Notes
Late 18th/early 19th centuries –
paradigm shift in penal codes, modernization. From public torture and execution
to institutionalized work, rehabilitation, and total management of time.
- Public >> private
- Physical pain >> loss of liberty
- justice system abdicates responsibility for violence inflicted
on prisoners abu ghraib, outsourcing of prisons.
- public emphasis shifts to trial/sentencing
- however, a trace of torture still remains hidden within the
system
the shift in punishment is matched by a shift in the
definition of crime – from physical to mental/spiritual/psychological. In other
words, sex criminals are punished for perversion, violent criminals are
punished for aggression.
This shift had political purposes. In analyzing it, it’s
necessary to shed the “illusion” that the primary purpose of penalty is to
reduce crime.
“political technology of the body” = control over body using
knowledge and institutionalized force
penal system is not a product of state vs. people or class
vs. class, but rather a confluence of diverse ‘micro-powers’ that flow,
converge, and conflict within the network of society.
SOUL = site of power relations regarding a body.
Public executions provided an outlet of direct conflict
between king and subjects. This was politically dangerous.
Reform movement was conducted in the name of the ‘humanity’
of the prisoner. However, this was due not to increased empathy but to regulate
the effects of power.
Prior to reform, shift in crime from physical
violence (often rights-oriented) to property theft. paralleled rise of
bourgeoisie, increase in standard of living
Reform movement was not just opposed to torture but also reacting
against inefficiency, chaos and consolidated power of old (monarchical) system
Crimes of property vs. crimes of rights – mimicked class
divisions.
Old calculus – severity of punishment must match severity of
crime.
New calculus – one must punish exactly enough to prevent
repetition of crime.
In order to reach this new calculus, crimes and punishments
needed to be quantified, taxonomized, and matched with certainty.
Late-18th C.: three ways of organizing the power
to punish:
- monarchical: ritual vengeance of king on condemned body (ceremony)
- reform: punishment produces a juridical subject through a public imposition of signs on his soul (representation)
- institutional: reprogram body and behavior in prisons (exercise)
MC asks: Why was model #3 adopted?
Technologies of discipline:
- distribution
o enclosure
o partitioning
o functional sites
o rank (as unit of arrangement)
- control of activity
o time-table
o temporal elaboration (applied to individual acts)
o correlation of the body and the gesture
o body-object articulation
o exhaustive use
- organization of geneses
o evolutional model
o ‘seriation’ of activities
- composition of forces
o e.g. separation of military troops into units with
different sizes and functions
o mechanical model of organization
o precise system of command
Training – the creation of ‘individuals’ who can
interoperate in complementary fashion from a formless mass of humanity – is
another central element of discipline. The instruments of training are:
- hierarchical observation
- normalizing judgment
- the examination (combines previous two) this sheds a little light on the qualifying exams process…
o turns visibility into a power relation
o uses documentation to fix individuality
o turns each individual into a ‘case’
feudal society et al: the powerful are more individualized
disciplinary regime: the powerless are more individualized
makes me think of marketing
evolution: shift from brands to direct marketing
so, basically, MF is saying that the post-enlightenment
individual is tantamount to (and defined as) a powerless subject. Very
counterintuitive.
Bentham’s Panopticon – the prisoners are completely
visible from the central tower, and they are aware of their visibility. The
prisoners can see the tower, but they cannot tell whether they are being
watched at any given moment. Thus, they internalize the watchful gaze of the
guard, and essentially become their own guards. One
important aspect of the Panopticon which MF doesn’t explicitly state: the
danger of surveillance must be backed up by a real threat of punishment.
Surveillance alone has limited effect.
- automatizes and disindividualizes power
- can be integrated into any organizational or institutional
function
- became basis for “disciplinary society” in which we live
Processes of social change >> disciplinary society
- functional inversion of disciplines.
o From neutralizing threats to creating useful
individuals.
- Swarming of disciplinary mechanisms.
