Discipline and punish panopticism summary

Discipline and Punish Michel Foucoult

General Summary Discipline and Punish is a history of the modern penal system. Foucault seeks to analyze punishment in its social context, and to examine how changing power relations affected punishment. He begins by analyzing the situation before the eighteenth century, when public execution and corporal punishment were key punishments, and torture was part of most criminal investigations. Punishment was ceremonial and directed at the prisoner's body. It was a ritual in which the audience was important. Public execution reestablished the authority and power of the King. Popular literature reported the details of executions, and the public was heavily involved in them. The eighteenth century saw various calls for reform of punishment. The reformers, according to Foucault, were not motivated by a concern for the welfare of prisoners. Rather, they wanted to make power operate more efficiently. They proposed a theater of punishment, in which a complex system of representations and signs was displayed publicly. Punishments related obviously to their crimes, and served as an obstacle to lawbreaking. Prison is not yet imaginable as a penalty. Three new models of penality helped to overcome resistance to it. Nevertheless, great differences existed between this kind of coercive institution and the early, punitive city. The way is prepared for the prison by the developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the disciplines. Discipline is a series of techniques by which the body's operations can be controlled. Discipline worked by coercing and arranging the individual's movements and his experience of space and time. This is achieved by devices such as timetables and military drills, and the process of exercise. Through discipline, individuals are created out of a mass. Disciplinary power has three elements: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment and examination. Observation and the gaze are key instruments of power. By these processes, and through the human sciences, the notion of the norm developed. Disciplinary power is exemplified by Bentham's Panopticon, a building that shows how individuals can be supervised and controlled efficiently. Institutions modeled on the panopticon begin to spread throughout society. Prison develops from this idea of discipline. It aims both to deprive the individual of his freedom and to reform him. The penitentiary is the next development. It combines the prison with the workshop and the hospital. The penitentiary replaces the prisoner with the delinquent. The delinquent is created as a response to changes in popular illegality, in order to marginalize and control popular behavior. Criticism of the failure of prisons misses the point, because failure is part of its very nature. The process by which failure and operation are combined is the carceral system. The aim of prison, and of the carceral system, is to produce delinquency as a means of structuring and controlling crime. From this perspective, they succeed. The prison is part of a network of power that spreads throughout society, and which is controlled by the rules of strategy alone. Calls for its abolition fail to recognize the depth at which it is embedded in modern society, or its real function.

Important Terms The carceral system - The complex system introduced towards the end of Discipline and Punish. It attempts to explain both the operation of the modern prison and its failure. The carceral system includes the architecture of the prison, its regulations and its staff: it extends beyond the prison itself to penetrate into society. Its components are the discipline of the prison, the development of a rational technique for managing prisoners, the rise of criminality and strategies of reform. The carceral system therefore contains both the failure and reform of the prison; it is part of Foucault's argument that failure is an essential part of the working of the prison. See also delinquent. The classical period - The time-period from 1660 to the end of the 19th century. Discipline and Punish, like most of Foucault's works, refers mainly to this age. For Foucault, the classical period is seen as the birth of many of the characteristic institutions and structures of the modern world, as well as of mechanisms of control and the human sciences. Delinquent - The concept that eventually replaces that of the "prisoner", according to Foucault. The delinquent is created by the operation of the carceral system and the human sciences, and strictly separated from other popular illegal activities. He is part of a small, hardened group of criminals, identified with the lower social classes. Most importantly, he is defined as "abnormal", and analyzed and controlled by the mechanisms that Foucault describes. There are several advantages in replacing the criminal by the delinquent: delinquents are clearly set apart from the rest of society, and therefore easy to supervise and control. A small, controlled group is far easier to cope with than the alternative: large roaming bands of brigands and robbers, or revolutionary crowds. In part, Foucault argues that the figure of the delinquent was a response to the danger presented by the lower orders in the nineteenth century. Discipline - Discipline is a way of controlling the movement and operations of the body in a constant way. It is a type of power that coerces the body by regulating and dividing up its movement, and the space and time in which it moves. Timetables and the ranks into which soldiers are arranged are examples of this regulation. The disciplines are the methods by which this control became possible. Foucault traces the origins of discipline back to monasteries and armies. He is clear, however, that the concept changed in the eighteenth century. Discipline became a widely used technique to control whole populations. The modern prison, and indeed the modern state, is unthinkable without this idea of the mass control of bodies and movement. Discourse - The basic unit that Foucault analyzes in all his works. Foucault defines the discourse as a system in which certain knowledge is possible; discourses determine what is true or false in a particular field. The discourse of psychiatry, for example, determines what it is possible to know about madness. Saying things outside of a discourse is almost impossible. Foucault's argument about prisons is a good example: abolishing the prison is unthinkable partly because we do not have the words to describe any alternative. The prison is at the center of the modern discourse of punishment. Exercise - Foucault traces exercise back to monasteries and the activities of monks. In its early form, it involves regulating the body by imposing religious activities upon it in order to please God and achieve salvation. Foucault argues that the concept changed in the classical period. It became an attempt to impose increasingly complex activities on the body in order to control it. Military drills, or physical training at school are examples of this later form of exercise.

