Discipline and Punish: Michel Foucault
Joel
Joel Correia
GEOG 5100: Social Theory
1 October 2012
Discussion questions
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault
1. How does Foucault elaborate the changes in punishment over time in relation to the body?
a. What does he say about the implications of these changes on society and the nature of discipline?
2. What are key shifts or developments in the role of punishment that Foucault discusses?
3. Foucault focuses much attention to the role and deployment of power in this text.
a. What is the role of the sovereign and/or state in this deployment?
b. How does Foucault relate power to politics or political acts?
c. How is power in the Foucaultian sense a discursive formation?
4. During the course of the semester we have read and engaged with many theorists whose works address different modes of production. Whereas for Marx it was a mode of production focused on outputs (i.e. the commodity or product) and for Lefebvre it was the mode of production focused on space, is it possible or productive then to envision Foucault’s work as an analysis of a particular mode of production that produces power?
a. If yes, why?
b. If no, why not?
5. In this text, Foucault often refers to the political economy of power and relates changes in the forms of punishment and discipline to the expansion of capitalism.
a. Is there a clear relationship between economic development, the evolution of disciplinary actions, and new forms of punishment?
i. If so, please elaborate.
b. How is Foucault’s notion of political economy similar to that of Marx and how is it different?
6. Foucault is considered by many scholars and critiques to be a theorist of power. However Foucault repeatedly demonstrates that there is an explicit relationship between the role and use of power to space.
a. How does Foucault’s work inform our understanding of productions of space?
b. How is Foucault a spatial theorist?
c. Can we articulate a relationship between Foucault’s theories and Lefebvre’s work on the production of space?
7. According to Foucault, what role does the nascence and development of the contemporary prison have on society as a whole?
a. How have the model of the prison and lessons of punishment been incorporated into our daily lives?
8. A common critique of Foucault is that his work on the discursive nature of power creates a totalizing theory that subsumes all and thus has limited analytical value.
a. Do you agree or disagree? Why?
b. How can we apply Foucault’s theoretic in our research?
9. Why does Foucault devote so much attention to panopticism?
a. How does it influence society outside of the prison?
b. How does society and social organization influence the functioning of the prison?
10. How is space reconfigured/reorganized for the purpose of disciplining throughout Foucault’s historical analysis?
11. In what ways does punishment change form throughout this work?
a. How is this related to social organization and economic development?
12. How are criminals, patients, and delinquents related?
a. In what ways is their “treatment” similar or different?
13. In thinking about Foucault, what are the implications of power and punishment in light of “special circumstances” (i.e. for the prosecution of terrorists, communists during the Cold War, and other “enemies of the state”) where regulations and rules are masked?
a. How does this or where does this fit into Foucault’s analysis?
b. What is the spatial component inherent in this type of punishment and display of power?
14. What other scholars and philosophers have been influenced by Foucault’s work?
a. How can we tell and how have they employed his theories?
Key Terms/Concepts:
· Power
· Punishment
· Discipline
· Body
· Sovereign
· Gaze, Surveillance, Panopitcon
· Hierarchal Observation, Normalizing Judgments, Examination, Treatment
· Discourse: Signs, writing, symbols, codes
· Docile bodies: art of distributions, control of activities, organization of geneses, composition of forces
· Biopolitics
· Punishment as the product of fear
· Objectification
· Criminal, Patient, Delinquent
· Carceral
· Individualization, isolation
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Joanna Weidler-Lewis
Michel Foucault Discipline
& Punish
In Discipline & Punish Foucault recounts the history of the modern penal system in an effort to explore the ways in which discipline and punishment are used to normalize individuals not only in prisons but also through other social institutions including factories, hospitals, and schools. Both discipline and punishment are expressions of power. Punishment itself is an exercise of power whether it is the sovereign commanding an execution or the regulating effects of power within the law. Discipline "is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of applications, targets; it is a 'physics' or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology" (p. 215).
Foucault details the evolution of punishment from a public spectacle of torture to public chain gangs to the modern prison. Similarly, he recounts the transition of the body as the object of torture, as "the place where the vengeance of the sovereign was applied, the anchoring point for a manifestation of power" (p. 55) to the body as secondary to the soul to the body as 'docile' and capable of being controlled and disciplined, and, therefore, capable of being trained. "Discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space," which employs the following techniques: enclosure, partitioning, the rule of functional sites (places that allow for both supervision as well as "break dangerous communication" between individuals), and rank (p. 141). (In this way you can see how both hospitals and schools are institutions of discipline for example a hospital ward is enclosed, partitioned, easily supervised, and based on some type of classification, e.g. type of illness.)
The main purpose of disciplinary power is to train, and it does so by relying on the use of "simple" instruments: hierarchical observations, normalizing judgments, and their combination, the examination (p. 170). Hierarchical observation underscores the idea that the power of observation is coercive: that people can be controlled by watching them. Normalizing judgments refers to the way in which defining that which is normal becomes an instrument of power, normalization makes it "possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialties and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another" (p. 184). The examination "is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish" (p. 184). Foucault says an examination can be of any type, a hospital exam, a scientific exam, a school exam, etc. Regardless of type, the examination allows for the individual to be looked at, written about and analyzed; the individual is a 'case' to be controlled. In fact, it is through discipline that the individual emerges: "discipline 'makes' individuals" (p. 170). Given this, my question for Foucault is what role does individual agency have within this framework?
