Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Foucault asks, but does not fully answer, how non-tortuous physical coersion as exemplified in the prison system came to be the dominant form of punishment. In the classical age of the 17th and 18th centuries, man came to be understood as trainable. This is the knowledge part of the equation. Foucault amply demonstrates that discipline was implemented in various fields at this time. Power. Man was trained. Instead of deterrence, in which man would have to be understood as teachable, punishment is just one form of regulation, against which all men potentially deviate from a norm. How did not just organization, but the concern for hyper-efficiency come about in the new discipline? Foucault points out the shift of focus from the crime to the criminal himself, from the temporary breach order to permanent surveillance of a population. Power, once clearly visible, becomes diffuse and subtle. But what caused this? Claiming that it is easier, more economical is not circular only if it is results that power seeks, instead of working according a set of ideals or limit, any kind of humanism. In this history, there is no agency, hence the disregard for any justifications behind laws, for they would be merely after the fact. Structures move between fields, from the religion of monastic life to the schools, from the military to the prison system. Things merely happen. No responsibility. This history disregards the Enlightenment, perhaps because it did not take.

Just as my title says, this book gives expert analysis on the topic of how disciplines make us into docile bodies and therefore, easier to control. Dont let the title fool you, this book, while it does deal with some of the history of criminology, it deal much more heavily into disciplines. A must read for the student of social control. The only thing that is missing, which is also a common theme in Foucault's work, are recommendations for what society should do. Its clear that he takes issue with disciplines (although, dont fool yourself into thinking that he thinks all disciplines are bad) but he offers no way to get out of them. An untrained Foucault reader might think that he prefers the barbaric public torture to modern punishment and this is its weakness.

This edition of the book has no index! Quite a frustration when trying to use it for academic writing.

A few chapters are interesting because they bring back the gruesome spectacle of publc torture. So, if you're a sadist, and to some extent we all are (by watching horror flicks like Saw, etc.), you will dig how he introduces his power-knowledge theme and applies it to punishment today and yesterday.

His writing itself is filled with run-on sentences, albeit with the overused semicolons and colons. And his paragraphs are too long. Did he skip language/writing classes? Foucault's terms are seldom defined adequately, if at all, and he is hard to follow. It's hard to see how this gives any value to his books. It takes a lot away in my opinion, perhaps masking the bleakness of some of his work.

Contemporary, left of center writing begins every social criticism (for the purposes of the left, the individual is immaterial, if not downright anathema) with a premise strikingly biblical: before the serpent, always bourgeois and rational, there was eden. Foucault refers to the world before reason came slithering in as a place without madness (cf. History of Madness) and a place without crime (this work). After seducing the good to think their innocent acts a sin, and those who perpetrate them naked and wicked, yea, then did the commercial devils Work and Industry clothe our bodies in cover-alls and deliver us over into a toiling hell, where there are toilets, moon rockets, and day schools. for foucault, madness is an identity assigned to those who will not reason as the devils say one should; and crime is a mere name intended to demean an act of rebellion against the authority of these same devils.

gimme a break! the entire hypothesis is outlandish in the extreme. true, there are brilliancies in Foucault's work, but they more often than not illuminate how banal the method behind it, and therefore resemble the critical equivalent of a slight of hand, put there to conceal the purpose. I would broadly categorize corruption as the maintenance of an untruth for private purposes. Foucault is profoundly guilty of this kind of dishonesty, and it corrupts what value his observation might intrinsically possess.

brains, please, people.

what might cato say today? "methinks, the left (latin for left is sinister: remarkably apropo) ought utterly be destroyed." a good enough beginning for this perdition would be its authors and all their works, mostly for being stupid, and telling such catchable lies.

tlt-