Key Arguments

• He warns that focusing only on legislation or procedures risks treating ‘humanization’ or the human sciences “as a massive, external, inert and primary fact,” missing their embeddedness in tactics of power.
• Rule 1: “Do not concentrate the study of the punitive mechanisms on their ‘repressive’ effects alone, on their ‘punishment’ aspects alone, but situate them in a whole series of their possible positive effects, even if these seem marginal at first sight. As a consequence, regard punishment as a complex social function.”
• Rule 2: “Analyse punitive methods not simply as consequences of legislation or as indicators of social structures, but as techniques possessing their own specificity in the more general field of other ways of exercising power. Regard punishment as a political tactic.”
• Rule 3: Instead of separating penal law and human sciences, he asks us to “see whether there is not some common matrix or whether they do not both derive from a single process of ‘epistemologico-juridical’ formation; in short, make the technology of power the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system and of the knowledge of man.”
• Rule 4: He urges us to “discover whether this entry of the soul on to the scene of penal justice, and with it the insertion in legal practice of a whole corpus of ‘scientific’ knowledge, is not the effect of a transformation of the way in which the body itself is invested by power relations… try to study the metamorphosis of punitive methods on the basis of a political technology of the body in which might be read a common history of power relations and object relations.”

Source Quotes

By studying only the general social forms, as Durkheim did (cf. Bibliography), one runs the risk of positing as the principle of greater leniency in punishment processes of individualization that are rather one of the effects of the new tactics of power, among which are to be included the new penal mechanisms. This study obeys four general rules: 1. Do not concentrate the study of the punitive mechanisms on their ‘repressive’ effects alone, on their ‘punishment’ aspects alone, but situate them in a whole series of their possible positive effects, even if these seem marginal at first sight.

By studying only the general social forms, as Durkheim did (cf. Bibliography), one runs the risk of positing as the principle of greater leniency in punishment processes of individualization that are rather one of the effects of the new tactics of power, among which are to be included the new penal mechanisms. This study obeys four general rules: 1. Do not concentrate the study of the punitive mechanisms on their ‘repressive’ effects alone, on their ‘punishment’ aspects alone, but situate them in a whole series of their possible positive effects, even if these seem marginal at first sight. As a consequence, regard punishment as a complex social function. 2.

As a consequence, regard punishment as a complex social function. 2. Analyse punitive methods not simply as consequences of legislation or as indicators of social structures, but as techniques possessing their own specificity in the more general field of other ways of exercising power. Regard punishment as a political tactic. 3.

3. Instead of treating the history of penal law and the history of the human sciences as two separate series whose overlapping appears to have had on one or the other, or perhaps on both, a disturbing or useful effect, according to one’s point of view, see whether there is not some common matrix or whether they do not both derive from a single process of ‘epistemologico-juridical’ formation; in short, make the technology of power the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system and of the knowledge of man. 4.

Try to discover whether this entry of the soul on to the scene of penal justice, and with it the insertion in legal practice of a whole corpus of ‘scientific’ knowledge, is not the effect of a transformation of the way in which the body itself is invested by power relations. In short, try to study the metamorphosis of punitive methods on the basis of a political technology of the body in which might be read a common history of power relations and object relations. Thus, by an analysis of penal leniency as a technique of power, one might understand both how man, the soul, the normal or abnormal individual have come to duplicate crime as objects of penal intervention; and in what way a specific mode of subjection was able to give birth to man as an object of knowledge for a discourse with a ‘scientific’ status.

Key Concepts

• This study obeys four general rules:
• 1. Do not concentrate the study of the punitive mechanisms on their ‘repressive’ effects alone, on their ‘punishment’ aspects alone, but situate them in a whole series of their possible positive effects, even if these seem marginal at first sight. As a consequence, regard punishment as a complex social function.
• 2. Analyse punitive methods not simply as consequences of legislation or as indicators of social structures, but as techniques possessing their own specificity in the more general field of other ways of exercising power. Regard punishment as a political tactic.
• see whether there is not some common matrix or whether they do not both derive from a single process of ‘epistemologico-juridical’ formation; in short, make the technology of power the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system and of the knowledge of man.
• try to study the metamorphosis of punitive methods on the basis of a political technology of the body in which might be read a common history of power relations and object relations.

Context

Immediately after defining his project, Foucault sets out four methodological rules that structure his genealogical analysis of punishment, power, and the human sciences throughout Discipline and Punish.