Monitor and punish

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Monitoring and Punishing: The Birth of Prison is a book by the French philosopher Michel Foucault . The work published in 1975 under the title Surveiller et punir was published in German in 1976. It is closely related to the author's work in the Groupe d'information sur les prisons , GIP (Prison Information Group), which from 1971 worked to give prisoners in French prisons the opportunity to present their situation in public .

theme

The book itself deals primarily with the development of modern penal systems in Europe in the early 18th century, primarily in France and England . Ultimately, thanks to Foucault's subject-critical perspective, it is about the constitution of the subject prisoner by means of regimes of power and truth. In contrast to his later writings, however, power still has a subject here: Foucault's distinction between subjectless power, on the one hand, and institutional rule, on the other, has not yet been developed.

In the ongoing reception it became important to note that the monitoring practices are not processes that have been outsourced from society, but that they can also be demonstrated in the newly emerging factories, schools and other institutions. Ultimately, the constituted subjects are particularly suitable for the newly forming society. However, these theses can already be found in many places in Foucault himself. It is pointed out again and again how the individual moments of power have been outsourced from prisons and can be found more and more in all institutions and areas of life.

Disciplinary power

According to Foucault, repression and surveillance cannot simply be understood as a one-sided relationship between an impact on a previously “whole body” or “whole mind”. Power , and with it repression , are not only oppressive but also productive. That means that it is the power structures that constitute the subjects that then form a society. Foucault identifies three major power techniques:

  1. Enclosure of individuals in an area closed off from the outside, whereby any transfer between the enclosed area and the outside world, for example of people or goods, can be controlled.
  2. Parceling, that is, each individual is assigned a fixed place and function, which makes it more effective to control individuals and their services.
  3. Hierarchization, i.e. the individuals are classified according to rank and status. Each individual is then defined by a very specific distance from others and will try to adapt to the norm on which the classification is based (e.g. good grades, high productivity).

After these power techniques were only slowly developed in the 16th and 17th centuries and established themselves in their pure form in the 18th and 19th centuries, a further optimization of the disciplinary techniques has since been observed. Although the influences of the institutions exercising power have disappeared (in schools through education, in companies through trade unions and the teaching of employees), more and more and more subtle intermediate institutions have been created, which firstly keep the individual submissive through controlled concessions (pedagogy , Rights of prisoners, students, soldiers, etc.) and, secondly, they are increasingly distributed in society (school is linked to a company through certificates and achievements, school and youth welfare office and fellow citizens cooperate in monitoring families, etc.).

Foucault describes society as a structure that is interspersed with the smallest lines of power and in which all individuals are constantly occupied by power mechanisms. Power should be understood as something multifaceted, multi-layered, intangible that people do not own, but can only control to a limited extent from strategic positions. Equivalently, Foucault represents a system Darwinist position here, i.e. systems (e.g. states, companies) whose monitoring effectively both increases productivity and reduces the costs of domination inevitably prevail over other systems.

Panopticon

The Panopticon of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham pointed Foucault as an architecture, the basics of the current with the formation of society can be described. It is a proposal for a perfect prison: In the middle of it stands a tower, from which guards can see the open prison cells arranged around it. In this way, the prisoners are placed under the permanent potential control of an all-encompassing view. They could be observed at any time and punished for actions that were deemed wrong. This leads to a new conception of behavior for them, which includes precisely this potential gaze of the supervisor.

Panoptic prison from the Machado dictatorship in Cuba

This approach becomes more perfidious if - as Bentham suggests - it is also applied and enlarged in schools and barracks. Then several rings of cells arranged in a circle could cause guards to be controlled again by guards standing above them. This can potentially be taken a few levels further.

The Panopticon appears as a description of the modern disciplinary society, as a symbol of today's society. Foucault coined the term panoptism for this , but expressed himself ambiguously as usual in subsequent conversations:

“The investigation ends around 1830. Nonetheless, in this case readers, both critical and approving, have taken the book as a description of the present society of inclusion. I have never said that, even if it is correct, that the writing of this book was related to a certain experience of our modernity. "

effect

Foucault's theses have had an impact far beyond the history of prisons. For one, his views of power and subject were welcomed. Parts of current feminism , gender studies , postcolonial studies and other schools of thought follow on from Foucault and above all on the theses presented in Surveillance and Punishment .

On the other hand, there was decisive criticism from Marxist thinkers: Foucault understood power as a pre-social relationship and not necessarily tied to the economy. For him, power becomes an ahistorical constant that precludes any change in it. He regards power itself as an interrelationship between individuals, with the "more powerful" people influencing the behavior of the less powerful people. The latter, however, have the possibility of influence, so they are not “powerless”. Thus the term “power” is reified (instead of “ruler” → “power relationship”).

The American political scientist Mark Lilla pointed out that Foucault's book was received much more cautiously in France than in the Anglo-American region and explains this through the work The Archipelago Gulag by Alexander Solzhenitsyn , which appeared almost simultaneously in France : “The contrast between the two books would have could not be bigger and dampened whatever Foucault had hoped to achieve with his book in France. In the face of this report of physical and mental torture by a regime that many in France still saw as the spearhead of progress, it became difficult to maintain the thesis that Western classrooms are equivalent to prisons without going beyond the limits of good taste ”.

criticism

The French sociologist Raymond Boudon has described surveillance and punishment as "no longer scientific"; Foucault's argument is sociologically "not allowed".

See also

literature

  • Michel Foucault: Monitoring and Punishing. The birth of the prison . 9th edition. Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch 2271, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-38771-9 (French: Surveiller et punir. La naissance de la prison . Paris 1975. Translated by Walter Seitter, first edition: 1977).
  • Jacques Donzelot: The Failures of Theory . About Michel Foucault's surveillance and punishment. In: Wilhelm Schmid (Ed.): Thinking and Existence with Michel Foucault . Suhrkamp (es 1657), Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-11657-6 .
  • Andreas Hetzel: Interpretation. Michel Foucault: Monitoring and punishing / The will to know . In: interpretations. Major works of social philosophy . Reclam, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-15-018114-3 , pp. 195-224 .
  • Petra Neuenhaus: Max Weber and Michel Foucault. About power and rule in the modern age . In: Intersection of the civilization process . tape 14 . Centaurus, Pfaffenweiler 1993, ISBN 3-89085-820-1 .
  • Jan Rehmann : From prison to the modern soul. Foucault's “Monitoring and Punishing” revisited . In: The argument . tape 45 , no. 249 . Argument, 2003, ISSN  0004-1157 , p. 63-81 .
  • Marc Rölli, Roberto Nigro (Ed.): 40 years of surveillance and punishment. On the topicality of Foucault's power analysis . Conference publication, 2015, Zurich. transcript, Bielefeld 2017, ISBN 3-8376-3847-2 .
  • Karsten Uhl : Michel Foucault: Monitoring and punishing. The birth of the prison, in: Christina Schlepper / Jan Wehrheim, ed .: Key Works of Critical Criminology, Weinheim: Beltz Juventa, 2017, pp. 237–247.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michel Foucault: Monitoring and punishing. The birth of the prison . 1st edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1977, ISBN 3-518-27784-7 , pp. including 355 ff .
  2. ↑ Michel Foucault: Man is an animal of experience. Conversation with Ducio Trombadori. Frankfurt / M. 1996, p. 31.
  3. ↑ Mark Lilla: The Unrestrained Spirit. The tyrannophilia of the intellectuals. Kösel Verlag, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-466-37128-0 , p. 148
  4. ^ Raymond Boudon: Ideology. History of a concept. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-499-55469-0 , pp. 189, 260