Foucault Punitive Society 24 January 1973

 Questions:

1. General question for MF: when he talks about the “elective affinity between the prison-form and the wage-form,” he mentions their relationship to be one of interpenetration; what does this mean? How are we to understand interpenetration? (P.71)
2. When MF says that prisons are not trying to be under the juridical and the law (p.66), what does he mean? MF doesn’t provide an example, what would one be?
3. Connection to prison-form and wage-form as it relates to his argument about time (p.72); what does it mean for time to be the crux (or hinge) between the prison-form and the wage-form?
4. P.65 MF talks about interesting phenomenon where prisons emerge and criminal as social enemy emerge; how does MF draw conclusion that criminal as social enemy and incarceration are correlated but not causal in relation?
5. Clarifying question (p.63) regarding “principal penalties in which remain in the Penal Code”; when is MF referencing? (1831, 1973, etc?)

Question 5: he’s trying to map the threshold between 17th and 18th century. The Punitive Society, he’s lecturing as he’s working on Discipline and Punish. There’s a new modality of power arising—discipline—which relates to the prison. There are something’s from the previous penal period which have been re-imagined. There are things that remain but are reconfigured through the perspective of discipline. We can see the things which remain but there is a shift, like a paradigm shift. MF doesn’t want to say that anything started from scratch. It’s not a radical break, where everything is started anew, things are repurposed; just looking at when things emerge. The prison is not new but its function is. 

To some extent, there is a lack of clarity regarding timelines because different societies (e.g. England and France) and their legal code. What is event for MF? It’s not like a big event in time but an overlapping of simultaneous little events in time.

(P.63-65) In the 1810 code, “whole system of incarceration re-organized…” this re-organizes structure of prisons. Did features of old codes featured different forms of imprisonment by different names? It has a different function, it was about making sure someone could be punished. The function was different so the ontology was different; criminals have always existed but not this type of criminal. 

(P.64) Discussion of liberty illuminating how prison as a space of loss of liberty. In D&P: the “dark side of liberal society.” As we discover the liberties, we discovered the disciplines, the reverse of the enlightenment is the prison. Questions arise: Does discipline create its own techniques? Are all techniques used by discipline in turn disciplinary? Example of the colony and bio-power; there is still sovereign power (the boomerang of the sovereign power coming back).

The question of the timeline becomes difficult: France is in a transitory period re penal code, there is a non-linear shift. 

Why does MF think he can just say this (re: question 3); MF not going to say yes or no but methodologically deposit. What if we just look at the practices and techniques? Just because we think of the criminal as a social enemy it doesn’t necessarily entail practical changes; you need to look at power and knowledge together. There probably is a correlation but there is still heterogenous processes occurring. Challenges simplistic notion of history (this happened so this etc), there is not a clear causal relation. It is a complex relationship. MF distinguishes (p.66) the confrontation of penal and penitentiary.

Question 2: We are here, years later, and these are now bound together; prisons break laws all the time but it doesn’t seem to matter. What does MF mean, why does it matter? Seems like penitentiary is extra-judicial but it is the judicial that sends criminals there. The criminal as coming to the books after it was created in the practices. MF wants to go reverse order; we needed to incarcerate people and then made them criminals. Similar ways he analyzes state. The effect of all these changes in law, penitentiary, etc is the criminal. Or is it the reverse? We have separated the criminal from society (e.g. colonization, enslavement), but there are still criminals in society; how do you send them outside of society from within society? Processes are intertwined but there is not a clear causal relation. 

Is there now a different relation than MF is talking about? Systems that mark out who should be punished, deemed an outside and the system that carries that out are different discourses that don’t necessarily emerge together. It’s not the discourse, they are distinct discourses but the interplay happens at the institutional level. At this time, not private prisons, so what penitentiary is saying that the state doesn’t have a say? MF references (footnote 26): “the law must follow the prisoner into the prison.” Somehow, the prison has been cognizant as outside as law, otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to say the law follows the prisoner. The way they were speaking doesn’t imply a separation.

Now we think of criminology; MF is thinking of a threshold, of the practice of getting people jailed/imprisoned was not in complete symphony with penal law. There was a moment when they were not matched but will work itself out. Doesn’t mean they will directly map up but MF showing this shift. Two opposition MF discusses: at the level of discourse and the law and the science of the criminal (what will become criminology which operates outside the law.) Does seem a lot would be permitted in the case of punishment; during this period, there is a constraining on this excessiveness, a tug-of-war whether the law gets to decide or people who are trying to theorize new methods of punishment (e.g. Bentham). Isn’t this still suggesting a conceptual difference influencing the practice, which it seems MF wants to differentiate; there is an autonomy of processes that isn’t necessarily constrained. The process has its own logic. (P.66) Here the juridical is also the idea of sovereignty; see a struggle between power, the threshold between power. How does power go from sovereign torture to discipline?

Is the logic of prisons and power then not juridical in that way? MF talking about the threshold from the 18th century to 19th century metropole. MF addresses limitations in view (to France). 

(P.70) Different models of prison shifting to confinement: MF saying these practices almost preceded the discourse and theory around it. Whenever they had to try to translate it into law, that’s when you get talk of confinement. Primacy of practice; doesn’t mean hierarchy for MF. It’s a methodological assessment. Penal theory is having all these developments but the practices of the prison are already being implemented; it’s not a progressive, or dialectic, relation. There’s not contradictions but events and problems being worked through. MF not going through traditional philosophical route but looking to the archive. What MF does by mapping power is trying to give a toolbox to whoever is doing politics. Not telling you what to do but mapping out what could be useful. MF is not political in that he is going to give an answer as to what we should do but rather question what is useful. We first have practices and then theory. 

Question 3: MF questions the experiential organization of time in modernity. The clock and the watch both become important as the shift of time changes importance. How time is organized and experienced in a historical way. (P.71) “Time being the only good possessed…” Map this to MF archaeology: this is the time of history. MF not on the level of discourse but on the level of practice. 

Question 1: Interpenetration: MF wants to study so many things in their specificity, MF is opposed to notion of totality. There’s a lot which he cannot explain. There’s a curious proximity and distance between labor and prison. Example of finger trap; something about the relationship that is symbiotic, opposition doesn’t mean they constrain each other. You need a system where a prison can operate as punishment and question of how liberty is operating underneath. One way to read MF: he was a philosopher of experience (not in a phenomenological sense) and here he is trying to track the experience to this interweaving. It produces and produces it. MF trying to say the experience of time that is emerging is condition for the possibility of these two forms but at the same time you can’t track it independently from the practices. (P.72) “What allows us to analyze…” MF will eventually drop repression for production; beginning of bio-power/bio-politics.