The Body of the Condemned

After juxtaposing an excruciatingly detailed description of the torture of Robert-François Damiens with an utterly sterile list of prison regulations, Foucault begins this essay with the statement, "We have, then, a public execution and a time-table" (pg. 7). It is clear from the introduction, which is used to considerable dramatic effect, that his objective will be to retrace this sharp transformation and the sterilization of the penal system. This development is no secret of history, and is in fact studied in any general European history class. It is easy to look back on this period and see nothing but a normal and obvious progression of reforms. I think, however, that Foucault's dramatization here allows us to more fully comprehend how drastic and revolutionary the discursive evolution must have been to produce these two events.

The first process that Foucault looks at is the cessation of punishment as a spectacle. He explains how violence on the part of the state became undesirable, "an additional shame that justice is ashamed to impose on the condemned man" (pg. 9). For me, this observation brings immediately to mind the question of cruel and unusual punishment. Framed to prevent penal excesses such as in the Damiens incident, this phrase is now used to question the legitimacy of the death penalty in general, and it is obvious that the meaning of "cruel and unusual" has been significantly altered. Even for a convict who has murdered scores of people in cold blood, many hold to the belief that Foucault outlines: namely, that the execution of this person would be as hideous as his crimes and that the state would merely be perpetuating violence. With regards to the "bureaucratic concealment" (pg. 10) which acts to kind of hide this problem, I also was struck by the anonymity of the whole process today. For instance, the old idea of a firing squad composed of several men with blanks and others with real bullets so no one would know which person actually carried out the execution, the separation of the person administering lethal injections from the condemned by a one-way mirror, and even the proposal to have an automated injection, activated when two people simply press a button and a computer randomly chooses which button actually activates the system. It is remarkable to me the care with which our penal system goes about the whole process.

The second process is the shift away from punishment of the body, so that, "From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights" (pg. 11), to a denial of one's right to exist within a society. Foucault goes on to explain how the actual death of a person was made quick and as painless as possible. He brings up the example of the Guillotine, and it is hard not to remember how Guillotin himself described the experience as simply a nice, cool sensation on the back of the neck. I think the general characterisation of the "economy of suspended rights" is accurate for the prison system as a whole, and can even possibly extended to rights regained. Prisons now have their own judicial system to deal with infractions and misconduct while within the system, and prisoners with records of good behavior are granted privileges such as limited television, recreation, and even parole. The entire system utilizes a concept of rights and privileges regranted.

With regards to Foucault's analysis of the judgment of the individual and his normalization rather than strict judicial punishment, I am less convinced. First of all, to say that the process involves a significant moral normalization is a bit of a stretch. This is not to say that it doesn't exist at all. However, I would argue that in most cases the corrective nature of the penal system is geared entirely towards the other aspect that he acknowledges, the future protection of society. I think that the most visible element of moral normalization is in the case of sexual crimes, and the illegality of things such as child pornography involves a moral judgment. However, it also serves to protect a portion of society from predation. This idea is even further emphasized by violent offenders. The object of their rehabilitation is not to rid them of perversions or to make them more like ordinary people, but to eliminate the violent impulses that directly lead to the physical harm of others. Foucault seems to make much about society considering an individual's future actions, but I didn't quite see why this was so striking to him, as society always needs to protect itself. I understand Foucault's issues with the legitimacy of psychiatry, but at the same time, the psychiatrists play a smaller role than he gives them credit for. Multiple opinions are often considered, and there often has to be a fairly significant incapacity that is noticeable anyways. In sum, I would agree that a change has taken place in the judicial system, but it seems to me that he has mischaracterized and generalized it, when he goes as far as to label it an "exorbitant singularity" (pg. 23).

This said, I am not trying to refute that the criminal system is not an apparatus of the "political technology of the body" that Foucault talks about near the end. I would agree that it aims at subjecting the body to make it productive (the rhetoric of the whole prison system bears this out entirely, saying that we want to make our prisoners into 'productive members of society'). I guess to clarify the last paragraph, I disagreed with the whole emphasis on moral normalization. I think however that his characterization of the multiple and constantly interacting "micro-powers" is interesting and more endearing that a simple bipolar relationship.

Just on the subject of punishment in general, I think that the study of its development is highly interesting because I do not buy into any of the activist rhetoric about making prison systems more humane. The reason for this is that these people claim the true goal of the penal system is not simply retribution but rehabilitation and correction, and that punishment as we have seen in history is completely unjustified. This brought to mind a passage from Nietzsche, in which he criticizes the historical sense of philosophers writing in his day, tracing the origin and purpose of punishment by simply making inferences based upon its use in their own day. He explains how a concept, once created, goes through a myriad of reinterpretations and reversals so that all of its meanings become entangled and we cannot simply assume that our current perception bears on the original meaning. Foucault takes up this idea by analyzing the transition of concepts through different, and sometimes even the same, discourses. Just as Nietzsche criticized the blindness of his day, I think Foucault is right to re-evaluate our blindness about the development of punishment, and I would be interested in reading more fully his analysis of power in this area.