discipline and punish summary

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2/9/11 Discipline and Punish summary

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Discipline and PunishMichel Foucault (trans. Robert Hurley)

Part One: Torture1. The body of the condemnedThis first section of Part One serves as an introduction to the entire book. Examples ofeighteenth-century torture provide Foucault with many colorful episodes to relate in hisaccount of how penality changed in modernity. Foucault relates an explicit account ofDamiens torture to introduce his subject (3-5) and compares that account of penality toFauchers timetable for prisoners published in approximately 1837 (6-7).

The period separating these two accounts is a new age for penal justice in Europe and theUnited States that saw changes in the following areas:-- Economy of punishment-- Numerous projects for reform-- New theories of law and crime-- New moral and political justifications of the right to punish-- The disappearance of old laws and customs (7).

In the span of only a few decades between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tortureas public spectacle disappeared (7) as did the body as the major target of penal repression(8). Two processes were at work in this transformation:(1) Disappearance of punishment as spectacle (8); and(2) Slackening of the hold on the body (10)

Disappearance of punishment as spectacle (8)Punishment becomes a hidden part of the penal process with several consequences:(1) It leaves the domain of everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness;

(2) Its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity;(3) It is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishmentthat must discourage crime;(4) The mechanics of punishment changes its mechanisms; thus, justice no longer takespublic responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice . . .[and] is difficult toaccount for (9).

Public spectacle turned the tables, enveloping the executioner, judge, and other associatedparties in shame and often the subject of the publics violence. The change from punishmentas public spectacle saw the offender unequivocally marked with the negative sign; thepublicity shifted to the trial and justice dissociated itself from execution, trusting autonomousothers to do the job (9-10). E.g., in France, prison administration duties were theresponsibility of the Ministry of the Interior, but responsibility for penal servitude in the convictships and penal settlements lay with the Ministry of the Navy or the Ministry of the Colonies.

Beyond this distribution of roles operates a theoretical disavowal: do not imagine that thesentences that we judges pass are activated by a desire to punish; they are intended tocorrect, reclaim, cure; a technique of improvement represses, in the penalty, the strictexpiation of evil-doing, and relieves the magistrates of the demeaning task of punishing. Inmodern justice and on the part of those who dispense it there is a shame in punishing, whichdoes not always preclude zeal (10).

Slackening of the hold on the body (10)-- One no longer touched the body, or at least as li ttle as possible, and then only to reach


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something other than the body itself (11).-- The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes upon it toimprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of a liberty that isregarded both as a right and as property (11).-- From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy ofsuspended rights (11).-- The body and pain are not the ultimate objects of [the laws] punitive action, thus warders,doctors, chaplains, psychiatrists, psychologists, and educationalists have taken over from the

executioner (11).-- Impose penalties free of all pain (11).-- The reduction of these thousand deaths to strict capital punishment defines a whole newmorality concerning the act of punishing (12).-- At the beginning of the nineteenth century, then, the great spectacle of physicalpunishment disappeared; the tortured body was avoided; the theatrical representation of painwas excluded from punishment (14).-- By 1830-1848, public executions preceded by torture had almost entirely disappeared,though this change was not continuous (14).-- There remains a trace of torture in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice a trace

that has not been entirely overcome, but which is enveloped, increasingly, by the non-corporal nature of the penal system (16).-- The body has not been completely removed because of the implications of removingfreedom, e.g., food rationing, sexual deprivation, solitary confinement.

If the penality in its most severe forms no longer addresses itself to the body, on what does itlay hold? (16).There is a substitution of objects: the quality, the nature, and the substance of crime haschanged in its sense as the substance of which the punishable element is made (as opposedto its formal definition). Judgment is passed on offenses as defined by law, but judgment isalso passed on passions, instincts, anomalies, infirmities, maladjustments, effects ofenvironment or heredity, aggressivity, perversions, drives, and desires (17).

By solemnly inscribing offences in the field of objects susceptible of scientific knowledge,they provide the mechanisms of legal punishment with a justifiable hold not only on offences,but on individuals; not only on what they do, but also on what they are, will be, may be (18).

Within the very judicial modality of judgment, other types of assessment have slipped in,profoundly altering its rules of elaboration (19).

Old Question New Question

Has the act been established and is it punishable? What is this act, what is this act ofviolence or this murder? To what level or to what field of reality does it belong? Is it aphantasy, a psychotic reaction, a delusional episode, a perverse action?Who committed it? How can we assign the causal process that produced it? Where did itoriginate in the author himself? instinct, unconscious, environment, heredity?What law punishes this offence? What would be the most appropriate measures to take?How do we see the future development of the offender? What would be the best way ofrehabilitating him?

A whole set of assessing, diagnostic, prognostic, normative judgments concerning the

criminal have become lodged in the framework of penal judgment (19).

The reform of 1832, introducing attenuating circumstances, made it possible to modify the


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sentence according to the supposed degrees of an il lness or the forms of a semi-insanity.And the practice of calling on psychiatric expertise . . .means that the sentence, even if it isalways formulated in terms of legal punishment, implies . . .judgments of normality,attributions of causality, assessments of possible changes, anticipations as to the offendersfuture (20).

The sentence that condemns or acquits is not simply a judgment of guilt, a legal decisionthat lays down punishment it bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical

prescription for a possible normalization (21).

The whole machinery that has been developing for years around the implementation ofsentences and their adjustment to individuals creates a proliferation of the authorities ofjudicial decision-making and extends its powers of decision well beyond the sentence (21).

Let us examine the three questions to which [psychiatric experts] have to addressthemselves:(1) Does the convicted person represent a danger to society?(2) Is he susceptible to penal punishment?

(3) Is he curable or readjustable?These questions have nothing to do with article 64, nor with the possible insanity of theconvicted person at the moment of the act. They do not concern responsibility. Theyconcern nothing but the administration of the penalty, its necessity, its usefulness, its possibleeffectiveness; they make it possible to show, in an almost transparent vocabulary, whetherthe mental hospital would be a more suitable place of confinement than the prison, whetherthis confinement should be short or long, whether medical treatment of security measures arecalled for. What, then, is the role of the psychiatrist in penal matters? He is not an expert inresponsibility, but an adviser on punishment it is up to him to say whether the subject isdangerous, in what way one should be protected from him, how one should intervene toalter him, whether it would be better to try to force him into submission or to treat him (21-22).

To sum up, ever since the new penal system that defined by the great codes of theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been in operation, a general process has ledjudges to judge something other than crimes; they have been led in their sentences to dosomething other than judge; and the power of judging has been transferred in part, to otherauthorities than the judges of the offence. The whole penal operation has taken on extra-juridical elements and personnel (22).

Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference tosomething other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems. Its fate is

to be redefined by knowledge (22).

A corpus of knowledge, techniques, scientific discourses is formed and becomes entangledwith the practice of the power to punish (23).

