Book 68 - Michel Foucault "Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison"
Michel Foucault "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison" (Penguin Social Science)
My first intro to Foucault. I was surprised by how accessible this work is considering the mystique behind Foucault. Philosophically, Foucault describes the world we live in from the perspective of power and control. Rather than ask why prisons are such a failure, he asks what their dysfunction accomplishes (as well as who benefits).
So having read this book, it is easy to understand why Foucault was such an influential theorist; his explanation of the use of information collection and standardization to work on the body, in places from prisons to hospitals to armies to schools, offers a powerful theoretical apparatus with lots of applications across countries, times, and situations. That said, if you’ve read summaries elsewhere, it’s not clear to me that you need to read this book (cf. Bowling Alone). One very striking thing to me, since I also just finished Matt Taibbi’s The Divide, was how much these two books described the exact same thing: the extension of categorization, surveillance, and manipulation to poor people, who gain “identity” by being classified and recorded. By contrast, rich people gain identity (and even acclaim) by being above the law-that’s not Foucault’s focus, but he mentions it. Thus the modern army and modern capitalism go hand in hand.
My first intro to Foucault. I was surprised by how accessible this work is considering the mystique behind Foucault. Philosophically, Foucault describes the world we live in from the perspective of power and control. Rather than ask why prisons are such a failure, he asks what their dysfunction accomplishes (as well as who benefits).
So having read this book, it is easy to understand why Foucault was such an influential theorist; his explanation of the use of information collection and standardization to work on the body, in places from prisons to hospitals to armies to schools, offers a powerful theoretical apparatus with lots of applications across countries, times, and situations. That said, if you’ve read summaries elsewhere, it’s not clear to me that you need to read this book (cf. Bowling Alone). One very striking thing to me, since I also just finished Matt Taibbi’s The Divide, was how much these two books described the exact same thing: the extension of categorization, surveillance, and manipulation to poor people, who gain “identity” by being classified and recorded. By contrast, rich people gain identity (and even acclaim) by being above the law-that’s not Foucault’s focus, but he mentions it. Thus the modern army and modern capitalism go hand in hand.