28 March 1973

Abstract

TO CONCLUDE WHAT I have said this year I am going to try to bring to the fore what I have kept at the back of my mind while I have been talking. Basically, the point of departure was this: why this strange institution, the prison? The question is justified on several counts. In the first place, it is justified historically by the fact that the prison as a penal instrument was, after all, a radical innovation at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Suddenly, all the old forms of punishment, all that marvelous and shimmering folklore of classical punishments—the stocks, quartering, hanging, burning at the stake, and so on—gave way to this monotonous function of confinement. Historically, then, it is something new. Moreover, theoretically, I do not think the necessity of imprisonment can be deduced from the penal theories formulated in the second half of the eighteenth century, it cannot be deduced as a system of punishment coherent with these new theories. Theoretically it is a foreign element. Finally, for a functional reason:* the prison was dysfunctional from the start. First it was realized that the new system of penality did not bring about any reduction in the number of criminals, and then that it led to recidivism; that it quite perceptibly reinforced the cohesion of the group formed by delinquents.

Theme of the lectures: the prison-form as social form; a knowledge-power. (I) General analysis of power. Four schemas to be rejected. 1. Appropriation: power is not possessed, it is exercised. The case of worker saving. 2. Localization: power is not strictly localized in the State apparatuses, but is much more deep rooted. The case of police in the eighteenth century and of the penal in the nineteenth century. 3. Subordination: power does not guarantee, but constitutes modes of production. The case of sequestration. 4. Ideology: the exercise of power is not the site of the formation of ideology, but of knowledge; all knowledge makes possible the exercise of a power. The case of administrative survey (surveillance). (II) Analysis of disciplinary power: normalization, habit, discipline. ∽ Comparison of the use of the term “habit” in the philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Comparison of power-sovereignty in the eighteenth century and power-normalization in the nineteenth century. ∽ Sequestration produces the norm and produces normal individuals. New type of discourses: the human sciences.