Summary
Foucault begins Discipline and Punish with descriptions of two things: “a public execution and a timetable.” The execution is of Robert-François Damiens, who was drawn and quartered in 1757 for attempting to assassinate King Louis XV of France. The timetable is from 80 years later, detailing the daily schedule of a prisoner. Foucault is interested in this transformation in punishment, from public torture to private detention. He presents Discipline and Punish as a study of the political, historical, and social changes that were involved in this change in how people are disciplined in Western societies, especially in France, England, and to some extent the United States.
Over the course of the late 1700s and early 1800s, Foucault notes two major processes. First, punishment of criminals stops being a public spectacle, with crowds coming to see criminals tortured or receiving pain. Second, punishment stops targeting the criminal’s physical body. The point of giving a prisoner a schedule to follow, rather than physical pain to bear, was to target the prisoner’s soul rather than his body. Now, punishment is aimed at reforming criminals rather than hurting them. Foucault calls this the rise of the “age of sobriety in punishment.” Torture was meant to punish a crime. The prison was meant to reform the soul.
For Foucault, this is not just an interesting change in the nature of punishment. It is representative of a radical shift in the organization of Western societies as a whole, especially the relation between individuals, including individual criminals, and the society at large, including shared norms around appropriate behavior. If we track the history of how society went from public spectacle to private reform, we will also be tracking the history of the changing nature of power in society. Damiens was punished for a crime against the king. In the following century, people would instead be reformed for crimes they had committed against society: the people as a whole, rather than the monarch. This is the point Foucault explores at more length in the second chapter, “Spectacle of the Scaffold.” Damiens’s punishment isn’t just retribution for his crime. It’s also a public display of the king’s power, a celebration of the triumph of his rule. In more modern times, it is instead society, and social norms, that triumphs in the reform, rather than punishment, of the criminal.
According to Foucault, Western societies had to develop new institutions and technologies in order to make this shift from crime to soul, from pain to reform. First of all, society had to learn how to investigate this invisible part of a person. A crime was something visible: either murder was attempted or it was not. But to decide if a person is a good or bad person, to decide if their crime was because they were evil or simply mad, required new discussions and ideas. Thus, the period that sees the rise of reforming the soul also sees the rise of sciences like psychology, which study personality and what is motivating someone to do something.
This means that the institutions of judging someone, like the courts and the penal system, get “entangled” with a larger number of other institutions, like scientific and academic ones. This means we can’t just study the law in isolation in order to understand changes in punishment. We also have to look at discussions in lots of other areas, what Foucault calls discourse. There are scientific discourses and legal discourses and medical discourses and religious discourses. The task of the historian is to hold onto these discourses all at once and see how they are related and contribute to the same social goals. Thus, Foucault will talk about things like the “scientifico-legal complex,” in which discourses get blended together.
The entanglement of institutions is related to many of the principles guiding Foucault’s study. In his introduction, he lays out four principles explicitly. First, punishment isn’t just “repressive.” Repressing a certain kind of behavior, like stealing, might be an aim of punishment, but it does this by producing, through reform, something else: a better person. Foucault is interested in that productive side of things: what different kinds of punishment are making or transforming in society. Second, legislation needs to be understood as a political tactic. We saw this with Damiens: the king isn’t just enforcing the law but also showing off his own political power. Politics and the law go together. Third, science and the law go together, too, as we saw in how psychological discussions of “madness” might be brought into the courtroom. Finally, this entanglement should be seen as an effect of how “power is invested in the body.” That means power works by training bodies to do certain things.
Foucault concludes the first chapter of Discipline and Punish on a personal note. He talks about how he has been inspired while writing this study by the prison revolts in France in the early 1970s. The maltreatment of prisoners has led him to be interested in the history of the prison and how we got to the place we are today in terms of how criminality is understood and punished. Part of the task of this book is connecting the past to the present.
Analysis
For first-time readers of Foucault, the genre of Discipline and Punish can be a bit strange. This is because it is both a work of history and a work of theory. Foucault is telling a story about the past, drawing heavily from archival materials like court opinions and books and pamphlets. At the same time, he is theorizing the societies from which these documents come. His aim is to understand not only the rise of institutions like the prison or the reporting of events like an execution, but also what those things tell us about how power operates in a society.
This is why a history of punishment is really a history of society as a whole. The ways societies punish are related to the ways societies are structured, and understanding one leads to understanding the other. The key, as Foucault says, is discourse. It’s not just how people are punished, but also how people talk about punishment that matters. It’s in the language and documents history has left us that we learn what societies take for granted or assume, what they are afraid of, how they think about other people, and in what ways they organize their sense of how the world works.
The point is not that people write down a plan for organizing society. Rather, we can glimpse assumptions about society in what people are saying about other things. This is a key aspect of Foucault’s argument: the effects of something can be different from their intentions. It’s not that people sit down and think, “I want to re-structure society away from sovereign power into this other kind of power.” Rather, the things people do add up to this larger transformation. And the language they leave behind in documents picks up on the steps of this transformation in assumptions and behaviors along the way.
Another thing that surprises readers of Foucault is how he jumps around in time and place. Let’s start with place: this book quickly shifts national contexts, moving from Britain to France to America and so on. It’s not that Foucault writes a chapter for each place. Rather, he is interested in picking out major themes that transcend each context. He thinks there is a larger structural transformation in Western culture, and his subject is really power in the West rather than, say, prisoners in America. He jumps around a lot in order to get to these larger themes more quickly.
In terms of time, Foucault seems to be arguing in this chapter that studying the past is a way of studying the present. This is part of Foucault’s “genealogical critique.” Genealogy means a line of inheritance: for instance, tracing your history back through your parents and then your parents’ parents and so on. The idea is that who you are today is in part an effect of the generations that came before. The same goes for Foucault’s sense of history. The present inherits things from the past at the same time that it re-combines them, just as we each have unique DNA that is also a mixing of the DNA from our ancestry. Getting a better sense of the mutations and developments of the past allows us to understand how we got to where we are today. And, for Foucault, that also makes it possible to change the present. There is a contemporary political component to doing a history of the past.
