Books
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
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MPH, MSc
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Discipline and Punish is probably Michel Foucault's (1926-1984) best-known work. In it, Foucault explores the everyday disciplinary constraints that surveillance and control technology exert as power over individuals in their daily actions.
Torture
Torture was corporal punishment, with the body itself being the object of punishment, subjected to punishment (whipping), forced labor (galleys), forced to display marks, display signs of punishment (public parades), etc. Foucault begins the work by describing the fate of a condemned man who in 1757 received a punishment that ended in his quartering. The body was the object of punishment-spectacle, which culminated in France with the guillotine during the revolutionary ritual. However, most of the punishments in the 17th and 18th centuries did not involve torture, one of the most common being banishment.
The punishment could not be materially repaired as private damage, since the offense was also against the sovereign. The damage is not the act itself, but the potential for chaos that it could reproduce. Therefore, torture is a legal-political reparation and a spectacle whose purpose is to reaffirm sovereign power over individuals. The aim is to set an example and make everyone aware. Parades, stops in the streets, recitations at the church door, public reading of the sentence, etc. It is even a popular spectacle, a special occasion, in which the people are not only spectators but, to a certain extent, participants in the ritual of punishment.
The reform
Foucault finds that protest against torture "is everywhere in the second half of the 18th century." A morality and humanitarian discourse emerges among reformers (Beccaria, Dupaty, etc.). During the industrial revolution, blood crimes also decrease and crimes against property increase. Added to this is the bourgeois interest in the protection of property, largely building the law in their own interests. From the illegality of rights (of peasants, artisans, guilds, nobles, etc.), there is therefore a shift to the illegality of property.
The shift towards petty crime requires a greater apparatus of surveillance and control, creating a spiral of crime to be monitored and punished. Population growth, industrial production, the market economy, property, and other factors converge towards the centralization of punishment and the surveillance of the entire social body. Reform is above all a reconfiguration of the power to monitor and punish, not mere humanitarianism on the part of philosophers who are "friends of humanity," as Foucault calls them. In fact, the aim is not to punish less, but to punish more, to multiply the circuits of punishment, with a state apparatus infiltrating every corner of everyday life. Moreover, illegality falls most heavily on the popular classes, on mere customs or socially accepted acts, which begin to be punished. Surveillance and control cease to be marginal, and institutions dedicated to this end multiply. What was circumstantial becomes the general formula for discipline and punishment. The object of the police becomes every event at every moment. It is not man who is at the center of the new criminal justice system, but the confluence of interests toward the nascent technical-bureaucratic state.
In the Middle Ages, the procedure for obtaining the truth about a crime was based on "knowledge of the offense, knowledge of the perpetrator, knowledge of the law." Evidence was necessary; confession alone did not lead to conviction, but was part of the process under oath before man and God. If the accused resisted and did not confess, the magistrate might be forced to drop the charges. A principle described by Beccaria himself is the need to end oral customs and traditions and to publish laws so that everyone is aware of them, within a social contract. However, the punitive city comes into conflict with the principle of individualization, under which the act is no longer judged, and the idea that the seriousness of the offense dictates the severity of the punishment is rejected, giving way to an assessment of the person and the immorality of the action (intention, circumstances, will, past, etc.). In other words, punishment is directed at judgments, diagnoses, and prognoses of the normative.
"The situation that gave rise to the reform is not, therefore, one of a new sensibility, but rather one of a different policy toward illegalities." A policy of accounting, productive, instrumental, utilitarian. The very process of individualization disguises the arbitrariness that can be exercised in a sentence, which distances it not only from supposed neopositivism, but also from the very principle of proportionality, not to mention that it conceals the old right of clemency, which is always present.
Contrary to popular belief, prison sentences were rare before the reform, with solitary confinement being more of a temporary measure of detention. Prison sentences are one of many ideas still found in reformist texts, and are in fact widely criticized by many reformers, who see them as mere despotism. Prison is dark, useless to society, costly, and a school for crime, something that was clear more than two centuries ago. It also meant depriving many families of their only means of support. It does not respond to the principle of individualization, covering everything from minor to the most serious crimes with no difference except perhaps temporary. "I feel like I am seeing a doctor who has the same remedy for all ills," said Chabroud in the French parliament. It is contrary to all the rhetorical veneer of humanism with which the need for prisons has been sold. We are not facing a mere penal reform, but a reconfiguration of the power to punish and a new distribution of power in which different interests coincide.