Four guidelines of Foucaults study:(1) Do not concentrate the study of the punitive mechanisms on their repressive effect alone,on their punishment aspects alone, but situate them in a whole series of their possiblepositive effects, even if these seem marginal at first sight. As a consequence, regardpunishment as a complex social function.

(2) Analyse punitive methods not simply as consequences of legislation or as indicators ofsocial structures, but as techniques possessing their own specificity in the more general fieldof other ways of exercising power. Regard punishment as a political tactic.


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(3) Instead of treating the history of penal law and the history of the human sciences as twoseparate series whose overlapping appears to have had on one or the other, or perhaps onboth, a disturbing or useful effect, according to ones point of view, see whether there is notsome common matrix or whether they do not both derive from a single process ofepistemologico-juridical formation in short, make the technology of power the very principleboth of the humanization of the penal system and of the knowledge of man.(4) Try to discover whether this entry of the soul onto the scene of penal justice, and with itthe insertion in legal practice of a whole corpus of scientific knowledge, is not the effect of a

transformation of the way in which the body itself is invested by power relations.In short, try to study the metamorphosis of punitive methods on the basis of a politicaltechnology of the body in which might be read a common history of power relations andobject relations. Thus, by an analysis of penal leniency as a technique of power, one mightunderstand both how man, the soul, the normal or abnormal individual have come toduplicate crime as objects of penal intervention; an din what way a specific mode ofsubjection was able to give birth to man as an object of knowledge for a discourse with ascientific status (24).

Foucault references Rusche and Kirchheimers great work: Punishment and Social

Structures.

Introductory summaries of how the body is used in the penal systemWe must rid ourselves of the illusion that penality is a means of reducing crime and that itmay be severe or lenient, tend towards expiation of obtaining redress, towards the pursuit ofindividuals or the attribution of collective responsibility (24).-- We must analyse the concrete systems of punishment as social phenomena that cannot beaccounted for by the juridical structure of society alone, nor by its ethical choices.-- We must situate systems of punishment in their field of operation in which the punishmentof crime is not the sole element.-- We must show that punitive measures are not simply negative mechanisms that make itpossible to repress, to prevent, to exclude, to eliminate, but that they are linked to a wholeseries of positive and useful effects which it is their task to support.In our societies, the systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain political economyof the body: . . .it is always the body that is at issue the body and its forces, their utility andtheir docility, their distribution and their submission (25).

The body is directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate holdupon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to performceremonies, to emit signs. This political investment of the body is bound up . . .with itseconomic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of

power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possibleonly if it is caught up in a system of subjection in which need is also a political instrumentmeticulously prepared, calculated and used; the body becomes a useful force only if it is botha productive body and a subjected body (25-6).

There may be a knowledge of the body that is not exactly the science of its functioning, anda mastery of its forces that is more than the ability to conquer them: this knowledge and thismastery constitute what might be called the political technology of the body. This technologyis diffuse, rarely formulated in continuous, systematic discourse, made up of bits and pieces,implements a disparate set of tools or methods, cannot be localized in a particular type of

institution or state apparatus (26).

Power and the body


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-- The power exercised on the body is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy;-- Its effects of domination are attributed not to appropriation, but to dispositions,manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings;-- One should decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather thana privilege that one might possess;-- One should take as its model a perpetual battle rather than a contract.-- This power is exercised rather than possessed;-- It is not the privilege, acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of

its strategic positions an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the positionof those who are dominated.-- This power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who do nothave it; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them; it exerts pressure uponthem, just as they themselves, in their struggle against it, resist the grip it has on them. Thismeans that these relations go right down into the depths of society, that they are not localizedin the relations between the state and its citizens or on the frontier between classes and thatthey do not merely reproduce, at the level of individuals, bodies, gestures, and behavior, thegeneral form of the law or government; that, although there is continuity, there is neitheranalogy nor homology, but a specificity of mechanism and modality.

-- Lastly, they are not univocal; they define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses ofinstability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles, and of an at leasttemporary inversion of the power relations (26-7).

Power produces knowledge . . .power and knowledge directly imply one another . . .there isno power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor anyknowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. Thesepower-knowledge relations are to be analysed [on the basis of] the subject who knows, theobjects to be known, and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effectsof these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and their historical transformations(28).

It is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge . . .butpower-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up,that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge (28).

The body politic: a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays,communication routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest humanbodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge (28).

The soul exists, has a reality, is produced permanently around, on, and within the body by

the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished, on those one supervises,trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over thosewho are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives. This soul is born ofmethods of punishment, supervision and constraint. It is the element in which are articulatedthe effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, themachinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge andknowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power (29).

The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy (30).

2. The spectacle of the scaffoldTorture is a technique; it is not an extreme expression of lawless rage. To be torture,punishment must obey three principal criteria:


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(1) It must produce a certain degree of pain.(2) The production of pain is regulated.(3) Torture forms part of a ritual [that] meets two demands. It must mark the victim . . .[and]public torture and execution must be spectacular (33-4).

Eighteenth-century judicial practicesAspects of judicial procedures:-- The secret and written form of the [judicial] procedure reflects the principle that in criminal

matters the establishment of truth was the absolute right and the exclusive power of thesovereign and his judges (35).-- We have, then, a penal arithmetic that is meticulous on many points, but which still leavesa margin for a good deal of argument (37).-- Written, secret, subjected, in order to construct its proofs, to rigorous rules, the penalinvestigation was a machine that might produce the truth in the absence of the accused (37).-- The power of the confession reduced the need for other evidence or argument with thecriminals acceptance of his own responsibility for his own crime (37-8)-- Judicial torture: the rule was that if the accused held out and did not confess, themagistrate was forced to drop the charges. Investigation and punishment had become mixed

(40-1).

Upon the pronouncement of guiltThe guilty man openly bore his condemnation and the truth of the crime he had committed.His body served as the public support of a procedure and had several aspects:(1) It made the guilty man the herald of his own condemnation(2) It took up again the scene of the confession(3) It established the relation between the crime and the torture(4) Demonstrated ultimate proof at the juncture of mens judgment and Gods judgment

From the judicial torture to the execution, the body has produced and reproduced the truth ofthe crime or rather it constitutes the element which, through a whole set of rituals and trials,confesses that the crime took place, admits that the accused did indeed commit it, shows thathe bore it inscribed in himself and on himself, supports the operation of punishment andmanifests its effects in the most striking way. The body, several times tortured, provides thesynthesis of the reality of the deeds and the truth of the investigation, of the documents of thecase and the statements of the criminal, of the crime and the punishment. It is an essentialelement, therefore, in a penal liturgy, in which it must serve as the partner of a procedureordered around the formidable rights of the sovereign, the prosecution and secrecy (47).

Public execution as political ritual

The law represents the wil l of the sovereign, thus transgression of the law constitutes anattack on the sovereign.

