Foucault's Contribution to Punishment Theory - Book Report/Review Example

Running head: Examine Foucault's contribution to the study of punishment Examine Foucault's contribution to the study of punishment [The name of the writer appears here] [The name of institution appears here] Examine Foucault's contribution to the study of punishment For Foucault in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality the relationship between discursive systems of knowledge and power and domination becomes critical. Unlike Marxists, he sees no one set of factors as directing human destiny. Rather, he represents power in terms of a multiplicity of force relations throughout the entire social formation. Foucault's central critique of traditional approaches to power is against the "juridico-discursive" model of power which underpins not just Marxist theories but liberal theories of power as well. (Mark Olssen, 1999). The briefest thing to be said about Discipline and Punish is that it is about how certain people who were subjects of a sovereign became subjects of a new kind. The people in question were lawbreakers, malefactors, criminals--those who were apprehended and punished for contravening the sovereign's laws. They became and continue to be individuals who, having contravened the laws of societies having modern legal structures, undergo complex processing in institutionalized judicial and penal systems that center on the incarceration of offenders. Discipline and Punish is ostensibly about the change from lawful punishment as brutal monarchical vengeance to lawful punishment as humanized deterrence and rehabilitation. What the book is really about is the production of subjects through the imposition of disciplines; it is about how the process of constant observation, assessment, and control of inmates in the modern penitentiary manufactures new subjects through the employment of management techniques that intrude into and govern every aspect of life. But what makes Discipline and Punish more than a study of penalty is its portrayal of techniques employed in the manufacture of these new subjects as those more widely used in the production of the contemporary norm-governed social individual. (Richard Marsden, 1999). Foucault's point of departure in rethinking a subject-matter is to impugn the commonplace, to query accepted knowledge. In applying genealogy to penalty, Foucault impugns the commonplace view that our present penitentiary-centered penal system is the result of the progressive humanization of earlier, more ruthless methods of retributive punishment. Foucault begins by discussing how spectacular public punishments and executions constituted standard procedure for dealing with lawbreakers in the European monarchical order to roughly the mid-eighteenth century. He then considers two notable changes that took place: punishment and execution came to be conducted within official enclosures, and incarceration in penitentiaries emerged as the chief means of punishment and deterrence. Foucault challenges the accepted view that these changes were due to an increasingly humane attitude toward criminals. He offers an alternative account of how and why treatment of criminals ceased to be public, and of how and why the penitentiary, an establishment without strong precedents at the time, emerged as the favored institutional device for dealing with lawbreakers. (Jeremy R. Carrette, 2000). As to punishment: Foucault notes that theorists like Cesare Beccaria, and later Patrick Colquhoun and Jeremy Bentham, begin to insist that the gravity of the punishment ought to be proportionate to the crime. Penal reformers like John Howard agitate against punishments which work on the body either as a site of sensation or symbolically (for instance, the cutting out of the tongue for blasphemy) in favour of those which work on the body as the home of that discursive object, the "soul." Also, it began to be argued that punishment should be hidden from the public gaze. As early as 1751, in his Enquiry into the Causes of the Unfortunate Late Increase of Robbers, Henry Fielding had argued for the abolition of public executions. For him, punishment was a private affair and a social necessity, rather than the sign of the relation between sovereign and subject. Such arguments were strengthen by the fact that public executions themselves often caused riots against the authorities, the crowd sometimes taking the side of the offender, and, indeed, were occasions for an orgy of pick pocketing. In Britain a sustained campaign was also mounted against the number of offences-well over 200, many of them trivial crimes of property-that were subject to capital punishment. But, as Foucault was the first to point out, most importantly, though most abstractly, punishments were less and less aimed at acts-the crime-and more and more aimed at the subject who commits the act-the criminal. Under these pressures, people who break the law gradually became not so much "sinners," nor, as an often used melodramatic language would have it, "monsters" or "beasts," and even less ordinary people who have committed illegal acts, but essentially pathological, delinquents or criminals. In the mid-nineteenth century, the human sciences will develop a sub-branch, criminology (first called "criminal anthropology"), to study this new object and its preconditions. Its topic is the criminal and his/her body, heredity, psychopathology and environment. Criminology's aim is to show how genetic, evolutionary, sociological pathologies and failures produce this being, the criminal, so that crime can be better controlled. (Hudson, B, 2003) Thus, for Foucault, the history of penal punishment passes through three main stages (which echo the history of madness): punishment as spectacle (death in public places, branding, pillorying and so on), humane punishment, which aimed to recuperate the criminal; and last, normalizing punishment, which accepted the existence of crime in the society, if only under the sign of pathology. Both humane and normalizing punishment characteristically work through a particular and new apparatus-the prison or, as it came to be