Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison

By examining the rise of prison systems in Western culture, Foucault demonstrates the ways modern nation-states exert their power to dominate their citizens. This is a great book for anyone interested in power formations as well as continental theory.

Foucault's work is more philosophical than historical, and, as such, he is not bound by historical rules of evidence. Thus, the criticisms of the previous reviewer do not apply. This is a thoroughly enjoyable work for anyone interested in a serious look at power relations.

Focault's idea of Panopticism was originally made for explaining the nature of prison cells. However, as the idea was developed by several scholars, it is now attributed to the idea of a deity which makes every 'believer' paranoid in the sense that they believe that their god is constantly watching them wherever they go. great book for sociology and philosophy students!

The historical exegeses are largely superfluous and distract from the points of argumentation.

There are many elaborate dilations of the main propositions which do little more than meander towards the next one(s), as opposed to elucidating their logical-historical connection.

Foucault gives political manifesto content-length propositions that are reasonably insightful, in a basically historical-novelistic theory fiction format. "We are less Greek than we think." --Foucault is more anti-Enlightenment than he realizes and less "Nietzschean" so much as a paraphrastic derivative thinker than he would like to be.

The description of power relations does not necessarily reveal the ideology governing it. In fact, it does much to mythologize an omnipresent non-entity of whom we see and experience only its effects. One suspects there are only effects of power, of ideology; consequences which cannotn be telekeniticized by any localizable 'gaze' but follow materially from human actions.

15. He who does not know how to put his will into things at least puts a MEANING into them; that is, he believes there is a will in them already (principle of 'belief').
(Twilight of the Idols, "Maxims and Arrows" epigram 15)

As Foucault ought to have known, there is no meaning to power except in the feeling of its increase. The only gaze that is belongs to "the Other". In this sense, Foucault has articulated the narcissistic element of power. On the whole however, he identifies with it since he cannot dissociate power from its celebration: the carnival event of discipline and punish, the panoptical voyeurism of the carceral gaze. Naval gazing social theory par excellence (Knowledge is Power and Power is Ideology, therefore Ideology is Knowledge.) The gaze is a fiction unless the alleged 'observed' sees that he is being watched, there is no subject without the choice presented by the Other; the neurosis of the subject hypersensitive to the Other withstands the hermeneutical uncertainty with horror, inevitably directed at himself, --that there is nothing to see. Foucault's text makes ideology power's Echo, when it is really ideology that echoes Power. Ideology is the ignorance and absence of Power that would be the knowledge required to suspend ideology for authentic choices.

The Birth of the Prison is the death of the social, the death of the Other, the fettering of the individual himself to ideology. One must ask, "Where is ideology?" Foucault offers merely the dazed "everywhere and nowhere," as the gaze without eye, the predicate without subject, Donald Rumsfeld's "known unknowns" which are nothing at all. Discipline and Punish does not address the lexical of 'known knowns' because the language of oppression, of ideology requires a counter affirmation of Power. One assumes power or renounces it, and one must be doubly strong for the latter. Given the current state of events, its disavowal is a gesture into a void: one has no power to renounce if one is not the State itself. "Je suis le etat." Since it has been more difficult to define the "Je", the sovereign, one speaks of exploitation as a structural and institutional function. This impotent anthropomorphism of theory merely compounds the problem of ideology. Exploitation is an action committed man against man, and these actions must be identified with what systems enable these impingements on the sovereignty of other men.

"l'ecrasez l'infamie!"

Foucault does not crush the infamy. He does reveal its ankles slightly however this will not titillate, unless one does not already see the pudeurs of the clearly unclothed emperors of the various reigning ideologies. Ideology abhors clarity. Read Foucault, then forget Foucault.

A few chapters are interesting because they bring back the gruesome spectacle of publc torture. So, if you're a sadist, and to some extent we all are (by watching horror flicks like Saw, etc.), you will dig how he introduces his power-knowledge theme and applies it to punishment today and yesterday.

His writing itself is filled with run-on sentences, albeit with the overused semicolons and colons. And his paragraphs are too long. Did he skip language/writing classes? Foucault's terms are seldom defined adequately, if at all, and he is hard to follow. It's hard to see how this gives any value to his books. It takes a lot away in my opinion, perhaps masking the bleakness of some of his work.

I bought the book on a recommendation a year back and tried to read it but failed to concentrate enough as it was a pretty dense book. Recently I picked it up again, this time determined to finish it as it is considered an important work.

I have forced myself and it takes forever to get through a single page. Either the author or the translator did a lousy job. I wonder if the original is easier to decipher. I ended up putting the book down on page 111 (a third into the book). Do not waste your time with this book. Foucault may have been a great philosopher who had an impact on many other scholars but I wouldn't know because i cant understand what he wrote.