Public execution:-- restores the total power of the sovereign;-- is an exercise of terror to make all aware of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign;-- reactivates power;-- is a triumph of law.

The precise function of torture, then, had judicial and political purposes:

-- It revealed truth and showed the operation of power.-- It assured the articulation of the written on the oral, the secret on the public, the procedureof investigation on the operation of the confession.


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punish, according to modalities that render it more regular, more effective, more constant andmore detailed in its effects; in short, which increase its effects while diminishing its economiccost (that is to say, by dissociating it from the system of property, of buying and selling, ofcorruption in obtaining not only offices, but the decisions themselves) and its political cost (bydissociating it from the arbitrariness of monarchical power) (80-1).

The power to judge should no longer depend on the innumerable, discontinuous, sometimescontradictory privileges of sovereignty, but on the continuously distributed effects of public

power (81).

Reform, in the strict sense, as it was formulated in the theories of law or as it was outlinedin the various projects, was the political or philosophical resumption of this strategy, with itsprimary objectives: to make of the punishment and repression of illegalities a regular function,coextensive with society; not to punish less, but to punish better to punish with an attenuatedseverity perhaps, but in order to punish with more universality and necessity to insert thepower to punish more deeply into the social body (82).

The illegality of property was separated from the illegality of rights. This distinction

represents a class opposition because, on the one hand, the illegality that was to be mostaccessible to the lower classes was that of property the violent transfer of ownership andbecause, on the other, the bourgeoisie was to reserve to itself the illegality of rights: thepossibil ity of getting round its own regulations and its own laws, of ensuring for itself animmense sector of economic circulation by a skillful manipulation of gaps in the law gapsthat were foreseen by its silences, or opened up by de facto tolerance (87).

And this great redistribution of illegalities was even to be expressed through a specializationof the legal circuits: for illegalities of property for theft there were the ordinary courts andpunishments; for the illegalities of rights fraud, tax evasion, irregular commercial operations special legal institutions applied with transactions, accommodations, reduced fines, etc.The bourgeoisie reserved to itself the fruitful domain of the illegality of rights. And at thesame time as this split was taking place, there emerged the need for a constant policingconcerned essentially with this illegality of property. It became necessary to get rid of the oldeconomy of the power to punish, based on the principles of the confused and inadequatemultiplicity of authorities, the distribution and concentration of the power correlative withactual inertia and inevitable tolerance, punishments that were spectacular in theirmanifestations and haphazard in their application. It became necessary to define a strategyand techniques of punishment in which an economy of continuity and permanence wouldreplace that of expenditure and excess. In short, penal reform was born at the point ofjunction between the struggle against the super-power of the sovereign and that against the

infra[power of acquired and tolerated illegalities. And if penal reform was anything more thanthe temporary result of a purely circumstantial encounter, it was because, between this super-power and this infra-power, a whole network of relations was being formed (87-8).

Although the new criminal legislation appears to be characterized by less severe penalties,a clearer codification, a marked diminution of the arbitrary, a more generally acceptedconsensus concerning the power to punish (in the absence of a more real division in itsexercise), it is sustained in reality by an upheaval in the traditional economy of illegalities anda rigorous application of force to maintain their new adjustment. A penal system must beconceived as a mechanism intended to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate

them all (89).

The new theory of punishment


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The essential raisons detre of penal reform in the eighteenth century:-- Shift the object and change the scale;-- Define new tactics in order to reach a target that is now more subtle but also more widelyspread in the social body;-- Find new techniques for adjusting punishment to it and for adapting its effects;-- Lay down new principles for regularizing, refining, universalizing the art of punishing;-- Homogenize its application;-- Reduce its economic and political cost by increasing its effectiveness and by multiplying its

circuits;-- In short, constitute a new economy and a new technology of the power to punish (89)

Punishment took on a social contract model (89-90) where violations of the law violated thecontract of the society. The right to punish has been shifted from the vengeance of thesovereign to the defence of society (90).

The major function of punishment is to prevent future crime. One must punish exactlyenough to prevent repetition (93).

In a penality employing public torture and execution, example was the answer to the crime; ithad, by a sort of twin manifestation, to show the crime and at the same time to show thesovereign power that mastered it; in a penality calculated according to its own effects,example must refer back to the crime, but in the most discreet way possible and with thegreatest possible economy indicate the intervention of power ideally, too, it should preventany subsequent reappearance of either (93-4)

Five or six major rules of punishment:-- The rule of minimum quantity (to create more interest in avoiding the penalty thancommitting the crime)-- The rule of sufficient ideality (the idea of pain needs to be a sufficient deterrent)-- The rule of lateral effects (punishment that has minimal effects for the criminal andmaximum effects on other members of society)-- The rule of perfect certainty (clearly define and publish offenses and their punishments)-- The rule of common truth (reason will be applied to determine the truth of any criminalmatter)-- The rule of optimal specification (since punishment must prevent a repetition of the offense,it must take into account the profound nature of the criminal himself and individualize thepenalty)

The new political anatomy emerging in the eighteenth century has two intersecting lines of

objectification: that which rejects the criminal from the side of a nature against nature; andthat which seeks to control delinquency by a calculated economy of punishments that resultsin the supersession of the punitive semio-technique by a new political of the body (103).

The gentle way in punishmentThe art of punishing must rest on a whole technology of representation (104).

Characteristics of obstacle-signs:(1) Must be as unarbitrary as possible, natural, the punishment must proceed from the crime;the law must appear to be the necessity of things, and power must act while concealing itself

beneath the gentle force of nature(2) Reduce the desire that makes the crime attractive; increase the interest that makes thepenalty be feared; reverse the relation of intensities so that the representation of the penalty


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and its disadvantages is more lively than that of the crime and its pleasures(3) Punishment must be temporary and its duration must be integrated into the economy ofthe penalty(4) Punishment must be seen as being in the individuals best interest. There must be nomore secret, spectacular, or useless penalties. Punishment must be regarded as aretribution that the guilty man makes to each of his fellow citizens for the crime that haswronged them all (109). The convict pays twice: by the labour he provides and by the signsthat he produces. At the heart of socieyt, on the public squares or highways, the convict is a

focus of profit and signification. Visibly, he is serving everyone; but at the same time, he letsslip into the minds of all the crime-punishment sign: a secondary, purely moral, but muchmore real utility (109).(5) The example is now based on the lesson, the discourse, the decipherable sign, therepresentation of public morality (110). Each element of its ritual must speak, repeat thecrime, recall the law, show the need for punishment and justify its degree. . .The publicity ofpunishment must not have the physical effect of terror; it must open up a book to be read(111).(6) The criminal must not be glorified; the crime must be seen as a misfortune (112).

Each punishment should teach a lesson; each punishment should be a fable (113).Punishment as imprisonmentIn under twenty years, the principle so clearly formulated in the Constituent Assembly ofspecific, appropriate, effective penalties, constituting, in each case, a lesson for all, becamethe law of detention for every offence of any importance, except those requiring the deathpenalty (116).

