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Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucoult
General Summary
Discipline and Punish is a history of the modern penal system. Foucault seeks to analyze punishment in its social context, and to examine how changing power relations affected punishment. He begins by analyzing the situation before the eighteenth century, when public execution and corporal punishment were key punishments, and torture was part of most criminal investigations. Punishment was ceremonial and directed at the prisoner's body. It was a ritual in which the audience was important. Public execution reestablished the authority and power of the King. Popular literature reported the details of executions, and the public was heavily involved in them.
The eighteenth century saw various calls for reform of punishment. The reformers, according to Foucault, were not motivated by a concern for the welfare of prisoners. Rather, they wanted to make power operate more efficiently. They proposed a theater of punishment, in which a complex system of representations and signs was displayed publicly. Punishments related obviously to their crimes, and served as an obstacle to lawbreaking.
Prison is not yet imaginable as a penalty. Three new models of penality helped to overcome resistance to it. Nevertheless, great differences existed between this kind of coercive institution and the early, punitive city. The way is prepared for the prison by the developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the disciplines. Discipline is a series of techniques by which the body's operations can be controlled. Discipline worked by coercing and arranging the individual's movements and his experience of space and time. This is achieved by devices such as timetables and military drills, and the process of exercise. Through discipline, individuals are created out of a mass. Disciplinary power has three elements: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment and examination. Observation and the gaze are key instruments of power. By these processes, and through the human sciences, the notion of the norm developed.
Disciplinary power is exemplified by Bentham's Panopticon, a building that shows how individuals can be supervised and controlled efficiently. Institutions modeled on the panopticon begin to spread throughout society. Prison develops from this idea of discipline. It aims both to deprive the individual of his freedom and to reform him. The penitentiary is the next development. It combines the prison with the workshop and the hospital. The penitentiary replaces the prisoner with the delinquent. The delinquent is created as a response to changes in popular illegality, in order to marginalize and control popular behavior.
Criticism of the failure of prisons misses the point, because failure is part of its very nature. The process by which failure and operation are combined is the carceral system. The aim of prison, and of the carceral system, is to produce delinquency as a means of structuring and controlling crime. From this perspective, they succeed. The prison is part of a network of power that spreads throughout society, and which is controlled by the rules of strategy alone. Calls for its abolition fail to recognize the depth at which it is embedded in modern society, or its real function.
Important Terms
The carceral system - The complex system introduced towards the end of Discipline and Punish. It attempts to explain both the operation of the modern prison and its failure. The carceral system includes the architecture of the prison, its regulations and its staff: it extends beyond the prison itself to penetrate into society. Its components are the discipline of the prison, the development of a rational technique for managing prisoners, the rise of criminality and strategies of reform. The carceral system therefore contains both the failure and reform of the prison; it is part of Foucault's argument that failure is an essential part of the working of the prison. See also delinquent.
The classical period - The time-period from 1660 to the end of the 19th century. Discipline and Punish, like most of Foucault's works, refers mainly to this age. For Foucault, the classical period is seen as the birth of many of the characteristic institutions and structures of the modern world, as well as of mechanisms of control and the human sciences.
Delinquent - The concept that eventually replaces that of the "prisoner", according to Foucault. The delinquent is created by the operation of the carceral system and the human sciences, and strictly separated from other popular illegal activities. He is part of a small, hardened group of criminals, identified with the lower social classes. Most importantly, he is defined as "abnormal", and analyzed and controlled by the mechanisms that Foucault describes. There are several advantages in replacing the criminal by the delinquent: delinquents are clearly set apart from the rest of society, and therefore easy to supervise and control. A small, controlled group is far easier to cope with than the alternative: large roaming bands of brigands and robbers, or revolutionary crowds. In part, Foucault argues that the figure of the delinquent was a response to the danger presented by the lower orders in the nineteenth century.
Discipline - Discipline is a way of controlling the movement and operations of the body in a constant way. It is a type of power that coerces the body by regulating and dividing up its movement, and the space and time in which it moves. Timetables and the ranks into which soldiers are arranged are examples of this regulation. The disciplines are the methods by which this control became possible. Foucault traces the origins of discipline back to monasteries and armies. He is clear, however, that the concept changed in the eighteenth century. Discipline became a widely used technique to control whole populations. The modern prison, and indeed the modern state, is unthinkable without this idea of the mass control of bodies and movement.
Discourse - The basic unit that Foucault analyzes in all his works. Foucault defines the discourse as a system in which certain knowledge is possible; discourses determine what is true or false in a particular field. The discourse of psychiatry, for example, determines what it is possible to know about madness. Saying things outside of a discourse is almost impossible. Foucault's argument about prisons is a good example: abolishing the prison is unthinkable partly because we do not have the words to describe any alternative. The prison is at the center of the modern discourse of punishment.
