Carceral Archipelago - Foucault's Themes On Carceral Archipelago

Foucault's Themes On Carceral Archipelago

Historians have usually discounted the importance of the Panopticon because although Bentham drew up the plan, very few were actually built.Foucault claimed that numerous historians had missed the point: the idea of the Panopticon became used in many different settings in diverse ways. He quoted a 19th century legal scholar called Julius who argued that Bentham’s design was an event ‘in the history of the human mind’. It was the ‘birth certificate’ of ‘disciplinary society’. This is the key point in Foucault’s argument: the shift from the Panopticon to panopticism. The former is an architectural plan, the latter is a set of general ideas about the control of populations. Sociologists became interested in Foucault because of his account of panopticism. Here’s an important distinction: punishment was inflicted on people who had been shown to break the law;at least you had to have proof the law was broken.But,Foucault argued,why have proof?This was a ploy Foucault considered, proof was far more rigorous and exact in its approach because some form of finality had to be reached,a consensus,of return or recycling of punishment inflicted on those who had very little choice which was a transition from torture and straightforward execution by contrast,panopticism was a form of social control (and power) that is inflicted on everyone. It is pre-emptive.

Foucault argued that the social sciences emerged as part of the package of panoptic, controlling devices that gave birth to disciplinary society. Rather than thinking of psychology, sociology, psychiatry or criminology as emancipatory projects designed to improve societies, Foucault saw them as ‘strange sciences’ that develop the technologies and procedures of panopticism. This creates what he calls ‘power-knowledge’ that can be used for social control. This led to a view of society as a ‘carceral archipelago’. The word ‘carceral’ refers to anything concerning prisons, the word ‘archipelago’ denotes a cluster of islands. Foucault’s idea is that we now live in a world in which we are constantly being watched, judged, disciplined, evaluated and controlled by different ‘experts’ who write reports about us. Foucault writes that ‘the judges of normality are everywhere’.

Because of this, Foucault became interested in strategies of resistance. How can anyone escape the carceral archipelago? He admired vagabonds who refused to live as others expected them to live, anarchists who challenge authority and so on. He gave the example of a homeless young man sentenced to two years in a reformatory. The young man smiled when given his sentence and refused to be depressed by it, or judged by the court. We can now understand Foucault’s book. It is a ‘history of the present’. It explains how new forms of punishment in the 19th century became transformed into general techniques and procedures for controlling populations. Foucault argued that the social sciences are implicated in this process: they contribute to panopticism.

In his work after Discipline and Punish, Foucault became interested in a related question. Instead of looking at panoptic forms of control, he became interested in how people use information to think about themselves. He sometimes referred to this a study of ‘ethics’, other times he used the grander title: ‘technologies of the self’. Think of reading magazines that provide ideas about what to wear, what to eat and other broad lifestyle concerns. Foucault studied two related issues: what information was on hand and what people chose to do with the information.In many ways, this took him in a new direction, suggesting perhaps ways of living in the carceral archipelago without striving to escape from it.