Genealogy - A concept that Foucault originally borrowed from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, but made his own. A genealogy is an attempt to consider the origins of systems of knowledge, and to analyze discourses. It attempts to reveal the discontinuities and breaks in a discourse, to focus on the specific rather than on the general. In doing so, it aims to show that there have been other ways of thinking and acting, and that modern discourses are not any truer than those in the past. Most importantly, it aims to show that many modern ideas are not self- evidently "true", but the product of the workings of power. Foucault's genealogies aim to allow individuals trapped or excluded by such systems of knowledge to speak out; one of the aims of Discipline and Punish is to give modern prisoners, who are categorized as abnormal, examined and analyzed by criminologists and prison warders, a voice. The genealogy is somewhat similar to Foucault's idea of "Archaeology", found in The Order of Things, which emphasizes discontinuity to a greater extent. The human sciences - Sciences, or bodies of knowledge that have man as their subject. Psychiatry, criminology, sociology, psychology and medicine are the main human sciences. Together, the human sciences create a regime of power that controls and describes human behavior in terms of norms. By setting out what is "normal", the human sciences also create the idea of abnormality or deviation. Much of Foucault's work is an attempt to analyze how these categories structure modern life. See norm. Norm - An average standard created by the human sciences against which people are measured: the sane man, the law-abiding citizen, and the obedient child are all "normal" people. But an idea of the "normal" also implies the existence of the abnormal: the madman, the criminal and the deviant are the reverse side of this coin. An idea of deviance is possible only where norms exist. For Foucault, norms are concepts that are constantly used to evaluate and control us: they also exclude those who cannot conform to "normal" categories. As such, they are an unavoidable but somehow harmful feature of modern society. See human sciences. Penality - The particular system of investigation and punishment that a society uses. Penality includes all aspects of the examination and treatment of those who break the law. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault charts the development of the modern system of penality, which us based around the prison and the observation and control of convicts. Penitentiary - The penitentiary is a prison that does more than merely deprive men of their freedom. It also makes them work, and observes and treats them in a prison hospital. This combination of workshop, hospital and prison is the defining feature of the modern prison system for Foucault. The penitentiary also has a major role in creating the delinquent. Power - Foucault's conception of power is a central part of this work. Essentially, power is a relationship between people in which one affects another's actions. Power differs from force or violence, which affect the body physically. It involves making a free subject do something that he would not have done otherwise: power therefore involves restricting or altering someone's will. Power is present in all human relationships, and penetrates throughout society. The state does not have a monopoly over power, because power relations are deeply unstable and changeable. Having said that, patterns of domination do exist in society: for example, the modern power to punish was established through the action of the human sciences. The relationship between power and knowledge is also an important one. The human sciences are able to control and exclude people because they make claims to both knowledge and power. To claim that a statement is true is also to make a claim to power because truth can only be produced by power. Criminology can make claims that exclude the delinquent, for example, because a system of power relations exists in which the delinquent is dominated.

