Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish Part Two

Previously on Discipline and Punish • Vicious, graphic, visible torture • Display of sovereign’s power • Body of offender as opportunity for power’s display • Spectacle. Social control “celebrations” • Discipline And Punish • Torture • The Body Of The Condemned [3-31] • The Spectacle Of The Scaffold [32-69] • Punishment (73-131) • Generalized Punishment (73-103) • The Gentle Way In Punishment (104-131) • Discipline • Docile Bodies • The Art Of Distribution • The Control Of Activity • The Organization Of Geneses • The Composition Of Forces • The Means Of Correct Training • Hierarchical Observation • Normalizing Judgements • The Examination • Panopticism • Prison • Complete And Austere Institutions • Illegalities And Delinquency • The Carceral

Discipline And Punish • Torture • The Body Of The Condemned [3-31] • The Spectacle Of The Scaffold [32-69] • Punishment (73-131) • Generalized Punishment (73-103) • The Gentle Way In Punishment (104-131) • Discipline • Docile Bodies • The Art Of Distribution • The Control Of Activity • The Organization Of Geneses • The Composition Of Forces • The Means Of Correct Training • Hierarchical Observation • Normalizing Judgements • The Examination • Panopticism • Prison • Complete And Austere Institutions • Illegalities And Delinquency • The Carceral • II. Punishment (73-131) • A. Generalized Punishment (73-103) • B. The Gentle Way In Punishment (104-131)

Late 17th Century “Crisis of Penality” Where is protest against public execution coming from? • Foucault saw three components: • Danger – current practices supported or dramatized confrontation between violence of sovereign and violence of the people. • Excess – cruelty betrayed the tyrannical nature of the sovereign – calls for “measure” • Shamefulness – once question is opened and issue of limit arises, “soul” is transformed from what torture has to reach to be effective into what has to be left intact out of respect – calls for “humanity.” (74.4)

Foucault’s Question How does humanity as measure of punishment become attached to leniency and the economy of punishment? (74.9-75.1)

Methodology: How to find answer • Don’t think about it in terms of a policy maker thinking about it nor in terms of a Machiavellian sovereign trying to hold on to power. • Rather, think about how a society or culture “thinks” and how different forces and perspectives can change how that happens

Redefine the Problem • The reaction was not just to excess but to irregularity (78.4)

Evidence? • Look at what people were saying, what arguments justified “need for reform,” what values were cited, how was old way criticized, how was new way lauded, why is the progressive progressive? • In short, look at the layers of rhetorical sediment that make up history, not just main players or events.

Complaints • Overlapping and confusing jurisdictions • Inconsistent punishments • Conflicting rules • Too much power in some places, too little in others • Exaggerations and loopholes

Calls for a more regular, effective, sensible, efficient system.

What Reformers Saw A poorly organized economy of power  “Paralysis of justice”

Sources of the Movement “many different interests come together” in this “movement

What “reform” really was A cleaning up of the system “In short, the power to judge should no longer depend on the innumerable, discontinuous, sometimes contradictory privileges of sovereignty, but on the continuously distributed effects of public power.” (81.6)

REFORM • Rearrangement of power to punish, not less, but better. • severity but universality and necessity

Other Changes • Emergence of bourgeois society and “complexification” of organizational society creates new advocate for social order

Second half 18th c. The property of the bourgeoisie increasingly what crime is about

Corporate property could not tolerate property illegality at all – in fact, it needed guarantee of property to be able to operate – need for certainty and risk protection at the very heart of what it was (85.6)

Everyday illegality had been mundane aspect of life. Now it annoys a rising class of actor Less about annoying the king than about interfering with the bourgeoisie

“In short, penal reform was born at the point of junction between the struggle against the super-power of the sovereign and that against the infra-power of acquired and tolerated illegalities.” (87.8)

In other words… • Absolute power of sovereign comes with host of tolerated illegalities. Attack absolute power, and you attack the system of illegalities. • In agreeing to respect the basic rights of the prisoner as human, we reserve the right to expect conformity of all. In other words, if we stop punishment because this is one man among many, we expect conformity from the many of whom this is just one.

The right to punish has been shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defense of society (90.7).

Discipline And Punish • Torture • The Body Of The Condemned [3-31] • The Spectacle Of The Scaffold [32-69] • Punishment (73-131) • Generalized Punishment (73-103) • The Gentle Way In Punishment (104-131) • Discipline • Docile Bodies • The Art Of Distribution • The Control Of Activity • The Organization Of Geneses • The Composition Of Forces • The Means Of Correct Training • Hierarchical Observation • Normalizing Judgements • The Examination • Panopticism • Prison • Complete And Austere Institutions • Illegalities And Delinquency • The Carceral • III. Discipline • A. Docile Bodies • 1) The Art Of Distribution • 2) The Control Of Activity • 3) The Organization Of Geneses • 4) The Composition Of Forces • B. The Means Of Correct Training • 1) Hierarchical Observation • 2) Normalizing Judgements • 3) The Examination • C. Panopticism

Part III: Discipline Let’s start with a consideration of the overall structure of this part of the book. • Docile Bodies • The Means of Correct Training • Panopticism

Docile bodies (135) • What is the DOCILE BODY? At 136.6 we read that it is one that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved. • “Nature” and “nurture.” • Are Xs born, or made?

