An Analysis of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish Meghan Kallman with Rachele Dini Copyright © 2017 by Macat International Ltd 24:13 Coda Centre, 189 Munster Road, London SW6 6AW. Macat International has asserted its right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the copyright holder of this work. The print publication is protected by copyright. Prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, distribution or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, me- chanical, recording or otherwise, permission should be obtained from the publisher or where applicable a license permitting restricted copying in the United Kingdom should be obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Barnard’s Inn, 86 Fetter Lane, London EC4A 1EN, UK. 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CONTENTS WAYS IN TO THE TEXT Who Was Michel Foucault? 9 What Does Discipline and Punish Say? 10 Why Does Discipline and Punish Matter? 12 SECTION 1: INFLUENCES Module 1: The Author and the Historical Context 15 Module 2: Academic Context 20 Module 3: The Problem 25 Module 4: The Author’s Contribution 29 SECTION 2: IDEAS Module 5: Main Ideas 35 Module 6: Secondary Ideas 40 Module 7: Achievement 45 Module 8: Place in the Author’s Work 49 SECTION 3: IMPACT Module 9: The First Responses 55 Module 10: The Evolving Debate 60 Module 11: Impact and Influence Today 65 Module 12: Where Next? 70 Glossary of Terms 76 People Mentioned in the Text 88 Works Cited 93 THE MACAT LIBRARY The Macat Library is a series of unique academic explorations of seminal works in the humanities and social sciences – books and papers that have had a significant and widely recognised impact on their disciplines. 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CRITICAL THINKING AND DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH Primary critical thinking skill: ANALYSIS Secondary critical thinking skill: REASONING Michel Foucault is famous as one of the 20th-century’s most innovative thinkers – and his work on Discipline and Punish was so original and offered models so useful to other scholars that the book now ranks among the most influential academic works ever published. Foucault’s aim is to trace the way in which incarceration was transformed between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. What started as a spectacle, in which ritual punishments were focused on the prisoner’s body, eventually became a matter of the private disciplining of a delinquent soul. Foucault’s work is renowned for its original insights, and Discipline and Punish contains several of his most compelling observations. Much of the focus of the book is on making new connections between knowledge and power, leading Foucault to sketch out a new interpretation of the relationship between voir, savoir and pouvoir – or, ‘to see is to know is to have power.’ Foucault also dwells in fascinating detail on the true implications of a uniquely creative solution to the problems generated by incarcerating large numbers of criminals in a confined space – Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon,’ a prison constructed around a central tower from which hidden guards might – or might not – be monitoring any given prisoner at any given time. As Foucualt points out, the panopticon creates a prison in which inmates will discipline themselves, for fear of punishment, even when there are no guards present. He goes on to apply this insight to the manner in which all of us behave in the outside world – a world in which CCTV and speed cameras are explicitly designed to modify our behavior. Foucault’s highly original vision of prisons also ties them to broader structures of power, allowing him to argue that all previous conceptions of prison are misleading, even wrong. For Foucault, the ultimate purpose of incarceration is neither to punish inmates, nor to reduce crime. It is to produce delinquency as a way of enabling the state to control and of structure crime. ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE ORIGINAL WORK Michel Foucault was born in 1926 into a wealthy and conservative French family. He studied philosophy, but being gay in a homophobic society took its toll and after a suicide attempt in his early 20s, he was treated in a psychiatric hospital. Foucault is considered one of the most important modern thinkers. His analyses of the interplay of power, knowledge, and the makeup of the individual are considered key contributions to a wide range of academic fields, including sociology, history, and philosophy. Foucault died in 1984 at the age of 57. ABOUT THE AUTHORS OF THE ANALYSIS Dr Meghan Kallman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Brown University, working in the Department of Sociology. Her research focuses on bureaucratized morality and public altruism. In her spare time, she plays accordion in the Extraordinary Rendition Band, a guerilla activist collective in Providence, RI. Dr Rachele Dini studied at Cambridge, King’s College London and University College London. Much of her current work focuses on the representation of production and consumption in modern and contemporary Anglo-American fiction. She has taught at Cambridge and for the Foundation for International Education, and is now Ledturer in English at the University of Roehampton. Her first monograph, Consumerism, Waste and Re-use in Twentieth-century Fiction: Legacies of the Avant-Garde, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. 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This is the learning of the future.’ Rt Hon Charles Clarke, former UK Secretary of State for Education ‘The Macat analyses provide immediate access to the critical conversation surrounding the books that have shaped their respective discipline, which will make them an invaluable resource to all of those, students and teachers, working in the field.’ Professor William Tronzo, University of California at San Diego WAYS IN TO THE TEXT KEY POINTS • Michel Foucault (1926–84) was a French social philosopher and historian. • Discipline and Punish proposes a theory of modern power relations—the power held by different sections of society— by tracing a history of the modern prison and its impact on other social institutions such as hospitals, factories, schools, and workplaces. • Discipline and Punish has had an impact on the approach taken by scholars in the humanities and social sciences in understanding power, through its investigation of the roles of surveillance*—systematic monitoring—and knowledge- creation in constructing both individuals and relationships. Who Was Michel Foucault? Michel Foucault, the author of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), was a radical French social philosopher, historian, and literary critic. Today, he is widely recognized as being one of the most influential contemporary thinkers in both the social sciences and the humanities. The son of a surgeon, Foucault grew up in a wealthy and socially conservative home in western France, and enjoyed a privileged 9