Philosophical Themes, Ideas and Arguments Power and Knowledge The relationship between power and knowledge is central to Foucault's work. Discipline and Punish essentially charts the reorganization of the power to punish, and the development of various bodies of knowledge (the human sciences) that reinforce and interact with that power. The modern power to punish is based on the supervision and organization of bodies in time and space, according to strict technical methods: the modern knowledge that Foucault describes is the knowledge that relates to human nature and behavior, which is measured against a norm. Foucault's point is that one cannot exist without the other. The power and techniques of punishment depend on knowledge that creates and classifies individuals, and that knowledge derives its authority from certain relationships of power and domination. The Body The body as an object to be acted upon, but also as the subject of "political technology" is present throughout the work. Beginning with public execution, where the body is horrifically displayed, Foucault charts the transition to a situation where the body is no longer immediately affected. The body will always be affected by punishment—because we cannot imagine a non- corporal punishment—but in the modern system, Foucault says, the body is arranged, regulated and supervised rather than tortured. At the same time, the overall aim of the penal process becomes the reform of the soul, rather than the punishment of the body. Eventually, the concepts of the individual and the delinquent replace the reality of the body as the focus of attention, but the body of the criminal still plays a role. If anything can be seen as constant in this work, it is the idea that the body and punishment are closely linked. The History of the Soul Foucault's project in Discipline and Punish is to account for the modern penal system, but he also presents a genealogical account of the modern soul. This is not only due to the fact that the soul gradually replaces the body as the focus of punishment and reform. It is also due to the fact that modern processes of discipline have essentially created that soul. Without the human sciences and the various mechanisms of observation and examination, the normal soul or mind would not exist. Ideas such as the psyche, conscience, and good behavior are effects created by a particular regime of power and knowledge. For Foucault, examining that regime is a way of looking deep into our souls. His history of the soul is also a powerful critique, because it makes us confront what we have become by excluding and marginalizing certain elements of our society. The Prison and Society The relationship between the prison and the wider society cannot be stressed enough. For Foucault, the prison is not a marginal building on the edge of a city, but is closely integrated into the city. The same "strategies" of power and knowledge operate in both locations, and the mechanisms of discipline that control the delinquent also control the citizen. Indeed, the methods of observation and control that Foucault describes originated in monasteries, in hospitals and in the army. Related to this point is Foucault's argument that we cannot abolish the prison, because our ways of thinking about and carrying out punishment will not allow it. The

prison is part of a "carceral network" that spreads throughout society, infiltrating and penetrating everywhere. Paradox and Contrast This is perhaps more a stylistic point than a theme, but Discipline and Punish reveals Foucault's addiction to contrast and contradiction. From the shocking image at the beginning of the work to the many numbered lists and pairs of terms, the work is structured around a series of conceits and paradoxes. The idea that prison contains its own failure is a good example. Critics have criticized Foucault for what they see as his chronic obscurity, but at least part of the problem comes from his attitude to language and discourse. Discourses are complex structures in which people can become "trapped": perhaps the experience of being trapped inside some of Foucault's more difficult sentences is meant to echo this. Or perhaps, like many French philosophers, he was just fond of linguistic jokes. The Body of the Condemned Summary Foucault begins by comparing a public execution from 1757 to an account of prison rules from 1837. The shifts between the two reveal how new codes of law and order developed. One important feature is the disappearance of torture; the body of the criminal disappeared from view. Punishment as spectacle disappeared; the exhibition of prisoners, the pillory and the public execution ended. Now, the certainty of punishment, and not its horror, deters one from committing a crime. Conviction marks the prisoner; publicity shifts towards the trial and the sentence. A theoretical realignment occurs. Sentences are now intended to correct and improve. A sense of shame about punishment develops along with this. Punishment no longer touched the body. If it did, it was only to get at something beyond the body: the soul. New figures took over from the executioner, such as doctors, psychiatrists, chaplains and warders. Executions were made painless by drugs. The elimination of pain and the end of spectacle were linked. Machines like the guillotine, which kills almost without touching the body, were intended to be impersonal and painless. Between 1830 and 1848, public executions ended. This was an irregular, delayed process, however. A trace of torture remained because it is difficult to imagine what