How did models of imprisonment come to be popular given all the reasons againstimprisonment?

Walnut Street prison as an example prison:Work on the prisoners soul must be carried out as often as possible. The prison, though anadministrative apparatus, will at the same time be a machine for altering minds (125).

The most important thing [in a prison] was that this control and transformation of behaviourwere accompanied both as a condition and as a consequence by the development of aknowledge of the individuals (125). This ever-growing knowledge of the individuals made itpossible to divide them up in the prison not so much according to their crimes as according tothe dispositions that they revealed. The prison became a sort of permanent observatory thatmade it possible to distribute the varieties of vice or weakness (126).

Points of convergence between common views of eighteenth-century prison reform and theidea of imprisonment as punishment:(1) There is a difference in the temporal direction of punishment.(2) One punishes to transform a criminal.(3) The system must be open to individual variables.

Disparities between common views of eighteenth-century prison reform and the idea ofimprisonment as punishment:(1) Techniques of individualizing correction.(2) Imprisonment relies not on representations, but on a studied manipulation of the

individual.(3) Relation between individual being punished and the individual doing the punishing.(4) Imprisonment relies on secrecy.


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Punitive city or coercive institution? On the one hand, a functioning of penal power,distributed throughout the social space; present everywhere as scene, spectacle, sign,discourse; legible like an open book; operating by a permanent recodification of the mind ofthe citizens; eliminating crime by those obstacles placed before the idea of crime; actinginvisibly and uselessly on the soft fibres of the brain, as Servan put it. A power to punishthat ran the whole length of the social network would act at each of its points, and in the endwould no longer be perceived as a power of certain individuals over others, but as an

immediate reaction of all in relation to the individual. On the other hand, a compactfunctioning of the power to punish: a meticulous assumption of responsibility for the body andthe time of the convict, a regulation of his movements and behaviour by a system of authorityand knowledge; a concerted orthopaedy applied to convicts in order to reclaim themindividually; an autonomous administration of this power that is isolated both from the socialbody and from the judicial power in the strict sense. The emergence of the prison marks theinstitutionalization of the power to punish, or, to be more precise: will the power to punish bebetter served by concealing itself beneath a general social function, in the punitive city, or byinvesting itself in a coercive institution, in the enclosed space of the reformatory? (129-30).

Part Three: DisciplineDocile bodiesIn the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the disciplines became generalformulas of domination (137):-- Working the body at the level of movements, gestures, attitudes: an infinitesimal power overthe active body-- Object was the efficiency of movements, their internal organization-- Uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of the activity rather than itsresult; exercised according to a codification that partitions time, space, movement as closelyas possible.

Discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, docile bodies. Discipline increasesthe forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (inpolitical terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, itturns it into an aptitude, a capacity, which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, itreverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into arelation of strict subjection. If economic exploitation separates the force and the product oflabour, let us say that disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting linkbetween an increased aptitude and an increased domination (138).

Small acts of cunning endowed with a great power of diffusion, subtle arrangements,

apparently innocent, but profoundly suspicious, mechanisms that obeyed economies tooshameful to be acknowledged, or pursued petty forms of coercion it was nevertheless theythat brought about the mutation of the punitive system (139).

No detail is unimportant, but not so much for the meaning that it conceals within it as for thehold it provides for the power that wishes to seize it (140).

A meticulous observation of detail, and at the same time a political awareness of these smallthings, for the control and use of men, emerge through the classical age bearing with them awhole set of techniques, a whole corpus of methods and knowledge, descriptions, plans, and

data. And from such trifles, no doubt, the man of modern humanism was born (141).

The art of distributions


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Discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space, which employs thefollowing techniques:(1) Enclosure a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself, e.g., themonastery, army barracks, factories(2) Partitioning each individual has his own place and each place its individual, e.g., themonastic cell(3) Functional sites space that allowed supervision, disabled communication betweenindividuals, and was useful

(4) Rank the place one occupies in a classification. Ones distribution and circulation inrelation to others.

The table: in the form of disciplinary distribution, it distributes multiplicity and derives as manyeffects from it as possible. Disciplinary tactics are situated on the axis that links the singularand the multiple. It allows the characterization of the individual as individual and the orderingof a given multiplicity (149).

The control of activity(1) The time-table (a general framework for activity, increasing partitioning of time, attempt to

insure the quality of time [eliminate distractions and disturbances], how to constitute a totallyuseful time?)(2) Temporal elaboration of the act (a collective and obligatory rhythm, assures theelaboration of the act itself, controls its development and its stages from the inside. The actis broken down into its elements; the position of the body, limbs, articulations is defined; toeach movement are assigned a direction, an aptitude, a duration; their order of succession isprescribed [152])(3) Correlation of the body and the gesture (imposes the best relation between a gesture andthe overall position of the body, which is its condition of efficiency and speech)(4) Body-object articulation (defines each of the relations that the body must have with theobject that it manipulates)(5) Exhaustive use (the question of extracting from time more available moments and moreuseful forces)

The organization of genesesHow can one organize profitable durations? The disciplines, which analyse space, break upand rearrange activities, must also be understood as machinery for adding up andcapitalizing time:(1) Divide duration into successive or parallel segments, each of which must end at a specifictime(2) Organize threads according to an analytical plan successions of elements as simple as

possible, combining according to increasing complexity(3) Finalize these temporal segments, decide on how long each will last and conclude it withan exam, which will have the triple function of showing whether the subject has reached thelevel required, of guaranteeing that each subject undergoes the same apprenticeship and ofdifferentiating the abilities of each individual.(4) Draw up series of series; lay down for each individual, according to his rank, etc., theexercises that are suited to him.This is an exercise: the technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are bothrepetitive and different, but always graduated. By bending behaviour towards a terminalstate, exercise makes possible a perpetual characterization of the individual either in relation

to this term, in relation to other individuals, or in relation to a type of itinerary. It thus assures,in the form of continuity and constraint, a growth, an observation, a qualification.


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(174). As is the case in the industrial factory, where, according to the reasoning of thepowerful, any dishonesty is apt to be multiplied and could prove fatal (175). Thus theguild-style system of management by masters was replaced by management by companyagents. Surveillance thus becomes a decisive economic operator both as an internal partof the production machinery and as a specific mechanism in the disciplinary power (175).Foucault continues on to elementary teaching where the details of surveillance werespecified and it was integrated into the teaching relationship (175) through careful monitoring,and, later, in the case of Demia, the use of teaching assistants. Demias model is presented

as an institution of the mutual type in which Teaching proper, the acquisition ofknowledge, and observation (176).

Foucault comments here on the ability of power to operate as an integrated system (176)which allows for both hierarchical and lateral practices of power that systemic andindividual: Discipline makes possible the operation of a relational power that sustains itselfby its own mechanism and which, for the spectacle of public events, substitutes theuninterrupted play of calculated gazesthe hold over the bodyis a power that seems allthe less corporal in that it is more subtly physical (177).