The art of distributions (141) One prime component of discipline, Foucault claims, is the ordering, separation, and distribution of individuals in space. You can think of this as discipline’s mistrust of amorphous (shapeless), spontaneous, gatherings. • Wedding reception vs. the cocktail party,the parade vs. the riot,organized school vs. the 1-room school house,the regimented army vs. the lynch mob.

The Means of Correct Training • Hierarchical observation • Normalizing judgment • The examination

Hierarchical observation • Along side the development of telescope, microscope we get new science of man • Architecture that is not just about being seen but also to permit internal observation • bathroom stalls, smoked glass, etc. • DJR: Coleman’s seedling planters

Normalizing Judgement • “average” or “normal” as value laden terms? • workshop, school, army subject to a micro-penality of time (latenesses, absences, interruptions), activity (inattention, negligence, lack of zeal), behavior (impoliteness, disobedience), speech (idle chatter, insolence), the body (incorrect attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness), sexuality (impurity, indecency). (178.5) • order as natural and observable – (DJR – eh?) • to punish is to exercise (write 100 times “I must not…”) • keeping record book of points, marks

The examination • “The examination transformed the economy of visibility into the exercise of power.” (187.5) • “The examination also introduces individuality into the field of documentation.” (189.4) • Examination makes each individual a case. (191.5) • ascending vs. descending individualization (193) • “In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.” (194.5)

Panopticism (195ff) Foucault begins his discussion of “panopticism” with a description of the “plague mentality” or that style of thinking that seems to spring forth almost naturally when we are faced with a plague situation…

… a plague situation… What is the best thing to do in the face of a plague? When a disease is seen as potentially attacking anyone and everyone, when it feels as if it is “evil” among us, when any sense that scapegoats might work has been superseded by a realization that we are up against something bigger than that, what do we do?

Foucault’s answer is: • First, we partition and separate. Families are to stay in their homes. Each department is to keep to itself. The meat produced by each plant is to be kept separate. Doors are closed. The prison is placed under lock down with prisoners placed in their cells and no mixing in the yard. Parents send all the children to their rooms. Spaces are subdivided. In order to prevent the spread or to isolate the problem or just to get a handle on things we have the urge to reduce the amount of random mixing in the population. This is, for example, how a curfew is designed to prevent rioting. • Second, we subject everyone or everything to constant inspection. Guards are posted. IDs are checked at every door. • Third, the sick are registered (196.5). Recall the debates throughout the AIDS epidemic on the wisdom and necessity of maintaining a registry of HIV+ persons. • The goal of all of these is to meet "mixture" with analysis (<= ana - lysis -- to break up into parts), disorder with order (197.6).

The power of discipline is analysis and order.

Plague mentality represents a global shift… …in how society thinks about problems. In the old system, the paradigmatic case is the leper. The leper is treated by wearing a mark and by having to live outside the city walls or in a lepers’ colony. The model demonstrated by this is that of pure community – those who don’t fit in are simply ostracized. Recall, in this connection, the reaction of the Puritans to their community problems in the first decades of the Massachusetts Bay Colony – they constantly tried to identify who belonged and who did not and then tried to send those who didn’t out. By contrast, the plague mentality sees the evil as “among us” and responds to it by restructuring the community itself, segmenting it’s members, putting people in boxes. Rather than mark the evil doer, the whole society is broken down into categories and distributions. Everyone has a proper position. This approach is based on the ideal of the disciplined society, well ordered, clearly structured, etc.

“The plague as a form, at once real and imaginary, of disorder has as its medical and political correlative discipline. Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of ‘contagions’, of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder” (198.3).

The panopticon accomplishes a marvelous transformation… In the face of such disorder, The crowd or “multiplicity” which is a compact mass of interacting individuals becomes a collection of separated individualities. From the guard’s point of view, a crowd is transformed into a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised while from the inmate’s point of view a crowd has become a sequestered and observed solitude (201.3).

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the in-mates should be caught up in a power situation of which they themselves are the bearers. (201.5)

What now? For Bentham the idea of the panopticon was that power should be visible but unverifiable. For me, I am reminded that the point is to create a form of social organization that has properties of GOD -- cf. what they teach little kids: knows everything, always watching, you can't see him…. In other words…

…Unobtrusive Control Abounds

But it is not the whole story Informal Control Still Dominates – we control one another most of the time

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Discipline and Punish