JDVDBATTAGLIA.COM by John David Battaglia - August 28, 2008

Excerpts from DISCIPLINE & PUNISH by Michel Foucault (trans. A. Sheridan)

PART TWO - PUNISHMENT 1. Generalized punishment (conclusion from pages l0l thru 103) ...Beneath the humanization of the penalties, what one finds are all those rules that authorize, or rather demand, 'leniency', as a calculated economy of the power to punish. But they also provoke a shift in the point of application of this power; it is no longer the body, with the ritual play of excessive pains, spectacular brandings in the ritual of the public execution; it is the mind or rather a play of representations and signs circulating discreetly but necessarily and evidently in the minds of all. It is no longer the body, but the soul, said Mably. And we see very clearly what he meant by this term: the correlative of a technique of power. Old 'anatomies' of punishment are abandoned. But have we really entered the age of non-corporal punishment?

At the point of departure, then, one may place the political project of rooting out illegalities, generalizing the punitive function and delimiting, in order to control it, the power to punish. From this there emerge two lines of objectification of crime and of the criminal.
On the one handl the criminal designated as the enemy of all, whom it is in the interest of all to track down, falls outside the pact, disqualifies himself as a citizen and emerges, bearing within him as it were, a wild fragment of nature; he appears as a villain, a monster, a madman, perhaps, a sick and, before long, 'abnormal' individual. It is as such that, one day, he will belong to a scientific objectification and to the 'treatment' that is correlative to it. On the other hand, the need to measure, from within, the effects of the punitive power prescribes tactics of intervention over all eriminals, actual or potential: the organization of a field of prevention, the calculation of interests, the circulation of representations and signs, the constitution of a horizon of certainty and proof, the adjustment of penalties to ever more subtle variables; all this also leads to an objectification of criminals and crimes. In either case, one sees that the power relation that underlies the exercise of punishment beg ins to be duplicated by an object relation in which are caught up not only the crime as a fact to be established according to common norms, ,but the criminal as an individual to be known according to specific criteria. One also sees that this object relation is not superimposed, from the outside, on the punitive practice, as would be a prohibition laid on the fury of the public execution by the limits of the sensibility, or as would be a rational or 'scientific' interrogation as to what this man that one is punishing really is. The processes of objectification originate in the very tactics of power and of the arrangement of its exercise.

However, the two types of objectification that emerge with the project of penal reform are very different from one another: both in their chronology and in their effects. The objectification of the criminal as outside the law, as natural man, is still only a potentiality, a vanishing trace, in which are entangled the themes of political criticism and the figures of the imagination. One will have to wait a long time before homo criminalis becomes a definite object in the field of knowledge. The other, on the contrary, has had much more rapid and decisive effects in so rar as it was linked more directly to the reorganization of the power to punish: codification, definition of offences, the fixing of sceals of penalties, rules of procedure, definition of the role of magistrates. And also because it made use of the discourse already constituted by the Ideologues. 

This discourse provided, in effect, by means of the theory of interests, representations and signs, by the series and geneses that it reconstituted, a sort of general recipe for the exercise of power over men: the 'mind' as a surface of inscription for power, with semiology as its tool; the submission of bodies through the control of ideas; the analysis of representations as a principle in a politics of bodies that was much more effective than the ritual anatomy of torture and execution. [Texas and now the Nation swing/oscillate in this area, but to where ?] The thought of the Ideologues was not only a theory of the individual and society; it developed as a technology of subtle, effective, economic powers, in opposition to the sumptuous expenditure of the power of the sovereign. Let us hear once more what Servan has to say: the ideas of crime and punishment must be strongly linked and 'follow one another without interruption...When you have thus formed the chain of ideas in the heads of your citizens, you will then be able to pride yourselves on guiding them and being their masters. A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chains of their own ideas; it is the stable point of reason that he securs the end of the chain; this link is all the stronger in that we do not know of what it is made and we believe it to be our own work; despair and time eat away the bonds of iron and steel, but they are powerless against the habitual union of ideas, they can only tighten it still more; and on the soft fibres of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires'(Servan, 35). [Get the sense you're being 'played' ?] Yet?