Exercise - Foucault traces exercise back to monasteries and the activities of monks. In its early form, it involves regulating the body by imposing religious activities upon it in order to please God and achieve salvation. Foucault argues that the concept changed in the classical period. It became an attempt to impose increasingly complex activities on the body in order to control it. Military drills, or physical training at school are examples of this later form of exercise.
Philosophical Themes, Ideas and Arguments
Power and Knowledge
The relationship between power and knowledge is central to Foucault's work. Discipline and Punish essentially charts the reorganization of the power to punish, and the development of various bodies of knowledge (the human sciences) that reinforce and interact with that power. The modern power to punish is based on the supervision and organization of bodies in time and space, according to strict technical methods: the modern knowledge that Foucault describes is the knowledge that relates to human nature and behavior, which is measured against a norm. Foucault's point is that one cannot exist without the other. The power and techniques of punishment depend on knowledge that creates and classifies individuals, and that knowledge derives its authority from certain relationships of power and domination.
The Body
The body as an object to be acted upon, but also as the subject of "political technology" is present throughout the work. Beginning with public execution, where the body is horrifically displayed, Foucault charts the transition to a situation where the body is no longer immediately affected. The body will always be affected by punishment—because we cannot imagine a non- corporal punishment—but in the modern system, Foucault says, the body is arranged, regulated and supervised rather than tortured. At the same time, the overall aim of the penal process becomes the reform of the soul, rather than the punishment of the body. Eventually, the concepts of the individual and the delinquent replace the reality of the body as the focus of attention, but the body of the criminal still plays a role. If anything can be seen as constant in this work, it is the idea that the body and punishment are closely linked.
The History of the Soul
Foucault's project in Discipline and Punish is to account for the modern penal system, but he also presents a genealogical account of the modern soul. This is not only due to the fact that the soul gradually replaces the body as the focus of punishment and reform. It is also due to the fact that modern processes of discipline have essentially created that soul. Without the human sciences and the various mechanisms of observation and examination, the normal soul or mind would not exist. Ideas such as the psyche, conscience, and good behavior are effects created by a particular regime of power and knowledge. For Foucault, examining that regime is a way of looking deep into our souls. His history of the soul is also a powerful critique, because it makes us confront what we have become by excluding and marginalizing certain elements of our society.
The Prison and Society
The relationship between the prison and the wider society cannot be stressed enough. For Foucault, the prison is not a marginal building on the edge of a city, but is closely integrated into the city. The same "strategies" of power and knowledge operate in both locations, and the mechanisms of discipline that control the delinquent also control the citizen. Indeed, the methods of observation and control that Foucault describes originated in monasteries, in hospitals and in the army. Related to this point is Foucault's argument that we cannot abolish the prison, because our ways of thinking about and carrying out punishment will not allow it. The
prison is part of a "carceral network" that spreads throughout society, infiltrating and penetrating everywhere.
Paradox and Contrast
This is perhaps more a stylistic point than a theme, but Discipline and Punish reveals Foucault's addiction to contrast and contradiction. From the shocking image at the beginning of the work to the many numbered lists and pairs of terms, the work is structured around a series of conceits and paradoxes. The idea that prison contains its own failure is a good example. Critics have criticized Foucault for what they see as his chronic obscurity, but at least part of the problem comes from his attitude to language and discourse. Discourses are complex structures in which people can become "trapped": perhaps the experience of being trapped inside some of Foucault's more difficult sentences is meant to echo this. Or perhaps, like many French philosophers, he was just fond of linguistic jokes.
The Body of the Condemned
Summary
Foucault begins by comparing a public execution from 1757 to an account of prison rules from
- The shifts between the two reveal how new codes of law and order developed. One important feature is the disappearance of torture; the body of the criminal disappeared from view. Punishment as spectacle disappeared; the exhibition of prisoners, the pillory and the public execution ended. Now, the certainty of punishment, and not its horror, deters one from committing a crime. Conviction marks the prisoner; publicity shifts towards the trial and the sentence.
A theoretical realignment occurs. Sentences are now intended to correct and improve. A sense of shame about punishment develops along with this. Punishment no longer touched the body. If it did, it was only to get at something beyond the body: the soul. New figures took over from the executioner, such as doctors, psychiatrists, chaplains and warders. Executions were made painless by drugs. The elimination of pain and the end of spectacle were linked. Machines like the guillotine, which kills almost without touching the body, were intended to be impersonal and painless. Between 1830 and 1848, public executions ended. This was an irregular, delayed process, however. A trace of torture remained because it is difficult to imagine what a non- corporal punishment would be.
The penalty now addressed the soul. Although the definition of crimes changed, some elements remained the same. Judgment was now passed on the motives, passions and instincts of the criminal, not only punishing but also supervising and directing the individual. Offenses became objects of scientific knowledge. The development of a new penal system in Europe led to the soul of the criminal as well as the crime being judged.