Normalizing Judgement (sic)

1. Here Foucault presents us with the role of judgment in juvenile settings, such as theorphanage of the Chevalier Paulet, where students held morning tribunals to mete outpunishments to their peers, at which point he observes: At the heart of all disciplinarysystems functions a small penal mechanism (177). The workshop, the school, the armywere subject to a whole micro-penality of time...of activityof behaviorof speechof thebodyof sexuality (ellipses mark parenthetical examples by Foucault) resulting in a state inwhich one was always punishing and punishable.

2. Foucault warns us here that the punishment of discipline was not just that of a small-scalemodel of the court (178). Judgment was passed on those, student or soldier, who did notachieve or perform to the dictated level. These observable deficiencies resulted in bothpunishment and public relegation, in the case of the student, to the bench of the ignorant. In a disciplinary regime punishment involves a double juridico-natural reference (179).

3. Here Foucault argues that Disciplinary punishment, ostensibly, has the function ofreducing gaps. It must therefore be essentially corrective (179): The demoted corporalmust regain his rank, the failing student, work and rework a lesson. Disciplinary punishmentis, in the main, isomorphic with obligation itself, as, To punish is to exercise (180).

4. Punishment here is seen as only one element of a double system (of) gratification-punishment which operates in the process of training and correction through the carefuldefinition and bestowal of rewards (180). Foucault uses a typically il lustrative example ofstudents living in a micro-economy of privileges and impositions in the Christian Schools,where a transposition of the system of indulgences (basically, you could get out ofcatechism exercises by building up points) allowed for the continuous ranking of studentsbetween poles of good and bad. Here judgment was passed on more than an act. Thisknowledge of individuals judged/ranked the potential and value of the child.

5. Here Foucault exposes ranking and grading as means of punishment and reward through

the example of the Ecole Militaires four (and sometimes five) levels of achievement

assessed by officers, teachers, and their assistants, based on the moral qualities of thepupils and on their universally recognized behavior, and visually registered through the use


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of various colors of epaulettes (and maybe sackcloth) (181-182). The reasoning was,apparently, that the lowest, most shamed, ranks existed only to disappear (182), that is, towork their way up the epaulette-al hierarchy. This served the purpose of both classifying andencouraging conformity, according to Foucault. As he puts it: the art of punishing, in theregime of disciplinary power, is aimed neither at expiation, nor even precisely at repression,but at the following:1. It refers individual actions to a whole that is at once a field of comparison, a space of

differentiation and the principle of a rule to be followed

2. It differentiates individuals from one another3. It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes in terms of value the abilities, the

level, the nature of individuals4. It introducesthe constraint of a conformity that must be achieved.5. It defines the abnormal (182-183)

In short, it normalizes (183). Here Foucault contrasts the disciplinary to the judicialpenality, which referenced laws and binaries of moralities not observed individuals andrankings. It is the penality of the norm that brought about modern penality, not advent ofhuman sciences, etc (183). The Normal is perpetuated through institutions and manages to

both homogenize (through conformity)and individualize (through ranks and assessments).Through measurement , the norm introducesall the shading of individual differences in ahomogenized setting (184).

The Examination

The examination, according to Foucault, combines the techniques of an observinghierarchy and those of a normalizing judgment (184). After briefly lamenting the lack of pre-Foucault scholarship on this concept, the author offers the examples of the hospital (pp. 185-186), with its secularization and transformation into a place for observation, and the school(pp. 186-187), with its transformation into the pedagogical science of evaluating and ranking.

Foucault then presents three linkages that examinations created between a certain type ofthe formation of knowledge and a certain from of the exercise of power (187):

1. The examination transformed the economy of visibility into the exercise of power (pp.187-189)Here, through the example of Louis XIVs first military review, Foucault reminds us of theshift in visibility from the punisher to the punished and explains that the examination is themechanism of objectification in which disciplinary power manifests its potency, essentially,by arranging objects.

2. The examination also introduces individuality into the field of documentation (pp. 189-191)The examination leaves behind it a whole meticulous archive, through the act of powerwriting. The transcription and fixing of norms allowed also for the continuous analysis of theindividual and the application of a comparative system in which to place said individual.

3. The examination, surrounded by all its documentary techniques, makes each individual acase (pp. 191-192).Disciplinary power lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this

description a means of control and method of domination whereby the case is no longer aset of circumstances but a documented individual.


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Disciplines, then, mark the moment when the reversal of the political axis ofindividualizationtakes place (192). Whereas in the feudal regime the practice anddisplay of power made the powerful individual visible, in the disciplinary regimeindividualization is descending: as power becomes more anonymous and more functional,those on whom it is exercised tend to be more strongly individualized (193). Here Foucaultmakes the productive power of discipline explicit: We must cease once and for all todescribe the effects of power in negative terms[P]ower produces; it produces reality; itproduces domains of objects and rituals of truth, in short, the individual (194).

How, then, he asks, could such power (be derived) from the petty machinations of discipline(194)? The answer:

Part III, ch 3: Panopticism

Foucault s discussion of the Panopticon proper is preceded by the legacies of the plague andthe leper (195-200). Plague control at the end of the 17th century prescribed the creation

inspectors and the transformation of the home into an enclosed, segmented space, observedat every point, in which individuals were the objects of writing, observation, and power.Thus, the plague, symbol of all forms of confusion and disorder, was met by order andanalytic power; those acts and individuals that fell outside of this discipline werecontagions. Foucault contrasts the system of order established by the plague to theexclusionary, binary principals that defined the leper and the clean (my term). All themechanisms of power that the modern individual is subjected to are composed of those twoforms from which they distantly derive.

Benthams Panopticon is the physical manifestation of these forms. In it (visuals are widelyavailable on the Web), the prisoner, who occupies the periphery of the circular structure, isvisible to the guards, and invisible to the other prisoners. Foucault contrasts this to thedungeon, which served to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide (200). The exposedinmate is is the object of information, never a subject in communication as one might be in adungeon (200). In all settings, panopticism replaces crowds, and their collective effect[s]with collection[s] of separated individualities (201). Hence the major effect of thePanopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility thatassures the automatic functioning of power so that the effects are continuous andinternalized, and the practice of surveillance always a possibility (see p. 201 for moredescription and discussion). This machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad can beoperated by anyone, increasing the likelihood of, and anxiety regarding, observation (202).

The houses of security were to be replaced by this house of certainty (202). ThePanopticon was also a laboratory (203), a privileged place from experiments on men, andfor analyzing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them(204).

