“Discipline And Punish” By Foucault, Explained.
Gruesome torture and the death penalty were common several hundred years ago. Nowadays, luckily we don’t see that very often; now punishment is mostly being put in prison. Nice! But why? Foucault says the reason for this change is that now we live in a prison-like society, where people are endlessly disciplined and monitored to behave in a certain way. Let’s find out what he means by that.
Two cautionary notes:
One. This article proceeds along with the conversation between Hannah, a girl who loves to read and talk about western political thought, and a guy, who listens and jokes (in italics).
Two. The first section (Torture) includes a disturbing description of an execution. Please skip this section if you don’t like such things.
Torture
A guy named Damiens was “taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds … in a said cart, to the Palace de Gréve, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and claves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by for horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds[1]”
What!? This is so gross!!
I know, but this is how Discipline and Punish, written by a French philosopher named Michel Foucault, famously begins. For modern “civilized” people like us, this cruel execution in the 18th century seems nothing more than pure irrationality. Maybe it is just that a king was so angry and emotional that he abused his absolute power to inflict vengeance on the criminal.
Foucault disagrees. He argues that “[t]orture is a technique; it is not an extreme expression of lawless rage (Foucault 1977, 33).” Here, he is saying this brutal scene was not made by stupid officials. He is saying it is carefully designed for the state apparatus.
How so?
At that time, the state apparatus was tantamount to the absolute power of the monarch. Public executions were used to maintain authority “not only by making people aware that the slightest offense was likely to be punished, but by arousing feelings of terror by the spectacle of power letting its anger fall upon the guilty person (ibid, 58).”
By the way, the 18th century differs from our time in another respect: the truth was at the hand of the powerful, not of the objective, scientific observation. This is observed in the fact that the testimony by those with high authority or money such as priests and noble men were taken as credible while that of homeless and the poor were considered meaningless. Yes, this is so unfair. And this truth-power relation was further solidified by torture. Torture is used to extract a confession, and that confession is then used as evidence of the crime. By doing so, the king forced people to see the connection between power, torture, and the truth.
Oh god, the 18th century is so dark! I’m so lucky I live in this easier century!
Not so fast! Although such cruel punishment may not be common anymore, its basic function — reigning over society — still lingers on, just in a different form. Let’s see what Foucault has to say on this.
Punishment
As society has changed, so has the function of punishment. This intrinsic relationship between the punishment and the society is what Foucault seeks to uncover in his book. The 18th century saw the growth of production capacity owing to the Industrial Revolution, and some people began to accumulate fortunes. That changed the typical crimes of that time, from the more violent and aggressive ones such as murders, to the less violent ones like offenses against property, especially stealing. This change created the necessity of an institutions to protect the property.
In the face of this societal change, “reformers,” the ones who were critical toward the traditional justice system, raised concerns on the “excessive nature of the punishment”, especially “an excess that was bound up with an irregularity even more than with an abuse of the power to punish (ibid, 78).” It was worrisome for them, because such irregularity provided loopholes for thieves. The reason for this irregularity was that there were too many judicial entities, whose authority were conferred by the monarch. More often than not, their jurisdiction overlapped, which created, ironically, the loopholes. It meant that some delinquency was not punished, and even if it was, the severity of the punishment was inconsistent because of different practices among the entities. This was very inconvenient for the wealthy, who were just beginning to have something to lose.
Oh so it’s like my go-to cafe! The staff have no idea who is dealing with which order. So some guy had to wait like an hour while the lady next to me got like three bagels. That’s too much for her! That’s how I get free food.
Um… Anyhow, the wealthy and the reformers advocated for a judicial system that can punish numerous minor crimes with efficiency and consistency. This marks an important change in the role of punishment. Before, punishment was mainly for displaying the power of the monarch, but after the societal change, punishment became a means of preventing crime.
So, for the first time in the history, people started to consider the cost-benefit calculation of the punishment: how can we make the best tradeoff between the effectiveness of punishment and the cost of thereof. For punishing in a consistent, efficient way, one needs to categorize the types of crimes and classify individual cases accordingly. In other words, reformers sought to code all behaviors to make clear what falls into the legal and what into illegal categories. Otherwise, some would-be illegal actions may not be punished. Foucault calls this requirement the rule of optimal specification.