a non- corporal punishment would be. The penalty now addressed the soul. Although the definition of crimes changed, some elements remained the same. Judgment was now passed on the motives, passions and instincts of the criminal, not only punishing but also supervising and directing the individual. Offenses became objects of scientific knowledge. The development of a new penal system in Europe led to the soul of the criminal as well as the crime being judged. The power to punish becomes fragmented. Psychiatrists now decide on a criminal's medico- legal treatment. The adoption of these non-legal elements meant that the judge is not the only one who acts or judges. This book is a genealogy of the modern soul and the power to judge. It follows four general rules: one) to regard punishment as a complex social function; two) to regard punishment as a political tactic; three) to see whether the history of penal law and of the human sciences are

linked; four) to try to find in changes in penal techniques a political technology of the body and a general history of changing power relations. We need to situate punishment within systems of production and the political economy of the body. Historians have yet to consider the body as a subject of political power or power relations. The body is subjected to a body of knowledge; this is the political technology of the body. A "micro-physics" of power operates; power is a strategy, and we need to decipher it in a system of relations that can be called political anatomy. Power is not a property but a strategy evident in the relations between people. Power relations operate and exist through people. They go right down into society. We need to realize that power and knowledge are related. We should think of the body politic as a series of routes and weapons by which power operates. A history of the micro-physics of power is an element in the genealogy of the modern soul. Upon the idea of the "soul", concepts of the psyche, personality and consciousness are created, as well as scientific techniques and claims. This is not a substitution of the soul for the real man; now, the soul is the prison of the body. Foucault ends by relating his commitment to modern prisoners, and to writing a history of the present. Analysis The beginning of this section is typical of Foucault: he characteristically began his works with a shocking image to attract the reader's attention. The horror of Damiens's 1757 execution shows that this is an unusual kind of history book. Foucault draws heavily on contemporary documents, like the two at the beginning, but goes beyond this to construct a complicated theoretical argument. This argument will chart the movement between the public execution and the modern prison. The body-soul shift is central to Discipline and Punish. For Foucault, the body has a real existence, but the "modern soul" is a recent invention. There are limits to how you can punish the body, as the execution at the beginning demonstrates, but the soul allows new possibilities. Firstly, it allows you to consider why the crime occurred; the motives that drive the criminal become knowable, and the subject of investigation. Secondly, it becomes possible to consider the criminal beyond the crime and its punishment. Instead of inflicting a painful penalty, or killing him, it becomes possible to supervise and investigate him. The shift from body to soul also marks the end of the public idea of punishment, because whilst the body has to be tortured in public, the soul is a private thing. Foucault's idea of the fragmentation of judgment is related to the shift away from the body. When a criminal is condemned to be executed, the judge alone passes the sentence. When he is sent to prison, he is also evaluated by doctors and psychiatrists. The rise of what Foucault calls the human sciences is a personal preoccupation, found throughout his work. Psychiatry, social work, medicine and other professions assess and judge people according to standards called norms: they ultimately decide what is "normal" and "abnormal". This involves judging not a crime but a person, making decisions about his sanity, his treatment, and even when he should be released. According to Foucault, the modern world has given the important power to judge to a shadowy body of professionals whose role is sometimes uncertain. This section is also an introduction to Foucault's methodology. The reference to genealogy is vitally important here. It represents the idea of writing a history that reveals struggles, discontinuities and the role of the individual. Discourses such as that of modern punishment define what it is possible to say and do about certain things. People are in a sense trapped inside them, but Foucault aims to give them a voice and help them to resist. In Discipline and