Where the plague-stricken town was simple model of mechanical control or exclusion, thePanopticon must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of definingpower relations in terms of the everyday life of men applicable to hospitals, workshops,schools, and prisons (205). It is numerically efficient, continuously able to intervene yetnever needing to, and acts directly on individuals (206) regardless of scale. Lest we get too

caught up in his machine metaphor, Foucault warns us that the exercise of power takes placewithin the machine; power the Panopticon is a way of making power relations function in afunction, and of making a function through these power relations (206-207). This


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interior/exterior distinction gets a bit fuzzy when he goes on to discuss the Panopticon asopen to the outsiders who would take part in observation: it has become a transparentbuilding in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole (207).This seeming democratization of power is key to its being applied in the name of progress(208).

This transformation from the discipline-blockade to the discipline mechanism was born inthe rise of disciplinary thought in the 17th-18th centuries and concrete applications became

models for entire disciplines. The spread of disciplinary institutions is likened to other moreprofound processes, of which this spread is an aspect:

1. The functional inversion of the disciplines. (pp. 210-211)

Whereas the roles of institutions were once defined in negative terms (neutralize, fix, avoid),disciplines function increasingly as techniques for making useful individuals. This utility ledto their being associated with the most important, most central and most productive sectorsof society (education, training, war-making).

2. The swarming of disciplinary mechanisms. (pp. 211-212)

The methodologies of schools, hospitals, and other institutions came to be applied by theseinstitutions on the communities and individuals around them. These institutions also becamecenters of observations for the societies around them, subverting the traditional power of thechurch.

3. The state control of the disciplinary mechanisms. (pp. 213-217)

Here we are warned that the secularization of power and its shift from monarchic control, aswith the police in Foucaults example, is not a complete shift of disciplinary functions to thestate apparatus, as Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with anapparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise (215): one can speak of theformation of a disciplinary society[n]ot because the disciplinary modality of power hasreplaced all the others; but because it has infiltrated the others (216). Foucault sums-up theshift from the spectacle to the surveilled that is made concrete in Benthams Panopticon in alyrical discussion on pp. 216-217, where we are reminded that this has been a shift frompersons being repressed to individuals fabricated into a social order.

On pages 218-228, Foucault locates [t]he formulation of disciplinary society in the context ofa a number of broad historical processes (roughly three):

1. Economic processes (pp. 218-221)Disciplines try to define in relation to the (human) multiplicities a tactics of power that fulfillsthree criteria: lowest cost, maximized social power, and linkage to the output of theapparatuses within which it is exercised; in short to increase both the docility and the utilityof all the elements of the system (218). In the 18th century, this shift was concurrent withmobile populations and increased production capacities. While the old economy of powerwas wont to use violence to achieve control, discipline attempted to adjust people andapparatuses in order to counter the advantages of number through regimentation (219-220). This brings us to something of a definition: discipline is the unitary technique by

which the body is reduced as apolitical

force at the least cost and maximized as a useful

force. Not surprisingly, Foucault ties the rise of a capitalist economy to the proliferation ofpanoptic (?) power (221).


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2. Juridico-political processes (pp.221-224)Panopticism is neither an extension of, or independent of juridico-political power (221-222). Panopticism works it coercive force on the formal systems, even as the rise of themiddle class attempted to create a codified legal framework (222). Discipline acts as acounter-law and, through the minute disciplines, the panopticisms of every day works itsubtle magic against the more obvious mechanisms of the juridico-political (223). This whythe smallest techniques of discipline (those most associated with the body?) are

experienced or perceived as most foundational (223). The prisons power to punish hasbecome the power to observe, selectively prosecute, and train, not through the universalconsciousness of the law in each juridical subject but through the infinitely minute web ofpanoptic techniques (224).

3. Scientific processes (224-228)By the 18th century, these techniques achieved a level at which the formation of knowledgeand the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process. Withininstitutions, the growth of power could give rise to new knowledge or methodologies forcontrol. Foucault refers to this as a double processan epistemological thaw (224).

Foucault goes on to draw a parallel between disciplinary examination and judicial inquisitionor investigation, noting the relationship between inquisition and the rise of empirical methods(225-226). While investigation in the empirical sciences have managed to becomedetached from its politico-juridical model, the examination has not ( 227). Penal justicetoday is both inquisitorial and disciplinary. Where the justice of the (spectacular) AncienRegime was at its extreme in the infinite segmentation of the body of the regicideTheideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline; an interrogation without endaprocedure that would bethe permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessiblenorm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity (227). The final sentence ofPart III (p228) reads: Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks,hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

Part IV, ch 1. Complete and austere institutions

The turn of the 18th and 19th centuries saw the rise of detention as the penalty parexcellence (231). However, the birth of the prison was marked by conjunction of a justicethat is supposed to be equal and a legal machinery that is supposed to be autonomous,but which contains all the asymmetries of disciplinary subjection (231-232). Foucaultlaments that the concept of the prison has since become so naturalized that alternativesseem unthinkable. It even seems to be an egalitarian punishment in that time is assessed asopposed to fine in reparation for an offense against society. Foucault intends to further

investigate the transformative role of the prison, and he cautions us to remember that theprison has been, from its beginnings in the 19th century, a means of both deprivation ofliberty and the technical transformation of individuals (233), and he cites numerous sourcesto support the importance of the latter. He also argues that prison reform has been aroundfor as long as prisons have, and that said reforms are a part of the penal process, not aninterruption of it (234-235), and that in becoming a legal punishment, (the prison) weightedthe old juridico-political question of the right to punish with all the problems, all the agitationsthat have surrounded the corrective technologies of the individual (235).

Foucault draws the chapter title, complete and austere institutions, from an L. Baltard (pub.

1829; see Bibliography) in order to portray the exhaustive, uninterrupted, and despoticdisciplinary power of the prison (235-236), which was to be applied to the re-education andrecoding of existence of the prisoner. This is contrasted with simple detainment and the


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simple mechanism of exempla imagined by the reformers at the time of the idealogues(236). He lays out the principles of the disciplinary prison as follows:

1. Isolation: He finds three primary reasons or functions for isolation: to preventcollaboration and recidivism, to promote reformatory practice, and to create a situation inwhich the words and power of the imprisoning and reforming power will take on even greaterauthority due to the relative silence of all others (236-237). He then contrasts the Auburnand Pennsylvania models for prisons, which posited limited interaction with other prisoners

while working (reproducing exterior labor conditions) and utter solitude, respectively (237-239).

2. Work: Through numerous citations, Foucault pursues the question of the role of work inthe prisons. Long-running debates in France pitted those who considered prison labor to be amagnet for the indigent and competition for the free laborer against a penal system thatargued that prison labor offered little to no competition and that prisoners work and wageswere their incentive for reform. Foucault takes a third position: that prison labor was aboutthe constitution of a power relation (pp. 239-243).

3. The Declaration of Carceral Independence (247): Prison [became] increasingly aninstrument for the modulation of the penalty; and apparatus which, through the execution ofthe sentence with which it is entrusted, seems to have the right, in part at least, to assume itsprinciple (244). In assuming the responsibility for the means and extent of punishment andreform, the prison claims the right to be a power that not only possesses administrativeautonomy, but is also a part of punitive sovereignty (247).