HAHAHAHAH LET ME DEMONSTRATE WHAT I MEAN AS I QUOTE FROM THE BOOK (p.23), SEE IF YOU CAN UNDERSTAND WHAT HE IS SAYING ON YOUR FIRST TRY:

"Instead of treating the history of penal law and the history of the human sciences as two separate series whose overlapping appears to have had on one or the other, or perhaps on both, a disturbing or useful effect, according to one's point of view, see whether there is not some common matrix or whether they do not both derive from a single process of 'epistemologico-juridical' formation; in short, make the technology of power the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system and the knowledge of man."

NOT AS BAD AS FINNEGAN's WAKE, but it sure comes close.

Contemporary, left of center writing begins every social criticism (for the purposes of the left, the individual is immaterial, if not downright anathema) with a premise strikingly biblical: before the serpent, always bourgeois and rational, there was eden. Foucault refers to the world before reason came slithering in as a place without madness (cf. History of Madness) and a place without crime (this work). After seducing the good to think their innocent acts a sin, and those who perpetrate them naked and wicked, yea, then did the commercial devils Work and Industry clothe our bodies in cover-alls and deliver us over into a toiling hell, where there are toilets, moon rockets, and day schools. for foucault, madness is an identity assigned to those who will not reason as the devils say one should; and crime is a mere name intended to demean an act of rebellion against the authority of these same devils.

gimme a break! the entire hypothesis is outlandish in the extreme. true, there are brilliancies in Foucault's work, but they more often than not illuminate how banal the method behind it, and therefore resemble the critical equivalent of a slight of hand, put there to conceal the purpose. I would broadly categorize corruption as the maintenance of an untruth for private purposes. Foucault is profoundly guilty of this kind of dishonesty, and it corrupts what value his observation might intrinsically possess.

brains, please, people.

what might cato say today? "methinks, the left (latin for left is sinister: remarkably apropo) ought utterly be destroyed." a good enough beginning for this perdition would be its authors and all their works, mostly for being stupid, and telling such catchable lies.

tlt-

I bought the book on a recommendation a year back and tried to read it but failed to concentrate enough as it was a pretty dense book. Recently I picked it up again, this time determined to finish it as it is considered an important work.

I have forced myself and it takes forever to get through a single page. Either the author or the translator did a lousy job. I wonder if the original is easier to decipher. I ended up putting the book down on page 111 (a third into the book). Do not waste your time with this book. Foucault may have been a great philosopher who had an impact on many other scholars but I wouldn't know because i cant understand what he wrote.

HAHAHAHAH LET ME DEMONSTRATE WHAT I MEAN AS I QUOTE FROM THE BOOK (p.23), SEE IF YOU CAN UNDERSTAND WHAT HE IS SAYING ON YOUR FIRST TRY:

"Instead of treating the history of penal law and the history of the human sciences as two separate series whose overlapping appears to have had on one or the other, or perhaps on both, a disturbing or useful effect, according to one's point of view, see whether there is not some common matrix or whether they do not both derive from a single process of 'epistemologico-juridical' formation; in short, make the technology of power the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system and the knowledge of man."

NOT AS BAD AS FINNEGAN's WAKE, but it sure comes close.

Contemporary, left of center writing begins every social criticism (for the purposes of the left, the individual is immaterial, if not downright anathema) with a premise strikingly biblical: before the serpent, always bourgeois and rational, there was eden. Foucault refers to the world before reason came slithering in as a place without madness (cf. History of Madness) and a place without crime (this work). After seducing the good to think their innocent acts a sin, and those who perpetrate them naked and wicked, yea, then did the commercial devils Work and Industry clothe our bodies in cover-alls and deliver us over into a toiling hell, where there are toilets, moon rockets, and day schools. for foucault, madness is an identity assigned to those who will not reason as the devils say one should; and crime is a mere name intended to demean an act of rebellion against the authority of these same devils.

gimme a break! the entire hypothesis is outlandish in the extreme. true, there are brilliancies in Foucault's work, but they more often than not illuminate how banal the method behind it, and therefore resemble the critical equivalent of a slight of hand, put there to conceal the purpose. I would broadly categorize corruption as the maintenance of an untruth for private purposes. Foucault is profoundly guilty of this kind of dishonesty, and it corrupts what value his observation might intrinsically possess.

brains, please, people.

what might cato say today? "methinks, the left (latin for left is sinister: remarkably apropo) ought utterly be destroyed." a good enough beginning for this perdition would be its authors and all their works, mostly for being stupid, and telling such catchable lies.

tlt-