Analysis Of Discipline And Punishment By Foucault

In the first part of Discipline and Punishment, Michel Foucault argues that, over the course of a few short centuries, the penal system shifted its target from the criminal’s body to their soul. Foucault locates this shift in the transition from public torture to prisons; from punishment as a public means of expressing force to a private means of correcting and preventing nonconformity. Punitive power has been replaced with disciplinary power, and discipline works on the soul rather than the body. However, in Foucault’s analysis it is clear that the body is as important to disciplinary power as it was to the sovereign power. In this paper, I will show the ways in which “discipline ‘makes’ individuals” (170), and that it does this in order
For most of this chapter it appears as though his argument is that the soul is the new target of the penal system. He specifically refers to the modern penal system as “non-corporal” in nature, and argues that “penality in its most severe forms no longer addresses itself to the body”, but to “the soul” (16). The “punishment-body relation” has become, in the modern penal system, a means to a greater end, so that if the law must interact with the body at all it is only as “an instrument or intermediary” in the punishment of the soul (11). Ideally, the penal system would not need to interact with the body at all. Foucault spends most of the first chapter drawing the distinction between the older corporally-oriented punitive system and the modern system which punishes and concerns itself with the soul rather than the
The modern soul, “unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment… [It] is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercised over the body” (29-30). The soul is a means by which systems of power can better access and subjugate the body. Foucault initially makes this claim in his first chapter, but it is not until he delves more deeply into the functions of the disciplinary system that we understand how the soul provides access to the body. It is in fact discipline which distributes and submits bodies, which makes them useful and docile, and it is discipline that utilizes the modern soul. Discipline does this, Foucault explains, because it “‘makes’ individuals”