Summary:
Foucault's Discipline and Punish explores the idea of power. His approach introduced many questions about how individuals and organizations exercised and exerted power over others to achieve the desired results of their socially constructed paradigms. His discussion centers on the micro-physics of power: power that is strategic and tactical.
His thesis centers on the idea that the changes in punishment reflect a change in control - a shift in power. "If the penalty in its most severe forms no longer addresses itself to the body, on what does it lay hold? ... Since it is no longer the body, it must be the soul" (Foucault, 1977, p 16). This was the assumption and approach Foucault attempted to prove throughout the work.
Subjection is a large aspect of Foucault's discussion topics about torture, punishment, discipline, and prison. Subjugation is a matter of controlling and manipulating identity. If an individual can be convinced of a specific identity, his or her behavior changes. The book looked at the history and implications of such control. He believed that administrators sought to manage the causal process which caused the crime.
For Foucault, punishment used to surround the interplay between the sovereign (using mechanisms of power), and the criminal (rebelling in open warfare). Torture in the past was more about public display than corporal punishment (p. 11). The violence of the crime repeated upon the criminal's body to deter further infraction, almost as a form of revenge. Over time, the public physical punishment disappeared. Foucault refers to this as an age of sobriety, where even the guillotine was moved behind prison walls (pp. 14-15). Torture failed to reach the intended consequences as executioners became the focus of shame, rebels were made martyrs, and the public forums of torture failed to have the intended consequences.
Torture changed to punishment through the prison. In the process, the sovereign lost the power of the previous public displays. To counter the change, disciplining the individual helped adapt power for the industrial age. The individual played a role in society, and changing the behavior enabled the sovereign to exercise power through conformity.
Foucault used the example of the Panopticon style prison to demonstrate the power exerted through observation and the attempts of modern society to watch and observe behavior in order to adjust and control the populous. In light of modern concerns about the invasion of privacy by government organizations, this aspect of his concerns proved insightful. It should be noted that this type of prison, and the philosophy behind it would eventually be observed in other areas of society such as schools, factories, and other job sites.
Foucault would later modify and mitigate more extreme aspects of these ideas in later works, partially in response to criticism by Habermas.
Citation-worthy
"The book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge... instead of treating the history of penal law and the history of the human sciences as two separate series whose overlapping appears to have had on one or the other... a disturbing or useful effect, according to one's point of view, see whether there is not some common matrix" (Foucault, 1977, p. 23).
"Power-knowledge relations are to be analyzed therefore, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not free in relation to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject who knows, the objects to be known, and the modalities of knowledge" (Foucault, 1977, p. 28).
"The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested. It restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular" (Foucault, 1977, p. 47-48).
"Reform, in the strict sense, as it was formulated... not to punish less, but to punish better; to punish with an attenuated severity perhaps, but in order to punish with more universality and necessity; to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body" (Foucault, 1979, p. 82).
"[The] power to punish rested on five or six major rules[:] the rule of minimum quanity ... the rule of sufficient ideality ... the rule of lateral efffects ... the rule of perfect certainty ... the rule of common truth ... the rule of optimal specification" (Foucault, 1977, pp. 94-98).
"Discipline creates out of the bodies it controls four types of individuality, or rather an individuality that is endowed with four characteristics: it is cellular by the display of spatial distribution), it is organic (by the coding of activities), it is genetic (by the accumulation of time), it is combinatory (by the composition of forces). And, in doing so, it operates four great techniques: it draws up tables; it prescribes movements; it imposes exercises; lastly, in order to obtain the combination of forces, it arranges 'tactics'" (Foucault, 1977, p. 167).
"We have seen that, in penal justice, the prison transformed the punitive procedure into a penitentiary technique" (Foucault, 1977, p. 298).
