Discipline and Punish: Encyclopedia II - Discipline and Punish - Discipline

Discipline and Punish - Discipline

The emergence of prison as 'the' form of punishment for every crime grew out of the development of discipline in the 18th and 19th centuries, according to Foucault. He looks at the development of highly refined forms of discipline, of discipline concerned with the smallest and most precise aspects of a person's body. Discipline, he suggests, developed a new economy and politics for bodies. Modern institutions required that bodies must be individuated according to their tasks, as well as for training, observation, and control. Therefore, he argues, discipline created a whole new form of individuality for bodies, which enabled them to perform their duty within the new forms of economic, political, and military organizations emerging in the modern age and continuing to today.

The individuality discipline constructs for the bodies it controls has four characteristics, namely it makes individuality which is:

• cellular - determining the spatial distribution of the bodies
• organic - ensuring that the activities required of the bodies are "natural" for them
• genetic - controlling the evolution over time of the activities of the bodies
• combinatory - allowing for the combination of the force of many bodies into a single massive force

Foucault suggests that discipline creates "docile bodies", ideal for the new economics, politics and warfare of the modern age - bodies which function in factories, ordered military regiments, and school classrooms. But, to construct this individuality the disciplinary institutions must be able to a) constantly observe and record the bodies they control, b) ensure the internalization of the disciplinary individuality within the bodies being controlled. That is, discipline must come about without excessive force, but rather through careful observation, and molding of the bodies into the correct form through this observation. This requires a particular form of institution, which Foucault argues, was exemplified by Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon.

The Panopticon was the ultimate realization of a modern disciplinary institution. It allowed for constant observation, the constant possibility of observation,and perhaps most importantly was specifically designed so that the prisoner could never be sure whether he was being observed or not. Through this, it caused the internalization of disciplinary individuality, and the docile body required of its inmates. Thus, prison, and specifically those which follow the model of the Panopticon, provide the ideal form of modern punishment. Foucault argues that this is why the generalized, "gentle" punishment of public work gangs gave way to the prison. It was the ideal modernization of punishment, so its eventual dominance was natural.

Having laid out the emergence of the prison as the dominant form of punishment, Foucault devotes the rest of the book to examining its precise form and function in our society, to lay bare the reasons for its continued usage, and question the assumed results of its usage.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Discipline", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki