Discipline and Punish

But now, let us move on to Foucault's next category, disciplinary power.

In his book Discipline and Punish, which is, yeah, very interesting but extremely depressing, Foucault details the history of the modern prison system, and in so doing reveals a new form of power that he believes saturates modern society.

To begin the book, Foucault follows the historical process by which punishment has moved away from the spectacular torture of bodies that was common during the medieval era.

This is, you know, red-hot pincers, boiling liquids, and bodies breaking on the wheel.

about this execution.

One of his most widely read books is Discipline and Punish, which opens with a very lurid account of the drawing and quartering of a regicide 1757 or something like that with the screaming crowd and all the bloodlust.

And it was his way of giving a dramatic opening to a book that argued that the modern modernity or the modern world is shaped by these tools of discipline that operate in and through our bodies and that that shapes our sense of who we are.

And And that has had a big effect.

in which he describes it as a kind of eroticized, ecstatic account where Foucault, and I'll sort of explain in terms of the argument why this would be the case, but in which Foucault finds a kind of, again, a kind of jouissance, a kind of pleasure in this horrifying spectacle.

So Foucault's Discipline and Punish, certainly one of his most famous, I'd say probably Discipline and Punish, the opening section called The Body of the Condemned and the section on the Panopticon, along with the introduction to the history of sexuality, are probably the most assigned Foucault texts in American colleges and universities.

So it's interesting, given how conservatives usually think about Foucault, that it's quite plausible to read the opening section of Discipline and Punish as a sort of pro-public execution text in the following way.

The basic argument there, it begins with this extremely horrifying and gruesome description of the drawing and quartering of an attempted regicide in pre-revolutionary France.

And it describes it in graphic detail.

In other words, the violence that is carried out against the body of the condemned and the in the spectacle described at the opening, is spectacular, horrifying, but it is also rare and unique.

And it takes place at the center of the society as a kind of exceptional moment.

You know, whereas the narrative of discipline and punish is that the violence of the state, the state's ability to kind of monopolize and perpetrate violence on its subjects is gradually moved into the interiority of the selves of all of its citizens.

And all of this is on the eve of live streaming the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan.

Now, in the 1975 book Discipline and Punishment, Foucault wrote that, "Public execution was not meant merely to punish a crime, but to physically imprint the king's vengeance upon the body of the condemned." That's what they're doing.

But let's remember what Pete Buttigieg said this week, and has said for a while, that Trump is way less popular than he wants you to believe and that you are significantly more powerful than he wants you to think.

So vote early and vote in numbers too big to manipulate.

It's toys for adults.

But it's also it really made me think of Foucault's book, Discipline and Punish.

So he writes about how like industrial society, like in factories, in the military, like these institutions control the workers' body movements to produce what he calls docile bodies.

So basically, the movements that we must make over and over again within our daily jobs or lives or whatever are training us to be easily managed and controlled.

And then over time, it sort of becomes automatic.

Like the machine becomes a prosthetic body or the body becomes a prosthetic machine and they work together to produce.

And so when I was first reading this, I took a class on discipline and punish at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, which I highly recommend if anybody wants to take classes.

Made it really easy to comprehend because Foucault is very dense.

So in a future episode, I will talk about how true crime reinforces the idea and power of authority, which is why cops are always way too happy to feature in these true crime documentaries.

And, uh, maybe we'll read a little bit of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish if we're feeling a little academic.

I also think that American love of true crime makes us an especially paranoid group of people.

I hear some people like to watch true crime because they think that it'll help them in future scenarios where they're being, uh, uh, murdered.

And in reaction, of course, you have Foucault.

Discipline and Punish, a sort of wordy, difficult to read, but very interesting and influential book, where he talks about execution as a way to restore the injured sovereignty of power.

Of course, Foucault is a pedophile or French, depending on which term you like to use.

He's a bizarre figure, but nonetheless, he's incredibly influential, and he took what was a rising sentiment against the death penalty.