“The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property. The body, according to this penalty, is caught up in a system of constraints and privations, obligations and prohibitions. Physical pain, the pain of the body itself, is no longer the constituent element of the penalty. From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights. If it is still necessary for the law to reach and manipulate the body of the convict, it will be at a distance, in the proper way, according to strict rules, and with a much ‘higher’ aim.”
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage 2nd ed. 1991), p. 11.
While Michel Foucault accurately describes in his intellectual histories the evolution of various discourses of social and political hegemony from feudalistic monarchies to modern capitalist states—a transition from, in essence, the “body” as a ruling, controlling metaphor of cultural/technological domination to “spirit” as the ultimate definition of civilizing essence—his analysis is too abstractly universal to accurately describe the historical processes that reinforce the exclusion of certain “real” bodies from the idealistic classification of “spirit” even within the seemingly linear technological processes of “discipline and punishment” from a distance that he asserts is central to the more modern forms of torture and punishment. Read the rest of this entry »
Recent Comments