(As an aside, it was hard for me not to reflect on my own discipline when Foucault writes, "we are entering the age of the infinite examination and of compulsory objectification" (p. 189). We continue to normalize students through continuous testing; I can only imagine his reaction to No Child Left Behind.)
Foucault goes onto further discuss surveillance and observation by detailing Bentham's Panopticon as a structure that allows for an "unequal gaze" of the observed; the observed can never know if they are in fact being observed. He then returns to penal institutions, criminal punishment and their criticism: the details of each seem like an obligatory addition to a book subtitled "the birth of the prison" for his thesis extends far beyond the "carceral" system.
Lindsay Skog
Lindsay Skog
Foucault Discipline and Punish Response
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault traces the broad movement in society from bodies governed through violence and physical punishment to self-disciplined ‘juridical subjects’. For Foucault, the body occupies a central role in this movement. Foucault argues that the spectacle of public punishment, torture, and execution of the body served to deter crime; however, as the spectacle of punishment declined, concern increased over the reduction of pain in punishment, and punishment became private, the connection to the body became abstract; the body became a ‘juridical subject’. As a result the body’s role in the disciplining of a people was reduced. Discipline, therefore, had to find a new mechanism, or technology. Foucault argues that this new technology can be found in a political economy of power.
Foucault considers several instruments through which power operates, including knowledge, the examination, and surveillance. Of the three, the power-knowledge nexus is at the core of Foucault’s work and forms the base of the Foucauldian discursive construct. Foucault brings to our attention the enmeshed nature of power and knowledge in stating, “ . . . 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” (27). For Foucault, knowledge is produced out of, not outside of, power relations. In this work, Foucault is specifically considering the power to punish. For Foucault, a discursive ‘scientifico-legal complex’ produces the power to punish by constructing a knowledge of who and what is punishable. Moreover, for Foucault, power is productive; “ . . . it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (194).
The establishment of “domains of objects and rituals of truth” (194) allows for the construction of norms, which simultaneously creates the abnormal. For Foucault, the examination classifies an object as normal or abnormal, and in doing so the examination becomes an exercise in, or mechanism of, power.
Foucault understands surveillance as the third mechanism through which power operates. Indeed, it is through surveillance that the self-disciplined subject emerges. Foucault materializes the concept of the self-disciplined subject with the blueprint of the panopticon. Bentham’s idealized plan for a prison in which inmates are separated from each other and effectively monitored from a central tower becomes genius through a play of light that allows the centralized guard to observe every inmate, but does not allow the inmates to observe the guard. In this way, the inmates are never certain that they are being watched and are disciplined into behaving as though they were. Such form of surveillance “assures the automatic functioning of power” (201). Foucault argues that the panoptic vision pervades modern society and fosters self-disciplined subjects.
Foucault’s political economy of power may be understood as a reaction to Marx. While for Marx power stems from violence and an economic base, Foucault argues that power is discursively constructed through the ways institutions structure society. Institutions in Foucault’s thought set the terms of what is allowable and what is not both within and outside of those institutions. That is to say, Foucault is arguing that power stems from the ability to define what and who is criminal/punishable and what the mechanism is to discover the ‘truth’ of criminality—while masking a tenuous authority to do so. This, according to Foucault, happens through the institutions and structures of institutions—in this case, the prison as the institutionalization of the power to punish. From this perspective we can also see a clear link to Lefebvre’s understanding of the discursive construction of space. Like Foucault’s conceptualization of power, Lefebvre argues that space at once is produced and produces.
During the October 5 Geography Colloquium, Mary Thomas drew our attention to a significant critique of Foucault when she commented that those academics working in prison settings are wary of the reductionism inherent in Foucault. This comment speaks to the larger critique that Foucault’s reduction of power to a discourse leaves little room for analysis and elides the persistent questions around experience. In the case of Dr. Thomas’ work, a Foucauldian analysis of an adolescents girls’ incarceration center in Ohio would not have allowed her to ask questions about the peer relationships of girls in that center.
Kaitlin Fertaly
GEOG 5100 Social Theory
Kaitlin Fertaly
Response to Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes the history of prisons and historical forms of punishment ranging from public torture to contemporary incarceration, which hides the bodies of convicts, to explore how power is enacted on the body in various ways. He is also interested in exploring a knowledge and mastery over the body which constitutes what he calls “the political technology of the body” (26). This form of technology is power that ‘produces knowledge’ (28). It is this analysis of the relations between power and knowledge of and on the body which Foucault is most concerned with. In this reading of his work, I will focus on how Foucault imagines the body as a part of a political field of power and how his work can inform studies of skill and their transmission.
Foucault initially defines the political technology of the body as “a common history of power relations and object relations” and an analysis of these relations gives rise to a specific kind of subject that produced “man as an object of knowledge for a discourse with a ‘scientific’ status” (24). Essentially, Foucault is referring to the idea of a body which exists in a political/power field that has a kind of hold over said bodies—“they invest it; mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs”—all of which is tied up with its economic use as different modes of production require different uses of bodies (25-6). Yet who has the power to produce or form such “docile bodies” and how is it accomplished? To answer the “how” question, Foucault gives us a key concept: the body politic. The body politic is essentially the means by which power and knowledge relations are invested in human bodies in turn subjugating them as objects of knowledge. In answer to who, Foucault is less clear. Instead of arguing for a state or institutional force, he argues that power relations are not wholistic, continuous, systematic or even “possessed” by an individual, institution, or state apparatus but are “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”(26). Thus, Foucault’s analysis is clearly more focused on the processes by which bodies become marked by dominant power relations and the processes of knowledge (that enabled the production bodies as objects which could be studied in the first place), rather than on a structural or institutional force that creates this type of body.