Technopolitics of punishment
The accumulation of documents forms the basis of knowledge. From the accounting, technical society emerges a discipline framed by micro-penalization disseminated throughout the social body. Description is the first method of domination and control of the individual. This creates the accounting system that allows individuals to be classified, formalized, and operated on according to their instrumental purpose. Permanent observation generates the quantifiable and calculable human being. This is the concept of biopolitics that Foucault will develop elsewhere. The file is what allows the birth of "the sciences of man," giving rise to the operation of control techniques and production mounted on the individual. With the knowledge of the body, a use of the body is generated through political technology, in a microphysics of power distributed throughout society. "This technology is diffuse, rarely formulated in discourse."
The goal is not repair or reformist recovery, but rather time, schedules, rules, regular activities, and orders from the authority that monitors and disciplines. We move from the subject of law to the obedient subject of the state, from the punitive city to the disciplinary apparatus of the new sovereign: the administrative apparatus. The precarious medieval technique of surveillance and control required brutality and spectacle. As surveillance and control mechanisms progress, spectacle and brutality lose value and even become counterproductive to their acceptance and normalization. Coercion becomes more sophisticated, more subtle, disseminated throughout the system.
An administration of punishment is needed to generate a new economy of punishment. Punishment is no longer an act of the judge, but is filled with extrajudicial elements and characters: doctors, technicians, psychologists, etc. Punishment is thus transformed into a scientific discourse that prevents punishment from being seen simply as punishment, dissolves responsibility, excuses the executors, and rationalizes punishment. The technification of discipline depersonalizes punishment, automating it into a bureaucratic and technically specialized mechanism, and marks a new awareness of the power relationship between the system and the individual.
The legal system emerged in parallel with industrial society and the Napoleonic state. Discipline treats individuals as objects and instruments within a calculated and permanent apparatus of coercion and ends. The person becomes a piece that occupies a place within a whole, a new social Newton of earthly bodies: "discipline thus produces subjugated and trained bodies, docile bodies." The mechanical process encompasses not only the criminal justice system, but also schools, factories, barracks, workshops, hospitals, etc. There is a whole disciplinary system that orders and directs people's actions. For some reason, no one has been very interested in studying the functioning of this disciplinary science of the individual.
The struggle for rank allows for the necessary deviations to individualize the cogs in the general machinery, legitimizing the disciplinary system through reinforcement programs. The direction of behavior is not merely negative (punishing, preventing), but positive, directed, and applied from nursery school, to philanthropy, to administration, etc. Nothing is left without disciplinary direction.
The panopticon
The old sovereignty is now the brute force of the state. The punishment in full view of society proposed by the reformers becomes something dark, hidden from view. A specific architecture is created for this purpose. The entire reform has been reduced to a detention apparatus. The display of torture is transformed into the shadow of buildings where everything is darkened, leaving the disciplinary process behind walls, integrated into the body of the state apparatus. External morality is similarly transformed, and social consciousness only expects repressive action from the state and its mechanisms that take place behind walls. How is it possible that prison has become the only punishment, even to this day, contrary to the spirit of reform?
The military camp is the model of general visibility. It will be transferred to urban planning, to workers' cities, to prisons, hospitals, etc. Visibility is an internal part of the production apparatus, allowing for control and efficiency of the gears. Bentham's panopticon is the architectural center of this need for surveillance and control. The greatest effect on the individual is generated by the structure itself, the fact of knowing that one is constantly being observed, which guarantees the automatic functioning of power. The power relationship is transformed. From the architecture itself, the power relationship is exercised in the asymmetry of the visual relationship. Who sees and who is seen. With panoptic surveillance, power is exercised in a less physical way. Power is depersonalized; it does not matter who exercises surveillance and control, it is simply exercised through the mechanism. What was a utilitarian architectural solution devised by Bentham has become the model for society as a whole to this day. Power is exercised not so much over the bodies of those who are punished, but over the souls of those who are watched, educated, and corrected. For Foucault, the soul is the prison of the body.
