Discipline and Punish

[Tomcat]

Have you ever felt that at work you are constantly monitored, and your phone is tapped? And in general, that this is not an office, but a prison? Paranoia ?! Michel Foucault did not think so. In Discipline and Punish, he explains how schools, factories, armies, hospitals and prisons are alike and why. Today, we will look back at the highlights of this book and learn how society became an ideal place to discipline and discipline.

The famous philosopher-historian Michel Foucault covered only those topics that worried him personally. These topics went beyond accepted concepts in science, crossed disciplinary boundaries, and often the boundaries of reason. Discipline and Punish (1975) focuses on rethinking the history of penitentiary institutions through the prism of disciplinary practices of good governance. A little later, Foucault will supplement his findings and develop them into the concept of "biopolitics". Prison as a form of punishment replaced executions and torture not at all because of considerations of humanity, but out of the desire of the state for total control over the individual. Prison as an organization and even more tightly entered our life, becoming a model for any institution - from school to enterprise. In addition to the sonorous title,

Start

On March 2, 1757, Damien was sentenced to "public repentance before the central gates of the Paris Cathedral"; he “had to be brought there in a cart, in one shirt, with a burning candle weighing two pounds in his hands,” then “in the same cart, delivered to the Place de Grève and, after tearing the nipples, arms, thighs , and calves with hot tongs, to the chopping block erected there, and in his right hand he must hold a knife, with which he intended to commit regicide; This hand should be burned with burning sulfur, and in the places torn with tongs, splash a brew of liquid lead, boiling oil, resin, molten wax and molten sulfur, then tear and dismember his body with four horses, set his torso and severed limbs on fire, burn to ashes and scatter the ashes in the wind. "
“Finally he was quartered,” reports the Gazette d'Amsterdam. - The last action took a long time, since the horses were not trained to pull; then instead of four horses they harnessed six; but there were not enough of them, and in order to tear off the limbs of the unfortunate man, he had to cut his tendons and grind his joints ...
It is said that although he was an inveterate blasphemer, not the slightest blasphemy escaped his lips; only unbearable pain made him emit terrible cries, and he often repeated: "Lord Jesus, have mercy, help me, Lord" [1].

This is how Discipline and Punish begins.

Traditional history of punishment
Foucault gives evidence of the execution of Robert-François Damien, who attempted the assassination of King Louis XV of France. It was quartered on the Place de Grève in Paris on March 28, 1757.

It must be said that this execution was especially cruel for the 18th century, quartering in France had not been used for a hundred years before and never after. Such terrible sights and hellish torments are more characteristic of the Middle Ages. Until the first bourgeois revolutions, it was intimidation that was considered the purpose of punishment, and the death penalty and self-harm, corporal punishment were used as measures of punishment.

The revolutions changed attitudes towards punishment. The main goal was revenge and the elimination of the criminal as the cause of the crime.

Imprisonment in the 18th-19th centuries responded to the task of isolating the criminal and humiliating his human dignity, causing suffering.

However, the 19th-20th centuries changed the attitude towards punishment, establishing humane treatment of criminals and humanitarian standards for conditions of imprisonment as one of the basic principles of international law. Correction and re-education of a person was declared as the goals of imprisonment. But at the same time, the conditions of serving a sentence and keeping a criminal should not violate his fundamental rights and freedoms, should not humiliate him as a person.

Of course, this short description hardly pretends to cover the "history" of punishments, but it is enough to understand Foucault's ideas. And Monocler will definitely return to the history of punishments.

History of Foucault punishments
By itself, the outline of the history of Foucault's punishment differs little from the traditional one. In the Middle Ages, the primacy of fearsome public executions and cruel corporal punishment - bloody and merciless - reigned. The Age of Enlightenment got rid of the spectacle extravaganza, seeking to reduce the suffering of the criminal, nevertheless continuing the tradition of his physical destruction. Of course, solely for the sake of public safety. Later, imprisonment replaced all types of punishment, still saving society from danger and isolating the criminal, but thinking about the unfortunate one - keeping him alive.

This story has different meanings.

Physical suffering was replaced by moral suffering. Life is saved, but what allows you to be human and to act according to your own understanding - will is taken away. To educate and correct - this is how they declare the meaning of the conclusion (although in reality the effect is most often the opposite).

The main goal of a prison is to make a person “normal,” that is, predictable. Make sure that the sequence of actions is worked out to automatism. Train the prisoner to discipline and rules. Know and accept that you must obey. That you don't make the rules, but you follow them. And this goal is convenient and desirable not only in relation to prisoners. The state as a manager has long been looking for ways of ideal management and control of the masses. After all, how much more convenient it is to manage groups of people who act according to templates, rules, and schedule. And in this sense it does not matter at all which group we are talking about - students, workers or prisoners. Foucault explained this idea by giving the audience of his lectures a riddle.

Riddle from the maestro

“I'll ask you a riddle.
I will set out the charter of one of the institutions that actually existed in France in 1840-1845. I will quote this charter without specifying whether it is a factory, a prison, a psychiatric hospital, a monastery, a school, or a barracks; it is necessary to guess which institution we are talking about.
It is an institution containing four hundred unmarried people who are to rise every morning at 5 o'clock; at fifty, they have to finish their toilette, make the bed and drink coffee; at 6 o'clock the obligatory work began, ending in the evening at 8 o'clock 15 minutes, with a lunch break for an hour; at 8 hours 15 minutes - dinner and joint prayer; rest in the bedrooms starts at exactly 9 o'clock.
"The parish church," the charter also says, "can become a place of contact with the world, therefore a chapel has been consecrated inside the institution."
Believers from outside are not allowed. Pupils can leave the institution only during Sunday walks, but always under the supervision of church officials. Church ministers oversee walks, bedrooms, and oversee the workshops and their functioning. Church staff thus provide not only control over work and morals, but also economic control. Pupils receive not a salary, but a remuneration, the total amount of which is fixed at the level of 40-80 francs per year and which is given to them only upon leaving the institution. If a person of the opposite sex needs to cross the border of an establishment for practical or economic reasons, he must be carefully selected and stay on the territory only for a short time. He is obliged to remain silent under the threat of expulsion.
In general, the two basic organizational principles, according to the charter, are as follows: pupils should never be left alone in the bedroom, in the dining room, in the workshop and in the yard; in addition, any contact with the outside world is considered unacceptable; only the Holy Spirit should rule in the institution ”[2].