Punishment aiming at crime-prevention needs to follow another five rules.
1) The rule of minimum quantity: for efficiency, the optimal severity of and harm caused by punishment should be only slightly more than that of the crimes.
2) The rule of sufficient ideality: for deterrence, punishment can be effective only when the idea of painful punishment is directly associated with crimes.
3) The rule of lateral effects: the purpose of punishment is to deter fellow citizens, not the criminal himself.
4) The rule of perfect certainty: it should be crystal clear to citizens that committing a crime will certainly lead to a punishment. Otherwise deterrence doesn’t work, and would-be criminals are more likely to commit a crime.
5) The rule of common truth: the punishment should be based on solid, objective evidence. Otherwise, some criminals may be unpunished, and some innocent people may be punished. If that happens, people cannot associate punishment and crimes with certainty, rendering deterrence difficult if not impossible. It means that arbitrariness has no place in this judicial reform.
So, at the end of the 18th century, punitive power was organized in three forms. The first was punishment based on the monarchical power. The second was based on the ideas of reforming jurists. The third is what we haven’t talked about yet: a prison. While all three could have been a part of the judicial system from the 19th century onward, the prison became the overwhelmingly dominant method of punishment.
Discipline
Why is that?
In a nutshell, prison became accepted in modern society because the function of modern society is very much like prison: imposing discipline on people to turn them into the nation’s obedient servants.
Here, the role of punishment is shifted from the prevention of crimes towards imposing discipline on people so that they become the least costly to rule and the most productive in economic output. For this purpose, states impose discipline on people. We can see such discipline not just in prison, but also in schools, militaries, and hospitals.
What? It doesn’t make any sense! Society making us servants by using punishment and discipline? I don’t follow.
Sorry, that was hasty. Let’s first look at how exactly discipline works. There are four main things to consider.
First, discipline requires a closed building, such as a student dormitory or military barracks. By confining individuals in that building, it becomes much easier to recognize their distinguishing abilities and categorize them, and use them collectively and efficiently. It is hard to do all these things if the subordinates are scattered across, — for example, — different regions. It is much easier to maintain order, give them orders and produce substantial output. The characteristics of each person are examined and documented, so they can be dispatched to the most appropriate role in the organization. For example, those who are good with guns may become snipers, those who are good at finding a pattern would join a crypto team. Foucault calls this list of individuals’ features tableaux vivants, which « transform the confused, useless, dangerous multitudes into ordered multiplicities (ibid, 148). » Tableaux are therefore both « a technique of power and a procedure of knowing (ibid, 148). »
Second, discipline demands specific actions. The time-table is used for this purpose. Not just in prison, but also in hospitals, schools, and military, these institutions often impose a specific time table and temporality controls the collective behavior. Its ultimate version is manoeuvre, the body-object articulation. The military, for instance, specifies each step of body movement and tools in order: « Bring the weapon forward. In three stages. Raise the rifle with the right hand, bringing it close to the body so as to hold it perpendicular with the right knee, the end of the barrel at the eye level…[2] » We can say that it is the infiltration of power into every moves, forcing a body to be docile « in its minutest operations (ibid, 156). »
Third, discipline generates human capital gradually over time, by imposing exercise. It is most evident in the school system. We all start with elementary school, and gradually we get more sophisticated education and training, and develop skills over time. As a result, we become human capital, a functional component of society that is useful to its function.
Lastly, discipline not only ensures individual productivity, but also collective productivity. For that, discipline imposes tactics, which is « the art of constructing, with located bodies, coded activities and trained aptitudes, mechanisms in which the product of the various forces is increased by their calculated combination are no doubt the highest form of disciplinary practice (ibid, 167). » The most mundane example would be team sports. Sports tactics are not just about one player’s movements; it is about all team members’ movements and how to coordinate them to achieve the best result. So discipline not only specifies the role and space of individuals; it does that in consideration of other parts of the group. Creating the most efficient composition of individual forces is one of the most important aspects of discipline.
Foucault summarizes these four aspects as four types of individuality formed by discipline: « it is cellular (by the play 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) (ibid, 167).»
Observation
Okay, so discipline is basically about knowing what people are good at, training them to get better, and control their moves individually and collectively to achieve something, right? It’s like a control freak! But is discipline the only thing that explains why prison became common?
