Foucault Discipline & Punish 2nd Half

“The public execution is to be understood not only as judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested” (47).
The same holds true for the implementation of guilt. While it may begin in private, much of guilt laying is eventually public and designed to strip the receipient of self-respect.
“The public execution did not re-establish justice, it reactivated power” (49).
“Its ruthlessness, its spectacle, its physical violence, its unbalanced play of forces, its meticulous ceremonial, its entire apparatus were inscribed in the political functioning of the penal system” (49).
It appears we see a similarity in time frame and in strategy here with the conduct book. The power plays developed around an apparatus which was designed to politically disempower human beings.
“Shift the object and change the scale. Define new tactics in order to reach a target that is now more subtle but also more widely spread in the social body” (89).
This reminds me of something in one of my conduct book articles. I think it was Hemphill. That the conduct book and the instruction on conduct were initiated for women because they began taking a more active part in social life. Through the conduct book it looked as though the horizon was broadening, but it was actually adding more restrictions. It was a power play to keep woman in her place.
When talking about penal reform Foucault states about the rules and regs, “They must be as unarbitrary as possible” (104).
Guilt, on the other hand, allowed for, or provided, an absolutely arbitrary way of punishing women. It also allowed for a way for the male to be uninvolved after a time as women would punish themselves with that guilt.
“3. Consequently, one must use a temporal modulation. . .What use would it be if it had to be permanent?” (107).
Guilt has no temporal modulator. Timing, the bearing of guilt, is as long as the recipient keeps it going, or as long as the provider continues to prod the recipient into feeling it. Perfect punishment.
“Now he [the condemned man] became the king’s property, on which the sovereign left his mark and brought down the effects of his power” (109).
Guilt made women products of a male socially constructed society, a piece in a power play belonging to the man.
“By the late eighteenth century, the soldier has become something that can be made; out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it plaiable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit; in short, one has ‘got rid of the peasant’ and given him ‘the air of a soldier’ (ordinance of 20 March 1764).”
So, too, had women become something to be made into an image conceived of by the men. The onset of the conduct book?
“But in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the disciplines became general formulas of domination” (137).
“Thus, discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies” (138).
“In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an ‘aptitude’ a ‘capacity’, which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection” (138).
Did that to women, too.
“Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony” (141).
No doubt that this concerns women as well. You have the enclosed space of the home, then all the enclosed spaces provided by the dictates of men of the ideal woman. Quiet, respectful, handy with a needle, good with kids, a household keeper, etc. Boy, does this apply. By setting down all of the requisites of a “good” woman in books, by apply guilt rhetoric, the enclosure became smaller and smaller and the woman had little space at all in which to find herself.
“And there, too, it encourntered an old architectural and religious method; the monastic cell. Even if the compartments it assigns become purely ideal, the disciplinary space is always, basically, cellular” (143).
“The individual body becomes an element that may be placed, moved articulated on others” (164).
Not sure I understand the last part of this. What does he mean, articulated on others? But yes, women were placed and moved.
“At the heart of all disciplinary systems functions a small penal mechanism. It enjoys a kind of judicial privilege with its own laws, its specific offences, its particular forms of judgment” (178).
The cut direct, the giggle, snicker or snort, being shunned. Wow, there are so many in that small system that surrounded women of the 17th and 18th centuries, and beyond.
“In discipline, punishment is only one element of a double-system: gratification-punishment. And it is this system that operates in the process of training and correction” (180).
Women were rewarded with excellent reputations and the admiration of their peers. They were also rewarded with a good marriage, etc.
“We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces, it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production” (194).
YES!
“We are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power which we bring to ourselves since we are a part of its mechanism” (217).
Women were watched and judged by one another, by men, and by children as well. Their behavior was examined closely. Definitely part of a panoptic machine.