Foucault’s Discipline and Punish was, by a decent margin, the most challenging reading so far this semester. It was also interesting, so far as I could tell. When I was done, and after I read a few book reviews to see if I understood what I read, I concluded that the book could have been half as long as it was. Still, it was some very important stuff, and the Bentham-panopticon concept was fascinating.
The major agent for change for Foucault is the state. It seems, however, that with other Marxist authors, the state is a mechanism for powerful people to exert their preferences on everybody for the sake of increased income: a powerful force, with a known entity controlling it, for an obvious reason. Foucault’s state is a much more powerful force that seems to occupy and surround people working in the system (I imagined a fog flowing all around society), and many people don’t realize the part they are playing in maintaining power in the state. So many of us get caught in becoming a part of the “whole army of technicians [that] took over from the executioner, the immediate anatomist of pain: warders, doctors, chaplains, psychiatrists, psychologists, educationalists” (p. 11). And though the public spectacle of inflicting pain is gone, we now watch the accused through the arrest and trial, and then other people watch them when they are in prison, with a panopticon tower. More interestingly, it’s not just the prisoner who is watched, but we micromanage the training of those who will watch the prisoners, reminiscent of Thompson’s article on time.
No comments:
Post a Comment