Workshop on Foucault's Discipline and Punish (Parts 1 and 2)
by Thad Curtz and Betty Ruth Estes
On Interpretation: Public Acts, Spring 1998

This workshop is intended to help you explore the fundamental structure of the book. Please find a group of three or four people to work with. Appoint someone to keep an eye on the time and ask the group about moving on if it gets behind. You can read through the whole workshop before you begin if you like. We will take a break about half way through, after the first general discussion period.

Part 1 (15 minutes) - Work on this part without consulting the book.

In his final summary of the reading for today, Foucault says that in the late eighteenth century, "...one is confronted by three ways of organizing the power to punish." These three - "monarchical law", the proposals of "reforming jurists", and "the project for a prison institution" - are the three "technologies of power" which this book analyzes. He goes on to list the contrasting elements that he says characterize these three technologies. Here are the fifteen elements, all scrambled together:

the social body, mark, the administrative apparatus, the body subjected to training, ceremony, exercise, the sovereign and his force, sign, the tortured body, the vanquished enemy, trace, the individual subjected to immediate coercion, representation, the juridicial subject in the process of requalification, the soul with its manipulated representations

Make a table with three headings - one for monarchical law, one for the reforming jurists, and one for the project for a prison institution. Work together to get clear about what each of these fifteen elements means and to distribute them appropriately into the three columns, each element under the technology of power that it is part of. (You should end up with five elements in each column - five rows that summarize the contrasts of these three technologies.)

Part 2 (5 minutes) - Work on this part without the book too.

Foucault also says that the two newer technologies (the proposals of "reforming jurists", and "the project for a prison institution") both share the same fundamental conception of the right to punish, which is quite different from that of the old monarchical law, although they are very different at the level of mechanisms. Work together to try to write down a stantement of the conception they share.

Part 3 (10 minutes)

Now open the book and read over the next to the last paragaph in Part Two, beginning in the middle of page 130. Check to see if your arrangement of the elements and your answer to Part 2's question correspond with Foucault's summary. If not, try to get clear about the reasons for the differences.

Part 4 - (15 minutes)

We'll discuss any questions people have and then take a break.

Part 5 - (10 minutes) - Break

Part 6 - (30 minutes)

In the first footnote to Part Three, Foucault says that in this particular book he's chosen examples of these technologies of power from "...military, medical, educational, and industrial institutions." "Other examples," he says, "might have been taken from colonization, slavery and child rearing." Work together to invent three little stories about child rearing, a different story to illustrate each one of these three technologies of power being used within some family as part of the process of raising children. (You can write them down so you can read them out loud, or just have somebody in your group to be ready to tell each of them.)

After you get each story worked out, go back and check it against the list of five elements for that technology of power in your chart. Try to develop or adjust the story so that things in it correspond to each of those elements. (Obviously, you might need to chnge them to fit into a child-rearing setting... you wouldn't have a king in a family, for example, but you might have a parent who acted like a king in various ways.)

Part 7 (10 minutes)

Join with two other groups. Have one group share its story about child rearing using the technology of monarchical law, and the next group share its story about child-rearing using the technology of the reforming jurists, and the last group share its story about child rearing using the technology of the project for a prison institution.

Part 8 (10 minutes) - A hard question we'll continue to think about...

Each of these projects involves a different kind of public theatre, a different sort of social spectacle. On pp. 16-17, Foucault says that when France moved from the technology of monarchical law to the technology of the reforming jurists:

The old partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and the blood, gave way. A new character came on the scene, masked. It was the end of a certain kind of tragedy; comedy began, with shadow play, faceless voices, impalpable entities.

First, in what ways did the old justice resemble or function like a tragedy, Greek or Christian?

Second, in what ways did this second technology (that of the reforming jurists) resemble, or function like, a comedy?

Third - Foucault does not say much in our reading so far about the theatre or spectacle constituted by the third technology (that of the project for a prison institution). In fact, he sometimes seems to imply in passing that it made punishment invisible. In fact, however, this turns out to be a simplification. See if you can guess what sort of theatre or social spectacle this third technology will turn out to focus on...

Part 9 - Final questions...