The power to punish becomes fragmented. Psychiatrists now decide on a criminal's medico- legal treatment. The adoption of these non-legal elements meant that the judge is not the only one who acts or judges.
This book is a genealogy of the modern soul and the power to judge. It follows four general rules: one) to regard punishment as a complex social function; two) to regard punishment as a political tactic; three) to see whether the history of penal law and of the human sciences are
Punish, he writes in order free prisoners not from their cells but from the discourses that helped to create them. His argument is that when the power to judge shifted to a judgment about normal and abnormal, the modern soul was formed. The prisoner or delinquent with an abnormal soul is defined against the normal majority. In showing how the prisoner is oppressed, Foucault wants to show us what is wrong with the modern soul in general.
Of the four straightforward rules for this investigation, the fourth is the most interesting. The techniques applied to the prisoner and our attitudes to him show the ways in which power operates in society. The knowledge possessed by prison warders and psychiatrists creates a certain "technology of power." Foucault's metaphors are drawn from science and industry, but he is also clear that economic and social circumstances are important. The reference to systems of production (the means of making and creating products and capital) is from Marx. Foucault's discussion of power is central to Discipline and Punish. He thinks that power is a strategy, or a game not consciously played by individuals but one that operates within the machinery of society. Power affects everyone, from the prisoner to the prison guard, but no one individual can "control" it.
The remarks about the soul being the prison of the body reflect Foucault's love of contradictions, but they also make a deeper point. The body is imprisoned because people can be controlled by sciences directed at the soul, such as psychiatry. Foucault attempts to chart a move from a situation where the criminal's body is attacked, to one where we are all disciplined and controlled.
Finally, Foucault's role in the prison reform movement is an important context for this section: he helped to run the French Groupe d'information sur les Prisons (GIP) in the 1970s. The group distributed information on prisons to the public, and was concerned with letting prisoners speak for themselves. In a way, Foucault sees Discipline and Punish as a theoretical counterpart to the work he carried out in practice.
The Spectacle of the Scaffold
Summary
The French penal ordinance of 1670 set out very harsh penalties, but a gap existed between theory and penal practice. Public execution and torture were not the most frequent form of punishment. However, torture played a considerable part in penality. The definition of torture involves an exact, measurable quantity of pain. An "economy of power" is invested in torture. Torture is part of a ceremony that reveals the truth of a crime. The trial is initially a hidden process. But a tradition of rules of evidence existed: there were different degrees of proof. Now these degrees relate to the juridical effects or the outcome of the trial. Penal investigation was written, secret and subject to rules. It was a machine that might produce the truth in the absence of the accused. But a confession removed the need for further investigation. A confession transforms an investigation from a process carried on against the criminal to a voluntary affirmation. The ambiguity of the confession explains the means used to obtain it: the oath and judicial torture.
Torture is an ancient practice, which had a strict place in the classical legal system. It had two elements: a secret investigation by judicial authority and a ritual act by the accused. The body of the accused linked these two elements. This is why, until the whole classical system of punishment was examined, there was no critique of torture. Judicial torture was a regulated practice, almost a game. If the suspect successfully resisted, he could be freed. Classical
torture was a way of finding evidence in which investigation and punishment were mixed. As the system of proof produced a partial proof of guilt, torture punished this partial guiltiness whilst investigating it further.
In the execution, the criminal's body showed the truth of his crime because, one) the criminal became the herald of his own condemnation; two) it took up the scene of confession, where the full truth was revealed; three) it pinned public torture onto the crime itself; four) its slowness and suffering became the ultimate proof at the end of the ritual. From judicial torture to execution, the body produces and reproduces the truth of the crime. A public execution is to be understood as a political as well as a judicial ritual. The intervention of the sovereign in a case was a reply to an offense against him. Public execution was a ritual by which injured sovereignty was restored. Public execution was a ritual of armed law with two aspects: victory and struggle. The conflict and triumph of the executioner over the body of the accused was like a challenge or a joust.
Attitudes toward punishment were related to general attitudes to the body and death. Death was familiar because of epidemics and wars. These general reasons explain the possibility and long survival of physical punishment. Torture was embedded in legal practice because it revealed the truth and showed the workings of power though the body of the condemned. This truth-power relation remains at the heart of all mechanisms of punishment, and is found in different forms in contemporary penal practice. The Enlightenment condemned the "atrocity" of public execution. Atrocity is the part of crime that torture turns back on itself to display the truth of crime to the world. The mechanism of atrocity mixed the sovereign and crime together; atrocity was the "organized destruction of infamy by omnipotence."
