Furthermore, Garland explicates developing relationships between power, knowledge, and the body as the framework of the study. “Although he avoids saying so explicitly, this analytical framework is intended to reveal the irreducible materiality of the history process: a kind of physical substratum upon which all else is based.” (Ibid: 853)
In the next part of the book, by analyzing judicial inquisition and torture, Foucault emphasizes on ritual and descent impact of torture, he mainly attempts to explain the shift between public execution that has a political as well as juridical function to reconstitute injured sovereignty and the ‘humane’ version (1977: 48). There are several reasons, according to Foucault, why the punishment of public execution replaced by a ‘humane’ version. Most difficult part was the imposition of penalty to the guilty (Ibid: 58). Besides, the tendencies to come to transport the condemned man into a hero and to affirm his belated repentance are other reasons; there was a political fear of the effects of the ambiguous rituals on the part of the state (Ibid: 65-67).
- Punishment
In the second half of the eighteen century, the protests and petitions against executions and torture by philosophers, theoreticians of the law increased therefore the physical confrontation between the sovereign and the condemned man must end; a new version of punishment was needed, however, the aim must not be the revenge (Ibid: 74).
Penal reform, for Foucault, was born at the point of convergence between struggle against the super-power of the sovereign and that against the power of acquired and tolerated illegality (Ibid: 87). The struggle to delimit the power to punish was based on the need to control popular illegality, and, predominantly, the popular and tolerated illegality was intended to be limited. Even if reform began to attack illegality, it was not attacking to monarchy to which illegality also was linked.
Afterwards, the problem of measure for punishment occurred. The reformers of eighteen century, according to Foucault, found the idea that ‘humanity’ was the measure of punishment to restrain the power in case it became dangerous, but there were no proper definition or explanation. This is what Foucault cynically explains reform in eighteen century. In addition to reform, he assesses punishment as a way which shows the public the right way to follow, a sign that obstacles what they are able to do (Ibid).
- Discipline
Discipline, for Foucault, is an art of the human body (Ibid: 137). Now, the body is not subject to torture but is controlled and disciplined by various technologies and, somehow, now docility is obtained by the actions of disciple. From a wider perspective; individual movements, gestures, and capacities of the body were subject to power rather then the body as a whole; the objective became the economy, efficiency, and internal organization of movements; and the exercise of power was to be constant and regular so as to effect an uninterrupted supervision of the process of activity.”, this what made the human body, its elements and behaviour subject to a political anatomy of detail, to discipline (Smart, 1985: 85).
Foucault’s examples for discipline include arts of distributing individuals, controlling activity, modulating time, and economizing the individual as “an element in a machine” and the result is the creation of an individuality that is “cellular”, “organic”, “genetic”, and “combinatory” by the respective operations of drawing up tables, prescribing movements, imposing exercises, and arranging “tactics” (1977: 141-169).
Furthermore, Foucault, confidently, explains the success of disciplinary power through hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement, and their combination in a procedure, the examination (Ibid: 170). The concept of hierarchical observation signifies the connection between power and visibility through a gaze over subjugated bodies; normalizing judgement is associated with normalizing and inducing conformity, not to expiate or repress non-conformity by punishing (Smart, 1985); the examination refers to effectively combine the former two into a comprehensive system that renders individuals as both intelligible and susceptible to judgment (Milstein, 2001).
Bentham’s “Panopticon”, for Foucault represents the way in which discipline and punishment works. For Garland, the “Panopticon” is the very epitome of power-knowledge principles; it is an architectural form, is designed as a circular building with individual cells around its perimeter whose windows and lighting were planned in order to make their occupants clearly visible, is also designed to render individuals constantly subject to the knowledge and power of the central authorities. It is a machine that sustains a power relation (1986). Similarly, Milstein argues that Foucault offers us the Panopticon as a technique that economizes the investment of power-knowledge relations on the body. Moreover, while the Panopticon is no doubt the most famous of Foucault's metaphors for power in modern societies, however it would not be true to assume that Foucault intended the Panopticon or the prison to be a metaphor for society as a whole (Milstein, 2001).
