1. The body of the condemned
Discipline and Punish starts with a very specific description of the public execution of Damiens the regicide who was condemned to make amende honorable. The scene consists of his being carried to the scaffold and horses' struggling to dismember him and so on. The whole description is so vivid that any readers can picture the situation and even hear his desperate voice. This punishment strikes us as not only strange but abnormal. But He tells us "The point is that the intensity of your reaction shows how far we have moved away from the culture that thought this appropriate punishment."(113) And the pattern of punishment practiced in prisons became changed as below.
After 1837, the so called timetable was introduced to a prison in Paris by Léon Faucher. All the prisoners’ behaviors were carefully planned according to the timetable. The plans was made up of waking up at 5 o'clock, then getting dressed and making one's own bed within 5 minutes, and participating in the chapel for morning prayer and so forth. Physical torture had been almost vanished starting with the era of enlightenment. Most of us consider this change to be the birth of modern culture and humanistic development in punishment.
However, we need to figure out what caused this change. As Foucault says, if we see this change more carefully in the light of archaeoloical and geneaological viewpoint, it can be said that this change is not a benevolence but "a systematic use of power and authority". In other words, power and authority didn't lose their influence on humans at all, especially on human body. Rather, humans started to be regarded not as abstract beings but individualized objects of regulations and disciplines.
Pains accompanied by tortures were accepted as a crucial procedure even before the trials did not prove a suspect to be guilty. After the trial was over, the condemned was displayed in a public site to be executed. The crowd who gathered to see the criminal could confirm the power of King. It was the place where the existing order was made restored. But during the 18th century, people who assembled to watch the spectacles of torture and death became more and more unruly especially when the criminal had a good reputation through the community or the courage against authorities not to mention that the public execution failed to discourage possible crimes.
Approach to rule over people with the series of cruel spectacles doesn't work any longer. Sovereignty felt to need another method to control the people. This "science of discipline" was applied not just to the prisons, but to many modern institutions such as the army, schools, hospitals, madhouses, poorhouses, and factories where each individual develops as a subject.
When it comes to punishment, there were some changes in the punishment. The first change was the disappearance of punishment as a spectacle. And the second was the elimination of pain. Physical pain, the pain of the body itself, was no longer the constituent element of the penalty, which is now free of all pain. But for a long time guillotines had taken the place of scaffolds representing the similar spectacles. The hold on the body, of course, didn't disappear in the mid-19th century. At this time, there was an attempt to seize the soul of the condemned as well as his or her body. It means that a punishment ask one's heart, thoughts, will, and inclination including one's body. And the verdict became its continuation. In other words, the once temporary punishment changed its form into the continual supervision. For example, according to some good changes in the prisoner's behaviour, a judge could inflict rather shortened penalty on the criminal.
The question of madness started to evolve in penal practice. Just as today's prevailing practices, no one could accuse an insane person of having committed crimes, for the insane had an unsound mind at the time of the act. They were likely to be confined in the mental hospitals rather than the prisons after some examination performed by psychiatrists. This is a very important turning point in that the power of judging the condemned moved in part to other authorities such as psychiatric experts. Now, from these complexities of judging subjects, a question is asked to us. "How should we see punishment?" Foucault suggests us four answers as below.
① Regard punishment as a complex social function.(23)
② Regard punishment as a political tactic.(23)
③ Make the technology of power the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system and of the knowledge of man.(23)
④ Try to study the metamorphosis of punitive methods on the basis of a political technology of the body.(24)
All of these answers means that the body is involved not only in a biological field, but also directly in a political field. At last, we can conclude that the purpose of governing a body is to make it productive and subjected to the authoritative order by the knowledge and the mastery which constitute the political technology of the body.
2. The spectacle of the scaffold
The 2nd part named the spectacle of the scaffold presents us a variety of attributes of torture and the public execution. Torture revealed the significant part in penalty. And every penalty contains an element of torture, of supplice. Jaucourt identifies the supplice with 'Corporal punishment, painful to a more or less horrible degree'.(33) Foucault says that torture is a technique, that is he views torture as an art rather than manifestation of brutality. Here are three principles punishment should follow to become torture.
① Torture must produce a certain degree of pain.(33)
② The production of pain should be regulated according to the kind of criminal and crime itself.
③ Torture must form part of a ritual which shows the spectators the King's authority over the tortured.
As for the trials, the suspect couldn't know how the trial goes on and take any ways to defense oneself. The whole process of a trial was maintained in secrecy to prevent the disorder and violence among the crowd. This was a crucial rule in establishing the truth while many evidences were presented, full proofs or adminicule clues. Among the clues, the confession had priority over any other evidence. At this moment, it is obvious that we regard obtaining one's confession as an ultimate goal as well as its fundamental goal of torture. So it is natural for torture to be well equipped to make the condemned confess. But we can't say this is all about torture. Some other attribute of torture are presented as below.
① Torture was not a way of obtaining the truth at all costs.
② Torture was certainly cruel, but it was not savage.
③ Torture was carefully codified according to the different local practices.
④ Torture was a strict judicial game.(40)
However, we can't deny the fact that the search for truth through judicial torture was certainly a way of obtaining evidence, that is the confession of the guilty person.(41)
The body of the condemned takes the essential part before the people at this time. We can see this implementation as the immediate and striking manifestation of the truth. And it has several aspects.
① It made the guilty man the herald of his own condemnation.
② It took up once again the scene of the confession.(43)
③ It pinned the public torture on to the crime itself.(44) In other words, torture had a 'symbolic' aspect just as Damiens' hand and his dagger were smeared with sulphur and burnt together.
④ The Slowness of the process of torture and execution, its sudden dramatic moments, the cries and sufferings of the condemned man serve as an ultimate proof at the end of the judicial ritual.(45)
Now, the story moves from the torture to the public execution which is not only a judicial but also a political ritual where power is manifested. A person who would break the law was to be seen as a King's enemy, for the law was made by the King, furthermore the King was the law itself. So, anyone who violate the law was punished, for he or she insulted sovereignty touching the very person of the prince. In this respect, we can't help introducing the concept of politics to the public execution. The public execution, then, has a juridico-political function.(48)
Political functioning of the penal system brought some military forms to the public execution. For example, Ceremonial processions around the scaffold were similar to the military ones in battlefield. Because the criminal who rebelled against the law was an enemy of the prince. There are two aspects the public execution had. One was King's victory over the criminal, the other was the criminal's struggle. And the dissymmetry, the irreversible imbalance of forces were an essential element in the public execution.(50) At the far extreme was King, and the criminal was at the opposite side. In short, the farther the distance was, the more impressed the crowd were.
Foucault asserted several times that the cruelty seen from a series of punishment was not the result of a barbarous confusion. He said that the mechanism of atrocity and its necessary ways regulated sophisticatedly by those who were in charge of punishment had joined the process. However regulated and effective the public execution may be, the crowd started to cause a disturbance during public executions. At first, it was accepted as a sign of allegiance, but later, the sovereign could do no other than forbid the riot against executions. This could be a new starting point from which the new method to govern individuals including the condemned would be sought out. We could call it discipline.