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Foucault's Discipline and Punish An Exposition and Critique

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

David Garland
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Review Essay
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American Bar Foundation Research Journal , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , Fall 1986 , pp. 847 - 880
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Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1986 

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References

1 Foucault, M., Madness and Civilisation. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Random House, 1965); id., The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (London: Tavistock, 1973); id., The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970); id. The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972); id., The History of Sexuality, Vol.1, An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1978); Vol.2, The Uses of Pleasure (New York: Viking Press, 1986).Google Scholar

2 Foucault is not a structuralist in the sense of one who strictly follows the methodological rules of structuralist analysis (as set out, for example, in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure or Claude Levi-Strauss). He is, however, concerned to identify the structures that define the shape and limits of discourses and of institutional practices.Google Scholar

3 The concept of normalization refers to that form of regulation which works by setting standards or norms for proper conduct and correcting deviations from the norm. In its positive, correctional orientation it is rather different from the simple prohibition and punishment of misconduct. See the discussion later in the present essay.Google Scholar

4 The term “anatomy” is central to Foucault's work. It indicates his concern to identify the forms or structures that characterize his objects of study-a project that is morphological rather than strictly explanatory.Google Scholar

5 Foucault uses the term “the classical age” to refer to what other historians might call the early modern period, i.e., the late 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries. He develops this periodization particularly in The Order of Things, supra note 1, where he traces out “the classical episteme,” i.e., the structures of knowledge and discourse of the classical period.Google Scholar

6 Foucault uses “genealogy” in the Nietzschean sense to describe his method of writing a “history of the present.” The point of his history is to cast light on a contemporary issue or institution by investigating those historical conditions that brought it about. It shares this orientation towards the present with what are often (disparagingly) called “Whig” histories, but where they seek to celebrate contemporary achievements by depicting them as the “end” of history, Foucault's genealogy uses history to problematize and destabilize the present.Google Scholar

7 Much of Foucault's work is concerned to analyze the human sciences (or “the sciences of man”) and their effects on modern forms of government and regulation. The Order of Things, supra note 1, develops an analysis of the discursive conditions on which the human sciences depend. Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Vol.1, supra note 1, describe the role of the human sciences in disciplinary and social policy practices.Google Scholar

8 See Nietzsche, F., The Genealogy of Morals (New York: Vintage, 1969); G. Deleuze & F. Guat-tari, Anti-Oedipus (New York: Viking Press, 1977).Google Scholar

9 Foucault uses the notion of “the soul” to refer to what psychologists variously term the psyche, the self, subjectivity, consciousness, or the personality. He appears to use it for its metaphoric resonance-” the soul is the prison of the body” (at 30)-but also to avoid using a more theoretical term of art that might seem to commit him to a particular psychology of one kind or another. For Foucault it is the soul that is “the seat of the habits” and so is the target of disciplinary techniques.Google Scholar

10 The concept of “strategy” is important in Foucault's later work. He stresses that it is not to be understood as the game plan of any particular strategist. Rather it is a term that refers to a discernible pattern of institutional practices or political actions. These practices or actions are structured and to some extent calculated, but they are not necessarily coordinated by any single decision maker or agency.Google Scholar

11 “Supplice” is the French term-retained in the English translation-that refers specifically to the public torture and execution of criminals.Google Scholar

12 For a fuller account of the legal use of torture in the Europe of the Ancien Régime, see John Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).Google Scholar

13 Foucault's analysis of 18th-century criminal justice draws explicitly on the French histori-ographical work of P. Chaunu and E. Le Roy-Ladurie, but it is also striking how closely it parallels the arguments of D. Hay et al., Albion's Fatal Tree (London: Allen Lane, 1975), and E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters (London: Allen Lane, 1975). Foucault's interpretation of the political meaning of public executions is also similar to that set out in E. Durkheim, Deux lois de l'evolution penale, Année sociologique IV, 1899–1900 (translated as Two Laws of Penal Evolution in S. Lukes & A. Scull eds., Durkheim, and the Law (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983)).Google Scholar

