The same point concerning the importance of space to the exercise of power can be made for the discipl inary project. Since its publication in 1975, Discipline and Punish has been read as a historical investigation of the prison, especially within French history.33The book begins by contrasting the explosive torture of the regicide Damiens with the regime of the House of young prisoners – ‘a public execution [ un supplice] and a time-table’ (SP 14; DP 7). 34But much of the book is not about the punishment of criminals. Indeed, the majority of the text does not speak of the prison, but the standard reading of it certainly emphasizes those parts that do. Just as Colin Gordon has argued that Histoire de la folie is often reduced to ‘three or four striking tableaux’,
35
we could argue that the same is done to Discipline and Punish – the torture of Damiens and the House of young prisoners, the Panopticon, and the Carceral Archipelago.
As the following reading makes clear, the research presented in Discipline
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and Punish is part of a much wider project – one that occupied Foucault for much of his life. This is a research project that picks up on themes initially explored in Histoire de la folie , is developed in The Birth of the Clinic and dominates the research of the 1970s. This project is what I will call the policing of society. The concept of police is one to which Foucault returns again and again in his major works. However, the comments in these works are frequently made in passing and it is not always clear in what way he is using the concept.
Support for his use of the concept has to be gleaned from remarks in lectures, essays and conference papers, as well as from the wider discussion of the term in Europe in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
Foucault suggests that, from the beginning of the seventeenth century, there appeared a number of treatises concerning the government of territory. At their core these texts argued that for a state to be well organized it should extend over its entire territory a system of policing as tight and efficient as that found in cities. By police it is clear that Foucault means more than a uniformed force for the prevention and detection of crime. Rather, the concept is one which is concerned with a far more general set of regulations embodying a type of rationality to ensure good government.36This meant that the term extended far beyond the juridical: it was involved in education, welfare, assuring urban supplies and the correct standards necessary for handicrafts and commerce, the pricing of daily necessities, maintaining hygiene and health, fostering good working relations, and extended to the ways in which the city should be provided with street lighting, bridges, adornment and splendour. The police would therefore oversee a range of activities – religion, morality, health, supplies, roads, highways and town buildings, public safety, the liberal arts, trade, factories, manservants and factory workers, and the poor (DE IV, 272–4; FR 241–2; DE IV, 153–60; PPC 77–83). 37‘Police is the ensemble of mechanisms serving to ensure order, the properly channelled growth of wealth and the conditions of preservation of health “in general” ’ (DE III, 17; FR 277).
When Foucault discusses Louis Turquet de Mayenne’s La Monarchie aristo-de´mocratique (1611) he notes that there are four boards of police – two concerned with people in the positive and negative aspects of life, and two concerned with things, the first looking at commodities and manufactured goods and the second overseeing space and territory: private property, manorial rights, roads, rivers and public buildings (DE IV, 154–5; PPC 77–8). Similarly the discussion of von Justi’s manual Elements of Police notes that it begins with a study of territory (DE IV, 158–9; PPC 81–2). Foucault notes that this theme is frequently referred to in texts of this period: ‘architecture and urbanism occupy a place of considerable importance’. This is a development from works of the sixteenth century (DE IV, 270–1; FR 239–40). Foucault is interested
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in cameralism and Polizeiwissenschaft because of this notion of police, which, because it is concerned in very general ways with principles of order, security and discipline, can be used to understand the notion of power. What is of interest here is how the understanding of the control of space is central to police. Such a theme is developed in many of Foucault’s studies of this time, and understanding how the themes of police and space interlink sheds light on Foucault’s conception of power, which he suggests has space as a central component.
In tandem with this it is worth discussing the subtitle of the book: the birth of the prison. Discipline and Punish is clearly about issues concerned with the penal, but also about something much wider. Early in the book Foucault makes it clear that his project is to write the ‘history of the modern soul’ (SP 30; DP 23), and a few pages later he is even more explicit: ‘The history of this
“micro-physics” of punitive power would then be a genealogy or an element in a genealogy of the modern “soul”’ (SP 38; DP 29). Foucault then suggests that the ‘soul is the prison of the body’, and that he ‘would like to write the history of this prison, with all the political investments of the body that it gathers in its closed architecture’ (SP 38–9; DP 30–1; emphasis added). This prison, not the prison. The shift from the definite article to the particular appears to have been lost on most commentators. Quite clearly Foucault is explaining that the birth of the prison is about the birth of the soul .38
Recasting Discipline and Punish within this wider context opens up a number of themes for discussion. First, the most viable model for the disciplined society is not the prison, but the army. Second, shifting the emphasis away from the prison allows us to better understand Foucault’s remarks about schools, monasteries, hospitals and factories. These too are instruments in the birth of the modern soul and in the policing of society. Third, if the soul is the prison of the body, and the body is not simply understood in the singular but as the social body, we gain insights into Foucault’s remarks about the control of the population – bodies in plural . Fourth, we can note in passing how Foucault sees the links between the human, the human sciences and the notion of the subject – an analysis that builds on the work of The Order of Things and is developed in The History of Sexuality . Fifth, implicit in the preceding, and important for the overall emphasis of this book, we can be attentive to questions of space in the disciplined society without solely restricting ourselves to the Panopticon.