In discussing the production of “docile bodies,” Foucault identifies a number of means, which he refers to as disciplines, by which bodies are marked or relegated. Discipline begins with the distribution of bodies in space (141), a temporal and rhythmic organization of each activity (149), the capitalization of time by the break-up and rearrangement of activities (156), and the coordination of force and activity all of which incorporate the body, an individual part, into a machine that should be greater than the sum of its parts. The result of these forces of discipline is “dissociate[d] power from the body; one the one hand, it turn 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” (138). Later, in a discussion of the proliferation of panoptic power, Foucault makes a connection between the rise of a capitalist economy with discipline as a technique to produce a maximally useful, docile body at the lowest cost (221). (And in reading about the production of useful bodies, all I could think about was the kid’s show Thomas the Tank Engine where all the little trains just want to be “really useful engines.”)
Another aspect of his arguments about docile bodies and panopticism are questions it raises about how we learn a skill and how those skills might be transmitted between individuals or groups. While Foucault’s examples are mostly from large institutions including schools, prisons, hospitals, the military, etc., how, for example, might the methods of discipline be (or not) incorporated into skills like cooking or weaving? Obviously in learning any skill, bodies must be taught to do things in certain ways but what element of power is there? Do the same methods of discipline apply in apprenticeship? And, what of bodies that refuse to be “docile”?
Elizabeth Wharton
Elizabeth Wharton
On Foucault’s Discipline & Punish
Social Theory
October 7, 2012
Discipline & Punish is often described as Foucault’s first explicitly political project – written in the wake of the 1968 student movements as well as a series of prison riots in France (and elsewhere), events which Foucault viewed as emerging from the same fabric of societal power relations. As such, while focused on the specific history of the evolution of the prison system, it is more broadly a work that interrogates the composition and workings of the contemporary “political anatomy” or “mechanics of power,” asking how does the dominant society perpetuate its power over the individual, and why is it that people conform to its dominant rules?
Discipline & Punish opens with the stark contrast of a gruesome death sentence in 1757 to a meticulously laid out schedule for prisoner in 1837, where each minute of the day is planned and controlled. Demonstrating that the power of the state vis-à-vis the person to be punished had not diminished, but rather changed its object, from body to the soul. Foucault’s soul, however, is not a theological entity, but rather “the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power… The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body” (p. 29-30; italics mine).
Foucault then various conceptions of punishment and what it should aim to accomplish that he describes as in play during the 18th century, representing three distinct “technologies of power”: the old version of the “sovereign and his force” in which the spectacle of the tortured body is tied intimately with an emphasis on the “vanquished enemy” (so the ultimate crime is one that targets the sovereign and the response is the elimination of the enemy – “a power that asserted itself as an armed power whose functions of maintaining order were not entirely unconnected with the functions of war” (p.57)); a second approach in which neither torture nor spectacle were necessarily eliminated, but were part of a very different calculation – in which the goal of the punishment was correction rather than defeat, and in which a finely tuned proportionality between the nature of the crime and the punishment meted out was regarded as the means to obtain this correction – both as response and deterrence; and finally, the birth of the prison – a form of punishment that moves away from “a procedure for requalifying individuals as subjects” (p. 130) but rather to “punishment as a technique for the coercion of individuals” (p. 131).
Foucault works at unraveling how it is that we arrived at the particular mode of punishment we employ today, centered around the prison (what was previously a minor practical aside to the focus of punishment), and what characterizes this modality of control. Central to this discussion are the concepts of docile bodies and panopticism. Foucault’s docile body is not conventionally docile, i.e. passive, but very much an actor within modern society: “Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)” (p. 138). The docile body, according to Foucault, is produced via several specific kinds of disciplines, the first being explicitly spatial – the “art of distributions” – whereby individuals are categorized and distributed in space. (Here, Foucault employs term of “enclosure” but differently than Marx or Polanyi. Rather than an inherently violent act creating the proletariat class by separating them from land/means of livelihood; Foucault’s enclosure is “the protected place of disciplinary monotony” (p. 141)) The second mode of docile body production lies in the micro-control of bodily activity, e.g. the correlation of body and gesture embodied in the discipline of, inter alia, “good handwriting”. This spatial and bodily discipline come together in the linear hierarchy of the organization of genesis, that is the discipline of defined linear progress; it is then scaled up to the composition of forces, that is, the organization of multiple bodies “to construct a machine whose effect will be maximized by the concerted articulation of the elementary parts of which it is composed” (p. 164). The examination, then, sums up the fundamental change that had taken place as connected to the gaze – the gaze that examines, scores, puts in place and directs has reversed direction from the previous architecture of power in which the focus of visibility was directed toward the sovereign (and the spectacle of his/her power).