One reason why a punishment that was unafraid of atrocity was replaced by a "humane" version is very important. A key element in the execution was the people or audience. But the role of the people was ambiguous. Criminals often had to be protected from the crowd, and crowds often tried to free prisoners. The intervention of the crowd in executions posed a political problem. In his last words, the convict could, and did, say anything. Uncertainty exists over these last words: were they fictitious? Perhaps crime literature was neither "popular expression" nor moralizing propaganda but the space in which the two investigations of penal practice met.
Broadsheets decreased in popularity as the political function of popular illegality altered. A new literature developed, in which crime was glorified as a fine art or mode of privilege. Accounts of executions became accounts of investigation; crime literature moved from an account of confessions to the intellectual struggle between criminal and investigator. In this new genre there were no more heroes or executions; although the criminal was punished, he did not suffer. Newspapers began to recount the details of everyday crime and punishment. The people were robbed of their old pride in crime, and murders became the game of the well-behaved.
Analysis
Foucault essentially begins at the base of the pre-modern system of punishment, by analyzing judicial inquisition and torture. Judicial inquisition was carried out by Church and state authorities, as a means of exploring a crime and establishing the "truth". It was a key part of the inquisition process, which resembled the execution in some ways. It seems very alien to the modern mind. Foucault shows that, although torture was a brutal phenomenon, it was deeply rooted in contemporary legal systems, and cannot be understood apart from this discourse. It can also clearly be distinguished from the execution itself. Torture was highly regulated, and can be conceived of as a kind of perverse game, in which the prisoner negotiates with his
penality itself. Crime literature stopped being a dangerous space and focused on investigation rather than on execution. In a sense it became more "official" and repressive.
Generalized Punishment
Summary
Petitions against executions and torture increased in the eighteenth century. There was a need to end physical confrontation between the sovereign and the criminal. Execution became shameful and revolting. The reformers argued that judicial violence exceeds the legitimate exercise of power—that criminal justice should punish, not take revenge. The need for punishment without torture was first formulated as a need to recognize the humanity of the criminal. Man became the legal limit of power, beyond which it could not act. But how did man come to be set up against the traditional practice of punishment? A problem of the economy of punishment arises. How could "man" and "measure" be reconciled? The eighteenth century resolved the problem of this economy with the idea that humanity was the measure of punishment, but with no proper explanation or definition.
Foucault salutes great reformers like Beccaria, but reform needs to be situated within a process by which crimes became less violent and punishments less intense. There were fewer murders, and criminals tended to work in smaller groups. They moved from attacking bodies to seizing goods. This can be explained by better socio-economic circumstances and harsher laws. It was part if a development that placed a greater value on property and production. There was an attempt to adjust and refine the mechanisms of power that frame individuals' everyday lives. A remarkable strategic coincidence existed between this change and the discourse of the reformers. They attacked an excess bound up in the irregularity of the power to punish. Penal justice was irregular because of the great number of courts and legal loopholes. The criticism of the reformers was directed at the bad economy of power, not the weakness or cruelty of the powerful. The dysfunction of power was related to an excess concentration of power in the King. Eighteenth century reform of the criminal law was a rearrangement of structures of power. It aimed not to punish less but to punish better.
The conjecture that saw the birth of reform was not that of a new sensibility but of another policy with regard to illegalities. Illegality was deeply rooted in the ancien regime. Sometimes laws were ignored, and exemptions were made. Tolerance existed for the less favored people, whom the laws vigorously defended. The paradox of necessary illegality was its identification with criminality, and the consequent ambiguity of attitude. A network of glorification grew up around crime. A crisis of popular illegality occurred in the eighteenth century, when an illegality of rights shifted to an illegality of goods. The bourgeois could not accept popular illegality when it concerned their property. As new forms of production and capital accumulation emerged, popular practices relating to an illegality of rights became transformed into an illegality of property.