- State-control of mechanisms of discipline
Rise of disciplinary society is linked to other historical
processes:
- Economic: rise of capitalism
- Juridico-political: rise of representative democracy
- Scientific: industrial revolution
Quotes
“The body as the major target of penal repression has
disappeared.” (8)
“From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has
become an economy of suspended rights.” (11)
“the judges have gradually . . . taken to judging something
other than crimes, namely, the ‘soul’ of the individual.” (19) modernity >> individualism
“Regard punishment as a political tactic.” (23)
“try to study the metamorphosis of punitive methods on the
basis of a political technology of the body in which might be read a common
history of power relations and object relations.” (24) statement of purpose
“one might say that the definition of offences and their
prosecution are carried out in turn in order to maintain the punitive
mechanisms and their functions.” (24)
“The body becomes a useful force only if it is both a
productive body and a subjected body.” (26)
“power and knowledge directly imply one another . . . 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) Knowledge <<
>> Power. This is one of F’s MAJOR THESES.
“The soul is the effect and instrument of a political
anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.” (30)
public execution was “dangerous, in that it provided a
support for a confrontation between the violence of the king and the violence
of the people.” (73)
“The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at
the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.”
(79)
“the economy of legalities was restructured with the
development of capitalist society. The illegality of property [lower classes] was separated from the
illegality of rights [bourgeoisie].”
(87)
“A penal system must be conceived as a mechanism intended to
administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them all.” (89)
“While jurists or philosophers were seeking . . . a primal
model for the construction or the reconstruction of the social body, the
soldiers and with them the technicians of discipline were elaborating
procedures for the individual and collective coercion of bodies.” (169)
“in all the mechanisms of discipline, the examination is
highly ritualized. In it are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the
experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth.” (184) YES YES YES
“The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an
‘ideological’ representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by
this specific technology of power that I have called ‘discipline.’” (194) individual as powerless subject
“power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of
objects and rituals of truth.” Big part of MF’s
theory. good quote re: power << >> knowledge
“‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution
nor with an apparatus; it 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.” (215) discipline defined.
“The growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to the
specific modality of disciplinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of
submitting forces and bodies, in short, ‘political anatomy’, could be operated
in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses and institutions.” (221) capitalism << >> disciplinary society
“The ‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also
invented the disciplines.” (222)
Additional Notes
This is an email conversation
Daniel Chamberlain and I had about Discipline
and Punish when we read part of it for a class last year:
Aram:
my instinct when reading a book like discipline and
punish or the history of sexuality is to highlight every word and write:
yes
YES!
yes
oh yes
all the way down the margins. i'll confess i have read some foucault in the
past, as an undergraduate, but at the time i found it extremely challenging,
and didn't distinguish him too much from other french social theorists.
however, as the years passed, i found that foucault was one of the few who
stuck out in my mind and offered continuing value for understanding culture.
this time around, the read was much easier.
i could write a laundry list of the things i like in foucault – his
quasi-historical methodology, his first-principles approach to theory, and his
brilliant articulation of power and knowledge are just a few – but instead i'll
use my final paragraph or two to point out something important I think he got
wrong.
in the panopticon chapter of discipline and punish (which seems to be a big
fave with the whole class), foucault holds that "our society is one not of
spectacle, but of surveillance. . . the circuits of communication are the
supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge" (p. 217).
to my mind, this description does not adequately account for two of the most
important communication media of our day -- television and the internet, which offer obverse counterexamples.
true, television is a centralized information medium, and this points to a
centralization of power. however, although the medium offers us a kind of
double consciousness, a vision of ourselves as we should be or fear we are, it
can not be appropriately described as a widespread surveillance mechanism.
rather, it turns its viewers into voyeurs. this is a very important
distinction. a central facet of our enjoyment of tv is our presumed passivity and anonymity -- we are, at no point, afraid of being SEEN. in fact, most
people, given the rare opportunity, jump at the chance to appear on television.
this is also pathological, but quite distinct from foucault's point.
the internet, which didn't exist as a consumer medium in foucault's day, is
another counterexample. yes, it serves equally (or more) as a surveillance
medium and an anonymous/passive medium, but it isn't centralized – at least,
not in the sense that television is. this may be changing -- the patriot act and
the rapid consolidation of internet media ownership are certainly producing
twin spectres of centralization online, but the medium as we have known it for
the past 10 years is fundamentally decentralized and, in many important ways, democratic. as long as such media exist in our society, i
think foucault's characterization remains incomplete and overly simplistic.
