Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society Lecture Five (31st January, 1973)

Questions:

1. What is the level of autonomy of the subject of power relations?

2. (P. 92): “new form of judicial established through it…” What does it mean to say that it is not the “old monastic form” but a new “juridical-religious connection that emerges through it?

3. (88-89): What is a good example of the impermeability of Christianity and the penal system?

4. How does the Quaker conception of political power contrast with a non-religious or non-Quaker conception of political power? (perhaps catholic?)

5. (91 first paragraph): connaissance (program of knowledge) and savoir (criminal as object of knowledge) / what are the elements F. lists (dossier, biography, etc.) tracking? Is it pouvoir or something else? 

6. (85): “temporal justice”: what does he mean by this term? 

7. (84) F. points to a formal analogy and a functional dis-analogy, how do we understand the distinction between an analysis of forms v. an analysis of functions. What does he mean by “function” here? What would some synonyms be?

8. (90): “The Christian conscience penetrates…” What does it mean that it penetrates not from the ideological level of principles, but from the base/ bottom?

9. (89) What is the penitentiary? How do we specify its function or its form? Or is it an institution/ technique?

Beginning with Q9: a footnote on 65 is illuminating.

• Perhaps the penitentiary is more abstract, somewhat synonymous with the prison

• Penitentiary is a place to make people penitent, to correct or repent for wrongdoing

• Historical claim is being made: wherein the penitent movement takes place in the Americas (in Pennsylvania), and then is brought back to France. 

• Also speaks to processes of globalization during the modern era.

Question 4:

• In catholicism, the institutions, modalities of power and practices are a top-down form of power. The political form takes on a verticality, while the Quaker model seems more horizontal.

• Power, on the Quaker model, must be moral, where any politics beyond morality is excluded.

• Raises questions about slave labor and colonization

• Perhaps a good segway to question about impermeability 

Question 3:

• The idea of the sovereign here seems based on the Roman conception (infraction against the sovereign).

• But, don’t Christians (87) also hold this view?

• The claim for Foucault seems to be that when it comes to lay justice, the Church (before the Quakers), was satisfied that the state, with its own mechanisms, would control the institution of punishment. When the Quakers come along, they believe that it is the Church’s role to intervene in these practices of punishments.

• And, this first intermeshing does not take place at the level of principles, but “through the penitentiary’s invasion of the whole of the penal and the juridical”

• Is one point that the Quakers have a different conception of evil (as something to be eradicated) versus something inevitable in human nature? (Catholics)

• Raises questions about the genealogical analysis of morality, similar to Nietzsche. 

• What has to happen for Christian morality to be autonomous such that it becomes formal for a punitive society?

• How do we move from the case of the vagabond, who isn’t an object of Christian intervention, to the evildoer, who becomes an object of jurico-religious power?

• And, what kind of example would Foucault need to claim that the penal system and christianity are impermeable before this moment he is articulating through the phenomenon of the Quakers?

• There is a difference between claiming an affinity between relations and forms and claiming a causal connection. Is Foucault tracing affinities? What gets emphasized in either project? 

• Maybe one form that “affinity” takes is “alliance,” rather than “descendent” or “descent” –thinking methodologically about the history F.’s genealogy is giving.

• Interestingly, Foucault describes his genealogical analysis here (84) as “dynastic” (not plural)

Question 5:

• Pages 90-91, the second consequence of the heterogeneity of the judicial and moral: knowledge of the prisoner (as such) becomes a central problem.

• Unfolding of punishment with surveillance or supervision, “the object must be monitored” (91)

• This accumulation of connaissance (knowledge) qua object of savoir, is possible through various techniques: dossier, etc., –are these surface knowledges or depth knowledges?

• How do we read the “need for”? Is the “need for” available to the episteme or actors?

• What comes first? The “need” or the techniques?

• Quakers were aware of a need to cure/punish the object: criminal, where the savoir that conditions the need for techniques and practices (dossiers, etc) is something like objectification of the criminal–of knowability and ultimately individualization/normalization (pouvoir) 

• Where will we end up? That the criminal will become objectified as an object of knowledge and power, and this is his social status.