Penal reform was born at a point between the struggle against the super-power of the sovereign and that against the infra-power of acquired illegality. Monarchical power left subjects able to practice illegalities; in attacking one, you attack the other. For many reformers, the struggle to delimit the power to punish was based on the need to control popular illegality more strictly. Public execution was criticized because it represented the coming together of unlimited sovereign power and popular illegality. But reform was successful because it came to stress the suppression of popular illegality. New, less severe criminal systems were sustained by upheaval
in the traditional economy of illegalities. The key feature of eighteenth century penal reform was the constitution of a new economy and a new technology of power. This new strategy falls into a general theory of the contract. The citizen was presumed to have agreed to the law by which he is punished. The criminal was therefore a juridical paradox, participating in his own punishment. The whole of society was present in the punishment, which gives rise to a problem of degree of punishment. The formidable right to punish conflicted with the individual. The right to punish has shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defense of society. The great force of this penalty was like another "super-power", a penalty without bounds. This causes a need to establish a principle of moderation for the power of punishment. The principle of moderation is articulated first as a humanitarian discourse. The recourse to sensibility contains a principle of calculation. The principle takes root that one should never apply "inhumane" punishments; this is because of the necessary regulation of power and not because of the criminal's humanity. The object of punishment is to create consequences for crime. Punishment must be adjusted to the nature of the crime. The eighteenth century, however, had the idea that one should punish just enough to prevent recurrence. The example is no longer a ritual but a sign that serves as an obstacle. The technique of punitive signs rested on six major rules: The rule of minimum quantity, the idea that the criminal should have a little more interest in avoiding the penalty than in risking the crime; The rule of sufficient ideality, punishment has to use representation to deter, not corporal reality; The rule of lateral effects, the punishment should have a great effect on the observer, as in Beccaria's idea of slavery; The rule of perfect certainty, there must be an unbreakable link between crime and penalty; The rule of common truth, penal practice must be subject to the common idea of truth and demonstration; The rule of optimal specification, all offenses must be precisely classified. There is a need for a tabulation of offenses, a taxonomy that relates every crime to a punishment. The division between first offender and recidivist becomes important.
Beneath the humanization of penalties are rules that demand "leniency" as a calculated economy of power to punish. This power is applied not to the body but to the mind as a play of representations or signs. The new art of punishment reveals the supersession of punitive semio- techniques by a new political anatomy, in which the body is the most important feature.
Analysis
From torture and execution, Foucault moves to considering calls for reform. In his view, the reform movement was humanitarian in the sense that man (and the pain he felt) became a standard against which punishments were assessed. The body changed from being the place where punishment acted, to a reason why it should act differently. The reformers first attempted to separate torture and cruelty from punishment; of course, for Foucault the link between torture and investigation means that, strictly speaking, torture was never part of punishment. In general, Foucault is unimpressed by interpretations of penal reform that see it as motivated by a love of one's fellow men. He takes a more calculating attitude to humanitarian reform. This calculation extends to the processes that surrounded reform. Reform was possible within a structure in which crime itself was changed and reduced. As with his explanation of execution, Foucault looks at deep economic and social structures. The shift in the forces of production (referred to by other writers as the Industrial Revolution) led to an increase in productivity and a greater emphasis on property. In turn, this led to an increase in property crime, but also to an alteration in the operation of power in society. The fact that the reformers called for change as these deep shifts occurred was not a coincidence. Rather, it was a "strategic coincidence," a change in the way power works. The intentions or free-will of the reformers were unimportant. Foucault then dissects the reformers' case. Just as their calls for reform were linked to shifts in power, they attacked the way power worked in society. Foucault's metaphor of the economy is
more serious the crime, the longer the penalty. Four) The punishment should be directed at others, not just the criminal. Obstacle-signs must circulate widely. Five) A learned economy of publicity exists. The penalty is now a representation of public morality. The code of the laws is evident in punishment. Punishment is also an act of mourning; society has lost the citizen who breaks the law. Six) The traditional discourse of crime is inverted. How can you end the dubious glory of the criminal? The punitive city will contain hundreds of tiny theaters of punishment. Each penalty must be a fable.
The use of imprisonment is not yet imaginable, because it does not yet correspond to the crime, and has no effect on the public. Prison as a universal penalty is incompatible with the technique of penalty as representation. The problem is that prison shortly became the essential punishment. It has a central place in the French penal code of 1810: a great hierarchical prison structure was planned. This is a very different physics of power. Across Europe, the theater of punishment is replaced by the prison system.
It is surprising that imprisonment took on such a major role. It was necessary to overcome the fact that imprisonment was related to arbitrary royal power. How did it become the general form of punishment? The most common explanation is that several models of punitive imprisonment formed in the classical period. Their prestige allegedly overcame the legal obstacles and despotic functioning of imprisonment. The last model, begun in Philadelphia, organized the prisoner's life by a timetable. Work was carried out on his soul; a whole corpus of individualizing knowledge about the prisoner developed.
There are points of convergence and disparity between these models. All are mechanisms directed towards the future. All also require methods to individualize the penalty. However, disparity exists in the technology of the penalty, in the techniques of control over the individual. Individual correction assures a process of redesigning the individual as a subject of the law through the reinforcement of a system of signs and representations. Corrective penality, on the other hand, acts on the soul. Instead of representations, forms of coercion operate here. Exercise, timetables and plans all try to restore the obedient subject, who obeys habit, rules and orders.
There are two ways of reacting to an offense: to restore the juridical subject of the social pact, or to shape an obedient subject. Punishment by timetable makes a spectacle impossible, and establishes a certain relationship between the convict and punisher. The subject must be subjected to total power, which is secret and autonomous. The secrecy and autonomy of power cannot exist in a theory and policy that aims to make punishment transparent and to include the citizen. The power that applied the penalties now threatened to become as arbitrary as the power that once decided them.