“In place of exceptional power of the scaffold, we have the constant surveillance of the prison” Driver notes as Foucault’s thought. Besides, Foucault argues that the simple efficiency and obvious equity of the Panopticon enables its spread throughout the society (Driver, 1992: 149). In addition to Driver, Geertz description “Panopticon” as “cruel, ingenious cage” which is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form, a figure of political technology. In his study, it is also worth to saying that whereas the classical age never quite managed to build it, the modern age has very nearly done so with a different conception of what criminality is (1992).
According to Garland, “generalized panopticism” which refers to the imitation of disciplinary principles in society’s major institutions is not precisely detailed in Foucault’s text, yet, sometimes the claim is relatively modest. He also adds that at other times an exaggerated rhetoric comes into prominence and he describes modern society as “the disciplinary society”, “society of surveillance” in the panoptic machine (Garland, 1986).
Cohen has also criticized Foucault’s study; he states in his work that “A construction like this was not just an isolated human menagerie, laboratory, or forcing ground for behavioural change, rather, panopticism emerges as a new modality of control throughout society.” According to him, what Foucault claims is, the reform of prisoners, the instruction of schoolchildren, the confinement of the insane, and the supervision of workers all become ‘projects of docility’ related to the new political and economic order. (1978: 567)
This technique of power-knowledge was also initially cultivated within isolated institutions, but then was gradually adapted into techniques that could be applied in various other contexts. Foucault called this widening scope of application the “swarming” of disciplinary mechanisms (Rouse: 100). In contrary with Foucault’s thought in ‘Discipline and Punish’, Smart declares that Foucault’s conception of the disciplinary society is open to a degree of misunderstanding because of the term ‘disciplined’ societies. This is probably because, for Smart, there have been too much emphasises on techniques of domination in Foucault’s studies of asylums and prisons (1985).
He is not the only one criticizes Foucault ‘disciplinary society’ in that way, but Shelley. While Foucault writes "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?", despite the logical consistency of his arguments, he overstates the disciplinary role of the prison in modern society. She supports her idea with the sentences of “Prisons control only a small uninfluential sector of the population; therefore, it is hard to accept a central thesis of Discipline and Punish that the prison provides the model for all other institutions of the disciplinary society” (Shelley, 1979). Similarly, Simon states that the influence of Discipline and Punish has been surprisingly thin from the point of view that the theory of power which makes the society disciplinary has not been elaborated or applied (1996). Controversially, Hunter handles what Foucault says as a way in which the existing school system must be reconsidered; “His work provides to reopen the question of whether the school is in fact an apparatus for social domination of subjectivity... it also misses a chance that Foucault’s work holds out to educational themselves, namely, to reconsider their own ethical and political relation to the actually existing school system” (Hunter, 1996: 144).
- Prison
In the last section Foucault begins with a complex explanation of the rise and fall of the prison that is related to his own experience of prison reform. He does not see the modern prison as prison at all, but a penitentiary that combines the different functions of a workshop, in which prisoners engage with the world of production and a hospital where medical observation operates. The reason is not only to increase the efficiency of power, but also economic reasons were incentive (Foucault, 1977). In addition to analyzing and judging the inmate, the penitentiary adds to the punitive mechanism that requisite "knowledge of the individual" for determining his motivation, his drive, his criminal nature (Milstein, 2001). This is when the convicted offender becomes delinquent by the help of penitentiary. The delinquent, for Foucault, is distinguishable from the offender by the fact that he is to be characterized not by his offense, for which he was sentenced by the courts; yet, his life becomes the target of the penitentiary mechanism (1977: 251). He is also defined as "abnormal", and examined and controlled by the mechanisms that Foucault describes.
The final sections of book return to historical narrative and trace the actual position of prisons with the network of social control. Even if Garland says that these parts of Discipline and Punish are not satisfactory, he brings a main theme out that the prison has always been a failure in penological terms but it successfully achieves important political effects at a wider social level. There are two reasons which Foucault suggests for the existence of prison so far; the first is that the prison is “deeply rooted” (1977: 271), the second is that the prison carries out “certain very precise functions” (Garland, 1986: 863).