Final comments
Punishment is not merely a sanction; it has a complex social function, particularly as a political tactic. The Christian soul has by no means been replaced by a man of philosophical reflection and knowledge, as the enlightened and scientific view of the world would have us believe. For Foucault, the soul is built on the daily discipline of those "who are subjected to a production apparatus and controlled throughout their existence." Punishment thus moves from the negative (repressing, preventing, excluding, etc.) to the positive: usefulness, docility, productivity, "correct" behavior, etc. In other words, the administration of reinforcements distributed throughout the social space at all times and throughout life to achieve obedient citizens. The plague-ridden city is Foucault's example of total social control. Under the threat of epidemics, perfect discipline and legitimized violence emerge. Nothing could be more relevant today.
Criminal law is embedded in the historical, economic, technical, and other processes. In other words, it is embedded in the material and technical structures of a vast network that weaves together power relations. Power is not merely the preservation of the dominance of a ruling class, but rather the action of a set of strategic positions that exercise it (we can see here why many Marxists do not forgive Foucault).
Regarding prisons, social demands have almost always been material, which paradoxically only makes them more decorous, more tolerable, thereby legitimizing the acceptance of this system of power. From a social contract theory, we could say that criminals attack the whole of society and receive the force of the whole of society, but the reality is that the interests of the power circuits are defended and the force of the state is received without any social benefit.
The technopolitics of punishment progresses from submission to the economic and technical rationality of punishment. The mechanical device of coercion operates in the shadow of the law, rendering the subject of law increasingly residual and inoperative over the disciplined subject. Justice itself is subjected to the panoptic operation of systematic coercion disseminated throughout the social space, which guarantees the integrity of the interests of the system.
The object of society is no longer the community, public life, or social relations. All that remains is the individual and his relationship with the state. The transformation of life into a mechanized operation ultimately leads to people losing control of society. Scientific technocracy is the equivalent of military society. It is not based on securing rights and freedoms, nor is it based on will, but rather imposes a model of training and docility, in which people are subordinate cogs through permanent coercion, in a visibly authoritarian manner with the excuse of "public health" when necessary. It is not machinery at the service of man, but man at the service of machinery. It is discipline that produces the social reality we live in, not the legal discourse of contracts. This leads to a progressive positive subject mounted on a productive and social control apparatus. We can add to Foucault: the state changes for its own survival, not for morality.
"Is it any wonder that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which in turn resemble prisons?" Michel Foucault.
Cite as: Bordallo. A. Review of Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. ICNS. Available at https://www.icns.es/en/news/michel-foucault-discipline-and-punishment
Copyright© ICNS Institute
Torture
Torture was corporal punishment, with the body itself being the object of punishment, subjected to punishment (whipping), forced labor (galleys), forced to display marks, display signs of punishment (public parades), etc. Foucault begins the work by describing the fate of a condemned man who in 1757 received a punishment that ended in his quartering. The body was the object of punishment-spectacle, which culminated in France with the guillotine during the revolutionary ritual. However, most of the punishments in the 17th and 18th centuries did not involve torture, one of the most common being banishment.
The punishment could not be materially repaired as private damage, since the offense was also against the sovereign. The damage is not the act itself, but the potential for chaos that it could reproduce. Therefore, torture is a legal-political reparation and a spectacle whose purpose is to reaffirm sovereign power over individuals. The aim is to set an example and make everyone aware. Parades, stops in the streets, recitations at the church door, public reading of the sentence, etc. It is even a popular spectacle, a special occasion, in which the people are not only spectators but, to a certain extent, participants in the ritual of punishment.
The reform
Foucault finds that protest against torture "is everywhere in the second half of the 18th century." A morality and humanitarian discourse emerges among reformers (Beccaria, Dupaty, etc.). During the industrial revolution, blood crimes also decrease and crimes against property increase. Added to this is the bourgeois interest in the protection of property, largely building the law in their own interests. From the illegality of rights (of peasants, artisans, guilds, nobles, etc.), there is therefore a shift to the illegality of property.
The shift towards petty crime requires a greater apparatus of surveillance and control, creating a spiral of crime to be monitored and punished. Population growth, industrial production, the market economy, property, and other factors converge towards the centralization of punishment and the surveillance of the entire social body. Reform is above all a reconfiguration of the power to monitor and punish, not mere humanitarianism on the part of philosophers who are "friends of humanity," as Foucault calls them. In fact, the aim is not to punish less, but to punish more, to multiply the circuits of punishment, with a state apparatus infiltrating every corner of everyday life. Moreover, illegality falls most heavily on the popular classes, on mere customs or socially accepted acts, which begin to be punished. Surveillance and control cease to be marginal, and institutions dedicated to this end multiply. What was circumstantial becomes the general formula for discipline and punishment. The object of the police becomes every event at every moment. It is not man who is at the center of the new criminal justice system, but the confluence of interests toward the nascent technical-bureaucratic state.
