5: Controlling Labour Pt. 2

Question 1

three explanations for the relationship between punishment and surplus labour

Answer 1

economic value of labour and the motive for economic crime

political needs of capital (especially legitimation and control)

ideological components of agency
- beliefs about the causes of crime
- perceptions of moral panic

Question 2

what is Foucault concerned with?

Answer 2

how modern states control their subjects
- development of forms of power

how practices and history of punishment can tell us about bigger social and political questions

Question 3

• sovereign/repressive power

Answer 3

state punishment taking the form of physical/public violence in feudalist/mercantilist history

primarily to exact revenge on the criminal for the crime

spectacle of punishment designed to instil fear and deter other people from committing crimes

modern societies where punishment takes on a much less violence and argument much gentler character

Question 4

• disciplinary/normalising power

Answer 4

broad shift in the way power is exercised
- depersonalised power which is more diffuse

everyone, including people in positions of power are subjected to the influence of disciplinary power

reliance on training, regimentation, optimisation and surveillance
- ultimately doing what the system wants without having to tell you what to do

Question 5

Foucault and the body

Answer 5

power no longer inflicted onto the body in the form of public torture but insinuated into the body

body made available for use and improvement

crime (which was normal with Durkheim) now becomes individual pathology
- implication that they can be cured
- creation of knowledge in tandem with power

Question 6

are we really more humane with new forms of punishment?

Answer 6

modern states moved from enforcing their authority forcefully and physically through violence to enforcing their authority psychologically

new forms of normalising power operate on the level of knowledge, colonising how we think and are subject to more pervasive control

modernity and modern institutions like the state in Western liberal democracies have successfully disciplined us into being docile, passive subjects of power