Punish, he writes in order free prisoners not from their cells but from the discourses that helped to create them. His argument is that when the power to judge shifted to a judgment about normal and abnormal, the modern soul was formed. The prisoner or delinquent with an abnormal soul is defined against the normal majority. In showing how the prisoner is oppressed, Foucault wants to show us what is wrong with the modern soul in general. Of the four straightforward rules for this investigation, the fourth is the most interesting. The techniques applied to the prisoner and our attitudes to him show the ways in which power operates in society. The knowledge possessed by prison warders and psychiatrists creates a certain "technology of power." Foucault's metaphors are drawn from science and industry, but he is also clear that economic and social circumstances are important. The reference to systems of production (the means of making and creating products and capital) is from Marx. Foucault's discussion of power is central to Discipline and Punish. He thinks that power is a strategy, or a game not consciously played by individuals but one that operates within the machinery of society. Power affects everyone, from the prisoner to the prison guard, but no one individual can "control" it. The remarks about the soul being the prison of the body reflect Foucault's love of contradictions, but they also make a deeper point. The body is imprisoned because people can be controlled by sciences directed at the soul, such as psychiatry. Foucault attempts to chart a move from a situation where the criminal's body is attacked, to one where we are all disciplined and controlled. Finally, Foucault's role in the prison reform movement is an important context for this section: he helped to run the French Groupe d'information sur les Prisons (GIP) in the 1970s. The group distributed information on prisons to the public, and was concerned with letting prisoners speak for themselves. In a way, Foucault sees Discipline and Punish as a theoretical counterpart to the work he carried out in practice. The Spectacle of the Scaffold Summary The French penal ordinance of 1670 set out very harsh penalties, but a gap existed between theory and penal practice. Public execution and torture were not the most frequent form of punishment. However, torture played a considerable part in penality. The definition of torture involves an exact, measurable quantity of pain. An "economy of power" is invested in torture. Torture is part of a ceremony that reveals the truth of a crime. The trial is initially a hidden process. But a tradition of rules of evidence existed: there were different degrees of proof. Now these degrees relate to the juridical effects or the outcome of the trial. Penal investigation was written, secret and subject to rules. It was a machine that might produce the truth in the absence of the accused. But a confession removed the need for further investigation. A confession transforms an investigation from a process carried on against the criminal to a voluntary affirmation. The ambiguity of the confession explains the means used to obtain it: the oath and judicial torture. Torture is an ancient practice, which had a strict place in the classical legal system. It had two elements: a secret investigation by judicial authority and a ritual act by the accused. The body of the accused linked these two elements. This is why, until the whole classical system of punishment was examined, there was no critique of torture. Judicial torture was a regulated practice, almost a game. If the suspect successfully resisted, he could be freed. Classical

torture was a way of finding evidence in which investigation and punishment were mixed. As the system of proof produced a partial proof of guilt, torture punished this partial guiltiness whilst investigating it further. In the execution, the criminal's body showed the truth of his crime because, one) the criminal became the herald of his own condemnation; two) it took up the scene of confession, where the full truth was revealed; three) it pinned public torture onto the crime itself; four) its slowness and suffering became the ultimate proof at the end of the ritual. From judicial torture to execution, the body produces and reproduces the truth of the crime. A public execution is to be understood as a political as well as a judicial ritual. The intervention of the sovereign in a case was a reply to an offense against him. Public execution was a ritual by which injured sovereignty was restored. Public execution was a ritual of armed law with two aspects: victory and struggle. The conflict and triumph of the executioner over the body of the accused was like a challenge or a joust. Attitudes toward punishment were related to general attitudes to the body and death. Death was familiar because of epidemics and wars. These general reasons explain the possibility and long survival of physical punishment. Torture was embedded in legal practice because it revealed the truth and showed the workings of power though the body of the condemned. This truth-power relation remains at the heart of all mechanisms of punishment, and is found in different forms in contemporary penal practice. The Enlightenment condemned the "atrocity" of public execution. Atrocity is the part of crime that torture turns back on itself to display the truth of crime to the world. The mechanism of atrocity mixed the sovereign and crime together; atrocity was the "organized destruction of infamy by omnipotence." One reason why a punishment that was unafraid of atrocity was replaced by a "humane" version is very important. A key element in the execution was the people or audience. But the role of the people was ambiguous. Criminals often had to be protected from the crowd, and crowds often tried to free prisoners. The intervention of the crowd in executions posed a political problem. In his last words, the convict could, and did, say anything. Uncertainty exists over these last words: were they fictitious? Perhaps crime literature was neither "popular expression" nor moralizing propaganda but the space in which the two investigations of penal practice met. Broadsheets decreased in popularity as the political function of popular illegality altered. A new literature developed, in which crime was glorified as a fine art