Michel Foucault: the Will to Truth by Sheridan Alan;

Author:Sheridan, Alan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

5

Society, Power, and Knowledge

During the next year or two, Foucault continued his study of ‘penal theories and institutions’, publishing in 1975, Surveiller et punir, subtitled ‘naissance de la prison’. (The English translation, Discipline and Punish, the Birth of the Prison, appeared in Britain and the USA in 1977.) In a sense, this book is a return, after the ‘interdiscursive’ analyses of Les mots et les choses and L’archéologie du savoir, to the single discourse/institution study as exemplified in Histoire de la folie and Naissance de la clinique. Like the study of medicine, it charts the ‘birth’ of an institution and covers roughly the same period of time. For just as the teaching hospital and clinical medicine were created in the early nineteenth century, so too were the prison and penology as we understand them today. Foucault shows how the still largely ‘medieval’ penal theory and practice of the ancien régime gave way in France, after the Revolution, to an institutionalization of imprisonment based on quite different theoretical premises. Between the two there was a transitional period of ‘enlightenment’, in which reformers tried to discredit the old barbarities and create a new penology based, not on punishment, but on dissuasion by public display. But this book is not just about ‘the birth of the prison’, or rather, the implications of that event reach far beyond the sphere of penology. The techniques of discipline and observation incorporated in the new prison derive from three centuries of practice in other spheres, notably in education and the army. Moreover, there is an astonishing coincidence between the new prison and other contemporary institutions: hospital, factory, school, and barracks. It is no accident that Jeremy Bentham’s famous ‘panopticon’, a circular building enclosing a central inspection tower, was recommended and implemented for all these institutions. Lastly, it is Foucault’s thesis that our own societies are maintained not by army, police, and a centralized, visible state apparatus, but precisely by those techniques of dressage, discipline, and diffused power at work in ‘carceral’ institutions.

Surveiller et punir opens in spectacular fashion with the full panoply of a supplice, a public execution reserved for the greatest of all crimes under theancien régime, regicide. Poor Damiens was not even successful in his attempt to kill Louis XV with a single blow of his penknife, but this hardly mitigated the conditions of his dying:

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…(SP, 9; DP, 3).

That, in the future tense, was the sentence. The actual execution, related by an eye-witness, is much more gruesome, because inefficient and long drawn-out. Foucault follows this account with extracts from rules drawn up ‘for the

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