Anne Schwan - How to Read Foucaults Discipline and Punish

How to Read Theory

Stephen Shapiro, Department of English and
Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick
Ed White, Department of English, University of Florida

How to Read Theory is a new series of clear, introductory guides to critical theory and cultural studies classics designed to encourage readers to think independently. Each title focuses on a single, key text and concisely explains its arguments and significance, showing the contemporary relevance of theory and presenting difficult theoretical concepts in clear, jargon-free prose. Presented in a compact, user-friendly format, the How to Read Theory series is designed to appeal to students and to interested readers who are coming to these key texts for the first time.

Also available:

How to Read Marxs Capital
Stephen Shapiro

First published 2011 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by
Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martins Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Copyright Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro 2011

The right of Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 2981 9 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 2980 2 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7837 1083 6 ePub

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America

Another book on Foucault? Michel Foucault (19261984) is one of the most internationally influential French scholars of the post-World War II period. Known primarily for his work on the mutually enabling relationship between knowledge and power and their use for social control, Foucault has been so influential in the English-speaking humanities and social sciences that it is barely possible to consider yourself a serious student in these fields without a working understanding of his writing, concepts and terminology. Whether contemporary writers strongly agree or disagree with Foucault, or fall somewhere in between, nearly all respond to his widespread influence, even if many are, at times, themselves unaware of their dependence on it. Consequently, the number of books and articles that try to explain, use or extend Foucault is very long indeed. Why then, is there any need, at this late date, for a readers guide to Foucault and one of his most-cited works, Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison (1975, English translation 1977)? The How to Read Theory series has as its overall motive to fill a gap for new readers of theoretical classics who have been disserved over recent years. As theory has become more commonly used in the humanities and social sciences, students have been increasingly taught these writings through selected key passages of larger works, usually in specially designed anthologies. This strategy, however, denies those new to theory the chance to read critical arguments in their full context. Anthology readers lose the chance to see the process by which an argument is built up or how they might even respond to somewhat prefabricated snippets. If those hostile to the presence of theory often complain that many writers use certain theoretical words and phrases as if they were magic incantations that could simply be sprinkled, with mesmeric spirit, over an essay as if they were self-evident truths, the anthology approach is partially to blame, no matter how well-intentioned its editors.

How to Read Theory, on the other hand, believes that unfamiliar readers are best educated when they are helped to understand the whole trajectory of an important work by exploring its overall careful construction. Without this complete horizon, readers risk isolating bits of an argument and then misunderstanding what a much-studied writer is trying to say.

Nowhere is this error of incompleteness more common than with Foucault in general and in particular, Discipline and Punish, one of his most significant works. Precisely because Discipline and Punish has been so cited, a great deal of writing on it is unhelpful, since English-speaking readers, who have frequently relied on secondary explanations and anthologies, do not realize the limits and errors these create. We feel that readers who want to benefit fully from Foucaults insights need to go back and read Discipline and Punish as a whole, paying attention to its actual claims and structure of argument, rather than the imaginary ones claimed for it. In particular, existing summaries of Discipline and Punish have been especially marred by three key absences, which we hope here to repair.

The first of these gaps is that abbreviated versions of Discipline and Punish lose sight that Discipline and Punish is above all a work of history emerging out of a particular French intellectual context. The book examines the strategy and tactics in punishments changing forms from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth (and beyond). Yet when Foucault published his work, there was still a large difference, if not mutual hostility, between the kinds of historical writing that were dominant in English-speaking lands and the ones by French scholars, who were challenging the themes and methods that Anglophone historians favoured. One feature of this split was the French scholars move away from defining history by great (usually) men and towards the study of a social history of anonymous or non-heroic figures, those often overlooked from academic perspectives, namely the working class and the poor, women, rural labourers, deviants and criminals (these being overlapping categories). Another feature of the French historians was a declining commitment to relying on specific monumental dates, like those of battles, and towards longer periods of time, by taking several decades, or even centuries, as a single unit or by choosing dates that are not immediately dependent on the actions of a small group of elite historical figures. Even when Anglophone left and labour historians did begin to produce histories of the disempowered, they still tended to highlight events rather than longer time-spans.

Because Foucaults work falls generally within these French interests, his work was largely introduced into the United States and the United Kingdom by literature, rather than history, professors. While the former were more accepting of Foucaults concerns, they were, conversely, often less interested in the historical phases that Foucault described and what helped create these changes. They focused instead mainly on the most recent historical phase that might be useful as a way to interpret modern literary and cultural affairs. By ignoring the several shifts between periods of time that Foucault describes, literary and cultural studies scholars lost sense of his claim about how modes of punishment carry meaning only in context of their own moments dominant features and tensions. Yet if we are not attentive to Foucaults descriptions of ways in which Western societies developed into their modern forms, then we lose sight of both the present as a moment in an ongoing process and Foucaults, admittedly often implicit, suggestions for how we might move beyond or escape this present. Furthermore, if readers only examine parts of