or mode of privilege. Accounts of executions became accounts of investigation; crime literature moved from an account of confessions to the intellectual struggle between criminal and investigator. In this new genre there were no more heroes or executions; although the criminal was punished, he did not suffer. Newspapers began to recount the details of everyday crime and punishment. The people were robbed of their old pride in crime, and murders became the game of the well-behaved. Analysis Foucault essentially begins at the base of the pre-modern system of punishment, by analyzing judicial inquisition and torture. Judicial inquisition was carried out by Church and state authorities, as a means of exploring a crime and establishing the "truth". It was a key part of the inquisition process, which resembled the execution in some ways. It seems very alien to the modern mind. Foucault shows that, although torture was a brutal phenomenon, it was deeply rooted in contemporary legal systems, and cannot be understood apart from this discourse. It can also clearly be distinguished from the execution itself. Torture was highly regulated, and can be conceived of as a kind of perverse game, in which the prisoner negotiates with his

questioner. By arguing that torture had a clearly-defined structure and a logic of its own, Foucault is not defending or approving of it. He is merely trying to explain it in terms of his idea of legal and penal discourse. Perhaps the most important idea in this section is that torture and execution are both part of a public and ceremonial system of punishment. The process of punishment begins with the secret investigation, which may be hidden even from the accused, and then progresses to the public ritual of the execution. Both acts, however, are embedded in what Foucault calls the classical system of law, and cannot be understood apart from it. The real link between torture and execution is provided by the body of the criminal. In both cases, it is acted on by the authorities in a violent way. Both procedures also aim at "truth". This is a difficult term, which means both asserting that the criminal is guilty, but also that the crime itself exists as an act beyond the moment at which it was committed. The investigation, through a range of evidence and "proofs", establishes guilt, but the execution remembers and reenacts the crime. Foucault's treatment of public execution is sophisticated and complex. He argues that the ritual of execution depends on a specific political situation, in which a monarch is the all-powerful head of state. A certain hierarchical order exists in this situation, with the sovereign at the top and the lower orders distributed below. Power works from the top down in this kind of society. Crime upsets this order and challenges the sovereign's power. Execution is a ritual designed to reestablish order, but it was played out like a tournament or sports contest. The executioner represented the King in this action: in killing the prisoner, he was the king's champion. Essentially, the reestablishment of order can be reduced to a one-on-one combat. This combat cannot exist without an audience, however, because the people must witness order being replaced for the process to work. Foucault may be referring to Jurgen Habermas's idea of "representative publicity," in which the King's power is represented before the people by various rituals. Foucault's explanation goes beyond the theoretical level, however, as he relates the execution to its social and economic context. The concept of atrocity is a puzzling one. Atrocity is the most horrible part of torture, but yet is necessary to reveal the truth of the crime. It resembles the violence of the crime itself, and shows the violence that is inherent in crime. The shift between atrocious and humane punishment is a reformulation of the shift between public execution and prison. Foucault explains this in terms of the audience. An audience is necessary because the people must watch, or the ritual will have no meaning. By watching, however, they also take part. Watching can cross the line drawn by the sovereign, when the people physically attack the executioner, or try to free the prisoner. Participation can also involve reading or writing about crime in literature. Eighteenth century crime literature, according to Foucault, was centered on the convict's last words, which contrast with the relative silence of torture. If the process of punishment is seen as a discourse, then the very moment of execution becomes the one moment when the accused can speak. This is a dangerous and unstable moment. Last words were printed in pamphlets and broadsheets, which were another unstable way of representing crime to the world. Responses to this literature and the behavior of crowds are part of what Foucault calls popular illegality. Popular illegality covers a whole range of behavior that is beyond and outside the law, such as demonstrations and riots. Similarly, changes in the literature showed changes in