Daniel:
In the spirit of discussion I
would like to (respectfully, of course) challenge Aram's critique of the
panoptic potential of television and the Internet. I should start by
recognizing that he is certainly correct in pointing out the anonymous use of
television and the decentralization of the Internet - these are certainly not
panoptic devices in the same sense as Bentham's prison.
On the one hand, I think that each medium carries the potential for
surveillance - on the one hand through actual, direct tracking and on the other
through the reminder of the constantly-scanning and documenting nature of our
visual culture. Of these two, the possibility of out-and-out direct
surveillance is clear: web sites leave cookies on computers; cable companies
can determine when and how your cable box is being used; TiVo collects and
compiles user data; Nielson directly invades thousands of homes. While
this is certainly not the same as constant, direct surveillance of every
citizen, and this surveillance is being applied by corporations, it seems
certain that these technologies can be (and are being) used for monitoring
purposes.
The argument that TV & the Internet also provide surveillance through
documenting functions is a bit more precarious. I would suggest that in
addition to providing a vision of ourselves as we should be or fear we are,
Television also reminds us that we could easily be the subject of its gaze -
television news can turn its cameras on any subject; reality TV programs &
talk shows create spaces in which 'real' people are the social agents; programs
like Cops and Americas most wanted not only remind us of extra-televisual surveillance,
they also directly ask for viewer input into the surveillance project.
The documenting function of the Internet is possibly more pernicious, as the
very fact of its democracy allows anyone with access to offer their life (or a
portion of their choosing) up for surveillance, in the form of web pages, shared photos,
blogs, Amazon wish lists, etc.
It is this last example that I think is the most Foucauldian in nature. Through
the positive provision of the technology of the Internet we have a means of
opening ourselves to other's gaze and situating ourselves in fields of
regulation and power. The question of centralization is still difficult
here. In one sense, this information is dispersed in virtual space and on thousands of separate servers. In another sense, this
information can be thought of as being centralized through its very existence
on the Internet as a system of discourses and a space of knowledge.
If it is true that TV & the Internet can work in this manner, I think that
the next question to ask regards the relations of power. Who is doing
this surveillance and who benefits from it? Does policing occur at the
level of the individual (the argument from the panopticon), the state, or
corporations that have an interest in these media? I think that in some ways this gets toward Hall's critique of Foucault – is there an
ideology at work? How is the state involved? Where is the opportunity for
resistance?
Aram:
i agree in principle with everything daniel has said; the
spirit of the panopticon does linger behind our media infrastructure, and both
television and the internet offer an ever-richer treasure trove of
"consumer data," available both to hegemonic interests and to other
individuals. this is far truer today than it was in foucault's day, and there
is no reason to believe the pace of data collection and analysis will slacken.
however, the internalization of surveillance is fundamental to the
benthamite/foucauldian model, and this has not yet emerged as social norm, in
my opinion. i used to do consumer internet research for a living, and one of
the facts that perpetually amazed me was the degree to which online consumers
are unaware of their own visibility. i noticed this last semester, as well,
when my undergrad students -- kids who have come of age with the web -- were
amazed to learn about cookies, data mining, etc.
thus, while a certain kind of surveillance is certainly happening (and i am
much more afraid of echo/carnivore/patriot act than cookies and spybots, btw),
it does not represent a panoptical phenomenon because the subjects themselves
are blind to it.
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