Foucault’s Discipline and
Punish
Spring 2006
About the Author
To the extent that Foucault fits into the philosophical tradition, it is the
critical tradition of Kant, and his project could be called a Critical History
of Thought. This should not be taken to mean a history of ideas that
would be at the same time an analysis of errors that might be gauged
after the fact; or a decipherment of the misinterpretations linked to them
and on which what we think today might depend. If what is meant by
thought is the act that posits a subject and an object, along with their
possible relations, a critical history of thought would be an analysis of
the conditions under which certain relations of subject to object are
formed or modified, insofar as those relations constitute a possible
knowledge [savoir].
This text was first written by Foucault as a retrospective view about his work for the introduction to his
book "History of Sexuality", it was then given by Foucault, under the pseudonym "Maurice Florence"
as the article for the entry "Foucault" in "Dictionnaire des philosophes" 1984, pp 942-944.
http://foucault.info/foucault/biography.html
Faces of Michel Foucault
Again, about himself…
'My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to
show people that they are much freer than they
feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence,
some themes which have been built up at a certain
moment during history, and that this so-called
evidence can be criticized and destroyed.‘
'Truth, power, self: An interview with Michel Foucault October 25 1982', in Technologies
of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault Eds Luther H. Martin and Patrick Hutton,
Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, p.10
[http://www.qut.edu.au/edu/cpol/foucault/quotes.html accessed 12 April 12, 2000]
Personal Biography
• Born in 1926 in Poitiers, the son of a
surgeon. Teenage years in occupied
France. Educated in the very competitive
French academic system finally winning a
place at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in
Paris. First successful writings in the
1960s. Died in 1984.
Intellectual Biography
•
•
•
•
•
“Foucault, like many began his philosophical career considering psychological
phenomena. In Mental Illness and Personality(1954), he developed an existential
phenomenology within the boundaries of Marxist thought.
His interest in philosophical science and history led him to write extensively on the
middle ages and the "archaeology of knowledge." Shifting to a more genealogical
explanation of the transitions between major stages of human development led him to
consider the causal effects of non-related causes upon the development of new
thought.
His major works also include: History of Madness in the Classical Age(1961), The
Birth of the Clinic(1963), The Order of Things(1966), and The Archaeology of
Knowledge(1969). His later works dealing with sexuality and religion, as well as
modern thought include Discipline and Punish(1975), History of Sexuality(1976), The
Confessions of the Flesh(unpublished), The Use of Pleasure(1984), and The Care of
the Self(1984).
His later works clearly show the major thrust of his thought: he sought the liberation
of man from contingent conceptual constraints masked as unsurpassable a priori
limits and the adumbration of alternative forms of existence.”
[http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/phil/philo/phils/foucault.html accessed 12 April 2000]
Intellectual Biography (cont’d)
• Major works also include: History of Madness in the
Classical Age (1961), (1963), The Order of Things
(1966), and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). His
later works dealing with sexuality and religion, as well as
modern thought include Discipline and Punish (1975),
History of Sexuality (1976), The Confessions of the
Flesh (unpublished), The Use of Pleasure (1984), and
The Care of the Self (1984).
• His later works clearly show the major thrust of his
thought: he sought the liberation of man from contingent
conceptual constraints masked as unsurpassable a priori
limits and the adumbration of alternative forms of
existence.”
• [http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/phil/philo/phils/foucault.html accessed
12 April 2000]
The Books
Our Book Today
Discipline and Punish, from the outside in
•
Is this the structure of the book?
I.
Torture
II.
Punishment
III. Discipline
IV. Prison
Or is it this…
Torture
Punishment
Discipline
Prison
Or is it this…
Torture
Punishment
Discipline
Prison
Or this?
Prison
Discipline
Punishment
Torture
Can we even say, before we’ve
“defined” what Foucault means
by each section title?
Torture
• Mid-18th century
• Spectacular (literally) assault on body
• Intentional pain
• Marking the body
• Person as “mark-able”
Punishment
• “‘Let penalties be regulated and proportioned to
the offences, let the death sentence be passed
onl on those convicted of murder, and let the
tortures that revolt humanity be abolished.’” (73)
• 19th century penal reform
• Punishment as “reformatory” in which the
offender is re-trained as an obedient subject, a
compliant signatory to the social contract.
• Person as repairable.
Discipline
• Making soldiers. Break down, build up.
• Close order drill.
• This idea can be transferred to other
activities – can make lawyers, activists,
MBA, etc. – molding people.
• You can build the rules into people.
• Person as docile, programmable,
trainable.
Prison
• Prison is an invention but one that has come to be
completely taken for granted.
• All control reduced to single “cash” nexus of “time”
• Generalized control is normalized, made to be a part of
“how things are” rather than self-consciously “the law of
the king”
• Control embedded in knowledge.
• Society as complex network of power
And so, look at page 7
• “We have, then, a public execution and a timetable. They do not punish the same crimes or
the same type of delinquent. But they each
define a penal style. Less than a century
separates them. … Among so many changes, I
shall consider one: the disappearance of torture
as a public spectacle. …
• “…it has been attributed too readily and too
emphatically to a process of ‘humanization’,….”
