient times, voluntary practices were made
by the people in which they fix their rules of conducts and sought of modifying
their mode of being, thus, giving their lives a certain aesthetic and stylistic
form.
“For Foucault, to make one’s life a work of art is to lead a life that in
its perfection and brilliance is an “example” and an inspiration of others.”
(Genealogy of Ethics, p. 362)
Life must be made into an art in which order could be found. But the limits of
its order must constantly be challenged. It must not be confined on the mere
docility of one’s body to the normalizing norms of the society.
Truth of ourselves then is not only based on the scientific findings of the
sciences. The truth of ourselves is not therefore only found on the studies of
the human sciences. The deployments of sexuality are not the definitive guage of
what reality really is. “Truth is the function of who you are, what you have made
for yourself, and what you have made of your self from the givens of life.”
Knowing the truth of ourselves is not simply based on the findings of
psychologies. Our identity is not bound on a piece of paper. These studies of one’s
tendencies, genetic make-up, etc., is not the ultimate gauge of the truth of the
self. Truth could be known through a series of preparations of ourselves towards
it. It is a never-ending process. One needs to work on the self before truth reveals
itself.
What is this work then? What form of elaboration of self is needed? Philosophy
is a way of life. Philosophy makes us think better; we evaluate the subjectives,
and modulate them, because the price we have to pay for them is just to high. One
must always remember his humanity. As humans with personhood, we create our selves.
We take responsibility for everything we do. We are endowed with all the faculties
to do and act responsible given all these realities of life. What difference will
our actions do if we only act without responsibility? There is nothing different
from the animals.
As humans, we should not only follow what is dictated by the institutitons
without even using the intellect. Because of our God given qualities, we are capable
of freely choosing our actions. This freedom enables as to act responsibly for
everything we do. And this acknowledgement of the responsibility, which we are
capable of doing, is the means of forming our own identity. The “bios,” that which
has beginning and end, gives in us now this pressure to work; our immortal works
will overcome our own mortality. We need to have that defining quality in us that
will last through all ages.
Aesthetics should not only be confined in the artworks of artists, i.e.,
schooled artists. Just as these artists have their own identity in their artworks
even without their signature, every man should be an artist whose artwork is not
just any outside object but he himself. His life is not just a form that passes
through the molding hands of the modern institutions but must also have the internal
power and will to form his own identity. This is life as aesthetics. A life not
of total submission but a work on one’s own very self. It is an aesthetics mode
of subjection. It is not closed, but an open-ended. Not indifferent, but willing
to take responsibility.