What is this institution?

In fact, the answer to this question does not matter, since this could be any institution: an institution for women and men, for young people and adolescents, a prison, a boarding school, a school and a correctional colony.

The answer to the riddle
It is really just a factory. Business for women in the Rhone region (region of France)

Discipline is the perfect weapon
What, then, teaches us to be wrong in answering Foucault's riddle? What makes such different institutions like a school and a prison similar? The simple answer is discipline. Discipline in the organization of any institution. Discipline in monitoring the activities of the supervised.

There are several principles for organizing institutions:

1. Fencing off. The establishment must be located in a separate area, separated from another space. Better - a fence. Schools are fenced in, prisons are fenced with barbed wire, the office boundaries in the business center are separated by a security and access system, the plant is fenced in and workers are allowed through the checkpoints.

2. The principle of elementary localization or tracing and distribution in cells. Each institution is divided into cells - classrooms, wards, cells, offices and classrooms.

3. The rule of functional placement (not empty space) - every space is leaving occupied, all areas are "usable".

4. The unit is not territory, not place, but rank. Rank - the place occupied in the classification. In the army, these are ranks, in school - classes.

Thus, discipline is an art of rank and a technique for transforming placements. It individualizes bodies through localization, which does not mean fixing them in a certain place, but their distribution and circulation in a network of relationships.

After the space is properly organized, the activities of the wards need to be organized.

The operating principles are as follows:

1. Distribution of working time

The three main methods are establishing rhythm, forcing well-defined activities, and introducing repetitive cycles. A marching step, a soldier's march, greeting the teacher while standing before the start of the lesson, wake-up call, lunch and rest.

2. Detailing the action in time

For each movement, the direction, scope, duration are provided, the sequence of its execution is prescribed. Time penetrates into the body, and with it - all kinds of the most detailed control exercised by power. The daily routine is the main commandment of regime institutions.

3. Correlation of body and gesture.

Imposes the best balance between gesture and general posture, which is a prerequisite for its efficiency and speed. How can a soldier assemble a machine gun in a minute, or how is it better for a student to sit while writing.

4. The relationship between body and object.

Discipline determines what relationship the body should maintain with the object it manipulates (how to hold a pen in hand).

5. Exhaustive use or the principle of anti-idleness. It prohibits the waste of time that is allocated by the state and / or God and is paid for by people.

Society is the ideal object and victim
All of these disciplinary principles are implemented both in any prison and in our society.

Foucault recalls Jeremiah Bentham, who in the 18th century proposed “a miniature model of our society of general orthopedics: the notorious freak show.

It is an architectural structure that allows one person to exert power over others; a type of institution suitable for both schools and hospitals, prisons, correctional facilities, orphanages and factories.

The Panopticon is a ring-shaped structure with a courtyard in the middle with a tower in the center. The ring is subdivided into small chambers with windows facing both the courtyard and the outside. In each of these small cells is placed - for correctional purposes - a child learning to write, a working laborer, a reforming prisoner, a madman realizing his madness. The overseer is located in the central tower.

General plan, external and internal view of the Panopticon of Jeremiah Bentham, drawing by Willie Reveli, 1791 © Wikimedia Commons

Since each of the cells faces both the inside and the outside, the watchman's gaze is able to penetrate the entire cell; there is no place for a shadow in it, and therefore, everything that the individual does is exposed to the gaze of the overseer, who observes through the latticed shutters and half-open doors so that he is able to see everything and at the same time be out of reach of the eyes of others.

According to Bentham, this wonderful little architectonic trick can be used in a number of institutions.

The Panopticon is a utopian idea of a society and a type of power, which, in fact, is the society we now know, a utopia brought to life. This type of power may well be called "panoptism". We live in a society where panoptism prevails.
This is a type of power over individuals, exercised in the form of constant observation of individuals, in the forms of control, punishment and reward, in the form of correction, that is, the education and transformation of individuals in accordance with certain norms. The three aspects of panoptism: supervision, control and correction - appear to be the main dimensions of power relations inherent in our society ”[3].

In the grandiose social panoptism, the function of which was precisely the transformation of people's lives into a productive force, the prison played more symbolic and indicative than economic, punitive and corrective functions. The prison appears to be an inverted image of society, an image that has become a threat [4].

(B) place of detention
According to Foucault, we all live in a society that is permanently watched, supervised. We all live in a prison, in a freak show.

***

Many historians and narrow specialists accuse Foucault of "attracting facts." It is too easy and simple to add up historical events in his theory of rational management, and subsequently - biopolitics. It is not otherwise than the case in the art of the philosopher's well- groomed style and his violent and / or sick imagination. Be that as it may, neither a criminologist, nor a sociologist, nor a political scientist will pass by these conclusions. The author offers us too much food for thought.

October 15 marks the 90th anniversary of the birth of Michel Foucault, and our world has hardly changed too much during this time ...