In the Middle Ages, the procedure for obtaining the truth about a crime was based on "knowledge of the offense, knowledge of the perpetrator, knowledge of the law." Evidence was necessary; confession alone did not lead to conviction, but was part of the process under oath before man and God. If the accused resisted and did not confess, the magistrate might be forced to drop the charges. A principle described by Beccaria himself is the need to end oral customs and traditions and to publish laws so that everyone is aware of them, within a social contract. However, the punitive city comes into conflict with the principle of individualization, under which the act is no longer judged, and the idea that the seriousness of the offense dictates the severity of the punishment is rejected, giving way to an assessment of the person and the immorality of the action (intention, circumstances, will, past, etc.). In other words, punishment is directed at judgments, diagnoses, and prognoses of the normative.
"The situation that gave rise to the reform is not, therefore, one of a new sensibility, but rather one of a different policy toward illegalities." A policy of accounting, productive, instrumental, utilitarian. The very process of individualization disguises the arbitrariness that can be exercised in a sentence, which distances it not only from supposed neopositivism, but also from the very principle of proportionality, not to mention that it conceals the old right of clemency, which is always present.
Contrary to popular belief, prison sentences were rare before the reform, with solitary confinement being more of a temporary measure of detention. Prison sentences are one of many ideas still found in reformist texts, and are in fact widely criticized by many reformers, who see them as mere despotism. Prison is dark, useless to society, costly, and a school for crime, something that was clear more than two centuries ago. It also meant depriving many families of their only means of support. It does not respond to the principle of individualization, covering everything from minor to the most serious crimes with no difference except perhaps temporary. "I feel like I am seeing a doctor who has the same remedy for all ills," said Chabroud in the French parliament. It is contrary to all the rhetorical veneer of humanism with which the need for prisons has been sold. We are not facing a mere penal reform, but a reconfiguration of the power to punish and a new distribution of power in which different interests coincide.
Technopolitics of punishment
The accumulation of documents forms the basis of knowledge. From the accounting, technical society emerges a discipline framed by micro-penalization disseminated throughout the social body. Description is the first method of domination and control of the individual. This creates the accounting system that allows individuals to be classified, formalized, and operated on according to their instrumental purpose. Permanent observation generates the quantifiable and calculable human being. This is the concept of biopolitics that Foucault will develop elsewhere. The file is what allows the birth of "the sciences of man," giving rise to the operation of control techniques and production mounted on the individual. With the knowledge of the body, a use of the body is generated through political technology, in a microphysics of power distributed throughout society. "This technology is diffuse, rarely formulated in discourse."
The goal is not repair or reformist recovery, but rather time, schedules, rules, regular activities, and orders from the authority that monitors and disciplines. We move from the subject of law to the obedient subject of the state, from the punitive city to the disciplinary apparatus of the new sovereign: the administrative apparatus. The precarious medieval technique of surveillance and control required brutality and spectacle. As surveillance and control mechanisms progress, spectacle and brutality lose value and even become counterproductive to their acceptance and normalization. Coercion becomes more sophisticated, more subtle, disseminated throughout the system.
An administration of punishment is needed to generate a new economy of punishment. Punishment is no longer an act of the judge, but is filled with extrajudicial elements and characters: doctors, technicians, psychologists, etc. Punishment is thus transformed into a scientific discourse that prevents punishment from being seen simply as punishment, dissolves responsibility, excuses the executors, and rationalizes punishment. The technification of discipline depersonalizes punishment, automating it into a bureaucratic and technically specialized mechanism, and marks a new awareness of the power relationship between the system and the individual.
The legal system emerged in parallel with industrial society and the Napoleonic state. Discipline treats individuals as objects and instruments within a calculated and permanent apparatus of coercion and ends. The person becomes a piece that occupies a place within a whole, a new social Newton of earthly bodies: "discipline thus produces subjugated and trained bodies, docile bodies." The mechanical process encompasses not only the criminal justice system, but also schools, factories, barracks, workshops, hospitals, etc. There is a whole disciplinary system that orders and directs people's actions. For some reason, no one has been very interested in studying the functioning of this disciplinary science of the individual.