called, the penitentiary. For this is not the old prison of the absolutist monarchies in which families often lived, which were themselves commercial enterprises and were certainly not secure from break-outs in the modern sense. The old prisons remained closely attached to the economy of the outside world, prisoners having to pay for goods and services: the more you paid, the better room and service you received. In them, sentenced criminal offenders (of whom there were relatively few because prison was a rare form of punishment) were restrained by chains rather than bars and walls. The "hulks" which were also used as prisons, and which became chronically overcrowded during the war with America when transportation temporarily ceased, were even more disordered, insecure and infested with contagious disease. And there was another image of the old prison-very different from that depicted in Gay's The Beggar's Opera, for instance. One finds it in Sterne's mention of the Bastille in A Sentimental Journey, or more forcefully in Piranesi's imaginary designs collected in his book of engravings Prisons. In these baroque buildings, whose scale has nothing to do with the individual body, people can rot and die forgotten-the key having been, as prisoners still say, thrown away. During the nineteenth century imprisonment becomes a more focused form of punishment, and, in Britain, by its end it is no longer used for debtors at all. Prisons are gradually removed from private hands; by 1877 the state takes full responsibility for them. A particular kind of architecture is developed for penitentiaries. But, for Foucault, it is Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon (1791) which stands as the type of modern penalty. Bentham himself took the idea of the Panopticon from his brother Samuel, who invented it-a circular building with cells built at its circumference-for Catherine the Great. Jeremy thought of it as a machine for increasing productivity and managing moral reform in a variety of contexts, at least at first, attempting to market it like any other entrepreneurial project. (Marsh, I. with Cochrane, J and Melville, G, 2004) The Panopticon was a building that made no concession to tradition or to its surroundings: its design shares the fascination with circular forms, and the lack of interest in ornamental faades, characteristic of contemporary French architects like Boulle and Ledoux. When it was used as a prison, its unique and revolutionary feature was not that inmates were to be isolated in their cells (all the more opportunity for self-inspection, individuation and remorse); condemned to hard and productive labour (the treadmill is invented as a form of punishment in the 1810s, the same decade that saw the last of the pillory); deprived of their civilian clothing, and subject to a system of rewards for good behaviour, but that they could be viewed at all times by a guard at the centre of the circle whom they could not see-hence panopticon. All their acts came under official regulation and inspection. The guard, living with his family, could in turn be inspected by the general public, who now become the ultimate agent of invigilation and judgement, replacing the "dread sovereign" who, present or not, had both stage-managed spectacular punishment, and underwritten access to legal rights. In this structure, everybody is exposed to light and sight; nobody exists outside inspection. Also, nobody can see themselves or anybody of their own status-in that sense, there are no mirrors. Because the viewed cannot see the viewer it is as if the invigilating eye has been disjointed from any bodily eye: the guard "sees" whether he is present or not. And, though Foucault does not explicitly say so, the "invilating" apparatus extends beyond the prison into the public sphere through the media. During the nineteenth century, more and more activity-sexual, commercial, legal-becomes accessible to the press. If the public could not literally inspect the prisons, then the press, as their "representative," could, at least at strictly prescribed times. It would be a mistake to reduce the role of the press to that of a simple adjunct to disciplinary power, yet it is worth noting that where it was most inspectorial it was also most normalizing. Thus, it was Henry Labouchre, the proprietor of the path breaking, "muck-raking" journal Truth-which uncovered a series of commercial scandals during the 1880s-who, as a member of parliament, sponsored the 1885 Bill that outlawed sexual activity between men. (Thomas R. Flynn, 1997). Discipline and Punish begins with a horrendous account of the drawing and-quartering of a regicide, an account made even more ghastly be cause the victim was fully conscious and had to have some sinews and tendons partially severed before the horses could tear his body apart. Foucault spares no detail and recounts the execution in a detached academic manner that makes his description all the more gruesome. The point of the story is to show how the person was a juridical subject on whom monarchical power was brought to bear in a hideous but legal exercise of restitution and reestablishment of authority. (New Burn, T, 2003). Public punishment, consisting of torture and maiming (mutilation, branding, and cutting off of the hands), and public execution (hanging, beheading, and drawing-and-quartering) were routine in the exercise of monarchical power, serving both to punish transgressions against the sovereign's laws and, even more important, to "reconstitute" the defied sovereign's power. But public retributive punishment of those who defied the sovereign's laws was not a customary, though lamentable, abuse of monarchical power; it was quite legal. The carrying out of retribution on a given transgressor was a fearsome but legitimate display of total domination. The transgressor was broken or killed as a subject of the offended sovereign or, in effect, as the property of the sovereign. The display thus served to warn others that they were vulnerable to the same retributive treatment and reminded them that they were vulnerable because they too were subjects. (John Mccumber, 2000). Sometime