Birth of the Asylum

So ignoring the question of religion and religious madness for a moment, I'd like to focus on the reformation of the Asylum, which reminded me a lot of the transformation of the penal system. Under the guise of more humane treatment for the prisoners, in this case the treatment of the madmen, the sovereign's ability to control and regulate was extended in a broader, more efficient manner. Specifically in the context of the asylum, Foucault addresses fear in the relationship between the madmen and the 'normal' people outside of the asylum. Here, Foucault says that the conception of fear has changed from one of fearing the insane, to the insane fearing their own insanity. At first this seems a little out-there and far to understand, but after reading farther it makes quite a bit of sense. The madman was given the liberation from chains, loathing, etc. on the condition that he obide by certain rules and regulations of the asylum. As Foucault says "he promised to restrain himself," as the necessity for external control became unnecessary - all that was needed to calm the madman was a simple reminder that failure to adhere to the rules would force those around him to inflict punishment. In this way, fear became the primary motivator for self-regulationa and adherence to standardized norms of begavior, as "any manifestation of madness will be linked to punshiment." In turn, this also releives the enactor of the punshiment from guilt and/or responsbility (much like justice was releived of the guilt of having to punish transgressors), as the madman himself becomes entirely responsible for any punishment brought upon him. In this way, the liberation and humaneness of the asylum became, as Foucault labels them, "justifications" for the extension of the means and methods of control and regulation.

The Body of the Condemned

The main purpose of The Body of the Condemned is to discuss the transformation from the spectacle of punishment to more subtle reforms of correction. Contrary to the way punishment operated in the good-old days, Foucault says that contemporary politics have brought the end of the “gloomy festival of punishment” mainly because of the end of the spectacle of torturous punishment – not only punishment of the sort described at the beginning of this essay, but rather the entirety of public punishment including public works-services etc. The main reason for this was the inversion of roles…the criminal became the victim of the state, and the public viewed the executioner as the criminal and the offender as the victim to pity.
The obvious reaction to this by the state/sovereign power was to withdraw punishment from the public domain and make it the least visible part. Foucault extracts several important implications from this transformation from visibility to hiding. First, punishment leaves our everyday thoughts and enters the realm of what he calls “abstract consciousness,” where we recognize its importance not by bearing witness to it, but by knowing that punishment is inevitable for all transgressors. Second, and related to the inevitability claim, Foucault points out that the deterrent factor of punishment comes from the guarantee of punishment instead of the so-called spectacle of punishment. Third, the practice of execution is no longer a display of the sovereign’s awesome power, but has become an obligatory blemish on justice. The trial and conviction have been cast into the public domain to display the criminal’s guilt and complicity with evilness and the execution becomes something to pity the sovereign for for having to carry it out.
Another important transformation in the realm of punishment was in the area of intent. Instead of desiring to inflict pain upon criminals, punishment has now become corrective in nature – a direct part of the project of normalization.
Fifth, the body served no longer as the site of punishment but has become a vehicle for restricting non-physical parts of individuals’ lives – things like liberty and freedom, in what Foucault has labeled the “economy of suspended rights.” Here, life is taken away completely devoid from physical pain.
When physical pain was necessary because of the severity of the crime, it was no longer a long, drawn-out process but a quick and almost painless process. This can be seen in the historical creation of a more efficient gallows and the European guillotine, both designed to bring about the fastest death possible. Even more specifically, the guillotine revolutionalized the death penalty by reducing the contact between the state, or sovereign, and the criminal to a mere tenth of a second – much the same way contact between the law and punishment was reduced to a miniscule amount of time. This separation in turn was even further enhanced by representing the execution of death sentences in words and representations instead of pictures, and by covering the body in cloth to prevent its visibility.
So where then, if not in the body, does he sovereign exact punishment? As Michel Foucault points out, the answer is the soul. Specifically, Foucault says punishment “acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations.” This represents the other major transformation in the criminal realm: the attachment of psychological aspects to crimes. Not only are crimes like murder and rape punished, but so too the mental desires and thoughts that accompany them. These “attenuating circumstances” are used not only to explain the criminal’s actions, but also the way we can expect the criminal to act in the future. And, more importantly, punishment has begun to attempt to alter these future projections. A modern day example of this normalization attempt can be seen in parole boards and the reduction of sentences. If inmates display certain tendencies of community service, apologetics, or more ‘normal’ ways, they’re allowed to return to society more quickly. Another contemporary example is found in the punishment of the mentally challenged or unstable individuals who commit crimes. Since it’s considered heinous and unusual torture to physically punish these individuals, they are placed in special homes to be rehabilitated and mentally stabilized. Here the institutional discipline of science finds a fantastic home where it can expand its knowledge/power base and provide an excuse for the sovereign to plan and manage the lives of the scientifically altered individuals. In addition, the application of the power/knowledge dynamic makes it possible to “ground judgment in truth” because it can lay judgment on the motivations, the crime, and the proper fixing.
Finally, the entirety of this transportation can be described by the desire to obtain a cure for the criminally ill individuals among us. In analyzing this technique, Foucault reminds us to keep four important principles in mind: punishment is a complex social function that serves to deter citizens from engaging in “evil” behaviors; punishment is a political tactic used by the sovereign to normalize those who have gone astray via criminal action; the history of science and penal law have are intertwined to create a humanization of the penal system that alleviates evilness from the sovereign’s inaction of punishment; and finally that the control of the soul of the criminal allows the investment of power relations within the criminal mind. One final point that Foucault addresses is that this last point of the investment of power relations in the soul is critical to the repression and restraint of the body through non-physical means. In Foucault’s own words, “the soul is the prison of the body.”

