MICHEL FOUCAULT, DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH

BIOGRAPHIC AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC
Foucault, Michel. DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: The Birth of the Prison. Tr. by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. French original, 1975. Ursinus College Myrin Library call number: 365/F821.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART ONE TORTURE

1. The body of the condemned, 3

2. The spectacle of the scaffold, 32

PART TWO PUNISHMENT

1. Generalized punishment, 73,

2. The gentle way of punishment, 104

PART THREE DISCIPLINE

1. Docile bodies, 135
This includes the art of distributions, the control of activity, the organization of geneses, the composition of forces.

2. The means of correct training, 170
This includes hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement, and the examination.

3. Panopticism, 195

PART FOUR PRISON

1. Complete and austere institutions, 231

2. Illegalities and delinquency, 257

3. The carceral, 293

SELECTED SUMMARY NOTES ON THE TEXT
QUOTABLE QUOTES
POWER-KNOWLEDGE: Here we have the essence of Foucault's notion of the centrality of power in the arrangement of society. It is this notion that precludes the possibility of objective knowledge. This is from the opening chapter on the body of the condemned, where Foucault establishes the terms of his discourse:

"Perhaps, too, we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests. Perhaps we should abandon the belief that power makes mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit, rather, that power produces knowledge...; that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations..../In short, it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge." (pp.27/28)

SIGNIFICANCE, EVALUATION, AND RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER WORK
CAVEAT: WORK WILL RESUME ON THIS INCOMPLETE FILE. MEANWHILE, WE INVITE READERS/BROWSERS TO TAKE FROM WHAT IS HERE WHAT THEY WILL. THEY SHOULD UNDERSTAND THAT THE PROGRAMME DOES NOT HOLD ITSELF RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS FILE UNTIL WE REMOVE THIS CAVEAT.

8 February 1997

Return to THE PROGRAMME contents page.