No, we have one more social mechanism of exercising power: observation. The mechanism is so simple that every parent knows about it. The most effective way to prevent children from being disobedient is to watch them.
This power dynamic differs from that of a monarch. People obey the rules because they are seen and judged by everyone else according to the rules, all the time; not because they fear revenge from the king. Modern institutions like prison, school, and the military all have this feature. Foucault raises the example of a teacher having good students monitor other students.
I’ve been there! There was this classmate who really liked to take the side of rules and teachers, and always said to me after I’d done something wrong: « Whoa! That’s bad! I’m gonna tell our teacher! »
Yes, and that bluff works only when the norm (the idea of what is normal/good and what is not) is shared not only among teachers but also students. Just like the coding of legal and illegal behaviors in the judicial realm, the norm of good and bad behavior is established as ideals which people should reach. The incremental adjustment of individual behaviors to this norm is done by punishing the bad and rewarding the good.
One way of doing so is an exam. « The distribution according to ranks or grade has a double role: it marks the gaps, hierarchizes qualities, skills and aptitudes; but it also punishes and rewards (ibid, 180). » It helps visualize what people are to be (we are supposed to get good scores!), and it motivates people to be that one. Although a previous article talked about the negative impact of exam in society, here exams are considered as an indispensable component to ensure the functioning of discipline and power.
This observational mechanism of power is most demonstrated by an architecture called Panopticon. Foucault describes it as follows: « at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the periphery building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy (ibid, 200).»
In such an architecture, ones in the periphery are under observation from the central building all the time, but they cannot see the observer. Although they know that they are being watched, they cannot know when and how many observers watch them. In this structure, one constantly feels they are obliged to obey whatever rules, time-table, or work assignment. This structure also illustrates a new form of power; the power is exercised through an automatic mechanism enabled by the architecture, not by an act of powerful man; in it, more and more people can be coerced by less and less enforcers, because what is necessary is only that the coerced think being watched.
This is what power in modern society at work essentially looks like. The panoptic schema is used for almost every corner of our society where a certain set of behavior should be carried out. The point of this new power enforcement method is that it is so normal; it is everywhere, every time and we don’t even know we are subject to it. And that is why it is so powerful and efficient.
Prison
Given that panopticism is essentially how contemporary society works, it is no wonder that prison, an obvious example of panopticon, became the foremost modern form of punishment. Prison works perfectly on many levels. On the legal level, prison is perfect fit to our age because it punishes people by depriving them of their freedom, which we just started to care about after the Enlightenment. Also, on the cost-benefit level, prison can objectively measure a necessary degree of punishment by the prison term. As Nietzsche — by whom Foucault was influenced — suggested, punishment incorporates the notion of that debt, meaning that criminals have a debt to society and punishment is the way to pay back. With an accurate measurement of punishment now possible, criminals can pay back exactly what they owe. Lastly, on the level of discipline, as we have discussed, a prison is of course perfect: it is a microcosm of modern society in that it disciplines people through panoptic schema and makes them obedient.
Okay, enough about prison. What can we conclude about modern society?
Foucault points out three prisonlike features of modern society. First, every one of our behavior is either coded as normal/legal or abnormality/illegal. All behavior conforms within this binary, and we are monitored by others as well as society as a whole to remain obedient within the norm. Second, there is nowhere to escape from such monitoring. The monitoring network covers every corner of society. Lastly, since the roles of punishment and that of society are so similar, we will never truly realize how much punitive power resides in society. Overall, Foucault managed to show how modern society functions through the analysis of historical transition of punishment in a breathtakingly deep level. Its function is all about annihilating individual uniqueness and abnormality as well as forcing people into what society deems normal. It is a huge scheme meant to render us obedient and productive prisoners serving a never ending sentence.
Come to think of it, school and society are so much like prison! So maybe children’s hatred toward school is completely legit! So children, if you are looking for the most sophisticated defense as to why you hate school, this is it!
Yeah… This book covers much more than that though.
References
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.
[1] Piéces originales et procédures du procés fait á Robert-François Damiens, III, 1757: 372–4. Cited in Foucault, 1977:3.
[2] Ordonnance du 1er janvier 1766, pour régler l’exercise de l’infenterie
[3] [4] Harou-Romain, N. P. 1840. Project de pénitencier. p. 250