And page 9
• “Punishment had gradually ceased to be a
spectacle.
• “Punishment …become[s] he most hidden part
of the penal process.
• “It…enters [the realm] of abstract consciousness
• “[I]ts effectiveness…result[s] from its inevitability,
not from its visible intensity….”
Part I. Torture
Damiens
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert-Fran%C3%A7ois_Damiens
h
The
Assassination
of Louis XV by
Damiens
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/1/9/5/11956/11956-h/11956-h.htm
Damiens Being Broken on the Wheel
http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/602/
h
Eighty years later, Faucher drew up
his rules "for the House of young
prisoners in Paris"
•
"Art. 17. The prisoners' day will begin at six in the morning in
winter and at five in summer. They will work for nine hours a day
throughout the year. Two hours a day will be devoted to
instruction. Work and the day will end at nine o'clock in winter
and at eight in summer.
•
Art. 18. Rising. At the first drum-roll, the prisoners must rise and
dress in silence, as the supervisor opens the cell doors. At the
second drum-roll, they must be dressed and make their beds. At
the third, they must line up and proceed to the chapel for
morning prayer. There is a five-minute interval between each
drum-roll.
•
Art. 19. The prayers are conducted by the chaplain and followed by a moral or religious reading. This exercise
must not last more than half an hour.
•
Art. 20. Work. At a quarter to six in the summer, a quarter to seven in winter, the prisoners go down into the
courtyard where they must wash their hands and faces, and receive their first ration of bread. Immediately
afterwards, they form into work-teams and go off to work, which must begin at six in summer and seven in winter.
•
Art. 21. Meal. At ten o'clock the prisoners leave their work and go to the refectory; they wash their hands in their
courtyards and assemble in divisions. After the dinner, there is recreation until twenty minutes to eleven.
•
Art. 22. School. At twenty minutes to eleven, at the drum-roll, the prisoners form into ranks, and proceed in
divisions to the school. The class lasts two hours and consists alternately of reading, writing, drawing and
arithmetic.
“The Body of the Condemned”
Damiens’ Torture
1757
Faucher’s Timetable
1830s
Change? Humanization?
Change in Objective
Body as Object for power to
crush, leave mark on
Body as subject for power
to inhabit, colonize, take
over from inside
…a relationship between power
and the body…[24-30]
What I want to do is write a “correlative
history of the present” (31)
slave economy
feudal economy
mercantile economy
industrial economy
Punishment provides additional
labor force, and separates "civil"
slaves from war booty
Increase in corporal punishments
-- body is the only property
Penitentiary, forced labor, prison
factory
Need for free labor market 
corrective detention
QUESTION: What transformations
does Foucault take note of here?
• A whole series of parallel transformations. If we can line
them up we might be able to see some of his logic.
unbearable sensations 
effect by visibility

torture of body

judging crimes

who did it?

suspended rights
effect by inevitability
imprisonment of body
judging souls
how to understand
the authorship?
• This last suggests that we now ask "what did this?" We
want to know what sort of thing this criminal amongst us
is and how we should treat him.
What are we to make of the disappearance
of torture as a public spectacle?
• Answer: Let's not be too hasty to attribute it to a process
of humanization... [7]
– What “disappeared”? What should we make of this
transformation? The body as major target of penal repression
(8.3).
– Two processes were at work (8.4)
• Disappearance of punishment as spectacle – punishment become
hidden part of penal process. (8.5-9.5)
• Punishment as everyday perception  punishment in abstract
consciousness (9.5)
– Publicity shifts to the trial – judgment separated from punishment
– “slackening hold on the body” (10.6)
What are we to make of the disappearance
of torture as a public spectacle? (cont’d)
• Art of unbearable sensations  economy of suspended
rights (11.5)
• Executioner  warders, doctors, chaplains,
psychiatrists, educationalists (11.6)
• Real body  juridical subject as point of application of
law
• But despite all the changes there remains a “trace” of
torture in how we think about punishment – “prisoners
shouldn’t have it easy” we say (16.4-5)
SO, HOW WILL HE WRITE THIS HISTORY?
Four general rules:
1.
Regard punishment as a complex social function.
2.
View punitive methods one body techniques among the various
ways of exercising power. Regard punishment as a political
tactic.
3.
Don't see history of penal law and history of human sciences as
separate. Ask whether the "technology of power" is not a
common principle behind the "humanization of punishment" and
the "knowledge of man."
4.
Is this double trend -- soul into penal system and scientific
knowledge into legal practice -- result of a change in the way in
which the body is invested with power 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; and in 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.
[p.24] There comes to be a "proliferation of authorities"
who get to have a say in whether the guilty man "deserves"
this or that punishment and there is a body of
TECHNOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE with which such
decisions can be made and a group of EXPERTS who get
to make this determination.
