Tuesday, March 19, 2013

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: THE BIRTH OF THE PRISON

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: THE BIRTH OF THE PRISON

By Michel Foucault


More than thirty years after its first publication, Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison must be approached with a recognition of its intellectual impact.  It continues to be a critical part of undergraduate and graduate studies across a variety of disciplines, is persistently referred to and analyzed in professional publications, and is still more widely discussed.  The phenomenon of Discipline and Punish would itself merit analysis and review, a task that could now only be accomplished by taking into account the effect of Foucault's work on historiography and methodologies of reading.  Nevertheless, this aura of the book may obscure some of its shape and content.  Often enough, discussion (and perhaps memory) is largely restricted to the Panopticon, a synecdoche gone wrong, the part (however central) overshadowing the whole.  The narrow primary goal here then is to return to the text as a reminder of the wider set of arguments and figures Foucault delineates.  But the summary itself enables a secondary goal:  to look briefly to questions that in the wider view of the work remain for the present day.  It is beyond the scope of this review to analyze the reception phenomenon, the insertion of Discipline and Punishment in the academic stratum, though much could be borrowed from Foucault in looking to the emergence of the place of his own work.
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