A few notes on Foucault
Iāve almost always been in a habit of reading. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time in the library. Iād just grab an entire series of novels, and read them all, right in a row. Sometimes Iād end up reading non-fiction too. I ended up with a lot of books on software.
Then my local library got Internet access. Slowly, I started to spend less time in the stacks and more in front of a terminal. This wasnāt a bad thing; I still kept reading. Whatās more, what was previously a one way street turned into two: I didnāt just read the Internet, I wrote it. I spent hours and hours discussing the things Iād read with others.
In any case, as the years flew by, the things that Iāve been reading have become less and less substantial. Current events are fine and all, and pictures of cute cats are nice, but I feel like the volume of what Iāve been reading has gone up, but the quality has gone down. It happens. I canāt really be snide about not owning a TV while being subscribed to /r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu. Reddit somehow has morphed into a place where you can feel superior, but itās really just the same exact thing in different clothing. Combine this general unease with my aspirations for grad school in the fall, as well as my renewed interest in political philosophy, and my need to hit the books has become readily apparent.
Luckily, I have an ally in this quest, and Jamie has given me a reading list. Since reading and writing are two sides of a single coin, Iāll be writing about the things that I read here. Like many other things Iāve written about in the past, Iām sure that putting my thoughts down on paper (?) will help to gel my understanding and thoughts. First up: Michel Foucaultās āDiscipline and Punish.ā
Iāll get right to it: I really enjoyed reading this book. Itās partially because it took a lot of random things that I kind of knew and tied them to some experiences that Iāve had in a meaningful way. Itās also partially because I have a substantial infatuation with the conspiratorial; I re-read ā1984ā every year, and I often think about its all-knowing, all-seeing telescreen imagery when discussing anything vaguely political. āDiscipline and Punishā gave me the same sort of images, but they were fewer, and more firmly rooted in history and reality. The book opens with a section named āTorture,ā and the scene of Robert-FranƧois Damiensā punishments for attempted regicide. Iām sure that before the release of āSaw,ā these images were even more shocking:
⦠he was to be ātaken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burningwax weighing two poundsā; then, āin the said cart, to the Place de Greve, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs, and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax, and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes, and his ashes thrown to the winds.
Let it never be said that the people of 1757 were not thorough. Regardless, by January of 1840, weād transitioned to a prison system that looks pretty much the same as it does now. The bookās primary theme is discussing how we got from point A to point B, and then examining the āwhyā to explain how modern society has a new sovereign institution: the ācarceral system.ā
Before we can examine that question, though, we need to ask why we used torture as a form of punishment in the first place. The reasoning is actually straightforward: during the period of monarchy, everything revolves around the monarch. He is sovereign in a more absolute way than we even initially think of; the pop-culture image of a king has more to do with something of a popularity contest or that heās simply the guy on the top of the pyramid, but the nature of a monarchās power runs more deeply than that. It was called ādivine rightā for a reason, the physical body of the sovereign was the representation of God himself, and since the entire world belongs to God, thus it belongs to and is a part of the monarch. It reminds me of the kind of doublethink necessary to grasp the Catholic conception of the Holy Trinity, in this case God the Father, the king his son, and the world rather than a Holy Ghost. All one, yet three at the same time. In any case, if the land itself is the literal body of the king, then any transgression is an act of defiance not only of the rule of the monarch, but is making war upon God himself. And since damage has been done to the body of God, so must an equivalent exchange be made with the body of the aggressor. Torture also has an element of the theatrical to it, and therefore demonstrates to all of those watching that they must also comply with the rule of law or face the consequences.
However, eventually, torture became socially inconvenient. Basically, it was a case of the Streisand Effect: when you place that much attention on someone, you create a forum for sympathizers to create romantic images of their fallen hero. Thereās a great historical example of this in the Christian mythos: consider the polarizing effect that Christās torture on the cross maintains to this day. History is littered with the songs of fallen heros, and a call to follow in their stead. Eventually, whenever a new convict was to be strung up at a gallows, thereād be a state of disarray. Foucault describes several images of rioters throwing stones and even in some cases killing the executioner.
As a result of this, the nature of punishment slowly changed. Reformists argued that punishment was metered out unevenly, and inconsistently. Thus in the same way that monarchy gave way to democracy, the absolute right of the king to punish became distributed as well. However, centralized and distributed systems are quite different, and require different constructs to operate properly. Therefore, a distributed form of the right to punish would need some mechanism by which to operate. This mechanism is termed ādisciplineā by Foucault. Discipline creates a certain order all by itself, and he uses a great example of monks and monasteries to illustrate the concept of discipline. Think about all of these things that we consider virtuous:
- Studying is a disciplined form of reading
- Dieting is discipline applied to eating
- The image of a soldier is almost entirely one of discipline
- Morality is discipline applied to all of life
- Exercise is disciplined form of the body
But discipline has even greater roots in our society. Think about Taylorās Scientific Management, for example: itās a means of imposing discipline on workers to maximize their production. Schooling is a way of giving children a āstructured environmentā (structure seems to be synonymous with discipline in many cases) to develop in. Churches are places for the soul to become disciplined.
Submitting to discipline has deeper psychological effects as well. It creates the idea of a division: thereās those who follow the rules, and those that disregard them. And since weāve established that those who follow the rules are virtuous, those who donāt must not be. Since those that donāt follow the rules are doing bad things, they should be subject to punishment, so that they can remain disciplined. And thus the system of rules can be used as the distributed form of this right to punish, replacing the absolute right of the monarch. Submitting to this mentality makes people into ādocile bodiesā that perfectly fit into this worldview.
As an example of how far this disciplinary approach has gone, Foucault presents the Panopticon, which was a prison shaped like a pie, with a tower in the middle. Prisoners would be able to observe others directly across from themselves, and the guard who may or may not be in the tower would be able to watch all of the prisoners at once. Since you couldnāt tell if the guard was in the tower or not, discipline would become internalized, since you always had to assume that Big Brother is watching you⦠This way of thinking about society ends up creating an all-encompassing ācarceral systemā that we now live in.
Itās also important to note that this carceral system is total and absolutely permeating every aspect of society, yet they arenāt presented as such. Foucault specifically mentions that itās important to consider that the delinquent are still a part of the system, and not outside of it. Yet weāre constantly presented with images that serve to present the idea that thereās a ācriminal underworld,ā that those who lead a life of crime are part of a shadowy alternate universe. Foucault refers to this idea as āenclosureā: āDiscipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected space of disciplinary monotony.ā The enclosure embodies this separation, since thereās a space both within and outside of the enclosure. A self and an Other.
⦠so yeah. Thatās my summary. Iām still digesting a lot of this stuff, and so I may have more to say about it later.