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🪵 The Threshold

Punishment's deterrent power migrated from visible spectacle to certainty of apprehension

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tagsja-picks, xref, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, category/causal-relationships
aliases@foucault_discipline_1975, loc. 45

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Punishment’s deterrent power migrated from visible spectacle to certainty of apprehension

Evidence

Punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process. This has several consequences: it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness; its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity; it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime; the exemplary mechanics of punishment changes its mechanisms. As a result, justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice. If it too strikes, if it too kills, it is not as a glorification of its strength, but as an element of itself that it is obliged to tolerate, that it finds difficult to account for. The apportioning of blame is redistributed: in punishment-as-spectacle a confused horror spread from the scaffold; it enveloped both executioner and condemned; and, although it was always ready to invert the shame inflicted on the victim into pity or glory, it often turned the legal violence of the executioner into shame. Now the scandal and the light are to be distributed differently; it is the conviction itself that marks the offender with the unequivocally negative sign: the publicity has shifted to the trial, and to the sentence; the execution itself is like an additional shame that justice is ashamed to impose on the condemned man; so it keeps its distance from the act, tending always to entrust it to others, under the seal of secrecy. It is ugly to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 45

Categorization

  • XREF: Directly connects to Bentham/Foucault panopticism — certainty of being watched replaces the actuality of watching, exactly paralleling the shift from spectacle to internalized discipline. — connects to: Selective punishment builds the impression that transgression is never safe — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 58; Modern penality’s ideal is endless observation rather than spectacular punishment — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 353; The shift from spectacle to carceral punishment was a technical mutation, not a softening — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 393 (+15 more)

Broader Connections

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