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    How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punish
    How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punish
    How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punish
    Ebook207 pages3 hours

    How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punish

    By Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro

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    About this ebook

    Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is one of the best-selling works of critical theory and a key text on many undergraduate courses. However, it is a long, difficult text which makes Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro's excellent step-by-step reading guide a welcome addition to the How to Read Theory series.

    Undergraduates across a wide range of disciplines are expected to have a solid understanding of Foucault's key terms, which have become commonplace in critical thinking today. While there are many texts that survey Foucault's thought, these are often more general overviews or biographical précis that give little in the way of robust explanation and discussion.

    In contrast, Schwan and Shapiro take a plain-speaking, yet detailed, approach, specifically designed to give students a thorough understanding of one of the most influential texts in contemporary cultural theory.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPluto Press
    Release dateJul 8, 2011
    ISBN9781783710836
    How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punish
    Author

    Anne Schwan

    Anne Schwan is Associate Professor in English Literature at Edinburgh Napier University. She is a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh's Young Academy of Scotland and a Fellow of RSA. She is the co-author of How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punishment (Pluto, 2011).

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      Book preview

      How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punish - Anne Schwan

      Part One: Torture

      The first section of the first part of Discipline and Punish acts as an overview of the book’s argument. Here Foucault outlines his main themes and makes some, perhaps overly, brief comments on the assumptions driving his method of interpreting historical evidence. On first reading, this is one of the book’s most dense and at times elusive sections. Consequently, it is helpful to re-read it after having read through to the end of Discipline and Punish so that you can begin to notice the moves that Foucault makes and positions he takes very early on in the book.

      As we will see, Foucault divides his history of prisons into three historical phases, some of which overlap with one another, causing him sometimes to repeat points in different sections. In general, though, each of the book’s first three parts is devoted to a particular period, with Part Four as his critical overview and summary. In the second section of Part One, Foucault details the first of these three phases, what we might call the Age of Terror.

      1. The body of the condemned

      Discipline and Punish begins by contrasting two visions of criminal punishment: the 1757 public execution of Robert-François Damiens (1715–1757) for an attempted assassination of the French King Louis XV and the 1838 daily schedule for prisoners’ activities proposed by the journalist, and later centre-right French minister for the Interior, Léon Faucher (1803–1854).

      Foucault starts with contemporaneous newspaper accounts of Damiens’ gruesome death. After Damiens was publicly branded with red-hot irons, flesh torn away and body drawn and quartered, as horses ripped the limbs away from his torso, he was finally burnt alive. Against this horrifying, excessive carnival of an individual’s suffering, Faucher’s calmly regulated plan for the prisoners’ day appears to handle criminals in a more dignified and reasonable way, one that carefully avoids chaotic scenes and screams of human pain.

      Foucault chooses to contrast the ‘public execution and a time-table’ (7) as the two overarching markers in his study about changes within the history of punishment. He acknowledges that these two moments are not exactly comparable as items of representative evidence, since they deal with different kinds of crime, the attempted murder of a king, on one hand, and most likely small thefts or disorderly conduct, on the other. Yet the examples of a king’s would-be murderer and plans for anonymous men imprisoned for minor crimes neatly captures three larger themes that Foucault highlights throughout Discipline and Punish, involving the links among subjectivity, knowledge and power. Foucault argues that during the eighty years separating these scenes ‘the entire economy of punishment was redistributed’ (7). In the interval between these two events, a wave of prison reform swept across the West as these societies lost their tolerance for circus-like open-air spectacles where the ‘tortured, dismembered, amputated body, symbolically branded on face or shoulder’ was ‘exposed alive or dead to public view’ (8). Although Foucault’s illustrations are almost entirely French ones, he argues that they are representative of a ‘Western’ general trend throughout Europe (including Russia) and North America.

      While most histories of penal justice celebrate the removal of apparently senseless, grotesque punishment of criminals in favour of rational codes of law, involving juries and time-delimited imprisonment, as an humanitarian advance, Foucault suggests that before we rush to congratulate ourselves on this removal of public torture, we need to pay attention to what social interests motivated the disappearance of the body as ‘the major target of penal repression’ within a ‘gloomy festival of punishment’ (8) at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There are two significant features to this historical shift.

      Firstly, there ‘was the disappearance of punishment as spectacle’ (8), such as when prisoners were either brought on top of a platform for public retribution or forced to labour in easily visible chain-gangs cleaning the streets or repairing roads. Enlightenment-era reformers were increasingly worried that public executions might encourage a shocked public to commit violence against authorities, given the open cruelty of the older forms of punishment that made justice seem itself criminal-minded and uncivilized. Consequently, reformers used a ‘humanitarian’ language to argue for a less aggressive and risky way of treating criminals.

      In this light, the second main change in punishment is the removal of pain. The modern ‘punishment-body relation’ (11) seeks to cause less bodily hurt and looks more to deprive someone of ‘a liberty that is regarded as a right and as property’ involving limits to free movement and use of the individual’s time. The ‘outside’ of the criminal’s body is handled less and less as it becomes manipulated more intangibly and peacefully through confinement. Even when people are executed in the modern-day West, ‘the disappearance of the spectacle and the elimination of pain’ (11) remains a concern, as death sentences are usually carried out before small, invitation-only audiences and the prisoner is often either sedated before being killed or every effort is made for the death to be swift and ‘gentle’.

      The change in punishment’s form from spectacular, public punishment in the mid eighteenth century to more discreet forms of imprisonment in the early and mid nineteenth century has several social and tactical consequences, according to Foucault. With imprisonment, punishment becomes more ‘private’, isolated and hidden from the public’s gaze. While the performance of deliberative justice, the judging of guilt, becomes more visible, as trials are usually open to all and performed in the public record (whereas before they were secret), the execution of that trial’s punishment becomes more invisible, especially since few of us step inside a penitentiary, which, in any case, cannot easily be visited without some degree of permission by state officials or

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