In his discussion of the mechanisms of discipline, Foucault has little mention of the prison but rather draws on the dynamics of military and educational institutions to develop his argument. In Panopticism he returns to the prison, although making it clear that he regards the prison, insane asylum, factory, school, etc. as embodying at heart the same structures of discipline, in which surveillance “becomes one of the great instruments of power” (along with normalization) (p. 184). It is the function of the metaphor of the panopticon, by which power becomes both “visible and unverifiable” (p. 201) that ensures the operation of the disciplinary technologies earlier discussed. It is the key to the production of disciplined bodies (whether they are docile or designated delinquents).
This brings us to Foucault’s discussion of the institutional failure of prisons which I believe is particularly critical. If the fundamental purpose of prisons (and other such institutions) were purely to produce docile bodies, then they can be judged as manifest failures. Foucault, however, draws our attention to what is served by its very failure (“Can we not see here a consequence rather than a contradiction?” p. 272) The prison, he argues, is “not intended to eliminate offences, but rather to distinguish them, to distribute them, to use them; that is not so much that they render docile those that are likely to transgress the law, but that they tend to assimilate the transgression of the laws in a general tactics of subjection” (p 272). This strikes me as another arena in which Foucault’s work presents important implications for operationalized research. Specifically, the operation and persistence of certain institutions in the face of abject failure to accomplish their stated goals presents a perpetual puzzle, one that is in no way limited to prison systems. Foucault has provided us with a key line of inquiry toward unraveling this phenomenon: what interests are served by the failure itself?
A few of the many questions that arose for me as I was reading:
· I would like to explore the ways that Foucault discusses class in comparison to Marx. On the one hand, Foucault clearly treats class as a very different kind of category than Marx, but also frequently and explicitly draws on Marx his discussion of the production of docile bodies in particular seems to plug into an analysis of capitalist class relations consistent with Marx.
· From his opening discussion of the disappearance of spectacle, I was trying to make sense of his argument that it necessarily had to disappear. On page 129 he says that the new arrangement of disciplinary power “renders the dimension of the spectacle useless: it excludes it.” Really? How?
· Page 143: “Discipline organizes an analytical space.” Still working on this one... What is the analytical space to which he refers?
Eric Reiff
Eric Reiff
Discussion Paper
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
7 October 2012
In laying out the genealogy of the prison in this work, Foucault is attempting to reorient our understanding of power away from a central sovereign or a social contract to diffuse, diverse, reinforcing networks of disciplining power (307). In laying out the development of the prison as both reality and archetype for institutional governance he demonstrates how organically power moved from a personal relationship between subject and sovereign in which punishment was distributed as retribution for personal offences against the sovereign, to a more nuanced relationship of autonomous individuals to society. These individuals are not punished for retribution, but rather disciplined in order to normalize them, and utilized them productively as part of society. This change in relationships happened organically, subtly, and resulted in the penitentiary system of today. A system in which individuals are given sentences juridically in units of time, but then the space of detention is filled with non-juridical disciplinary administration (251). In other words, one is sentenced as an offender, but serves time as a delinquent. Foucault’s genealogy of the prison, leaves us with the argument that power is not centralized or juridical (contractual), but lays in systems of disciplining networks (schools, military, prisons, hospitals) that label us as normal, or deviants that need to be normalized. Foucault leaves us with several potential points of discussion:
· Foucault is exciting and enduring because he shakes so many disciplines’ (OH MY!) foundations without offering them answers or offering future direction. Should we let him be just a historian (archeologist, genealogist) of the specific topics that he covers like prisons? Or should we view him as a grand social theorist as he touches all the social disciplines?
· Then comes the question that perhaps Foucault is simply offering us some very powerful tools which we can understand the world, and not a grand social theory.
· We also need to resolve whether Foucault is cherry picking historical facts, and whether this indeed resolves into a real picture of strategic power in the world. Or is Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life) correct that Foucault has overlooked the spontaneous, subversive, tactical potential of an individual in the moment of action.
· Isn’t Foucault talking about the production of space? Can we rethink Foucault in terms of geography to gain any added clarity? (Unfortunately I haven’t read Knowledge, Power, Space yet!)
Though I find all of these questions to be stimulating, I’m going to add a little more discussion around the last question. Though I only recall a few uses of the word space in Discipline and Punish, in light of reading Lefebvre a few weeks ago, I have to remark that I feel much of Foucault’s argument could have been enhanced by a discussion of space. Foucault may have been even more compelling as a geographer. Space is the arena in which Foucault’s reinforcing networks of power could be articulated for what they are—the production of a particular kind of space from which emanates the diffuse disciplining power over the individual and between individuals. The genealogy that Foucault traces in Discipline and Punish is the reshaping of the space that existed between the sovereign and the subject to a space that exists between subjects. By talking about space as the place from which power emanates, I think that Foucault could be more convincing when he alludes to society being generally fashioned after the prison. By saying it is the space that is shaped (disciplined?) by the paradigm of the prison, he can argue that as schools, hospitals etc. that subsequently produce themselves in this particular space are shaped by the paradigm of the prison. I think that by focusing his genealogy on the production of space he could communicate more clearly as to where power is located and how it is disseminated. However, I still don’t think would have any clearer indication from Foucault as to what to do next. He still just shows us the structure of power that we then need to confront on our own.
Caitlin Ryan
Caitlin Ryan
Discussion Paper
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
8 October 2012
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault traces a history of the punishment of crime from feudal to contemporary times and, in so doing, develops a theory of the way in which power functions in modern society. While the focus is on the prison, Foucault regularly draws on analogies to schools and hospitals as well. The theory of power developed here is closely tied to several key themes, including the body, political-economic and knowledge systems, and space. I am particularly interested in the way that Foucault traces the history of punishment through changes in political economy, and will highlight these throughout the following essay.