The above techniques, to the extent that they exceed the state of detention, then, are to beknow as the penitentiary (248). The penitentiary, Foucault argues, became a trap not onlyfor prisoners, but for penal justice and judges, because it was able to introduce criminaljustice into relations of knowledge that have since become its infinite labyrinth (249). Theprisons observed not just for immediate control, but also to create a body of knowledgeregarding the individual and his response to reformation in order to exact unceasingly formthe inmate a body of knowledge that will make it possible to transform the penal measure intopenitentiary operations (251). As the offender becomes an individual to know, a newcharacter is created: that of the delinquent, who is characterized less by his act (offense)than by his life (251). For the re-education of the prisoner to be complete, the penitentiaryoperation must become the sum total existence of the delinquent, making of the prison asort of artificial and coercive theatre in which his life will be examined from top to bottom(251-252). This biographical approach to understanding the delinquent establishes thecriminal as existing before the crime and even outside it. This psycho-social concept of the

dangerous individual is, according to Foucault, still with us today (252), and came to becategorized and documented, ultimately a biographical unity, a kernel of danger,representing a type of anomaly (254). The dangerous individual, or delinquent, is anamalgamation of 18th century prison objects: the extra-societal monster and the juridicalsubject rehabilitated by punishment (255).

Part IV, ch 2. Illegalities and delinquency

Here Foucault begins with a discussion of the change from chain-gang to police carriageas a symptom and a symbol of the transition (or mutation) from the public display of powerto the penality of prison (257). The chain gang of the turn of the century was a manifestation


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of both detention and public torture (255). Foucault paints a vivid picture of the dangerous,public applications of the chains and processions in which crowds participated in thespectacle as if in a festival or carnival, taunting and/or studying the condemned in whatFoucault describes as part game, part ethnology of crime (259), in that the prisoner was thesubject of speculation as much as spectacle. The chain-gang of early 19th century France,like the scaffold, was as dangerous as it was public however, and the crowd, as well as theprisoner, were able to apply meanings to the sentence and presence of the condemned thatwere not those intended or sanctioned by the judges (259-263). This means of transportation

was replaced, in 1837, with a mobile equivalent of the panopticon, a cart in which detaineesof all varieties were sequestered into cells, observable by a center corridor by hidden fromthe view of the public, and prevented from interaction with one another, under constantsurveillance and punishment by warders, and restricted to self-corrective thoughts andreadings (263-264).

The years 1820-1845 also saw a critique of the prison, according to Foucault, who cautionsus against seeking to pat a timeline. He discusses five major critiques, which, we are told,are today repeated almost unchanged (265; as with previous discussions, Foucault cites19th century sources throughout):

1. Detention causes recidivism (pp. 265-266): Foucault cites numerous arguments andfigures regarding recidivism rates in support of his observation that prisons were producingdelinquents, not corrected individuals.

2. Prisons produce delinquents by the very conditions (they) impose upon (their) inmates(266-267): Useless work, violent constraints, and various abuses of power are cited.

3. Prisons bring together delinquents who then collaborate with one another (267): Amonghis more memorable citations are references to prisons as settings for anti-social clubs andbarracks of crime.

4. Ex-convict status and the markings and surveillance that come with it promotes recidivism267-268).

5. [T]he prison indirectly produces delinquents by throwing the inmates family intodestitution (268).

The above critiques, addressed by claiming either a rudimentary state of correctivemeasures or that corrective measures detract from the ability to punish, were/are alwaysrectified by the continued application of penitentiary technique: For a century and a half the

prison had always been offered as its own remedy (268). In an explicit reference to current(early nineteen-seventies) conditions, he argues that there has been a continuous appeal tothe seven universal maxims of the good penitential condition (for above, see 268-269; foritems 1-7, pp. 269-270):

1. Penal detention must have as its essential function the transformation of the individualsbehavior.2. Convicts must be isolated or at least distributed according to the penal gravity of their act,but above all according to age, mental attitude, the technique of correction to be used, thestages of their transformation.

3. It must be possible to alter the penalties according to the individuality of the convicts, theresults that have been obtained, progress or relapses.4. Work must be one of the essential elements in the transformation and progressive


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socialization of convicts.5. The education of the prisoner is for the authorities both an indispensable precaution inthe interests of society and an obligation to the prisoner.6. The Prison regime must, at least in part, be supervised and administered by a specializedstaff possessing the moral qualities and technical abili ties required of educators.7. Imprisonment must be followed by measures of supervision and assistance until therehabilitation of the former prisoner is complete.

These continuously resurfacing propositions, serve uphold Foucaults assertion that thereis not a three-stage history of the prison, its failure, and reform, but a simultaneous system, afourfold system made up of: the super-power (of)penitentiary rationality; auxiliaryknowledge (or reproduction) of criminality; inverted efficiency; reform as isomorphicwiththe disciplinary functioning of the prison the element of utopian duplication (271). Thissupposed failure is, then, one of the effects of powerwhich may be grouped togetherunder the name of carceral system (271).

Having established the failure(s) of the prison (272), Foucault moves on to argue that they,

and the effects (particularly of marking or establishing the delinquent) have not beenabandoned because the prison, and no doubt punishment in general, is not intended toeliminate offences, but rather to distinguish them, to distribute them, to use them;they tendto assimilate the transgression of the laws in a general tactics of subjection, creating aneconomy of illegalities (272).

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, popular illegalities began to develop according tonew dimensionsintroduced by movements whichlinked together social conflicts, thestruggles against the political regimes, the resistance to the movement of industrialization,the effects of economic rises. The development of the political dimension of the popularillegalities were based in local actions (273-274), the rejection of the law or other regulationas struggle against those who enacted them (274), and the increases in regulatory functionsof those wielding political or economic authority leading to an increase in the occasions ofoffences by those who would otherwise have been within the law (273-275). This increasedpoliticization is tied by Foucault t to the changing role of the working-class in 19th centuryFrance and he cites numerous sources in support of the class dissymmetry affecting theapplication of law and justice (276). Delinquency, as a form of illegality, again becomes ameans by which to categorize, etc, on behalf of the carceral system (277). Foucault sumsup: We have seen how the carceral system substituted the delinquent for the offender, andalso superimposed upon juridical practice a whole horizon of possible knowledge all ofwhich enables them to reinforce one another perpetually, to objectify the delinquency behind

the offence, to solidify delinquency in the movement of illegalities (277).

Why and how, then, he asks, does penality invest certain practices in a mechanism ofpunishment-reproduction? His first assertion is that by defining and controlling a criminalelement, a more supervisable, manipulable group diffuses the possibility for more disruptive(political) illegalities (278-279). His second is that it is used as form of colonialism, evendomestically; for instance as a mechanism for reaping the profits of prostitution and otherillegalities (279-280). His third, the political use of delinquents as thugs or a clandestinepolice force in labor struggles in particular, all of which is made possible by surveillance anddocumentation in collaboration with the prison and judges (280-282). On pages 282-285

explores the biographies of Vidocq, cop and criminal who ended the Shakespearian agewhen sovereignty confronted abomination in a single character (283) and FrancoisLacenaire, fallen bourgeois criminal and cause celbre.