It is this semio-technique of punishments, this 'ideological power' which, partly at least, will remain in suspense and will be superseded by a new political anatomy, in which the body, once again, but in a new form, will be the principal character. [Don't I KNOW!] And this new political anatomy will permit the intersection of the two divergent lines of objectification that are to be seen emerging in the eighteenth century: that which rejects the criminal 'from the other side' - from the side of a nature against nature; and that which seeks to control delinquency by a calculated economy of punishments. A glance at the new art of punishing clearly reveals the supersession of the punitive semio-technique by a new politics of the body.

2. The gentle way in punishment (conclusion from pages l29 thru 131) ...In short, the divergence is the following: punitive city or coercive institution? On the one hand, a functioning of penal power, distributed throughout the social space; present everywhere as scene, spectacle, sign, discourse; legible like an open book; operating by a permanent recodification of the mind of the citizens; eliminating crime by those obstacles placed before the idea of crime:
acting invisibly and uselessly on the 'soft fibres of the brain', as Servan put it. A power to punish that ran the whole length of the social network would act at each of its points, and in the end would no longer be perceived as a power of certain individuals over others, but as an immediate reaction of all in relation to the individual.
On the other hand, a compact functioning of the power to punish: a meticulous assumption of resposibility for the body and the time of the convict, a regulation of his movements and behaviour by a system of authority and knowledge; a concerted orthopaedy applied to convicts in order to reclaim them individually; an autonomous administration of this power that is isolated both from the social body and from the judicial power in the strict sense. The emergence of the prison marks the institutionalization of the power to punish, or, to be more precise: will the power to punish be better served by concealing itself beneath a general social function, in the 'punitive city', or by investing itself in a coercive institution, in the enclosed space of the 'reformatory'? 

In any case, it can be said that, in the late eighteenth century, one is confronted by three ways of organizing the power to punish. The first is the one that was still functioning and which was based on the old monarchical law. The other two both refer to a preventive, utilitarian, corrective conception of a right to punish that belongs to society as a whole; but they are very different from one another at the level of the mechanisms they envisage. Broadly speaking, one might say that, in monarchical law, punishment is a ceremonial of sovereignty; it uses the ritual marks of the vengeance that it applies to the body of the condemned man; and it deploys before the eyes of the spectators an effect of terror as intense as it io discontinuous, irregular and always above its own law, the physical presence of the sovereign and of his power. The reforming jurists, on the other hand, saw punishment as a procedure for requalifying individuals as subjects, as juridical subjects; it uses not marks, but signs, coded sets of representations, which would be given the most rapid circulation and the most general acceptance possible by citizens witnessing the scene of punishment. Lastly, in the project for a prison institution that was then developing, punishment was seen as a technique for the coercion of individuals; it operated methods of training the body - not signs- by the traces it leaves, in the form of habits, in behaviour; and it presupposed the setting up of a specific power for the administration of the penalty. We have, then, the sovereign and his force, the social body and the administrative apparatus; mark, sign, trace;
ceremony, representation, exercise; the vannuished enemy, the judidical subject in the process of requalification, the individual subjected to immediate coercion; the tortured body, the soul with its manipulated representations, the body subjected to training. We have here the three series of elements that characterize the three mechanisms that face one another in the second half of the eighteenth century. They cannot be reduced to theories of law, nor can they be identified with apparatuses or institutions, nor can they be derived from moral choices. They are modalities according to which the power to punish is exercised: three technologies of power.

The problem, then, is the following: how is it that, in the end, it was the third that was adopted? How did the coercive, corporal, solitary, secret model of the power to punish replace the representative, scenic, signifying, public, collective model? Why did the physical exercise of punishment replace, with the prison that is its institutional support, the social play of the signs of punishment and the prolix festival that circulated them?

[ Now in our current situation or space something seems to be missing, could it be the 'social contract' due to the incestuous perversion of our legal system or a void in our constitution and democracy by a seditious swing towards neo-fascism ? Or just the fact that a group of Texas lawyers and inbred-idiots won, stole, inherited or all of the above; the levers, controls and rudder of this great ship of state and have almost run her aground. Let us hope a strong wind will come to help us right this ship and sail her to open water for we have another ship on the horizon sensing we are in peril and with no intention of lending a helping hand.] JDVD

...If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility -without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises -were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. Last sentence from, THE ORDER OF THINGS, by Michel Foucault

JDVD

HAPPY READING!

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