In Discipline and Punish [Foucault] is back asserting some by now familiar Foucaultisms. "Man" as an individualistic, psychological entity is an invention, and not a very good one, of the last two hundred years ("A meticulous observation of detail … a political awareness of these small things, for the control of men…. From such trifles, no doubt, the man of modern humanism is born"). Institutions, for all their rationalism, create what they pretend to perceive ("We must cease … to describe the effects of power in negative terms…. Power produces … domains of objects and rituals of truth"). And, most centrally, the modern, ritualized institutions of order are hazardous to your health ("At the heart of all disciplinary institutions functions a small penal mechanism"). But this time around the assertions sound, if anything, more ringingly convincing than before. Because this time he is writing about the most outside of outsiders, the most publicly reviled of exiles from the norm, the prisoner.
In fact, the birth of the prisoner, not the birth of the prison, is Foucault's real subject, and that is an important difference. Rather than deal primarily in the hard, statistical data of the rise and diffusion of penal institutions, Foucault here as usually relies on the ideas of institutions as articulated by the reformers, philosophes, and early liberals. Especially important for his argument is Jeremy Bentham's plan for a Panopticon, an unchained institution of perfect, and perfectly horrifying, surveillance…. Panopticism, for Foucault, is a cardinal moment. After an initial, economically motivated revulsion against public torture and execution …, the reformers first envision a "punitive city," an ideal(!) community where punishment will be constantly threatened, but reduced, meted out in a calculus of guilt to the measure of the crime that calls it forth. Bentham's plan, though, signals the abandonment of this utopia for a better repressive machine, the idea of the delinquent. The delinquent is not just an offender, but a psychic deformity from the social norm; he must be put away for private punishment, an example to us all, where society, become a massive police force, can claim with crocodile disingenuousness to be attempting his "reform." 1984, in other words, begins sometime around 1784.
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