Conclusions

In spite of the fact that Foucault strived as much as possible to compete with his contemporary Sartre, he did not provide an ideal political order under which the prison system acquires a different form from hitherto known forms. It is not by chance that Foucault did not offer an alternative to the modern penal system or the modern panoptic society at large. This is because Foucault, unlike Plato, Aristotle, Marx or even Sartre does not have a clear cut philosophical/political system. Nonetheless, his contribution is immense to the social sciences at large and to structuralism in particular, he provided proper tools of analysis to investigate the status quo as is, with no decorative setup. His point is strong in that he conducted a practical test in the very structure of knowledge. Although Foucault was enriched with the whole concept of Enlightenment, he grasped a variety of Kantian concepts and employed them, and considered himself to derive from the Kantian school of thought. What Foucault did in his epistemology was a build on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

If one is to evaluate Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, one cannot but take into consideration the formative trends that shaped his political thinking then. With the publication of this book, Foucault had already abandoned his communist inclination. Two major formative parameters shaped Discipline and Punish. First and foremost the aforementioned May 1968 events in Paris, in which university students attempted revolutionizing the educational system. The second factor is his involvement in the Maoist Gauche Proletarienne (GP), and founding in particular the Prison Information Group, which was meant to vocalize the prisoners’ plight.

It is quite a daring step on behalf of Foucault to venture into the whole concept of prison. Not only does he trace its history but also comments on its psychological ins and outs. In his dense and documented Discipline and Punish, he approaches reality with a photographic eye describing and assessing the very details of the modern penal system. If he does not offer a reformative and adequate solution to the prison, he at least unveils the terrain of the human fate within iron bars. His method is quite instructive in the sense that it shows reality as is, but with a shrewd insight one arrives at a crystal clear critique of the prison itself.

Reference:

Danaher, G. (2000).Understanding Foucault. New York:Allen & Unwin.

Micro-Powers and Foucault

Instead of analyzing cultures as totalities, Foucault views different cultures as discontinuities, eras that follow one another, but do not cause each other. This is his notion of the episteme, or ‘the underlying set of rules governing the production of discourses in any single period, may be seen as an attempt to reconcile change with the notion of a cultural totality.’ Taking into account Foucault’s analysis of discourse, power, and knowledge, it justifies Foucault’s denunciation of revolutionary or utopian attempts of change. He saw it necessary to create a break in the pre-conceived notions of power, which were much influenced by the ideas of Marx and Sartre, particularly in France.

Foucault did not view power as something that could be possessed, or as something seized by a ‘class’ as aforementioned. For Foucault, power took place between individuals and between groups and individuals. As Sheridan further elaborates, ‘There are many forms of power as there are types of relationships. Every group and every individual exercises power and is subjected to it.’ Therefore, Foucault rejected the idea that power can only be associated with the state and the coercive apparatuses of the state. To be taken into consideration are indeed the agencies of the state, but along with all other micro-powers existent in all types of relationships such as ones in families, schools, factories, ect.

Reference:

Michel F. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Book.

The Panopticon

The concept of the panoptic gaze came into being during the industrial revolution partly because the factories necessitated a workforce. This workforce had to receive physical check-ups, had to be made flexible, and had to be trained in a specific manner required for factory work, all under the watchful, panoptic gaze. Training, in general began to take on a new dimension; it no longer consisted of finding the right people who just happen to suit the right criteria, but instead it focused on recruiting ordinary people, training and orienting them to fit the necessary criteria. The military, for example, underwent this new approach in the modern era. While pre-modern military would look for men, initially strong, physically fit, and courageous, modern military did not necessarily recruit men who looked like ‘typical’ soldiers to begin with. Rather, the focus was shifted from men actually looking like soldiers, to actually behaving like ones. For this reason, a meticulous and especially magnified type of training was required. Hard and particular training was required, because those who did not conform to the ideal of how a soldier should behave were punished.

References:

Lowman, J. (1987) Transcarceration: Essays in the Sociology of Social Control . Cambridge: Avebury.

Michel F. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Book.