Foucault begins with a detailed and gruesome discussion of the role of public torture and execution in medieval Europe. The public nature of torture and execution was a political tool--a tactic, as Foucault later calls it (not to be confused with Certeau’s use of ‘tactic’ and ‘strategy’)--that was meant to instill fear in the audience, serve as a demonstration of sovereign power, and draw the audience into the event such that they also took part in it. This kind of power depended on the public event for renewal (p. 57). But the role of the public spectacle of torture and execution was nonetheless ambiguous, and it did not always serve to reinvigorate sovereign power. It was a common site of public resistance and protest in which the monarch did not have complete control. Criminals could be transformed into heroes when the public intervened and “executions could easily lead to the beginnings of social disturbances (p. 61).” In other words, “the great spectacle of punishment ran the risk of being rejected by the very people to whom it was addressed (63).” Compare this with the 20th century, which aimed to put as much distance as possible between both the crime and the punishment, and between the punishment and the public. (Before moving on, I think it is worth noting that Foucault ends this section with a discussion of the literature of torture and execution. While Foucault draws on such kinds of discursive methods, his project is nevertheless imminently material.)
Foucault attributes the transition away from the mode of sovereign power described above to three important changes that took place in the 18th century, which Foucault alternatingly refers to as “methods”, “techniques” or “disciplines” (pp. 136-137). First, the scale of control changed such that power was enacted not just at the level of the individual body, but upon its parts as well. This “infinitesimal power” seems to correspond with new economic patterns, such as nascent industrialization and the mechanization of labor, which are discussed in subsequent chapters. Second, the object of the control changed: for docile bodies, what mattered was not their behavior or ability to repent, but rather their gestures, the efficiency of movement and exercise. Third, there was a change in the modality of power that supervises and partitions the processes of bodily activity. These three disciplines acted in specific ways directly on the body such that, “a ‘political anatomy’, which was also a ‘mechanics of power’, was being born (138).” That political anatomy (and note here the explicit use of language associated with the body) is the principle of Panopticism.
The concept of the Panopticon deserves some rather mundane description in order to understand what Foucault is doing with it. The Panopticon is an architectural structure with a tower in the middle from which one may view everything in the surrounding periphery. It is associated with permanent visibility, structuring power through the distribution of bodies, but it does not exercise power through the body itself; it is in fact non-corporal. The location of bodies is not important, but rather the relations, spatial distributions, the hierarchical ordering of bodies that matter. These are the mechanisms through which power is enacted. Force is unnecessary. The panopticon is not theoretical, not a “dream building”, it is a political technology that arranges power and can be adapted to any kind of use; anyone can operate it, and likewise the efficiency and effect of anyone operating it can be overseen and inspected externally. This last characteristic makes it a tool of democratic power that can be supervised by society as a whole. Its aim is not simply to maintain power, but rather explicitly economic: “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 (208).” Here I am reminded both of Harvey’s 3% growth principle and Marx’s ideas of the reproduction of labor.
The chapter describing the Panopticon begins with a description of the steps taken when the plague appeared in a town in the 17th century. These were severe and strictly ordered. These tactics (if Foucault would call them so) occupy the opposite end of a discipline spectrum that is focused on the negative - taking away, limiting, blockading, etc. Panoptic discipline, on the other hand, is a positive, enabling force or mechanism that is more efficient and subtle. The shift from one to the other occurred over the 17th and 18th centuries through the advent of what Foucault calls “disciplinary society” (p. 209).
Since there are many more directions that deserve to be pursued in this discussion, but not enough space. Therefore I simply want to end with the following suggestions for future discussion:
● How is the view of power that is described by the Panopticon similar or different to the concept of “governmentality” that is developed in next week’s Foucault reading, Security, Territory and Population?
● What is the relationship between the discursive and material in Foucault’s writings?
● Can we better understand what Foucault is trying to do with knowledge production, how that is tied to his theory of power as developed through the historical metaphor of torture and the prison?
Austin Cowley
Austin Cowley
GEOG 5100: Introduction to Social Theory
From Prison to Town: Michel Foucault’s Use of Scale
I want to briefly mention that this paper will consider Security, Territory, Population and Discipline and Punish while also incorporating Foucauldian concepts from other works. Keeping in line with the class schedule, I will emphasize Discipline and Punish over other works.
How have the changing forms of violence exacted on the human body coincided with different modes of governance? How do these modes of governance operate across different scales? For Michel Foucault, power is of course everywhere, and interrogating the forms, processes, and intersections of the relationships of power is at the center of the project. In doing so, however, he argues that political theory has yet to “cut off the head of the king”, indicating a post-structuralist approach (Foucault, 1978). The question of power rarely escapes Foucault’s analysis, and yet he does so without privileging its centralized forms. Moving from the body to population and from institutional arrangements to territory, this paper briefly charts Foucault’s discussion of both power and governance as it moves across different scales.