A divergence exists between the punitive city and the coercive institution. In the first, the functioning of penal power is distributed throughout the social space. In the other, there is a compact functioning of power, an assumption of responsibility for the body and time of the convict and an attempt to reclaim him individually. In the late eighteenth century, there were three ways of organizing the power to punish: one) based on the old monarchical law which still functioned. Punishment was the ceremonial of sovereignty. Both (two) and (three) were corrective, utilitarian and the consequence of the right to punish belonging to society as a whole. However, these two ways differed in terms of their mechanisms. In (two), the reforming jurists saw punishment as a way of re- qualifying individuals as subjects using signs recognized by the citizen. In (three), which was a project for prison reform, punishment was seen as a technique for the coercion of individuals. It operated by training habits.
These three mechanisms cannot be reduced to theories of law, or derived from moral choices. They are technologies of power. The problem is why the third model was adopted. Why did the coercive, corporal solitary model replace the representative, signifying, collective model?
Analysis
This section is in one sense a continuation of themes introduced in the discussion of eighteenth century reformers and theories of punishment. The obstacle-sign represents a crime and its associated penalty together, in a way that is public and easy to understand. Crudely put, the obstacle-sign works like this: a man is tempted to steal, but then thinks of the penalty, which is probably the confiscation of his possessions. He is no longer tempted to steal. There is a link between the punishment and the crime: if you steal, the state takes away your property. Petty theft is a fairly minor crime, so the penalty is neither severe nor long-lasting. People see the thief losing his property, and are deterred.
Foucault imagines this relationship of signs as a coherent system, or economy. This is perhaps his most obvious use of structuralist terminology (see Context). The system operates in what he calls the punitive city, a place in which watching is still important, but in a different way. The model here is the theater, where what you see is not real but a representation. A degree of distance is introduced between the spectator and the action. The punitive city is not the ritual of the public execution, chiefly because it aims to prevent future lawbreaking.
More importantly, this is a system in which prison is an impossible idea, because it does not represent anything, and does not relate to the public. But prisons soon dominated punishment in Europe. Their dominance was by no means assured. Foucault makes it clear that several legal and representative obstacles existed. In France, for example, prison was for debtors and those sent there by the arbitrary power of the King, through a so-called lettre de cachet. Few people suggested its widespread use in the early eighteenth century.
The dominant one was corrective penality. This form of punishment was not representative, but involved coercion of the soul, as described in the first section. Correction attempted to "reset" the soul back to obedience by introducing certain new habits. It did not try to restore the individual to the place in society he had lost by breaking the law, but rather to create a subject who obeyed without question. In order to achieve this goal, secrecy and control over punishment were needed. This is a very different situation to that of the public, visible representation of punishment.
In many ways, this is a key turning point in Discipline and Punish. Foucault shows the beginning of modern coercive institutions. The coercive institution is very different to the punitive city: there is no theater, and the punishment itself is hidden and based on an idea of training. There were three ways for the prison to develop, but only the third took off. This is very characteristic of Foucault's genealogical method. He shows turning points and crucial breaks in order to make us realize that things could have been different. The rest of the book is an attempt to explain why one particular element prevailed, not from choice but through the operation of power.
has a long history: it is found in military, religious, and universal practice as ritual or ceremony. Exercises became tasks of increasing complexity that marked the acquisition of knowledge and good behavior. Exercise was initially a way of organizing time towards salvation, but it became part of a political technology of the body.
"The Composition of forces." The military unit became a machine of many parts; there was a need to create smaller units out of a mass. This was similar to the idea of creating a productive force that was greater than its elements. Discipline became the art of composing forces to obtain an efficient machine. This demands explanation: one) the individual body becomes an element that is placed, moved and articulated. The soldier or body is inserted into a larger machine. two) The time of the individual unit is adjusted to the time of others. three) A carefully measured combination of forces requires a precise command of forces. The leader needs to signal in various ways to his charges.
Discipline creates individuality out of the bodies that it controls. It is cellular, organic and genetic. It has four techniques: it draws up tables, it prescribes movements, it imposes exercises and arranges tactics. The highest form of disciplinary practice is war as strategy. Strategy makes it possible to understand warfare as a way of conducting politics between states. The classical age sees the birth of strategy between states, but also the creation of a strategy by which bodies within states were controlled. This was a military dream of society, which referred not to a contract or the state of nature but to the cogs of a machine. While jurists and philosophers looked to the contract to explain the creation of society, the technicians of discipline created procedures for the individual and collective coercion of bodies.
Analysis
Again, the body is the subject of attention. Now, however, the body is not subject to torture but to forces of discipline and control. Foucault analyzes various technologies that control and affect the body.