Google Images, (2009). Retrieved July 9, 2009, from Google Image Search Web site: http://images.google.com.lb/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi

Foucault: Hierarchy and "Normalizing Judgement"

Hierarchy and ‘the normalizing judgment’ are essential parts of systems of discipline. The authoritative gaze or the hierarchal gaze becomes necessary to ensure that individuals are conforming to the ideal of how a soldier, a pupil, a prisoner or a factory worker should behave. The architecture of the Enlightenment, more specifically of schools, asylums, and prisons was one that allowed authorized surveillance. The architecture of that era was not only for aesthetical purposes, namely to look appealing to the observer from the outside, but the architecture also had to allow a type of observation to take place inside the buildings. Architecture was designed to allow internal observation that is to create a type of hierarchal observation. The ‘normalizing judgment’ on the other hand, involves establishing a standard norm that individuals must measure up to a certain level, and those unable to reach the set level are deemed as ‘abnormal’. The normalizing judgment on the basis of how they act, in relation to their location, and in relation to other people. Therefore, children in school are expected to behave in a certain manner, as are workers in a factory, and soldiers in a military. The ‘normalizing judgment’ allows for control to take place, as it required that individuals within institutions be scrutinized and monitored.

References:

Lowman, J. (1987) Transcarceration: Essays in the Sociology of Social Control . Cambridge: Avebury.

Morris, M. (2006) Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy. Sydney : MacArthur Press.

The Prison Is A Microcosm

The prison, with its timetable and daily routine activities for delinquents, reflects in many ways the outside world. Not only are prisoners separated from one another in different cells, but they are also expected to labor. Their bodies are expected to “perform menial tasks”, and there exists a division of labor in the prison just as there would be in any other institution, in addition to “its own experts, hierarchies, ranks and network, and its own codes of conduct, protocols and procedures.” (Danaher, 2000) In many ways, the prison functions as a model of the of the outside modern world, where the individual is scrutinized, checked, and counted to the extent that even the possibility of being watched and monitored makes one subject to control.

References:

Danaher, G. (2000).Understanding Foucault. New York:Allen & Unwin.

Google Images, (2009). Retrieved July 9, 2009, from Google Image Search Web site: http://images.google.com.lb/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi

Power Is Not Classes

Power, in the Foucaultian sense, is not only in the hands of the dominant class; in fact it is best to not even use the word “class” when talking about Foucault’s idea of power. For him, “micro-powers’ are in fact “infinitely complex system of power relations that permeate every aspect of social life.” (Sheridan, 1980) Differing from Marx’s theory of class struggle, Foucault explains the change in penal system procedures as a change that logistically aligned with the new type of industrializing and colonizing system that was beginning to replace the feudal power. These new industrializing systems needed to deal with delinquent acts, and thus gave rise to the network of micro-powers.

Reference:

Sheridan, A. (1990) Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth. London: Routledge.

Foucault on Institutions

While Foucault does not deny that the abolishment of torture is itself an achievement, he, however, develops a more critical thesis of societies that are not only maintained by coercive apparatuses of the state such as the army or the police “but precisely those techniques of dressage, discipline, and diffused power at work in ‘carceral’ institutions.”(Sheridan, 1980) In other words, there is no real need to torture the body since controlling the mind had become a more effective alternative. Consequently, the new system of punishment produced different experts on the behavior sciences, “small scale legal systems and parallel judges have multiplied around the principal judgment: psychiatric and psychological experts, magistrates concerned with implementation of sentences, educationalists, members of the prison service, all fragment the legal power to punish.”(Foucault, 1977) As Foucault explains, within the modern penal system, there exists the participation of “extra-judicial” elements that are in fact not there to be integrated into the “actual power to punish” but “in order to exculpate the judge from being purely and simply he who punishes.” So in this sense, the penal system justifies its decisions by referring to the extra-judicial elements that serve as legal systems’ sources of knowledge, and knowledge thus becomes a source of power.

References:

Michel F. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Book.
Sheridan, A. (1990) Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth. London: Routledge