The shift from public torture and execution to highly institutionalized forms of punishment outline what Foucault (1977) calls differing “penal styles”. Most importantly public execution drew a clear line of power from the sovereign to the subject. The violence exacted upon Damiens the regicide’s body, although carried out by the executioner, is ordered directly from the king to demonstrate his power over the sovereign subject. This spectacle, however, was deeply revolting to society and shameful to the condemned. Thus the impetus to reform punishment into something more “humane” set in motion processes that changed not just the style of punishment but also the types of crimes being punished and a redistribution of power relationships between the governing and the governed. This newer form of punishment relied less on direct and brutal forms of violence and more on institutionalized techniques of discipline, the locus of which was the individual body – Foucault argues that the classical age, “discovered the body as object and target of power (136).” For geographers, an entire canon of spatial analysis emerges in how physical arrangements and structures make these techniques of discipline possible. At a larger scale, power and governance take shape through a territory and the population in it.
How do disciplinary mechanisms help explain a broader notion of biopolitical governance from the body to a population? A common analytical device for Foucault is the triad in motion. In the case of Security, Territory, Population this triad is presented in the title. Most basically, sovereignty is enacted within a territory. This, however, is meaningless without a population to govern within those borders. Here a reciprocal relationship between discipline, the individual, and a population arises. First, the mechanisms of discipline are more broadly realized as apparatuses of security: discipline with the intent of reform. As discipline translates more broadly to security, so to does the individual body to a population. Likewise, the spatial arrangements that reinforced the power relationships in places like prisons and hospitals appear as territory: “whereas discipline structures a space and addresses the essential problem of a hierarchical and functional distribution of elements, and security will try to plan a milieu in terms of events or series of events or possible elements, of series that will have to be regulated within a multivalent and transformable framework (20).” Michel Foucault’s body of work has most profoundly impacted the canon of social theory through opening new analytical frameworks and methods for seeing the world. Although his intellectual project was ultimately cut short, the notion of scale nonetheless helps explain the trajectory of his work.
Ahn Lee
Ahn Lee
GEOG 5100
Foucault: Discipline and Punish
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes the evolution, from the “Anciene Régime” to our modern era, of punishment alongside a history of shifting political economies and forms of knowledge. The point of this work is not chronicle the various modes of punishment throughout the ages but rather to explore corresponding changes in the exercise of power and the economy of maintaining it. Foucault pulls examples from military, medical, education and industrial institutions to color and broaden his exploration of the relationship between power and the body. In doing so he connects developments within the penal system to societal and political changes more generally and implicates his audience directly in the production and reproduction of norms.
By opening with a scene of graphic physical torture, Foucault relates the body, and the ritualized atrocities committed against it, at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries to the absolute power of the sovereign. Public torture served the purpose of both addressing a crime and exacerbating it in such a way as to reaffirm the power of the sovereign over the body. Interestingly, what the reformers of the late 18th century sought was not only a limit to the “frontier of the power to punish” (74) but, more specifically, a greater regulation over justice and the legibility of crime itself. In essence, the issues irregular justice, which the reformers intended to differentiate more clearly, were the result of a “bad economy of power” (79).
From this system thus evolved a refined punitive strategy in which the power to punish is institutionalized in the prison. This power is invisible yet omnipotent and operates through careful attention to detail in the distribution, individualization, partitioning, and conditioning of both bodies and the spaces they inhabit. Here, images of the educational system, of bells and strict time tables, of hall monitors and ritualized exams illustrate a system of individualization, ranking, and controlling bodies. Likewise, prisons became spaces of supposed rehabilitation, correction, and conditioning alongside these “new mechanisms of normalizing judgment”, all of which culminated, of course, in the notion of panopticism.
From here, Foucault transitions to his discussion of the role of institutions (namely the prison) in strategically producing and reproducing delinquency. The prison, he notes, has failed as the theater of criminal rehabilitation, but has in fact, succeeded in the production and reproduction of delinquency. In essence, it seems the modern penitentiary system has succeeded in creating its own hierarchy of illegalities and irregular justice, perhaps not dissimilar from the anciene régime, except in its illicitness and invisibility.
Points I found particularly interesting were Foucault’s occasional references to shifting political economies (particularly to the shifting role of the sovereign, the end of the guild system, and the role of private property) and his even more sporadic mention of demographic change. The difference between how a system of apprenticeship and guilds provides for a certain type of knowledge and the ways in which a disciplinary educational system quantifies and normalizes knowledge, is particularly striking in view of certain demographic necessities—namely the education of a rapidly expanding population. What, then, is the relationship between population growth, or demographic trends more generally, and changes in the technology of the body?
Lauren Gifford
Lauren Gifford
Discipline and Punish (Michel Foucault)
October 7, 2012
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault explores the evolution of punishment and control from early forms of that focused on the individual to more modern techniques that are less direct, yet further reaching. As a geographer, I saw this transition as a shift both scale-- from the individual to society, and back to the individual-- and space-- from public to private and even into one’s mind. One could imagine, if Foucault were still writing today, that technology and the cyber space would broaden the scale and shift the space even further.
Throughout D&P, observation shifts in scale from investigations (often secret) that punish the individual to a place where social examination and observation is the norm and one is never sure if he or she is being monitored. Foucault writes: “The public execution was the logical culmination of a procedure governed by the Inquisition. The practice of placing individuals under ‘observation’ is a natural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures” (227). (I cannot help but think of these ideas on observation in relation to the Patriot Act)
Power is the primary motivation for enacting punishment across the scales of control, yet its manifestation shifts with the scale and space of the punishment. What started out as a violent, public spectacle evolved into a somewhat-private prison and institution system. In between was what Foucault calls “gentile punishment,” that was public, and made prisoners appear to do good for the community while reminding society of the consequence of crime (127). This all proved to further the individual body from the actual crime.