penality itself. Crime literature stopped being a dangerous space and focused on investigation rather than on execution. In a sense it became more "official" and repressive. Generalized Punishment Summary Petitions against executions and torture increased in the eighteenth century. There was a need to end physical confrontation between the sovereign and the criminal. Execution became shameful and revolting. The reformers argued that judicial violence exceeds the legitimate exercise of power—that criminal justice should punish, not take revenge. The need for punishment without torture was first formulated as a need to recognize the humanity of the criminal. Man became the legal limit of power, beyond which it could not act. But how did man come to be set up against the traditional practice of punishment? A problem of the economy of punishment arises. How could "man" and "measure" be reconciled? The eighteenth century resolved the problem of this economy with the idea that humanity was the measure of punishment, but with no proper explanation or definition. Foucault salutes great reformers like Beccaria, but reform needs to be situated within a process by which crimes became less violent and punishments less intense. There were fewer murders, and criminals tended to work in smaller groups. They moved from attacking bodies to seizing goods. This can be explained by better socio-economic circumstances and harsher laws. It was part if a development that placed a greater value on property and production. There was an attempt to adjust and refine the mechanisms of power that frame individuals' everyday lives. A remarkable strategic coincidence existed between this change and the discourse of the reformers. They attacked an excess bound up in the irregularity of the power to punish. Penal justice was irregular because of the great number of courts and legal loopholes. The criticism of the reformers was directed at the bad economy of power, not the weakness or cruelty of the powerful. The dysfunction of power was related to an excess concentration of power in the King. Eighteenth century reform of the criminal law was a rearrangement of structures of power. It aimed not to punish less but to punish better. The conjecture that saw the birth of reform was not that of a new sensibility but of another policy with regard to illegalities. Illegality was deeply rooted in the ancien regime. Sometimes laws were ignored, and exemptions were made. Tolerance existed for the less favored people, whom the laws vigorously defended. The paradox of necessary illegality was its identification with criminality, and the consequent ambiguity of attitude. A network of glorification grew up around crime. A crisis of popular illegality occurred in the eighteenth century, when an illegality of rights shifted to an illegality of goods. The bourgeois could not accept popular illegality when it concerned their property. As new forms of production and capital accumulation emerged, popular practices relating to an illegality of rights became transformed into an illegality of property. Penal reform was born at a point between the struggle against the super-power of the sovereign and that against the infra-power of acquired illegality. Monarchical power left subjects able to practice illegalities; in attacking one, you attack the other. For many reformers, the struggle to delimit the power to punish was based on the need to control popular illegality more strictly. Public execution was criticized because it represented the coming together of unlimited sovereign power and popular illegality. But reform was successful because it came to stress the suppression of popular illegality. New, less severe criminal systems were sustained by upheaval

in the traditional economy of illegalities. The key feature of eighteenth century penal reform was the constitution of a new economy and a new technology of power. This new strategy falls into a general theory of the contract. The citizen was presumed to have agreed to the law by which he is punished. The criminal was therefore a juridical paradox, participating in his own punishment. The whole of society was present in the punishment, which gives rise to a problem of degree of punishment. The formidable right to punish conflicted with the individual. The right to punish has shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defense of society. The great force of this penalty was like another "super-power", a penalty without bounds. This causes a need to establish a principle of moderation for the power of punishment. The principle of moderation is articulated first as a humanitarian discourse. The recourse to sensibility contains a principle of calculation. The principle takes root that one should never apply "inhumane" punishments; this is because of the necessary regulation of power and not because of the criminal's humanity. The object of punishment is to create consequences for crime. Punishment must be adjusted to the nature of the crime. The eighteenth century, however, had the idea that one should punish just enough to prevent recurrence. The example is no longer a ritual but a sign that serves as an obstacle. The technique of punitive signs rested on six major rules: The rule of minimum quantity, the idea that the criminal should have a little more interest in avoiding the penalty than in risking the crime; The rule of sufficient ideality, punishment has to use representation to deter, not corporal reality; The rule of lateral effects, the punishment should have a great effect on the observer, as in Beccaria's idea of slavery; The rule of perfect certainty, there must be an unbreakable link between crime and penalty; The rule of common truth, penal practice must be subject to the common idea of truth and demonstration; The rule of optimal specification, all offenses must be precisely classified. There is a need for a tabulation of offenses, a taxonomy that relates every crime to a punishment. The division between first offender and recidivist becomes important. Beneath the humanization of penalties are rules that demand "leniency" as a calculated economy of