14 Rothman, D., The Discovery of the Asylum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); and Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980). M. Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (New York: Pantheon, 1978). For a discussion of how these “revisionist” texts revised the orthodoxies of penal history, see the essay by D. Philips in S. Cohen & A. Scull eds., Social Control and the State (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983).Google Scholar

15 Here Foucault's argument closely parallels Marx's famous distinction between “the two spheres” of capitalist society-the sphere of consumption or exchange, which is the realm of freedom and equality, contrasted with the sphere of production where despotism and exploitation are the order of the day. See on this B. Fine et al., Capitalism and the Rule of Law (London: Hutchison, 1979).Google Scholar

16 Perhaps a contemporary example of the unintended consequences of the prison being used in just this way would be the “Scared Straight” juvenile program developed in New Jersey in the early 1980s. This used the facts of intraprisoner violence, rape, and brutality to try to deter young offenders from becoming involved in crimes that might lead to imprisonment-and thus put them at the mercy of those (illegal but officially acknowledged) abuses.Google Scholar

17 The term “norm” is used here to mean a standard of conduct specified and policed by a formal agency (such as a school, health authorities, social work agencies, etc.) rather than simply a cultural or moral norm. Cf. note 3 above.Google Scholar

18 The following studies take up and apply Foucault's ideas in this respect: J. Donzelot, The Policing of Families (London: Hutchison, 1980); D. Garland, Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (Aldershot: Gower, 1985); F. Castel et al., The Psychiatric Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); P. Miller & N. Rose, eds., The Power of Psychiatry (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986); J. Minson, The Genealogy of Morals (London: Macmillan, 1985). See also the journal Ideology and Consciousness.Google Scholar

19 See F. Guattari & G. Deleuze, supra note 8; B. S. Turner, Body and Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985). See also the feminist journal m/f. Google Scholar

20 Cohen, Stanley, Visions of Social Control, at 10 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985).Google Scholar

21 See the works cited in supra note 18 and the essays collected in D. Garland & P. Young, eds., The Power to Punish (London: Heinemann, 1983); S. Cohen & A. Scull, supra note 14; and B. Fine et al., supra note 15.Google Scholar

22 For critiques of treatment and rehabilitation, see American Friends Service Committee, Struggle for Justice (Philadelphia: Hill & Wang, 1971); N. Kittrie, The Right To Be Different (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972); and F. Allen, The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981). On the critique of positivist, correctionalist criminology, see I. Taylor et al., The New Criminology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).Google Scholar

23 See Foucault, M., On Attica, 19 Telos, (Spring 1974).Google Scholar

24 See Durkheim, E., The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1964); Two Laws of Penal Evolution in S. Lukes & A. Scull, supra note 13; and G. Rusche & O. Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968).Google Scholar

25 The arguments of Discipline and Punish are not presented as complementary to others, and no attempt is made to link its theses into the penological literature and historical studies already in existence. On page 25 Foucault says, “It is certainly legitimate to write a history of punishment against the background of moral ideas or legal structures” but the rhetorical force of the rest of the book tends to undercut this.Google Scholar

26 See, e.g., S. Cohen, Visions of Social Control (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985); D. Garland, Punishment and Welfare, supra note 18; T. Mathiesen, The Future of Control Systems in D. Garland & P. Young, supra note 21; P. Carlen, Women's Imprisonment: A Study in Social Control (London: Rout-ledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).Google Scholar

27 For sociologists influenced by Discipline and Punish see supra note 26. For historians, see M. Perrot, ed., L'Impossible Prison (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980); G. Wright, Between the Guillotine and Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); P. O'Brien, The Promise of Punishment: Prisons in Nineteenth Century France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982); P. Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

