Foucault, Michel Discipline & Punish

Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books: New York. (1978).

“The disappearance of public executions marks therefore the decline of the spectacle; but it also marks a slackening of the hold on the body” (10).

“The criticism that was often leveled at the penitentiary system in the early nineteenth century (imprisonment is not punishmen: prisoners are less hungry, less cold, less deprived in general than many of poor people or even workers) suggests a postulate that was never explicitly denied: it is just that the condemned man should suffer physically more than other men. It is difficult to dissociate punishment from additional physical pain. What would a non-corporal punishment be?” (16).

This is also a way of implementing a means of humiliation. We remove respect in order to place a person on a lower social level. Striking or hurting the body makes that lack of respect more clear. So, all in all, there is a rhetorical tool of respect.

“Throughout the penal ritual, from the preliminary investigation to the sentence and the final effects of the penalty, a domain has been penetrated by objects that not only duplicate, but also dissociate the juridically defined and coded objects” (18).
“But what is odd about modern criminal justice is that, although it has taken on so many extra-juridical elements, it has done so not in order to be able to define them juridically and gradually to integrate them into the actual power to punish: on the contrary, it has done so in order to make them function within the penal operation as non-juridical elements; in order tos top this operation being simply a legal punishment; in order to exculpate the judge from being purely and simply he who punishes (22).

Interesting. Terministic screens going on?

"Thus, by an analysis of penal leniency as a technique of power one might understand both how man, the soul, the normal or abnormal individual have come to duplicate crime as objects of penal intervention; and in what way a specific mode of subjection was able to give birth to man as an object of knowledge for a discourse with a ‘scientific’ status” (24).

“But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs” (25).

“Perhaps, too, we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist onl where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests. . .We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (27).

Does this speak to encouraging authority in students? By allowing students to feel as though they have power over their education, that it is not run by others, then we allow them to absorb knowledge of their own devising.