The Spectacle of the Scaffold [32-69]
• Review of penal practices in pre-rev
France (1670-1790) – torture as technique
[32-35]
• Visibility, pain, body, truth [35-42]
• How the body produces and reproduces
the truth of the crime [42-47]
The Spectacle of the Scaffold [32-69]
• Execution as socio-political restoration of the
injured sovereign (“it reactivated power” (49.6))
[47-54]
– Spectacle all out of proportion so as to give
impression of imbalance – suggest a “god” on earth
(49.3)
– Cf. Touching the ark of the covenant – instant death –
scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”
– Cf. What terrorists do (blow up big buildings, for
example) and how the state reacts to terrorists.
Important to react viciously to make the point that
“states” still rule the world.
The Spectacle of the Scaffold [32-69]
• Why did public torture survive so long? Not retaliation but
a ritual of power. [54-57]
• The public was important part of spectacle of torture but
also dangerous to sovereign because at the same time it
felt its own power. Execution days as social control
holidays (cf. riots during parades, e.g., after sports
victories). Thus public spectacle gives way to “more
humane” more controlled techniques. [57-65]
• From apocryphal “gallows speeches” to crime literature in
which the criminal is the cunning hero [65-69]
Leading Questions
1.
What is the picture you get of the earliest form of
torture that Foucault describes at the start of the book?
2.
What does Foucault mean by “humanization” at
7.8? What is the “it” of the next sentence? Put into
your own words his claim that “perhaps it has been
attributed too readily and too emphatically to a process
of ‘humanization’, thus dispensing with the need for
further analysis”?
Leading Questions
3. At 18.9-19.1 Foucault writes of the legal system’s
consideration of the offender’s mental state (or soul) that
it is only apparently “limitative” and “explanatory.” What
does he mean by this? What does he mean when he
says, in the same paragraph, “judging something more
than crimes, namely, the ‘soul’ of the criminal”?
4. A common theme in writers like Foucault is that of
“inscription.” At 18.8, for example, we read “Psychiatric
expertise … find[s] one if [its] precise functions here: by
solemnly inscribing offenses in the field of objects
subject to 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 on what they are, will be, may be.” What do
you understand this metaphor of inscription to mean
here?
OLD WAY
NEW WAY
 Convict is king's
property
 Mark
 Effects of King's
power
 Convict is society's
property
 Sign
 Useful appropriation
Public Works
Community Service
Sign
Labor
crime
punishment
Leading Questions
5.
Foucault says, on page 20, that the sentence implies
"judgements of normality, attributions of causality,
assessments of possible changes, anticipations as to
the offender's future." What does he mean by this?
6.
There is a useful summary paragraph on p. 23:
This book is intended as a correlative history of the
modern soul and of a new power to judge; a genealogy
of the present scientifico-legal complex from which
the power to punish derives its bases, justifications,
and rules, from which it extends its effects and by
which it masks its exorbitant singularity.
What do you understand by “correlative history, genealogy,
scientifico-legal complex, singularity”?
Can we come up with a paraphrase of this paragraph to tell
ourselves what this book is about?
Leading Questions
7.
At 24.3 the author writes “penal leniency as a
technique of power….” What does this mean?
8.
What initial definitions of “power” can we derive from
the paragraphs between 26.6 and 27.5?
Robert-François Damiens
(1715-1757) was a Frenchman who attained notoriety by unsuccessfully attempting the assassination of
Louis XV of France in 1757. He was the last person to be executed in France with the traditional and
gruesome form of death penalty used for regicides.
Damiens was born in a village near Arras in 1715, and early enlisted in the army. After his discharge, he
became a menial in the college of the Jesuits in Paris, and was dismissed from this as well as from other
employments for misconduct, his conduct earning for him the name of Robert le Diable (Robert the Devil).
During the disputes of Pope Clement XI with the parlement of Paris, Damiens' mind seems to have been
excited by the ecclesiastical disorganization which followed the refusal of the clergy to grant the
sacraments to the Jansenists and Convulsionnaires; and he appears to have thought that peace would be
restored by the death of the king. He, however, asserted, perhaps with truth, that he only intended to
frighten the king without wounding him severely.
On January 5, 1757, as the king was entering his carriage, Damiens rushed forward and stabbed him with
a knife, inflicting only a slight wound. He made no attempt to escape, and was at once seized. He was then
tortured so as to have him denounce his accomplices or those who had sent him, to no avail. He was
condemned as a regicide by the Parlement of Paris, and sentenced to be torn in pieces by horses in the
Place de Grève. He was first tortured with red-hot pincers; his hand, holding the knife used in the
attempted murder, was burnt using sulphur; molten wax, lead, and boiling oil were poured into his wounds.
Horses were then harnessed to his arms and legs for his dismemberment. Damiens' joints would not break;
after some hours, representatives of the Parlement ordered the executioner and his aides to cut Damiens'
joints. Damiens was then dismembered, to the applause of the crowd. His trunk, apparently still living, was
then burnt at the stake. He is viewed by some people as the Guy Fawkes of France since both of these
men tried to kill their kings but failed and were brutally executed.
After his death his house was razed to the ground, his brothers and sisters were ordered to change their
names, and his father, wife, and daughter were banished from France.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert-Fran%C3%A7ois_Damiens