It is no surprise that D&P preceded Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality. The roots of governmentality are clear throughout the text, as a primary motivation for discipline is to control society into behaving in a particular way. For example, incidents of torture, which were often played out as a public spectacle, were meant to demonstrate a physical vindication by the sovereign onto the individual. But public torture was also sending a message to the proletariat to behave, and avoid the fate of the tortured (a precipitant to other forms of discipline that use fear as a motivation to maintain social order?). This, like govermentality, is a form of social organization. We see governmentality again in Foucault’s writing on Penopticons as a metaphor for modern domination of subjects, where people never know if they’re being watched so always behave as if they are. The Penopticon also creates “a collection of separated individualities” (201) who are less likely—or able—to rebel against social norms because they are segregated from others.
While D&P offers an interesting framework to understand power, control and social order, I come away with questions about the disciplinary institutions that maintain power. It seems that as the scale of discipline has shifted, the understanding of who is in control has blurred. There is no longer a clear sovereign, and leadership is much more ambiguous, were a person (perhaps every person) can simultaneously be a docile body and part of the sovereign. Just like Marx wrote that individuals can both be part of the proletariat and control the means of production, I’m curious to discuss how Foucault explains this dichotomy.
Joel
Joel Correia
GEOG 5100
Response Paper
Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish
Discipline and Punish is arguably one of the most influential and renowned works by Michel Foucault in the Anglophone social sciences. Foucault outlines the evolution of disciplinary practices and punishment. He develops an important understanding of how power is manifest through careful planning and the deployment of discipline. In this manner it is an omnipresent discourse that is both visible and invisible, written and acted, that creates social order and the condition where we are all subject to its gaze in ways that cause us to engage in self-discipline. Power vis-a-vis discipline is established through manifold processes of panopticism, the minute control of activities, repetitive exercises, normalizing judgments, examination, and spatialization. Many questions came to mind as I read this text. However, I explore only one in this response. Though Foucault is considered by many scholars to be a theorist of power, he repeatedly demonstrates that there is an explicit relationship between power and space. Therefore, in what ways can we view Foucault as a spatial theorist?
Lefebvre views the act of the production of space as a power-laden process where control is based on spatial relations and the control and design of different spaces. Foucault’s analysis of the relationship between power and space shares some similarities with Lefebvre’s work that are worth exploring. For Foucault the exercise of power is based on incremental disciplinary actions that are related to both the space of the body and those external to the body. In Docile Bodies he illustrates how one can be trained through repeated and controlled exercise to become a model soldier or student. The body and mind become the locus of control and site where discipline is applied. Hence, a force external to the body exerts its power over it and in doing so creates a new space where the discourse of power is embodied and manifest. Moreover, Foucault masterfully argues that disciplinary techniques first developed for the punishment of prisoners and criminals influence spatial relations and design far beyond the prison. Hospitals, schools, and factories are all based on the same logic of control and discipline to such a degree that our world now consists of a “carcel archipelago” (297). Hence, similarly to Lefebvre, Foucault sees space as imbued with power, but also representative of power as a discursive formation. Though this is a rudimentary and brief analysis of Foucault, I argue that in these ways he can be viewed as a spatial theorist who sees power (via disciplinary techniques) as key to the production of space. I would like to explore this further in discussion during seminar.
Although appealing in many ways, I am leery of Foucault’s analytic. It feels too totalizing, too much like a meta-theory that disavows alternative options. If power (writ large) is an omnipresent force, a discourse that one cannot escape, what else is there to debate? His analysis is complex, well elaborated, and draws from powerful apropos examples, but the underlying simplicity leaves more to be desired. I see Foucault as an important reference and focal point that is useful for my research, but on the other hand this work (Discipline and Punish) serves more as a starting point rather than an answer.
galenbmurton
Galen Murton
October 7, 2012
Week 6 Reflection: Foucault
Foucault’s ‘Declaration of Carceral Independence’ (247)
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault illustrates how power has been institutionalized across society according to carceral systems with common political, economic, and technical modalities. From the prison to the parade ground, the classroom to the hospital ward, Foucault demonstrates that the state assumes, holds, and wields total power over individuals (namely, their bodies, minds, and souls) on the transcendent basis of a sophisticated penal system. The supreme realization of this system is the Panopticon and the 21st Century’s ubiquitous hierarchical administrative systems are, according to Foucault, direct descendents of this powerfully dehumanizing observation model.
Foucault’s theory of the Panopticon resonates powerfully with geographers (as does Discipline and Punish itself, widely regarded as his most influential book in the field). Is this because the Panopticon is about space? Although Foucault wrote broadly about time – generally in terms of his ‘archaelogical’ and ‘genealogical’ methodologies and specifically with regards to the revolutionary time-tables and schedules of the 18th century prison, for example – that other critical dimension of geography, space, received scant attention. The Panopticon is indeed the spatial fix of his thesis.