Docility is achieved through the actions of discipline. Discipline is different from force or violence because it is a way of controlling the operations and positions of the body. The link to the idea of academic "disciplines" such as the human sciences is intended, and becomes important later. The fact that Foucault finds the roots of discipline in monasteries and armies is important. Monastic rules, which regulate the behavior of monks, and drill exercises in the army both emphasize self-control and obedience to rules, but from differing starting points. When Foucault talks of their extension over time, he does not suggest that everyone eventually became monks or soldiers. Instead, he argues that institutions like prisons, schools and hospitals acted like machines for transforming and controlling people in this period. To do this, they fixed individuals in time and space. Foucault thinks of these institutions in terms of machines and living organisms, hence the reference to political anatomy.
The organization of individuals in space works according to certain rules. The whole process works within a larger space, such as the prison, which is divided into parts or cells. Discipline depends on the idea of a series, such as a line of pupils, or a rank of soldiers.
The control of time is equally important. Foucault again traces the regulation of time back to monastic life. The idea that people are held in a series is preserved, only this time they are controlled by a timetable like that discussed at the beginning of section one. Foucault's idea of a "positive economy" is hard to grasp. It essentially means that modern timetables aim to cram more and more activity into a day.
Time also has broader effects. These effects are related to the technology of time that includes both machines like clocks and the political technology that regulates the individual's time. The disciplines are not machines for calculating time in the same way as clocks, but rather ways of regulating time as the individual experiences it. Time is divided up like space. The convict's day is divided into one-hour segments, for example, according to a detailed plan. The control of space and time is essential to Foucault's disciplinary system because they are the most basic elements of human life. Regulating them affects the way in which people act and think; it is a particularly deep and effective strategy.
Foucault begins with time and space as the individual experiences them, but he places this time within a large context. He argues that a wider type of time existed, in which everyone moved; he also argues that the eighteenth century invented the idea of the progress of society. Foucault is talking about the Enlightenment, an eighteenth century philosophical movement that was concerned with reason and human progress. He is unusual in that he links this movement, represented by writers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant, to the development of prisons, timetables and other technologies. However, it is important to Foucault that philosophical texts and timetables are part of the same structures of power.
Like the timetable, exercise derives from the practices of monasteries, and is yet another way of regulating the body through activity. Prayer, which was aimed at salvation, and military drills are examples of this original form of exercise. The key shift came when the purpose of exercise changed from the benefit of the individual to control. Unlike silent prayer, the "exercise yard" of a prison does not necessarily benefit the prisoners, Foucault would argue.
The final element that Foucault analyzes is the idea of the body as part of a machine. This is a development of the division of space and time. Now, however, the body becomes a cog in a machine. Foucault does not argue that groups of people never existed before the classical period, but that the idea of arranging and controlling them was new. The power that arranges people, however, makes them into individual units. It seems like a contradiction in terms, but for Foucault the "individual" could exist only when massive groups were created. The group was not created from individuals, but vice versa. The idea of creating the individual as an object of knowledge becomes important later. Creating the individual out of the group contradicts the common philosophical view about the creation of society. This view argued that society came from a contract or agreement between men. Foucault reveals his opinion of modern society here: that you cannot choose to enter it through a contract, and that it controls you absolutely through technology and power.
The Means of Correct Training
Summary
The chief functioning of disciplinary power is to train. It links forces together to enhance and use them; it creates individual units from a mass of bodies. The success of disciplinary power depends on three elements: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination. In hierarchical observation, the exercise of discipline assumes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation. During the classical age "observatories" were constructed. They were part of a new physics and cosmology; new ideas of light and the visible secretly prepared a new knowledge of man. Observatories were arranged like a military camp, a model also found in schools, hospitals and prisons. Disciplinary institutions created a mechanism of control. The perfect disciplinary mechanism would make it possible to see everything constantly. The problem was breaking surveillance down into parts. In a factory, surveillance becomes part of
Observation is again important. It undergoes a further change, however: now it is a mechanism that coerces, rather than the process by which the public watches an execution. Foucault's point is that you can be coerced or forced to do something by being observed constantly. Not only do you feel self-conscious, but your behavior changes. This is an excellent example of the operation of power: an effect occurs on your body without physical violence.
Foucault charts the development not just of the process of observation but of the institutions in which it operates. The perfect disciplinary institution, he argues, is that in which everything can be seen at once: this is a clear reference to the Panopticon discussed in the next section. The way Foucault links the development of observatories to scientific developments shows his early interest in the history of science, but also one of the major criticisms of his work: that he puts theory before evidence. Whether such observatories were designed, or whether military camps actually operated in the way he describes is uncertain. This is perhaps unnecessary to the overall argument, which depends more on Foucault's philosophical interpretation of society than on historical evidence.