power to punish. This power is applied not to the body but to the mind as a play of representations or signs. The new art of punishment reveals the supersession of punitive semio- techniques by a new political anatomy, in which the body is the most important feature. Analysis From torture and execution, Foucault moves to considering calls for reform. In his view, the reform movement was humanitarian in the sense that man (and the pain he felt) became a standard against which punishments were assessed. The body changed from being the place where punishment acted, to a reason why it should act differently. The reformers first attempted to separate torture and cruelty from punishment; of course, for Foucault the link between torture and investigation means that, strictly speaking, torture was never part of punishment. In general, Foucault is unimpressed by interpretations of penal reform that see it as motivated by a love of one's fellow men. He takes a more calculating attitude to humanitarian reform. This calculation extends to the processes that surrounded reform. Reform was possible within a structure in which crime itself was changed and reduced. As with his explanation of execution, Foucault looks at deep economic and social structures. The shift in the forces of production (referred to by other writers as the Industrial Revolution) led to an increase in productivity and a greater emphasis on property. In turn, this led to an increase in property crime, but also to an alteration in the operation of power in society. The fact that the reformers called for change as these deep shifts occurred was not a coincidence. Rather, it was a "strategic coincidence," a change in the way power works. The intentions or free-will of the reformers were unimportant. Foucault then dissects the reformers' case. Just as their calls for reform were linked to shifts in power, they attacked the way power worked in society. Foucault's metaphor of the economy is

important here. Penal reform looked at the way that power operated, and its relationship to the king. It tried to maximize the efficiency of the whole operation. Fundamentally, reform was concerned with efficiency and illegality. Another discussion of popular illegality follows. Foucault sees illegality as integrated into the workings of the state in pre-modern France. It is a necessary part of the state, but is also a space in which poor people can speak and act. Illegality is affected by structural and economic changes. What Foucault calls a "crisis" of popular illegality is really yet another shift towards illegal behavior that centers on goods. Whereas the peasant previously rioted to protect his land rights against a landlord, now he stole chickens. Or possibly did both: Foucault is unclear on this point. This is a strange attitude to popular behavior in the period, which many historians have criticized. Illegality was also linked to the structure of the monarchy, which allowed it to occur. Reform began to attack illegality without attacking monarchy because the reformers wanted to make power work better. This interpretation has the benefit of explaining why many reformers were middle-class figures who were hostile to the lower orders. Foucault sees the theory of the contract (found in eighteenth- century authors such as Pufendorf and Rousseau) as the technology by which punishment came to act. If all the citizens agreed together to form a state, and to punish those who broke the laws, a great power was created. This power, whether it took the form of a monarchy or a republic, was immense. In part, the reformers were concerned with restraining the power to punish, in case it became dangerous. The answer they found, according to Foucault, was humanity. They used man as a standard to measure punishment and power against. They were not all that concerned for the criminal himself. This seems like a remarkably cynical view. From the idea of reform as calculation comes another calculation: the obstacle- sign. Punishment becomes a sign that shows the public the right path to follow, but which also relates exactly to the crime. This is very different to the execution. Punishment is no longer concerned with re-establishing order, but with preventing crime. Those who see a criminal being punished are now not necessary as part of the ritual. Rather, the ritual is designed to stop them from committing crime. The controversial nature of Foucault's views needs to be spelled out. Taking the reformers at their word is not possible for him because of the nature of his analysis. The reformers spoke within a discourse that interacted with economic developments and changes in the nature of power. Their words reflect the complex operations of power, rather than any real feeling for suffering convicts. Some might say that this is a complex way of analyzing the hidden motives behind any reform movement, but it is central to Foucault's argument that all of what anyone says or does reflects structures of power. The Gentle Art of Punishment Summary The art of punishment rests on a technology of representation. To find a suitable punishment is to find a deterrent that robs the crime of all attraction. It is the art of establishing representations of pairs of opposing values, obstacle-signs. Obstacle-signs must obey certain conditions to function: One) they must not be arbitrary. An immediate link between the crime and punishment is necessary. Two) The complex of signs must decrease the desire for crime and increase the fear of the penalty. Three) Temporal modulation is needed. Penalties cannot be permanent: