Foucault's Discipline and Punish: Power, Punishment, and Identity

Introduction: Foucault's Productive Power

Michel Foucault stated: "We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it excludes, it represses, it censors, it abstracts, it masks, it conceals. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production." The objective of this paper is to examine what Foucault means by this statement, how it relates to the rest of Discipline and Punish, and how it might connect to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. The paper concludes with a personal response, either in agreement or disagreement with the quote.

The claims Foucault makes in this statement are explained by McWhorter (1994) as going beyond the familiar observation that "few will disagree that our prison system, along with its subsidiary mechanisms, produces the conditions under which delinquency can spread and flourish" (p. 1). Foucault's assertion in Discipline and Punish is far stronger than that. Foucault is not merely reiterating the claim that prisons produce a medium for the development of delinquency; rather, he is claiming that our disciplinary society actually produces the delinquent self in its very being (McWhorter, 1994, p. 1).

Foucault's Core Assertion

Michel Foucault held that locking an individual in prison places that person in a fertile environment to truly become a criminal or delinquent. He argued that the form of discipline and punishment utilized in modern society is counter-productive to society and to the individual on every level of existence. According to McWhorter (1994):

"Delinquency itself — as a functional locus within a discourse but also as a possible form of selfhood, as a way of being, as a way of being known and of knowing oneself — arose simultaneously with and is sustained and perpetuated by what Foucault calls the carceral system. Delinquency and the prison system are the twin offspring of the same series of events, the same movement of power." (p. 34)

Two Types of Evidence for Foucault's Assertion

There are two types of evidence offered by Michel Foucault to support his assertion that the "very being of the delinquent is a product of a certain series of events within a network of power" (McWhorter, 1994, p. 34).

First, Foucault points to the "lack of the figure of the delinquent prior to the dramatic rise in the use of incarceration as a form of punishment in Western Europe" (p. 34). This was before the prison system was conceived in terms of "their internal hierarchies and structures of corrections and their attendant psychiatric and medical knowledges and practices; legal proceedings and techniques of punishment focused primarily on an act or series of acts" (McWhorter, 1994, p. 34).

Prior to the formation of the prison system, Foucault held that criminality "was merely a matter of action, not a state of being, and punishment was its counteraction" (McWhorter, 1994, p. 34). However, with the development of the carceral system, the primary focus became not the action "but rather the self, the true being of the one who acts offensively" (McWhorter, 1994, p. 34). From this view, an individual's actions are considered only "insofar as they function to initiate contact between the delinquent and the correctional system and insofar as they are understood to be the true expression of an underlying reality. Delinquency functions as the name of that reality" (McWhorter, 1994, p. 34).

Second, Foucault asserts that additional evidence supports the idea that "delinquency is produced within a certain configuration of power relations." Notably, Foucault holds that delinquency is useful, and that this utility corresponds with the mechanisms of power and their investments in delinquency. McWhorter states that delinquency is "indirectly useful because it represents such an improvement over popular, sporadic unlawfulness" (1994, p. 35). Delinquents are useful to those in power: they have historically been used as labor forces when territories were conquered for colonization, and today, inmates in county prisons continue to be used for labor, generating power and profits for those who control the system.

Delinquents represent a free labor force. McWhorter describes their uses as follows: "they have been used as a sort of covert labor force at home, available for employment by legitimate private businesses or various state agencies to work on the fringes of legality — as smugglers, prostitutes, odds-makers, informants, and spies" (1994, p. 5). Additionally, McWhorter reports that delinquents in urban ghettos serve to keep "racial and ethnic minorities frightened and disorganized; thus they cannot effectively challenge the oppression perpetrated against them by dominant social groups" (1994, p. 36).

According to Foucault: "in fabricating delinquency, it [disciplinary power] gave to criminal justice a unitary field of objects, authenticated by the 'sciences,' and thus enabled it to function on a general horizon of 'truth'" (DP 256, cited in McWhorter, 1994, p. 36). In other words, certain branches of knowledge — specifically the human sciences — have a great deal invested in "the fabrication and continued existence of the object of their study, the delinquent individual" (McWhorter, 1994, p. 37). It is noted, however, that Foucault's point extends well beyond the carceral system; as McWhorter puts it, "the trap is set for much bigger prey" (1994, p. 37).

It is Foucault's position that false identities have been constructed for the young men and women labeled as "delinquents." McWhorter explains the assumptions underlying this process: "The first important assumption is that fundamentally humanity occurs as individuals, each with his or her own true core identity that is untouched by power except a posteriori and negatively. The second important assumption, which is interrelated with the first, is that power is antithetical to truth; this leads to the conclusion that we must be suspicious of any claim to truth if it is clear that the claim is in the interest of some power" (p. 38).