Foucault

Michel Foucault, one of the most important figures in critical theory has been the centre of
attraction on the concepts of power, knowledge and discourse. His influence is perceptible in
post-structuralist, post-modernist, post-feminist, post-Marxist and post-colonial theories. The
impact of Foucault’s works has been reflected across a wide range of disciplinary fields such
as, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and history. The changing position is the hallmark of
his thinking. The history that Foucault wrote was not history of the usual kind. In its themes,
method, treatment and conclusions it was a new way of viewing the past. Marked by an
opposition to positivism of all kinds in the human sciences, it was an attempt at a highly
original merger of philosophy and history, which led to an incisive critique of modern
Western civilization and its Enlightenment foundations.
In his project of a historico-philosophical critique of modernity, Foucault’s eyes turned to
certain unusual but fascinating territories of history—madness, sexuality and criminality, and
the evolution of social attitudes towards them. Foucault’s first influential work, Madness and
Civilization (1961), is a book on the birth of the asylum, showing through historical account
how the conception of madness has changed corresponding to functions of social changes in
law, morals, medicine and criminology. In medieval times madness was regarded as holy; the
Renaissance man thought of it as having a share in truth; but in the early modern West,
madness became a disease, that is, when reason was firmly separated from unreason. Society
administered rationality negatively by isolating the insane, thus imposing its conception of
rationality and treatment of madness. In The Birth of the Clinic (1963), Foucault scrutinized
the rich history of medicine. Foucault’s masterpiece, The Order of Things (1966), is a history
of the variations in the representational presuppositions in the human sciences. The
Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), may be regarded as Foucault’s theoretical manifesto, in
which the analyses of the earlier substantive studies are systematized. Discipline and Punish
(1973), is a book on the birth of the modern prison. It is as well a discourse on the penal
establishments, as it is an account of the interaction of knowledge and power, a theme which
is further developed in The Will to Knowledge (1976). The History of Sexuality (1976), was
Foucault’s last historico-analytical enterprise.
Michel Foucault’s book, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, is a radical
reevaluation of our more mainstream assumptions regarding the role of penal institutions and
their foundational purposes in advanced, sophisticated societies, where freedom and liberty are
cherished. As Foucault states, “This book is intended to be a correlative history of the modern
soul and of a new power to judge; a genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from
which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications and rules, from which it extends and
by which it masks its exorbitant singularity”

The book is divided into four parts that convey how society’s response to crime evolved from
torture to punishment to discipline and, ultimately, to the creation of the prison.

At the outset, Foucault presents a stark retelling of the grotesque and horrific public execution
of Damiens the regicide in 1757, which is followed by a contrasting account of the
documented prison rules inmates are subjected to in 1837. The comparison between the two
approaches to punishment reveal a fundamental shift from the 18th Century to the 19th
Century, whereby the focus of punishment is no longer limited to the offender’s body and is
now extended to his or her “soul.” The soul refers to our modern concept of the mind, such as
the psyche, conscience, or personality, which allows for new possibilities of punishment as the
investigation of the subject, while incarcerated in prison, can now look beyond the crime to
unearth underlying motives that drive criminal behavior.

Prior to the creation of the modern prison, crimes were seen as direct challenges to the
sovereign’s power, which undermined the hierarchical order that placed the monarch as the
all-powerful head of state above the lower orders of society. Foucault refers to this power
structure as the political situation of the era in which power works from the top down. Under
these power dynamics, there was a ceremonial system of punishment that entails both torture
and execution. The trial was initially hidden and relied on torture to expose the truth of the
crime. A confession would remove the need for further investigation and transition the
ceremony to the public execution, where the executioner would serve as the sovereign’s
champion to carry out this political and judicial ritual in an effort to repair the injury to
sovereignty caused by the crime. In addition, “the spectacle” of public execution requires an
audience to bear witness to the restoration of order and give it meaning.

Foucault goes on to examine the penal reforms that occurred as societies evolved. During the
18th Century, judicial violence was increasingly seen as exceeding the legitimate limits of
power exercised by the sovereign. As such, humanitarian efforts by reformers, like Beccaria,
sought to end the shameful practices of torture and public execution and replace them with a
careful calculation that adjusted punishment to the nature of the crime, created new
consequences, and punished just enough in order to prevent future offending. This reflected
the concept of the social contract in which all citizens collectively agreed to form a state and
punish those who broke the laws to uphold the common defense of society.