I sense a significant divide, however, between the panoptical paradigm that Foucault popularized and the concept as originally devised by Jeremy Bentham. Along with John Stuart Mill, Bentham was an early theorist of Utilitarian ethics, positing that that which benefits the greatest number is good, and therefore right. By this logic, I believe Bentham would have proposed the Panopticon as a Utilitarian tool intended for the greatest benefit to society, and less of a system meant to dehumanize the masses, as characterized by Foucault. That is, Foucault paints the Panopticon as a sophisticated, manipulative, and severe (perhaps sinister) all-seeing, ever-present, dehumanizing force. While I’m not sure this is what Bentham originally intended, I concur with Foucault in that it is truly what panopticism has become.
In support of his panoptical thesis, Foucault illustrates the trajectory of the relationship between penal systems and state power according to three convergent yet disparate modalities. Respective to the primary aspect of the prisoner subjected to sovereign/state power (body, mind, and soul), these include: the monarchical system that punished the criminal’s body for violations against the crown (physical violence); the reformist system that incarcerated the prisoner and controlled the mind through isolation with the objective of rehabilitation (psychological warfare); and finally, the more recent prison institution that appropriates the soul of the criminal and, through penal labor, benefits society via materialist and capitalist-oriented punishments (a Marxist production of labor of ‘homo oeconomicus’). Significantly, the descendents of these mutually inclusive modalities are ever-present in the modern prison system.
For Foucault, the penitentiary is the apotheosis of penal order and a universalization of the fundamental principles of the Panopticon – work and surveillance, isolation and normalization, and records and examination. Surveillance dehumanizes the person, making him into a docile body whose labor can easily be appropriated. Normalization regulates his schedule according to externally established codes, rules, and representations. Examinations are the quantifiable benchmarks that establish order from judicial sentences down to daily schedules, all of which is recorded and possessed by the seat of power (state/sovereign). When all three modes are held in one hand, power becomes total and complete.
This convergence of surveillance, normalization, and examination is so effective that the panopitical penitentiary is not only the ultimate in discipline and punishment (the locus of power) but has been systematized across society. The three schemata that both comprise this ‘carceral apparatus’ and transcend the prison system are: the politco-moral (isolation and hierarchy); the economic-labor (compulsory work); and the technico-medical (normalization). These are otherwise identifiable as “the cell, the workshop, and the hospital” (248).
Foucault has been accused of an historical focus that reveals only that which nicely fits his narrative. But then again, and in his defense, he does not claim to offer a new, grand and total theory (as much as the critics would like him to); rather, he excavates a history to reveal its salience today. And though I do not agree that disciplinary methods of inquiry and investigation, such as those of the scientific method, are necessarily rooted in the Grand Inquisition, as Foucault implies with regards to “inquisitorial technique (225),” I do concur that the society in which we live has become increasingly akin to an environment of total surveillance, if not imprisonment. To wit, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (228). This is indeed a frightening fact.
Chandler Griffith
Chandler Griffith
Reaction Paper – Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
10/8/12
By acutely detailing the evolution of penal intervention in Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault is making larger claims about transferred sovereignty, the transformation of societal values, and the spatial dynamics of discipline. In the transition from torture and punishment to discipline and incarceration, penal intervention has positioned normalcy, over superiority, as the ultimate.
The first shift that Foucault specifies entails a transfer of the “right to punish” from the sovereign to society at large. For him, public execution is a “ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted (Foucault 1995, 48).” In the wake of public execution, just as the crime is now registered against society as opposed to against the sovereign, the right to punish has been shifted “from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defense of society (Foucault 1995, 90).” As compelling as this account is, it does little if anything to suggest why this shift took place. It isn’t enough to assume connections between changing polities and broader collective sentiment, and yet Foucault doesn’t even attempt to explain why penal sovereignty changed hands. This explanation may fall outside the scope of his project, but it is hard to follow and trust the full arch of his argument with little basis other than his own claims.
What is clear, however, is that in the move from torture to discipline, the representation of penal intervention is now written on the soul as opposed to signified on the body (Foucault 1995, 101). Habits and behaviors are the “signs” left on the soul by disciplinary practice (Foucault 1995, 131). While it’s arguable that branding no longer exists, when “criminality, rather than crime” became the focus of penal intervention, the body, as the tool, became less important than the motives driving it (Foucault 1995, 100). Thus, in order for discipline to produce “docile bodies,” ripe for subjugation and control, space had to be ordered in such a way as to promote discipline (Foucault 1995, 138).
This spatial dimension of Foucault’s work entails a detailed archaeology of the architecture of disciplinary spaces, as spaces constructed with the ultimate purpose of coercion and control (Foucault 1995, 175). He claims that discipline creates “complex spaces that are at once architectural, functional, and hierarchical (Foucault 1995, 148).” The most discussed of these disciplinary spaces, the panopticon, is that in which one can be “totally seen, without ever seeing (Foucault 1995, 202).” The inhabitant of such a space, a delinquent, is to be “distinguished from the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him (Foucault 1995, 251).” This echoes the shift from crime to criminality, from body to soul, and from act to agency. Foucault implies that delinquency is seen as disease, whose carriers need to be quarantined. This is precisely why he claims that the plague “gave rise to disciplinary projects (Foucault 1995, 198).”
This work has been monumental to contemporary understandings of the nature of power. Still, it is important to note the limitations of Foucault’s scope and analysis. It is hard to believe that someone doing an in depth analysis of power and knowledge in classical Europe could do so without actively engaging the colonial project. Though his study of carceralization may serve as a useful metonym for a broader shift towards normalcy and regularity, it was under colonialism that the European self was constructed, normalcy was solidified, and the use of knowledge as power was similarly as poignant.