Religions Reviewed

These three characters might also be called much less accurately by the titles of the book’s three parts: Discipline, Punishment, and Torture. They are ‘inhabitants’ of three epistemes (the ‘settings’ of the narrative): the Modern, the Classical, and the Renaissance; and as such, they are mutually incompatible, being founded in distinct “systems of thought,” segregated by the implicit functioning of language and meaning itself. Even so, they have coexisted and interpenetrated. There was no apocalyptic “twinkling of an eye” in which Punishment gave way to Discipline; there was a long conversation, in which, if we are to believe Foucault, neither ever understood the other.[1] By personifying the three penal systems treated in Discipline & Punish, we perhaps run a risk of violating central tenets of Foucault’s method: to deny a priori status to any subject, and to view allegorical relations as problems rather than solutions.  Yet it is profoundly difficult to think about agency without personification.

Causality is similarly hard to do without, and while Foucault may have succeeded in his own mind, there are certainly passages in Discipline & Punish which invite the reader to see the ‘series of regularities’ as a function of cause and effect. Concerning the transition from Torture to Punishment, he abjures the idea that penality became more temperate in direct response to a reduction in crime. But he then turns to economic and legal details in a way that makes them look very much like possible ‘causes.’[2] Sometimes he appears to propose a sort of circular causality which would take the place of linear causality, as in the collaborative relationship among delinquency, policing, and incarceration.[3] In an even more perplexing move, he disavows “that the human sciences emerged from the prison.” Yet he immediately insists, “The carceral network constituted one of the armatures of this power-knowledge that made the human sciences historically possible.”[4] Foucault’s vaguely-reified ‘power-knowledge’ seems always on the verge of acquiring the sort of transcendental properties that his method disclaims.

[1] Op. cit., pp. 114-5, e.g.

[2] Op. cit., p. 76.

[3] Op. cit., pp. 280-2.

[4] Op. cit., p. 305.