To Foucault, these reforms reflected structures of power that still sought to suppress forms of
popular illegality, which due to structural and economic changes underwent a shift in focus
from rebellion to a focus on goods and property crime. Thus, Foucault offers a critique of
these reform efforts and emphasizes how they strategically coincided with the modification of
how power functions in society. His argument is that the real motivations for penal reforms
were not manifested out of concern for the humane treatment of criminals in which the state
would punish less, but instead, the aims were to make punishment more efficient by relying on
the technology of representation via obstacle-signs to exert more control. Punishment was no
longer used to reestablish order, and was instead used to prevent crime through the technique
of punitive signs. According to Foucault, the appeal of corrective penality, which would target
the offender’s “soul” for restructuring and create a compliant subject prevailed as the
dominant form for organizing the power to punish and subsequently led to the adoption of the
modern coercive institution known as the prison.

The book further examines how docility is accomplished through the forces of discipline and
control of time and space. Foucault argues that it is through the division of space and time that
the individual is created out of the group. It is from the collective mass of bodies that the
notion of “the norm” is established, and the modern invention of “the individual” is compared
to this standard to determine if a person is normal (e.g., a sane person, a law-abiding citizen, or
an obedient child) or abnormal (e.g., an insane psychopath, a hardened criminal, or a defiant
child). The more abnormal one is, the more likely one is to be excluded or become subjected
to discipline and control. Furthermore, Foucault states that the primary function of disciplinary
power is to train docile bodies, and therefore, the success of disciplinary power relies on
hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination.
Hierarchical observation provides the watcher with a vantage point that makes it possible to
see everything constantly. Normalizing judgment creates a “penality of the norm” in which it
is possible to measure differences between individuals and use punishment to correct
departures from normal behavior. Thus, this judgment perpetually punishes and seeks to
normalize those who deviate from the norm. Lastly, the examination fuses the processes of
observation and normalization through a new ritualized practice that transforms the economy
of visibility into an innovative exercise of power. Now the individual subject is the focus of
observation and may be treated as a “case” to be analyzed and described. It is through these
disciplinary mechanisms, instead of force, that the calculated gaze of discipline operates.

As such, Foucault acknowledges Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison as the disciplinary

Towards the end, Foucault proclaims that since our society is built on liberty, the prison, as an
institution of coercion focused on the deprivation of liberty, is the obvious and self-evident
form of punishment for society to employ. Moreover, society has yet to find a viable
alternative, and as a result, is preoccupied with what we should do with the prison rather than
how we might function without it. Here, Foucault also explains how the modern prison is
actually a penitentiary that combines the dual functions of the workshop (i.e., where prisoners
engage in a world of production through “exercise”) and the hospital (i.e., where prisoners are
examined by professionals and abnormality is cataloged) to increase the efficiency of power in
the prison. Consequently, we see not only the expansion of prison but also the growth of the
human sciences (e.g., psychiatry, criminology, psychology, sociology, and medicine), which
create bodies of knowledge that controls and describes human behavior in relation to norms.

Furthermore, Foucault points out that rather than reduce crime, prisons produce “delinquents”
and prison conditions encourage criminal networks to flourish. Here, Foucault is not
necessarily arguing that prisons create crime; however, he does suggest that without prisons,
crime and the criminal would be perceived in different ways. So after hundreds of years of
witnessing prisons failing to reform “delinquency,” Foucault’s critique uncovers a perhaps
more sinister motive behind the carceral system in which the aim is not to eliminate crime, but
rather to reorganize our knowledge about crime in order to sustain a control society that
manages conflicts over power through the mechanism of normalization that shape and govern
everyone’s life.

Prisons are typically at the edge of cities or in rural areas hidden from the prying view of the
public. Subsequently, their remote location means that these coercive institutions are often
“out of sight, out of mind” and basically operate without the intrusion of public scrutiny.
Foucault spends a great deal of time explaining how inmates are kept busy with forms of
“exercise” and examined by professionals (e.g., psychologists) to assess changes in behavior,
attitude, mental state, and overall well-being. However, Foucault’s theory also has room to
evolve in order to investigate other ways in which inmates are manipulated and controlled to
become docile bodies. One practice of considerable concern is the used of solitary
confinement. A growing body of research is investigating how solitary confinement
exacerbates pre-existing mental illness and cultivates new psychoses, as well as elevating
levels of aggression, anxiety, and depression among inmates who receive this form of
punishment while incarcerated. Perhaps torture has not completely disappeared, but rather has
evolved to better produce “delinquency” that requires continued discipline and control.

By revisiting Foucault’s explanation of how society transitioned away from the spectacle of
public execution, we can recall that society was presented with two new ways to punitively
react to an offender. Rather than choosing to restore the offender to the social pact, we chose
to shape him or her into an obedient subject by using punishment as a technique of coercion
that trained the individual’s habits. According to Foucault, this approach led to the formation
of the carceral system we have today. Foucault also asserts that the prison is now an essential
building block of society, so removing it without changing other aspects of the system would
be futile. As Foucault reminds us, “Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist
only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.”