It is this last issue with which this reading most seriously wishes to take issue. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon is treated in a striking passage, and Foucault did help in its rediscovery, but it takes up only a few pages of the text. Many have taken it not only as the most apposite example of the new method of surveillance-led control, but also as the model for many of the
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others. If Madness and Civilisation has been reduced to three or four tableaux, Discipline and Punish is often simplified to just one. Pasquale Pasquino suggests this to Foucault in a 1978 interview with him. Foucault replies:
In reference to the reduction of my analyses to that simplistic figure which is the metaphor of the Panopticon . . . let us compare what they attribute to me with what I have said; and here it is easy to show that the analyses of power which I have made cannot at all be reduced to this figure . . . (DE III, 628; FL 257)
Instead of a reading which pays due attention to the place the Panopticon plays within the overall argument, all too often the world Foucault describes is seen through Bentham’s eyes.39There is much more than that here.
A TORTUROUS SEDIMENT
Before I look at the wider genealogy it is worth re-reading Discipline and Punish with attention to the question of punishment. This is because noting the basic error that is made in many readings helps to contextualize the other research.
Foucault’s understanding of supplice is both judicial and political – it is one of a number of rituals by which power is manifested (SP 58–9; DP 47–8). Its manifestation of military might is important in its role as public spectacle: ‘A whole military machine surrounded the supplice: cavalry of the watch, archers, guardsmen, soldiers’ (SP 61; DP 50). The ceremonies of supplice are visual displays of power, the marks of the sovereign are left in prominent places:
‘Pillories, gallows and scaffolds were erected in public squares or by the roadside; sometimes the corpses of the executed persons [ des supplicie´s] were displayed for several days near the scenes of their crimes. Not only must people know [sachent ], they must see [ voient ] with their own eyes’ (SP 70; DP 58).
Penal reformers – Foucault quotes de Mably – wished for a form of punishment that touched the soul rather than the body (SP 24; DP 16). Rather than simply destroy the body of the condemned, a gentle way in punishment could be found, one that took on several non-juridical elements, so as to make the punishment not solely legal: ‘We punish, but this is a way of saying that we wish to obtain a cure’ (SP 30; DP 22). ‘There must be no more spectacular, but useless [inutiles] penalties’ (SP 128; DP 109) – punishment must be ordered, organized and thoughtful. Just as the garden of species had proved a model for the understanding of the mad, it could also be used for a taxonomy of crimes: ‘One sought to constitute a Linnaeus of crimes and punish-ments . . .’ (SP 118; DP 99).
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Regarding the new phase of punishment discussed by Beccaria, Bentham and Brissot, Foucault talks of four possible types of punishment. The first he finds expressed in the affirmation: ‘You have broken the social pact, you no longer belong to the social body, you have put yourself outside of the space of legality; we expel you from the social space where that legality functioned’
(DE II, 590). This is the punishment of exile, banishment and deportation.
The second is also a species of exclusion, but its mechanism is not of material deportation, of transfer outside the social body, but isolation in the midst of moral space, of public opinion. Punishment at the level of scandal, shame, humiliation. The transgression [ faute] is made public, the individual is held up for public condemnation. The third is that of forced labour, of reparation for social injury, making amends in a way useful for the State or the society, a compensation. The fourth is the penalty of talion, making the punishment correspond to the crime – killing those who kill, taking the goods of those who steal (DE II, 589–90).
In the reformers’ dream the object of punishment is ‘no longer the body, with the ritual play of excessive pains, spectacular brandings [ marques e´clatan-tes] in the ritual of supplices; it is the mind or rather a play of representations and signs circulating discreetly but necessarily and evidently in the minds of all’ (SP 120; DP 101). Punishment needs to be constantly visible, a learning curve for the population as a whole,
a school rather than a festival; an ever-open book rather than a ceremony . . . The spectators must be able to consult at each moment the permanent lexicon of crime and punishment. Let us conceive of places of punishment as a Garden of the Laws that families would visit on Sundays. (SP 131–2;
DP 111)
This, then, is how one must imagine the punitive city. At the crossroads, in the gardens, at the side of roads being repaired or bridges built, in workshops open to all, in the depths of mines that may be visited, will be hundreds of tiny theatres of punishment . . . The great terrifying ritual of the supplices gives way, day after day, street after street, to this serious theatre, with its multifarious and persuasive scenes. (SP 133; DP 113)
However – and this is a point that is sometimes missed – this didn’t actually happen, at least not for long. Foucault argues that deportation disappeared fairly quickly, mechanisms of scandal were never arrived at in practice, forced labour was generally a symbolic punishment and equivalence was thought of as archaic. Instead another mode of punishment comes to the fore – one that Brissot and Beccaria had barely mentioned – imprisonment, which arose
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suddenly at the beginning of the nineteenth century as an institution (DE II, 591–2). There are therefore three moments to the change examined in Discipline and Punish. The first is the one based on the old monarchical law – a punishment directed at the body. ‘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’ (SP 154; DP 130). The problem arises in looking at what kind of punishment could strike the soul without touching the body:
‘What would a non-corporal punishment be?’ Even prison causes some physi-cal pain or privation. Foucault therefore suggests that modern forms of punishment retain ‘a “torturous” sediment [ un fond «suppliciant »]’ (SP 23; DP 16).