In the closing part of the book, Foucault uses, according to Garland, the phrase “Carceral archipelago” to describe the chain of institutions that stretches out from the prison (1986). The diffusion of disciplinary technologies and methods and the formation of a carceral network (a normalizing power) cover the whole social body. (Smart, 1985). The idea of this carceral continuum is used not just to describe the relations of one institution to another, but also to suggest the similarities that exist between societies (Garland, 1986). Foucault's argument for the carceral system is that it contains both the failure and reform of the prison and failure is an essential part of the working of the prison (1977).
- Critique and Conclusion
In his analysis, Foucault uses French literature and the foreign material cited consists almost entirely of the penological and legal arguments of Thorsten Sellin and Sir Leon Radzinowicz, thus, according to Shelly, he ignores the sociological and historical studies of David Rothman and Erving Goffman. In addition Foucault's work is not equally convincing on all analytical levels, it transcends traditional academic boundaries to provide a provocative examination of the relationship between prison and the mechanisms of social control in contemporary society (Shelly, 1979).
In terms of what Foucault thinks about structure of discipline, for Clary, he fails to realize the tremendous power of freewill/choice, his entire pessimistic structure of discipline decays. Clary also adds that Foucault does not take into account the free choice of a prisoner to challenge the mechanisms of the prison system. (2005)
In respect of modern penal practice and normalizing methods, according to Garland, in order to reinforce his approach to characterization of modern penal system Foucault uses no extensive or quantitative evidence. Furthermore, he insists on that since the beginning of the Carceral era, namely, for nearly 200 years, disciplinary characterization of modern penal system have been in place, however, “the spread of these normalizing methods only really took off in the early 20th century and that even now they have not yet succeeded in displacing other nondisciplinary sanctions from the central position in penal practice” (Garland, 1986).
For Simon, even if Foucault’s points were not wholly original, since Nietzsche had described the history of punishment long ago as a central place for creating obedient people, Discipline and Punish recast all the themes, mentioned about, amid brilliantly interpreted examples (1996). Popen, like Simon, states that Foucault follows the study of Nietzsche with Discipline and Punish; “The book announces a Nietzschean tropism in Foucault's thought and represents the transformation of the archaeological project into a "genealogical" enterprise” (1978).
Bibliography
Books:
Driver, Felix (1992), Geography and Power: The work of Michel Foucault, pp: 147-156, in Burke, Peter (ed.) (1992) Critical Thought Series 2: Critical Essays on Michel Foucault, Hants: Scolar Press
Foucault, Michel (1977), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison translated by Alan Sheridan, London: Penguin
Geertz, Clifford (1992), Stir Crazy, pp: 139-46, in Burke, Peter (ed.) (1992) Critical Thought Series 2: Critical Essays on Michel Foucault, Hants: Scolar Press
Hunter, Ian (1996), Assembling the School, pp: 143-167, in Barry, A., Osborne, T., and Rose, N. (Eds) (1996) Foucault and Political Reason, London: University College of London (UCL) Press
Rouse, Joseph (2006), Power/Knowledge, pp: 95-122in Gutting Garry (ed.) (2005), Cambridge Companion to Foucault, New York: Cambridge University Press, Second edition, 2006
Smart, Barry (1985), Key Sociologists: Michel Foucault, London: Routledge
Journals:
Cohen, Stanley (1978), Review: The Archaeology of Power, Reviewed work: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 7, No. 5 (Sep., 1978), pp. 566-568, American Sociological Association
Garland, David (1986) Review: Foucault's "Discipline and Punish"-An Exposition and Critique, American Bar Foundation Research Journal, Vol. 11, No. 4 (autumn, 1986), pp. 847- 880, Blackwell
Popen, Sharalyn (1978), Review: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. The School Review, Vol. 86, No. 4 (Aug., 1978), pp. 686-690, The University of Chicago Press
Shelley, Louise I. (1979) Reviewed work: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 84, No. 6 (May, 1979), pp. 1508-1510 Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Simon, Jonathan (1996), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Middle-Range Research Strategy, Reviewed work: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 25, No. 3 (May, 1996), pp. 316-319, American Sociological Association
Websites
Clary, Joshua R. (2005), A Critique of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Available: http://www.harding.edu/alphachi/pdf/onlinepublishes/2005/clary.pdf. Last accessed 23/03/09
Milstein, Brian (2001), On Reading Discipline and Punish, Available: http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/readingdp.html. Last accessed 23/03/09
