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Discipline & Punish : The Birth of the Prison

Discipline & Punish : The Birth of the Prison

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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The coercive foundations of modern disciplinary society
Review: "Discipline and Punish", a key text in the Foucaldian canon, is an ambitious, though at times imprecise, attempt to trace the ideological bases of the modern punitive apparati consolidated by the Enlightenment. His most important formulation is the recognition that curative or educative punishment is not dissimilar to judicial punishment, which treats crime as a sin against the social order. Curative discipline, Foucault contends, takes crime as a sin against the wrongdoer and is thus the obverse of penal coercion. He compares prisons, factories, schools, barracks and hospitals in their fundamental coercive underpinnings, a feature which is best illustrated by the Panopticon, Bentham's version of the model prison, which was designed to enforce total surveillance of the punished. As opposed to the view that the Enlightenment saw to the triumph of science, reason, progress and order, Foucault considers it as contributing to increased suffering and repression through social control. The corollary of Foucault's argument is that the West has achieved no progress in the past two centuries, a conclusion which is plain false. Reason, as understood by Foucault, is a technology of power with science as its tool; its area of domination human bodies and their actions, as demonstrated by disciplinary surveillance. The will to power, as knowledge, is expressed to consolidate the position of the bourgeois society, and the concentration of coercion, the prevalent quality inherent in modern culture. This is by far an eloquent and absorbing treatise.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The coercive foundations of modern disciplinary society
Review: "Discipline and Punish", a key text in the Foucaldian canon, is an ambitious, though at times imprecise, attempt to trace the ideological bases of the modern punitive apparati consolidated by the Enlightenment. His most important formulation is the recognition that curative or educative punishment is not dissimilar to judicial punishment, which treats crime as a sin against the social order. Curative discipline, Foucault contends, takes crime as a sin against the wrongdoer and is thus the obverse of penal coercion. He compares prisons, factories, schools, barracks and hospitals in their fundamental coercive underpinnings, a feature which is best illustrated by the Panopticon, Bentham's version of the model prison, which was designed to enforce total surveillance of the punished. As opposed to the view that the Enlightenment saw to the triumph of science, reason, progress and order, Foucault considers it as contributing to increased suffering and repression through social control. The corollary of Foucault's argument is that the West has achieved no progress in the past two centuries, a conclusion which is plain false. Reason, as understood by Foucault, is a technology of power with science as its tool; its area of domination human bodies and their actions, as demonstrated by disciplinary surveillance. The will to power, as knowledge, is expressed to consolidate the position of the bourgeois society, and the concentration of coercion, the prevalent quality inherent in modern culture. This is by far an eloquent and absorbing treatise.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Foucault's discipline and punish
Review: A truly remarkable postmodern historical insight into the power structure of the prison system as only Foucault can.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Fascinating but politically static
Review: According to James Miller's "The Passion of Michel Foucault" (which, by the way, is the best Foucault bio), Foucault described "Discipline and Punish" as his "first real book" and noted on more than one occasion its superiority to "The Order of Things," a prior book touted by some as his best. It's not difficult to see why he was so fond of this particular text. In "Discipline," readers will discover all of the things that have endeared so many academics and students to his work. For one, there are the radical, counter-intuitive arguments themselves. According to Foucault, western societies have moved away from a punitive mechanism focused on public torture to one based on prisons not because we have become more humane but because tortures no longer effectively served their purpose, to legitimize sovereign power (here, one can detect the virulent anti-Enlightenment strain that characterizes all of his books). But Foucault doesn't stop there. He argues that prisons are merely the visible embodiment of a broader, all-encompassing "power," the principles of which one can find crystallized in Jeremy Bentham's "panopticon." Basically, the panopticon is a model prison with an opaque tower in the center, which can house a warden or a guard, surrounded by the cages of the prisoners themselves. The panopticon creates an insurmountable power relation in which the prisoner, who can't look inside the tower to see if someone is there, internalizes the possible gaze of the authorities or the idea of being monitored perpetually, and behaves accordingly. Foucault goes on to argue that panoptic principles were not limited just to prisons, but eventually and on its own came to permeate schools, barracks, factories, and other social institutions. Hence, you have Foucault's basic thesis: that society itself is one grand prison. Did philosophy ever sound so sexy?

Equally enticing as the book's ultimate conclusion is the underlying historical method, which Foucault called "genealogy." One of the most interesting aspects of genealogy is its focus on the history of bodies, in particular the different ways in which power over time has manipulated the human body for tactical, social purposes (Foucault called this type of inquiry "the political technology of the body"; such intriguing, quasi-scientific terms, e.g. "the microphysics of power," is another fascinating aspect of the book). To be sure, the most controversial element of Foucault's historical method that can be found in the book is his unabashed description of it as "fiction." Readers may be put off by the notion that what they are reading is not really the truth; but for Foucault, truth per se was itself nothing more than the product or effect of power. So, "fiction" here doesn't mean "false" (since the latter implies the existence of an actual "truth"), but should be understood as a kind of "counter-fiction" to the hegemonic effects of truth.

The unanswered question in the book, however, is what we should do to combat this insidious "power." If power is so cunning and pervasive as to constitute who we are, how can we fight it except to entertain the bizzare notion that we should fight ourselves? "Discipline and Punish" pretends to present a concrete political work, but the political alternative is not really political at all, but more ethical in a Nietzschean, radically individualist way. In the meanwhile, countless children starve, women are prostituted by the thousands, and xenophobia runs rampant in this era of late capitalist globalization. Foucault cannot help us deal with these problems because the problematic of "Discipline and Punish" is normalization, not the problems of real suffering and evil in this world. So for those who want to read a fascinating and extremely erudite book that does nothing to change the world, I recommend "Discipline and Punish." For those more interested in making a real difference and want to deal with practical politics, I recommend anything by Chomsky instead.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Revealing
Review: Discipline & Punish is an investigation of modern techniques in discipline which reveals the hypocrisy of today's principal method of "reform."

