Digital Mind 🧠

🪵 The Threshold

Modern penal practice replaced the act-question with the identity-question

Properties2
tagsja-picks, xref, causal_relationships, singleton, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@foucault_birth_2004, loc. 332

4 min read

Modern penal practice replaced the act-question with the identity-question

Evidence

But what was now beginning to emerge was a modulation that referred to the defendant himself, to his nature, to his way of life and his attitude of mind, to his past, to the ‘quality’ and not to the intention of his will. One perceives, but as a place as yet unfilled, the locus in which, in penal practice, psychological knowledge will take over the role of casuistic jurisprudence. Of course, at the end of the eighteenth century, that moment was still far off. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 160 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Beneath the humanization of the penalties, what one finds are all those rules that authorize, or rather demand, ‘leniency’, as a calculated economy of the power to punish. But they also provoke a shift in the point of application of this power: it is no longer the body, with the ritual play of excessive pains, spectacular brandings in the ritual of the public execution; it is the mind or rather a play of representations and signs circulating discreetly but necessarily and evidently in the minds of all. It is no longer the body, but the soul, said Mably. And we see very clearly what he meant by this term: the correlative of a technique of power. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 162 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

On the one hand, the criminal designated as the enemy of all, whom it is in the interest of all to track down, falls outside the pact, disqualifies himself as a citizen and emerges, bearing within him as it were, a wild fragment of nature; he appears as a villain, a monster, a madman, perhaps, a sick and, before long, ‘abnormal’ individual. It is as such that, one day, he will belong to a scientific objectification and to the ‘treatment’ that is correlative to it. On the other hand, the need to measure, from within, the effects of the punitive power prescribes tactics of intervention over all criminals, actual or potential: the organization of a field of prevention, the calculation of interests, the circulation of representations and signs, the constitution of a horizon of certainty and proof, the adjustment of penalties to ever more subtle variables; all this also leads to an objectification of criminals and crimes. In either case, one sees that the power relation that underlies the exercise of punishment begins to be duplicated by an object relation in which are caught up not only the crime as a fact to be established according to common norms, but the criminal as an individual to be known according to specific criteria. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 163 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Penal reform shifted punishment from the act to the offender’s character — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 160; Punishment doubled into an object relation producing the criminal as a known individual — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 163; Penal judgement now asks diagnostic questions beyond determining guilt — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 59 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

✉️

Backlinks