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Foucault describes the production of delinquency as a continuously shifting process, asopposed to a result, in which the delinquents are separated from and made to bedemonized by the rest of the lower class populations, particularly in relation to laborstruggles. All of which is described as a whole tactic of confusion aimed at maintaining apermanent state of conflict (285-286). This was supplemented by a patient attempt to

portray the criminal as ever-present and everywhere to be feared in the newspapers andnovels of the time. By the end of the nineteenth century, the worker s newspapers wereactively campaigning against penal labor (286-287). This position is modified a bit torecognize that workers newspapers didnt solely vilify the criminal, but blamed societalconditions for forcing the criminal into desperate measures. Foucault argues that even theseobservations fell short of recognizing delinquency from above...the source of misery and theprinciple of revolt for the poor (287). It is, apparently, the increase in workers as politicalprisoners that leads the reappraisal of penal justice and the tactic of the counter-fait divers,which portrayed the decadent bourgeoisie as the ever-present criminal (288).Foucault cites the Fourierists as the first to elaborate a political theory which...places a

positive value on crime. He argues that they recognized not a criminal nature, but a play offorces which, according to the class to which individuals belong, will lead them to power or toprison (289). This, then was a recognition of penality as political tool and of the play ofopposing forces in which the prols were caught (289-290).He moves then to a third figure, a thirteen year old featured by La Phalange who opposed tothe discourse of the law that made him delinquent... the discourse of an il legality thatremained resistant to these coercions and which revealed indiscipline in a systematicallyambiguous manner as the disordered order of society and as the affirmation of inalienablerights (290). Through the boys dialogue with his sentencing judge the paper, and Foucault,discussed the violent split between the accused and society, between the society andsystem that renders the worker a slave. This discourse, which Foucault notes may not berepresentative of the discourse of the workers newspapers, as the precursor of therecognition of the political problem of delinquency and the most militant rejection of thelaw and the awareness of the bourgeois system of legality and illegality (292).

Part IV, ch 3. The carceral

Foucault chooses January 22, 1840, the date of the official opening of Mettray, as the dateof completion of the carceral system (293). Mettray, a prison for the underage, he explains,is the disciplinary form at its most extreme, the model in which are concentrated all thecoercive technologies of behavior: the family, the army, the workshop, the school, and the

judicial model (293-294). Here, the entire parapenal institution, which is created in ordernot to be a prison, culminates in the cell, on the walls of which are written in black letters:God sees you (294). The chiefs and their deputies at Mettray...were in a sense techniciansof behavior: engineers of conduct, orthopaedists of individuality who produced controllablebodies through their training (294-295). Foucault explicitly argues that Mettray producedinmates who would then become the technicians of control in the first training college purediscipline (295).

At this time power-knowledge, upheld by psychiatry and the judicial apparatus,(normalized) the power of normalization, and made warders out of prisoners (296). It was

the most famous of a whole series of institutions which, well beyond the frontiers of criminallaw, constituted what one might call the carceral archipelago (297).


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This time, minors were ostensibly being protected from the prison, then, is the moment when,according to Foucault, penality escapes transcends the boundaries of the prison proper:The frontiers between confinement, judicial punishment and institutions of discipline, wherewere already blurred in the classical age, tended to disappear and to constitute a greatcarceral continuum that diffused penitentiary techniques into the most innocent disciplines(297). The carceral system came to include a wide variety of institutions that were ostensiblycharitable or intended for the shelter and protection of the poor and the young, eventually,reaching all the disciplinary mechanisms that function throughout society (297-298).

Foucault summarizes: We have seen that, in penal justice, the prison transformed thepunitive procedure into a penitentiary technique; the carceral archipelago transported thistechnique from the penal institution to the entire social body (298). He then argues that therehave been six key results:

1. Individuals crimes, sins, and conduct were no longer judged by separate criteria andin relation to separate criteria. Irregular behavior was no longer the offence, the attack onthe common interest, it was the departure from the norm, the anomaly...the social enemy wastransformed into a deviant, whose deviance was deemed infectious. The carceral network

linked...the two long, multiple series of the punitive and the abnormal (pp. 298-300)

2. The carceral allows the recruitment of major delinquents and organizes... disciplinarycareers. Penality and discipline in the 19th century produced both docility and delinquency.In panoptic society, there are no outlaws, only those held and controlled by the law and itsmechanisms. The carceral archipelago assures...the formation of delinquency on the basisof subtle il legalities, the overlapping of the latter by the former and the establishment of aspecified criminality (pp. 300-301).

3. The carceral system succeeds in making the power to punish natural and legitimate, inlowering at least the threshold of tolerance to penality. It plays the legal register of justiceand the extra-legal register of discipline...against one another, masking the true violence ofpenality. Society and the prison now differ only in degree, and societal discipline (and theself policing it entails) is accepted as proper, even when applied to the mildesttransgressions (pp. 301-303).

4. The carceral network has a great normative function, and the judges of normality arepresent everywhere (p. 304)

5. The real capture of the body and its perpetual observation have created the knowableman, the object-effect of ... domination-observation. Foucault implies a relationship

between the rise of the human sciences and the penal process of power-knowledge (pp.304-305).

6. The prison is deeply rooted in mechanisms and strategies of power. However, theprison is neither indispensable or unalterable. Foucault names two processes capable ofexercising considerable restraint and transformation on the prison: 1) processes which(reduce) the utility...of a delinquency accommodated as a specific il legality, as when thelevy on sexual pleasure is carried out more efficiently through the market than through thearchaic hierarchy of prostitution; 2) The spread of and growth of mechanisms ofnormalization beyond the prison, which, Foucault argues, will soon make the specificity of

the prison unnecessary. (pp. 305-306)

Foucault closes with another passage from La Phalange, in relation to which he makes the


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books final points about the carceral city:

1. that at the center of this city...is a multiple network of diverse elements;2. that the model of the carceral city is... a strategic distribution of elements of differentnatures and levels3. that it is the court that is external and subordinate to the prison (and not vice versa)4. that it is linked to a whole series of carceral mechanisms5. that the above mechanisms are applied to transgression of production not of a central

law6. That ultimately what presides over all these mechanisms is not the unitary functioning ofan apparatus or an institution, but the necessity of combat and the rules of strategy. (pp. 307-308)

Foucault asks that we hear the distant roar of battle and begin our own studies of the powerof normalization and the formation of knowledge in modern society for which he hasprovided a background (308).

Outline prepared by Gretchen Haas and Brian Okstad

December 15, 2003

discipline and punish summary

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