during the mid- to late seventeenth century the practice of public torture and execution began to decline. The common view is that the changes were due to an increasingly enlightened and humane perception of lawbreakers. Foucault's central claim is that the changes had nothing to do with growing enlightenment and humanization, but rather with a basic reconception of the lawbreaker, which was part of the growth of a new management-oriented conception of human beings. This conception centered on exercising control not through violence and the threat of violence, but through reconfiguration of the subject or redefinition of subjectivity. The new conception of the subject involves two separate aspects. The first aspect is the status of the subject, as subjugated by or dependent on another or others. The second aspect is the experience of subjectivity, not in the sense of sheer sentience, but in the sense of being defined as an intentional being by one's self-knowledge, by one's awareness or image of who and what one is. Throughout Foucault's discussions of "subjectivity," particularly in his genealogical works, the notion is at once inclusive of and deliberately ambiguous between how one is a subject as a member of a governed society and how one is a subject in being an entity with a specific belief defined identity. Foucault provides a welter of factual material in tracing the change from harshly retributive to subject-defining punishment. This material is the substance of the genealogical account of the development of the prison and the reconception of those imprisoned. Unfortunately, it also may limit productive interpretation of Discipline and Punish by making it appear only as a kind of contrary socio-historical account of the development of the contemporary penal system. Foucault can be plausibly read as offering an account that challenges the established account that attributes the development of the penitentiary-based penal system to reform due to a change in the perception of criminals from being the property of the sovereign to being subjects owed a measure of humane consideration. But if read in this way, Foucault is taken as arguing only that penalty changed not because of a genuine humane regard for the criminals it processes but because of vested interests operating covertly behind a mask of humaneness. As will become clear, this possible but limited interpretation seriously distorts Foucault's notion of power by attributing the changes in penalty to concealed or conspiratorial agency. Foucault contends that a "soul" was introduced into legal and penal proceedings as an integral part of the reconception of subjectivity. The claim is that a whole new dimension of personhood is invented in making possible new kinds of control not previously envisaged. The production of the soul in the context of the development of penalty is not recognition of anything; it is a shift from a premodern to a modern conception of the self. The manufacture of the soul constitutes a conceptual shift from a self defined by familial, social, and political roles and possessed of the identity-determining immortal soul of religion, to a self defined by Cartesian autonomy and inwardness and one that is wholly self-determining. The modern self is one that contains the ground of intentional consciousness as an inherent property; it is a self that is "self constituting" in being itself "the source or agent of all meaning". The result is that the modern self is an irreducible node to which beliefs and affective states are ascribed; it is the ultimate source of action. Given this conception, it then becomes possible and necessary to shape the self through discipline in a way that it will regularly initiate the right sorts of actions. The way to achieve this end is to imbue the self with the right sorts of beliefs and affective states. Discipline and Punish portrays how disciplines developed to imbue selves with the right beliefs and affective states. (Geoff Danaher, Tony Schirato, Jen Webb, 2000). For Foucault, the subject is something to be understood as an historical product, as emergent. There could not be, then, discernment or acknowledgment of the soul in the process of humanizing penalty. Instead, the process of changing penalty contributed to the creation of the modern self in that "the subject" is a product of discourse. Rather than the subject being prior to discourse, the subject emerges in discourse. Rather than being "the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject," discourse is the generative context in which the subject arises. Once this is understood, discourse is seen as "a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity from himself may be determined". When we understand what we are actually doing in speaking as we do about people, by attending to the discontinuities genealogy uncovers, we appreciate that "the subject" is what we say it is. This is clearly a philosophical view of the self; it is not a socio-historical account of the recognition of some basic humanity. (Alan Milchman, Alan Rosenberg, 2003). Reference: Alan Milchman, Alan Rosenberg (2003). Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters; University of Minnesota Press Hudson, B. (2003) Understanding Justice: an introduction to ideas perspectives and controversies in modern penal theory, Buckingham: Open University Press Geoff Danaher, Tony Schirato, Jen Webb (2000). Understanding Foucault; Allen & Unwin Jeremy R. Carrette (2000). Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality; Routledge John Mccumber (2000). Philosophy and Freedom: Derrida, Rorty, Habermas, Foucault; Indiana University Press Mark Olssen (1999). Michel Foucault: Materialism and Education; Bergin & Garvey Marsh, I with Cochrane, J and Melville, G (2004) Criminal Justice: an Introduction to philosophies, theories and practice, London: Routledge New Burn, T. (2003). Crime and criminal justice policy, Harlow: Longman Richard Marsden (1999). The Nature of Capital: Marx after Foucault; Routledge Thomas R. Flynn (1997). Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason - Vol. 1 ; University of Chicago Press Read More