Foucault and Derrida by Roy Boyne

Author:Roy Boyne [Boyne, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781136160950
Google: gWv5AQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-11-05T04:53:54+00:00

Discipline and Punish

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the link was broken between Western justice and the slaughterhouse. It is Foucault’s argument that torture and public execution became anomalous in the context of an emergent capitalist society increasingly centred on property and the development of the productive forces of capital. The anomaly was expressed in a number of ways. The intermittent but spectacular assertion of the power of the sovereign, affirmed in the barbaric rites of the public execution, was denounced by reformers as tyrannical and inhuman. It was seen as a political threat: not only did public executions, dreadful torture and the humiliations of the chain-gang fail to frighten the masses into law-abiding subjection, as extraordinarily visible events they also actively encouraged the participation of the people in festivals of suspended social order. A new practice of punishment was required, a new mode of penality more appropriate to the demands of a rational social and economic order. Public torture would do little to create a well-ordered workforce. Over the course of less than a century, punishment would come to be seen not as revenge (although doubtless that element cannot be extirpated entirely) but as correction. The aim of the punishment process would be seen as the preservation of a general social order, and the reintegration of ‘corrected’ individuals into that order.11

Foucault’s account of this transformation definitely does not take the form of an annotated list of percipient decisions made by the major actors on the politico-judicial stage – we are, in this sense, well beyond humanism and the traditional forms of historiography. He describes a process without a subject, an evolution whose logic is one of functionalist adaptation to macro-contingency, rather than that of an executive committee’s response to altered circumstances. Typical in this respect is his discussion of that point in the process at which the dysfunctionality of the old punishment regime was effectively accepted, but at which a clear road towards the new penality was not yet seen. This is a point where advocates of the old order based on the power of the sovereign debated with the reformers whose dream was of a punitive Utopia which would be economically and socially invaluable. Whatever functions such debate filled, it did not arrive at the solution. For, as Foucault demonstrates, the general adaptations required by the new social order demanded more than a change in the form and content of punishment, more even than a thoroughgoing change in the nature of the law itself. What in retrospect can be seen to have been required was a whole set of mechanisms for the formation of a new breed of social subject, a new process for the making of human beings. This process, which Foucault tells us did emerge, was not decided upon in debate;12 nor was it some final triumph of revealed human nature. There was no unveiling of that which was always present, Foucault had learned that much from Derrida.13 No, what appears to have settled the

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