Foucault Discipline and Punish Intro

Michel Foucault wrote a book Discipline and Punish in 1975. It applied discipline and punishment to the "body" to show how the body inscribes knowledge and power, the investigation and control of public power, and the guilty plea of criminals are inscribed at the moment through torture. In the historical moment, the public's brutal punishment has disappeared. This is not the humanitarian progress of the judiciary, but the emergence of new knowledge power technology, which produces the "soul" of modern people. In the new context, sentencing (to initiate all intellectual power structures) is more important than punishment (just invisible imprisonment or execution). The sentence contains a hypothesis of normality, an analysis of causality, an assessment of possible changes, and an expected future of futures. Now, power can be in life, and because of its abstractness, it can be extended to others' lives. Foucault also includes comparing the idea of power in punishment between eighteen and nineteen centuries with what we have now.

The original body of power is now penalized, but during the 18th and 19th centuries: power and punishment began to generate distance between each other, power was separated from this material violence and the emotions it might trigger, and there was another abstraction - The existence of free-floating. The public execution during the execution, relying on the feeling of horror, can only touch the surface of the body at best, leaving marks, but the operation of power also puts the executioner in the same position as the criminal, sharing its injustice and cruelty. It may also make the criminal a hero or cause pity. At the same time, such executions are afflicted with the flesh and the experience of empathy, and such effects are more difficult to grasp. On the contrary, it is a new, not involved physical and painful, but inevitably coming, the power penalty process has a broader and deeper control.

The law is no longer a physical mark, but an abstract power that is exerted on the subject, covering all of his or her life, not just the flesh. The goal of the penalty is no longer the body but the subject. The law is not only about the illegal behavior, but also the knowledge and mastery of the subject, thus creating a series of knowledge objects and experts to extract knowledge. Building a new network of knowledge power, and derive many small authorities that have the ability to make judicial decisions, forming a vast system. Law and punishment are no longer directed at the body, but the "modern soul,” including the mind, in order to develop a series of assessments, diagnoses, normalization judgments, and the formation of new scientific, judicial links. The modern soul is the existence of matter, which corresponds to certain power technology, born from punishment, management, and restriction. It refers to the knowledge created by educators, psychologists, and psychologists that was taken in the techniques of punishment, surveillance, and restriction, which also a part of the authorities to help correcting the soul during the punishment. The modern soul is, therefore, the prison of imprisonment. In France and England, the penal system of the slave economy creates state slaves to provide free labor. Under the feudal economic system, the body is the only property and therefore has a lot of corporal punishment. The commodity economy requires a free labor force, and the penalty thus reduces forced labor.

Foucault generates few words to capture the new thing that emerges on the history node such as Political economy of the body, Political technology of the body and Micro-physics of power. The physical entanglement in the reality of political economy shows how it is constructed to serve political purposes, how to match the current economic atmosphere to the body, these constitute the body's political economy. The body is the political force, which implies that power can be mark, train, organize, torture, and force it to perform specific functions on the body. The knowledge and manipulation of the body form the body of political science. As Micro-physic that implies in law, these techniques are often diffused, decentralized, fragmented, using different tools, multiple forms, and not concentrated in the state or institution. Therefore, only microphysics can capture its operation. He then talked about power, which is not a property but strategy, its impact is temperament, operation, strategy, technology, function. It is easy to understand the power from this perspective is focusing on dynamics, tension, and special historical patterns. Power relations have many conflicting risks, unstable focus, and sometimes reversal. They cannot be owned by grasping the establishment or system but must continue to operate in a localized structure. Power enables the subject to become the object of knowledge research, and knowledge creates the subject on which power can be applied. Foucault thinks that we should abandon the "violent" to understand the power and use body politic to see how intellectual power uses various material components and techniques to attack, connect, and communicate, on the body, and control them. They can make the object of knowledge into a more effective and efficient of power.