The discussion of the norm returns to the point made in Foucault's discussion of the judicial inquisition: that the status of judgment changed in the pre-modern period. Judgment now concerns an arbitrary standard: pupils, soldiers and prisoners are observed and measured against this standard. What is normal is good, and what is abnormal is bad and must be corrected. Penality becomes about correcting deviations from the norm, organizing people into ranks and classifications according to their "normality". For Foucault, the norm is an entirely negative and harmful idea that allows the oppression and silencing of deviants and the "abnormal." The aim of Discipline and Punish is to show how unnatural this process is. Examination unites the processes of observation and normalization. It covers both the school exam and the medical examination, and was developed only in the eighteenth century. In an examination, the individual is looked at, written about and analyzed. There are similarities here with the concept of the "clinical gaze" that Foucault relates in his history of medicine, The Birth of the Clinic.
Foucault's negative conception of individuality is important. Advertising and the mass media tend to praise people seen as "individuals," but for Foucault the individual is a harmful device constructed by power. The more abnormal and excluded you are, the more individual you become. Individuality is the mark of the mental patient and the convict. It has nothing to do with taking control over one's own life. To free the excluded and allow them to speak, we need either to make them anonymous, or to expose the structures that separate them from "normal" society.
Panopticism
Summary
Foucault begins with a description of measures to be taken against the plague in the seventeenth century: partitioning of space and closing off houses, constant inspection and registration. Processes of quarantine and purification operate. The plague is met by order. Lepers were also separated from society, but the aim behind this was to create a pure community. The plague measures aim at a disciplined community. The plague stands as an image against which the idea of discipline was created. The existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring and supervising abnormal beings brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms created by the fear of the plague. All modern mechanisms for controlling abnormal individuals derive from these.
Foucault then discusses Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, a building with a tower at the center from which it is possible to see each cell in which a prisoner or schoolboy is incarcerated. Visibility is a trap. Each individual is seen but cannot communicate with the warders or other prisoners. The crowd is abolished. The panopticon induces a sense of permanent visibility that ensures the functioning of power. Bentham decreed that power should be visible yet unverifiable. The prisoner can always see the tower but never knows from where he is being observed.
The possibility that the panopticon is based on the royal menagerie at Versailles is raised. The Panopticon allows on to do the work of a naturalist: drawing up tables and taxonomies. It is also a laboratory of power, in which experiments are carried out on prisoners and staff. The plague- stricken town and the panopticon represent transformations of the disciplinary programme. The first case is an exceptional situation, where power is mobilized against an extraordinary evil. The second is a generalized model of human functioning, a way of defining power relations in everyday life. The Panopticon is not a dream building, but a diagram of power reduced to its ideal form. It perfects the operations of power by increasing the number of people who can be controlled, and decreasing the number needed to operate it. It gives power over people's minds through architecture. As it can be inspected from outside, there is no danger of tyranny. The panopticon was destined to spread throughout society. It makes power more economic and effective. It does this to develop the economy, spread education and improve public morality, not to save society. The panopticon represents the subordination of bodies that increases the utility of power while dispensing with the need for a prince. Bentham develops the idea that disciplines could be dispersed throughout society. He provides a formula for the functioning of a society that is penetrated by disciplinary mechanisms. There are two images of discipline: one) the discipline blockade—an exceptional enclosed space on the edge of society; and two) the discipline-mechanism—a functional mechanism to make power operate more efficiently. The move from one to the other represents the formation in the seventeenth and eighteenth century of a disciplinary society. Other increasingly profound processes operated: one) the functional inversion of disciplines; two) the swarming of disciplinary mechanisms; mechanisms begin to circulate openly in society, and are broken down into flexible methods of control; three) the state control of discipline, as in the formation of a central police power.
We can talk of the formation of a disciplinary society in the movement from enclosed disciplines to an infinitely extendible "panopticism". The formation of a disciplinary society is connected to several historical processes: one) disciplines are techniques of assuring the ordering of human masses that elaborate tactics of power that operate economically and invisibly. These tactics aim to increase the docility and utility of all elements of the system. This corresponds to a population increase, and a rise in the numbers to be supervised. The development of a capitalist economy led to a situation where these techniques could be operated in diverse regimes. Two) the panoptic modality of power is not independent. The disciplines and panopticism are the reverse of a process by which rights are guaranteed. The Enlightenment, which invented the liberties, also invented the disciplines. Three) what is new in the eighteenth century is the combination of disciplinary techniques. This occurred within a development of other technologies. The eighteenth century invented the examination, just as the middle-ages invented the judicial inquisition; much of modern penal techniques reveal the penetration of the examination into the inquisition.
The extreme of ancien regime penality was the dismemberment of the convict's body: the ideal position of modern penality is the indefinite examination. It is no surprise that the cellular, observational prison is the modern penal instrument, or that prisons resemble factories, schools and hospitals.