28 Spierenburg, P., supra note 27.Google Scholar

29 Spierenburg is here relying upon the general theses developed by Norbert Elias in his classic work, The Civilising Process: Vol.1, The History of Manners (New York: Urizen, 1978) and Vol.2, State Formation and Civilisation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982). For a discussion of Spierenburg's argument and its relation to other interpretations, including Foucault's, see D. Garland, The Punitive Mentality: Its Sociohistorical Development and Decline, 10 Contemp. Crises (1987).Google Scholar

30 Beattie, John M., Crime and Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

31 Langbein, J., supra note 12. Langbein argues that judicial torture could be abolished in the 18th century because prior changes in the law of proof had rendered it unnecessary. It was the growing authority of the legal profession within increasingly stabilized nation states-and the availability of new punishments other than blood sanctions-which made it possible from the 17th century onwards for jurists to develop a new system involving the judicial evaluation of evidence, and to gradually replace the old Roman-canon law of statutory proofs.Google Scholar

32 Brown, Robert, The Idea of Imprisonment, Times Literary Supp., 16 June 1978.Google Scholar

33 Spierenburg, P., supra note 27, at 108.Google Scholar

34 See Rothman, D., The Discovery of the Asylum, and Conscience and Convenience, both in note 14 supra, and also M. Ignatieff, supra note 14, and his State, Civil Society and Total Institutions: A Critique of Recent Social Histories of Punishment in S. Cohen & A. Scull, supra note 14.Google Scholar

35 Spierenburg, P., supra note 27, at 184.Google Scholar

36 Patton, Paul, Of Power and Prisons, in M. Morris and P. Patton, eds., Michel Foucault, Power, Truth, Strategy (Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979).Google Scholar

37 Brown, R., supra note 32, makes a related point when he points out that in the 19th century societies with widely different traditions, levels of industrialization, and kinds of political system all adopted the prison, a fact that casts doubt upon the generalizability of the specific links between the prison and class domination which Foucault identifies in 19th-century France.Google Scholar

38 See Garland, D., supra note 18, and A. E. Bottoms, Neglected Features of Contemporary Penal Systems in D. Garland & P. Young, supra note 21.Google Scholar

39 Geertz, Clifford, Stir Crazy, N.Y. Rev. Books, 26 Jan. 1978.Google Scholar

40 Bentham, J., An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1823).Google Scholar

41 See Walters, Richard H. et al., eds., Punishment (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), for a discussion of the psychological evidence.Google Scholar

42 On deterrence see the review of research by D. Beyleveld, A Bibliography on General Deterrence Research (Westmead: Saxon House, 1980).Google Scholar

43 See Durkheim, E., Two Laws of Penal Evolution, supra note 24. On the ambivalent place of vengeance in contemporary culture, see S. Jacoby, Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge (New York: Harper & Row, 1983).Google Scholar

44 The phrase is from C. Geertz, supra note 39.Google Scholar

45 Weber, M., The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism at 181 (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1985 reprint).Google Scholar

46 For a discussion of this point, see Lawrence Stone, Madness, N.Y. Rev. Books, 16 Dec. 1982, and An Exchange with Michel Foucault, N.Y. Rev. Books, 31 Mar. 1983.Google Scholar

47 In The History of Sexuality, Vol.1, supra note 1, the study which followed Discipline and Punish, Foucault turns his attention to the way in which social discourses and practices work to bring about the “subjectification” of individuals, i.e., to create them as persons with a particular kind of subjectivity. Although some of Discipline and Punish's arguments allude to this process, Discipline and Punish is more explicitly concerned with what might be termed the “objectification” of individuals. See Gordon, Colin, The Birth of the Subject, in Radical Philosophy, No. 17 (Summer 1977). This later work also develops an important conception Foucault terms “bio-politics.” This refers to those strategies of government that concern themselves with the life, health, efficiency, and security of whole populations. Bio-political regulation is seen as a form of regulation that accompanies and complements the individually oriented “disciplines.”Google Scholar

48 Foucault, M., Questions of Method: An Interview, Ideology and Consciousness, No.8, Spring 1981, at 13.Google Scholar