The third moment in this history of punishment ‘put to work procedures for the dressage of bodies’ (SP 155; DP 131) – it used the mind to affect the body, and vice versa. This is what Foucault means by suggesting that the soul is the prison of the body. To show these three moments, he sets up a series of triads:
The sovereign and his force, the social body, the administrative apparatus.
Mark, sign, trace . . . The tortured body, the soul with its manipulated representations, the body subjected to training . . . three series of elements that characterise the three mechanisms . . . three technologies of power. (SP 155; DP 131)40
The key question in Discipline and Punish is not so much why the sovereign and his force was replaced, but why the third was adopted in preference to the second. Why did the administrative apparatus replace the social body, why did the enclosed place of reform get chosen over the punitive city, ‘why did the physical exercise of punishment (which is not supplice) replace, with the prison that is its institutional support, the social play of the signs of punishment and the chattering [ bavarde] festival that circulated them?’ (SP 154–5; DP 130–1) In his answer to these questions Foucault suggests that four themes should be borne in mind. Punishment should be thought of both as ‘a complex social function’ and ‘a political tactic’, the technology of power should be made ‘the very principle both of the humanisation of the penal system and of the knowledge of the human’, and we should ‘try to discover whether this entry of the soul onto the scene of penal justice . . . is not the effect of a transformation of the way in which the body itself is invested in power relations’ (SP 31–2;
DP 23–4) . This last claim is particularly worth pursuing. How does a spatialized history help us to understand the changes in power/body relations – especially in non-penal institutions?
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THE ARMY, SCHOOLS, MONASTERIES, FACTORIES
Foucault’s discussion of the army, schools, monasteries and factories serves a dual purpose. First they provide many of the techniques later adopted in the modern prison; second they show how bodies were trained in a variety of ways, leading to the development of the modern soul. In the emphasis on the prison these examples are often passed by, though as Neocleous notes ‘if there is one institution that Foucault uses as his model it is the military rather than the prison’.41 The example of the military, and the use of military metaphors, is certainly key to Foucault’s work. His emphasis on strategies, tactics and battle shows this, as does his remark in conversation with the geographers of He´rodote that many of his spatial metaphors are taken from military discourse (DE III, 32–4; P/K 68–70). It is noteworthy that the first two chapters of the section entitled ‘Discipline’ both heavily rely on the military model, and hardly mention criminal law. In looking at the roots of disciplinary methods, Foucault suggests that many had long been in existence, and in a note he states that though his examples in these two chapters are drawn from the military, medicine, education and industry – note the lack of the penal – he could equally have taken them from colonization, slavery and child rearing (SP 166n1; DP 314n1).
Foucault’s understanding of discipline is that it begins at the same time that
‘an art of the human body was born . . . discipline is a political anatomy of detail’. This is why it needs to be interrogated with a ‘micro-physics’ of power (SP 162–3; DP 137–9). The use of detail, of minute regulations, the exacting gaze of the inspections, the continual supervision in schools, barracks, hospitals and workshops provide the political dream of ‘docile bodies’. ‘From such trifles’, suggests Foucault, ‘the human of modern humanism was born’ (SP 165–6; DP 140–1). What is important about these new mechanisms of power is that they introduce the notion of the norm. This norm – although probably a retrospective invention defined as much by what it is not as by what it is – allows ‘the shading of individual differences’ (SP 216; DP 184; see FDS 225) – a potential polarization.42 Behaviour and ability can be regulated according
to an established standard. This is especially found in the examination, which
‘combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalising judgement’, and is found in both schools and hospitals (SP 217–19; DP 185–7).
Foucault suggests four arts of discipline: distribution within space; the control of activity – timetables, rhythms, dressage; the use of exercises; the articulation and combination of forces. The first is the most important for the purpose here – indeed as Foucault states, ‘discipline is above all an analysis of space’ (DE III, 515). Foucault subdivides this into four techniques. Enclosure
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[cloˆture] is the first of these, ‘the protected place of disciplinary monotony’.
Obvious examples include the confinement of paupers and beggars, but Foucault also talks of boarding schools, based on the monastic model, barracks and certain factories. But he suggests that enclosure alone is not sufficient, and a further subdivision, or partitioning [quadrillage] is needed – ‘each individual has his own place; and each place its individual . . . discipline organises an analytical space’. Its model is ‘an old architectural and religious method’, the monastic cell – discipline is cellular. 43The partitions in dormitories serve this purpose (see VS 37; WK 27–8). These subdivided places are designated with particular purposes – Foucault calls these functional sites. This allows places to be coded, or recoded and used for new purposes, such as the lazarettos reused as venereal hospitals and madhouses in Histoire de la folie , but also for the spatial distribution of diseases in hospitals, especially military and naval ones.
Finally these enclosed, partitioned, and coded sites are placed in a
Finally these enclosed, partitioned, and coded sites are placed in a