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Should we open the doors and throw away the keys?
Review: Discipline and Punish is a brutally honest exploration of the construction of self through the examiniation of the evolution of the prison over the recent past. Michelle Foucault has comprehensively researched and deconstructed the prison: its "architecture" (focus on the Gaze and Bentham's Panopticon), engaging in ideas of "subjectivity and the discursively constructed self", and most importantly "discipline" to create a study of the evolving idea of human nature. Foucualt presents the idea that the self has its origins in "power" and "knowledge". We are then a creation of societal and disciplinary forces that reverberate and cause the "subject" to surrender to patterns of life within the full matrix of the world. This comprehensive and passionate study of power and discipline is probably the most complete "postmodern" discussions of social forces; the theories are coherent and have huge implications for our understanding of who we are and how we came to fill the our little spaces in the everyday that are part and parcel of this interrelation of knowledge and power. He is a sociologist, a psychologist, a structuralist (although he hates the label) - he is all this but more. Foucualt is a social theorist that tries to defy categorization. If this stuff gets you going, you should try "I, Pierre Riviere.....", "Madness and Civilization" and for the structuralists out there, "The Order of Things." A masterpiece and my favorite of all his works.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: BASIC ERRORS IN SCHOLARSHIP
Review: Do read this book.Then read 'Foucault' by J.G.Merquior. Then see if you can find a single good attempt to refute Merquior's arguments.Then ask yourself why you can't find one.Finally, ask yourself what value Foucault's work has if his hordes of disciples are unable to defend him against detailed charges of factual omission and distortion.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Crucial work in Foucault's oeuvre
Review: Following "L'archeologie du savoir" ("The Archaeology of Knowledge") Foucault's work increasingly focused on the analysis of social institutions. "Surveiller et punir" ("Discipline and Punish") was critically acclaimed even by mainstream historians and is probably his best-received book - today it has the widest readership of all his books because it's actually assigned reading in universities now. Crucial to an understanding of his work as a whole. At this point Foucault had truly become an "engaged" philosopher and this is the beginning of "the later Foucault", the activist and social critic.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The spectacle
Review: Foucault learns from history by looking backwards in time until a salient rupture appears, then goes forward detailing all of histories accounts. In Discipline and Punish, he takes us through the early 1800's to a time when the methods of upholding law and order were much more severe. He describes to us certain rituals of torture that were implemented not to uphold justice, but to extract truth. He contends that punishment was directed at the body and the spectacle of torture was the keeper of order. He then has us move past the Middle Ages to a rupture in history where the prison is born. Foucault now contends that punishment is no longer directed at the body; that it is aimed towards the soul. He posits that in our society we no longer have the spectacle of torture to keep us in line--no, a more economical restraint is applied: guilt & responsibility. It is the responsibility of being a model citizen that wills us to abide by the law. It is the fear of guilt that craves us to be `good'. It is the fear of being defined as `bad'; for fear of being suspect is as heavy as the physical chains worn by the malefactor-the ubiquitous invisible-chains; the inculcating chants of the anthems; the responsibility of the citizens to uphold the law and the guilt of not doing so. Foucault also inquires about other institutions-other architectural structures of power networks. One can wonder why the carceral system can be seen in schools, factories, hospitals, and so forth; these environments that we enter, spend a part of our lives in, and then leave to enter another. How many different institutions do you enter and leave in a day? How many hierarchical environments do you exist in the typical 24 hours? How many hierarchical roles do you play? How many different disciplines and regulations do you adhere to? One begins to feel fragmented, even schizophrenic, to the countless performances that we act out. Who are you really? Better yet, when are you? At work? When you are sitting home alone in your room? At any rate, it's a great book, but I wouldn't recommend it for the casual reader.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The spectacle
Review: Foucault learns from history by looking backwards in time until a salient rupture appears, then goes forward detailing all of histories accounts. In Discipline and Punish, he takes us through the early 1800's to a time when the methods of upholding law and order were much more severe. He describes to us certain rituals of torture that were implemented not to uphold justice, but to extract truth. He contends that punishment was directed at the body and the spectacle of torture was the keeper of order. He then has us move past the Middle Ages to a rupture in history where the prison is born. Foucault now contends that punishment is no longer directed at the body; that it is aimed towards the soul. He posits that in our society we no longer have the spectacle of torture to keep us in line--no, a more economical restraint is applied: guilt & responsibility. It is the responsibility of being a model citizen that wills us to abide by the law. It is the fear of guilt that craves us to be 'good'. It is the fear of being defined as 'bad'; for fear of being suspect is as heavy as the physical chains worn by the malefactor-the ubiquitous invisible-chains; the inculcating chants of the anthems; the responsibility of the citizens to uphold the law and the guilt of not doing so. Foucault also inquires about other institutions-other architectural structures of power networks. One can wonder why the carceral system can be seen in schools, factories, hospitals, and so forth; these environments that we enter, spend a part of our lives in, and then leave to enter another. How many different institutions do you enter and leave in a day? How many hierarchical environments do you exist in the typical 24 hours? How many hierarchical roles do you play? How many different disciplines and regulations do you adhere to? One begins to feel fragmented, even schizophrenic, to the countless performances that we act out. Who are you really? Better yet, when are you? At work? When you are sitting home alone in your room? At any rate, it's a great book, but I wouldn't recommend it for the casual reader.


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