Right of Death and Power over Life

An extremely interesting and rich chapter concerning the primary problem Foucault identifies with the new system of bio-power that governs moder day populaces. The part that particularly struck me was Foucault's identification of one of the core reasons why we always look to the sovereign state as the lcoation for change/protection and continually neglect the disciplines of society (schools, churches, the military, the family, etc.). The fear of death, Foucault says, has taken over the way we live our lives as the dominant system around us continually tells us what it measn to trully live, thereby enabling its mechanisms of normalization, control, and domination over us. The war in Iraq provides the perfect example of what Foucault's talking about. The Bush administration forstalled criticism for invading Iraq by overexaggerating the threat of biological weapons. In denying opponents' claims of his interest in expanding the U.S. empire, Bush repetedly insisted that the "liberation" of Iraq and the larger war on terror were crucial to the survival of the planet at large. This is exaclty what Foucault is talking about when he says "wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone." And, the implications are built right into the line that follows: "entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital." It is true that criticism regarding the Bsuh administration's military decisions has reached unprecedented levels of support accross the country, but the point about mobilization still holds. Recall, for example, the massive riots that occured against those individuals who protested the war in Iraq. Slanderous labels like "un-american," "unpatriotic," and other exclusionary titles were spit-out without hesitance. This example also addresses Foucault's analysis of the transformation of power later on, when he describes the shift from using the power of death to producing a certain type of life based on normalization of behaviors and the subsequent exclusion of those outside of the decided norm.

Finally, I'd just liek to briefly comment on the beginning of Foucault's critique of the law. Far from creating open-ended freedom for individualized prosperity, the democratic legal structures throughout the modern world are "the forms that made an essentially normalizing power acceptable." Foucault's anger or dissatisfaction with appeals to legal regulation are reasonable, given that they force us back into the vicious cycle of life-dependency upon the sovereign state and its disciplines. The only question that remains, then, is what is there to do? How do we break this cycle and create a life for ourselves devoid of dependence upon the larger institution of power relations?

Power of the Confession

I thougt our discussion last class was interesting in regards to the idea of the confession. Specifically, I'd like to comment here on the reverse (perhaps even perverse) effect of sexual expression. As Foucault mentions in Scientia Sexualis, "it is in the confession that truth and sex are joined, through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of an individual secret...one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is...the authority who requires the confession, presecribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forginve, console, adn reconcile." In other words, the co-called sexual liberation we beleive we're engaging in when disclosing our sexcapades is nothing more than a mechanism for the authority's expansion of surveillance and control over our bodies, be it the authority of the state, social institutions like the church, or individual people. For example, when a person gets married they're often supposed to disclose their most secretive sexual desires and adventures. But, this revealing, or confession, doesn't liberate the individual: the confessor is perpetually judged, condemned, and then consoled for being a "freak." We see a more public manifestation of this in the social lives of the politician's around us. The Bill Clinton example I brought up last time is a prime case in point, where Bill was forced to publically expose his sexual deviance with Monica Lewinsky, not to liberate his internal sex drive, but to become subject to public and legal scrutiny, and literally judged by the U.S. court-system. This example also illustrates the fallacy, or atleast the fallacy of the problem-solution construction, of sexual repression. Whether or not we are sexually oppressed, this idea of the need to live public lives of sexual pleasure is a tool by the dominant system around us to prevent true emancipation.