The struggle for rank allows for the necessary deviations to individualize the cogs in the general machinery, legitimizing the disciplinary system through reinforcement programs. The direction of behavior is not merely negative (punishing, preventing), but positive, directed, and applied from nursery school, to philanthropy, to administration, etc. Nothing is left without disciplinary direction.
The panopticon
The old sovereignty is now the brute force of the state. The punishment in full view of society proposed by the reformers becomes something dark, hidden from view. A specific architecture is created for this purpose. The entire reform has been reduced to a detention apparatus. The display of torture is transformed into the shadow of buildings where everything is darkened, leaving the disciplinary process behind walls, integrated into the body of the state apparatus. External morality is similarly transformed, and social consciousness only expects repressive action from the state and its mechanisms that take place behind walls. How is it possible that prison has become the only punishment, even to this day, contrary to the spirit of reform?
The military camp is the model of general visibility. It will be transferred to urban planning, to workers' cities, to prisons, hospitals, etc. Visibility is an internal part of the production apparatus, allowing for control and efficiency of the gears. Bentham's panopticon is the architectural center of this need for surveillance and control. The greatest effect on the individual is generated by the structure itself, the fact of knowing that one is constantly being observed, which guarantees the automatic functioning of power. The power relationship is transformed. From the architecture itself, the power relationship is exercised in the asymmetry of the visual relationship. Who sees and who is seen. With panoptic surveillance, power is exercised in a less physical way. Power is depersonalized; it does not matter who exercises surveillance and control, it is simply exercised through the mechanism. What was a utilitarian architectural solution devised by Bentham has become the model for society as a whole to this day. Power is exercised not so much over the bodies of those who are punished, but over the souls of those who are watched, educated, and corrected. For Foucault, the soul is the prison of the body.
Final comments
Punishment is not merely a sanction; it has a complex social function, particularly as a political tactic. The Christian soul has by no means been replaced by a man of philosophical reflection and knowledge, as the enlightened and scientific view of the world would have us believe. For Foucault, the soul is built on the daily discipline of those "who are subjected to a production apparatus and controlled throughout their existence." Punishment thus moves from the negative (repressing, preventing, excluding, etc.) to the positive: usefulness, docility, productivity, "correct" behavior, etc. In other words, the administration of reinforcements distributed throughout the social space at all times and throughout life to achieve obedient citizens. The plague-ridden city is Foucault's example of total social control. Under the threat of epidemics, perfect discipline and legitimized violence emerge. Nothing could be more relevant today.
Criminal law is embedded in the historical, economic, technical, and other processes. In other words, it is embedded in the material and technical structures of a vast network that weaves together power relations. Power is not merely the preservation of the dominance of a ruling class, but rather the action of a set of strategic positions that exercise it (we can see here why many Marxists do not forgive Foucault).
Regarding prisons, social demands have almost always been material, which paradoxically only makes them more decorous, more tolerable, thereby legitimizing the acceptance of this system of power. From a social contract theory, we could say that criminals attack the whole of society and receive the force of the whole of society, but the reality is that the interests of the power circuits are defended and the force of the state is received without any social benefit.
The technopolitics of punishment progresses from submission to the economic and technical rationality of punishment. The mechanical device of coercion operates in the shadow of the law, rendering the subject of law increasingly residual and inoperative over the disciplined subject. Justice itself is subjected to the panoptic operation of systematic coercion disseminated throughout the social space, which guarantees the integrity of the interests of the system.
The object of society is no longer the community, public life, or social relations. All that remains is the individual and his relationship with the state. The transformation of life into a mechanized operation ultimately leads to people losing control of society. Scientific technocracy is the equivalent of military society. It is not based on securing rights and freedoms, nor is it based on will, but rather imposes a model of training and docility, in which people are subordinate cogs through permanent coercion, in a visibly authoritarian manner with the excuse of "public health" when necessary. It is not machinery at the service of man, but man at the service of machinery. It is discipline that produces the social reality we live in, not the legal discourse of contracts. This leads to a progressive positive subject mounted on a productive and social control apparatus. We can add to Foucault: the state changes for its own survival, not for morality.
"Is it any wonder that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which in turn resemble prisons?" Michel Foucault.
Cite as: Bordallo. A. Review of Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. ICNS. Available at https://www.icns.es/en/news/michel-foucault-discipline-and-punishment
Copyright© ICNS Institute
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