Social CONTROL: Study Guide

Punishment & Power

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
Key Concepts
Discourse; Truth; Power/knowledge; Subjugated
Knowledge; Subjects; Biopower; Ethics;
Governmentality.

The Body –  The body trained to make it socially productive & economically
‘productive’ useful
 The body can only be constituted as ‘labour power … if it is caught
and ‘subjected’
up in a system of subjection’ (1977: 26)
 A ‘subjected’ body = one made into a ‘subject’ (subjectified, given
a set identity) and disempowered (made subject to authority).
 Pre-modern society: Sovereign power – exercised through violence
& appropriation " the body = target of penal repression
(punishment)
 ‘From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has
become an economy of suspended rights’ (1977: 11) ("‘disciplinary
power’)
Discourse,  Discourse as about more than linguistics, but “systems of thoughts
Truth & composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs and practices
that systematically construct the subjects and the worlds of which
Power/Knowled
they speak.”
ge  Discourse produces “Truths” and enables power relations through
power/knowledge
 Power/Knowledge: in knowing we exert power, and we exert power
by knowing. We grant power through knowledge, which therefore
constructs ‘truth’.
 Discourse creates subjects – i.e., medical discourse creates patients;
criminal justice discourse creates offenders
 Subjugated knowledges as discarded knowledge, as “those blocs of
historical knowledge which were present but disguised within the
body of functionalist and systematising theory and which criticism—
which obviously draws upon scholarship—has been able to reveal.”

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 Social CONTROL: Study Guide

Power – the ‘effect of strategic positions’

‘…power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the 'privilege', acquired or
preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions – an
effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are
dominated. (p.26-27)
‘…this power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who ‘do
not have it’; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them; it exerts pressure
upon them, just as they themselves, in their struggle against it, resist the grip it has on
them.
‘…these relations go right down into the depths of society’ (p.27)
Micro Powers
" i.e. power relations are not localised but pervasive: ‘micro-powers’
‘There is … a specificity of mechanism and modality’ (p.27), i.e. particular ways and
means through which power is exercised, invested, transmitted, resisted " e.g. discipline
(a type of power)
These power relations ‘are not univocal; they define innumerable points of
confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of
struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion of the power relations.’ (p.27)
" i.e. power is contested

‘…power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power
relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any
knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power
relations.’
‘…it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of
knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power knowledge, the processes
and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the
forms and possible domains of knowledge.’
‘Power produces knowledge’ (1977: 27)
From Sovereign Power to Power/Knowledge
Power Sovereign Power as:
Enacted on the body;
Knowle Brutal force;
dge Operated once rules were broken
Ritualised & symbolic;
Public (the spectacle).
The Panopticon
Disciplinary Power as:
Regulation & Surveillance;
Techniques of training on the body
‘Rational’ rather than ritual (claims to knowledge)
Within specific institutions (i.e. prisons, schools, military)
Private

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Disciplinary Power
A new mode of power relations: disciplinary power
" The prison: paradigmatic example
Body remains central but target shifts from body to mind/’soul’
Recall: ‘from…unbearable sensations’to ‘suspended rights’ (1977:11)

The prison = a paradigm

Foucault’s model for the way other institutions function:

‘…an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power’
"abstracts power from individual level…
"…to a ‘distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal
mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up’ (Foucault 1977:
202)

Knowledge-power Problems with Foucault?

 Criminal justice has been ‘redefined by  The problem of ‘truth’ – if all claims to
knowledge’ (p.22) truth are relative, how can we believe
 Knowledge-holders = ‘experts’ e.g. Foucault’s version?
psychiatrists, psychologists  Foucault was focused on the ‘big picture’
 differentiates ‘normal’ and the of society, and consequentially ignored
pathological; the law-abiding differences between social groups
from the criminal, ‘offender’/non- (classes, status groups, etc) and the role of
offender’ –> medical notions of social structures other than institutions
the ‘norm’ (i.e. patriarchy).
 " ‘Criminals’ need to be ‘cured’,  Doesn’t explain why certain groups are
their deviation from societal more likely to be the target of more
norms ‘corrected’ oppressive forms of power
 Fragmentation of the legal power to
punish – experts and judges
 The law and bodies of knowledge work
together in the project of normalisation
that produces the carceral archipelago.

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The ‘offender’ as an object of knowledge " facilitated

development of related human & social sciences – e.g.
criminology
The discovery of the ‘delinquent’- enabled class-based
Power- surveillance
knowledge & Ongoing legitimisation of punishment
the function of Invention of the ‘delinquent’ + birth of the modern
imprisonment prison = part of the same process
Prison does not reduce crime, or deliver retribution
The prison as ‘a factory for producing criminals’ – ‘has
been succeeding pretty well’ (Foucault [1976] 2009: 14)

Surveillance as creating ‘disciplined subjects’

The interiorising effects of power: “there is no need for
arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a
gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual
under its own weight will end up interiorising to the
point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus
Power/ exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself”.
Biopower as the techniques and strategies of control over
Knowledge & bodies and the population
its Effects Governmentality as “the art of government”; the forms of
social control and security enacted by disciplinary
institutions (schools, prisons, etc) to create and maintain an
ordered population.
Responsibilisation (if u see something, do something)
Normalisation

The body The modern Macro and micro levels of

and ‘soul’ prison is power
of the characterise Disciplinary power = " e.g. programs target
productive, i.e. trains in thinking & behaviour
criminal d by: efficiency and capability
" aim to bring about
the ‘self-controlled’
body
Direct and indirect control strategies

Control built into the structure of the

prison
Space and time: organise and segment prisoners

“A corpus of knowledge, techniques, ‘scientific’ discourses is

formed and becomes entangled with the practice of the power to
punish” (Foucault 1977: 23)

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 Social CONTROL: Study Guide

Critiques of Foucalt

Overgenera
lization –
Periodicity
the notion of
– some Politics –
discipline Functionali
discrepancy Foucault
more easily Partiality – sm –
between ignores
applied to insufficient ‘unintended
Foucault’s rights
young attention to consequence
account and discourses
people than expressive s’ of prison
the which may
adults; function of should not
occurrence temper
power punishment be mistaken
of penal forces of
overgenerali for purpose
events e.g. discipline
sed so loses
chain gangs
analytic
force

(Hudson 2003)

To sum up: Foucault’s Discipline & Punish (1977)

Important shift from punishment that targets the body – sovereign power
– to punishment that targets the mind and creates ‘docile bodies’ –
disciplinary power.
Discipline is key element in modern punishment, and modern society –
extends beyond the prison
Power is relational, interactional, it moves through people; inextricably
tied to knowledge.
Punishment creates the category of ‘delinquent’, ‘offender’
‘Soul training’ is linked to labour & economic productivity
Law and science complicit in the project of normalisation
Panopticon – e.g. surveillance & disciplinary strategies.

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Cruel and unusual punishment –

Clayton Lockett
‘With each development in the technology of
execution, the same promises have been made, that
each new technology was safe, reliable, effective
and humane. Those claims have not generally been
fulfilled’. (Sarat, 2014)
Use of the drug midazolam for lethal injection =
‘the chemical equivalent of being burned at the
stake’ (US Supreme Court Justice Sonia
Sotomayor, in Murphy 2015)

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