Let’s get gruesome! In 1757, Robert-François Damiens, a religious fanatic, suffered one of the most notorious and controversial public executions of all time for having attempted and embarrassingly failed to murder King Louis XI of France. He was the last person in France to be tortured in a variety of ways and executed by drawing and quartering, each of his limbs harnessed to galloping horses for four hours until he was dismembered and disemboweled. His still-living torso was burned at the stake.
A century later, punitive practices shifted toward our modern prison system with its more sterile, humane aesthetic, highly regimented daily schedules, and stated purpose of rehabilitating criminals and reincorporating them with society using punishment as a means to an end rather than its own grisly end.
This would seem to be a victory for humanitarianism, but is our current prison model as progressive as we’d like to believe? Foucault shares that the intended purposes of 18th Century punishment were to reciprocate the violence of the original crime and to make the criminal’s secret public through torture and confession. This had the unintended consequence of redistributing blame to the executioner, sympathy for the convict, and even riots in support of the accused.
With increased upheaval from audiences to executions, the rituals of interrogation and torture intended to express the omnipotent power of the sovereign in fact began to reveal that the ritual and the sovereign’s power itself depended upon the participation of the people.
Foucault argues that power is not a force that is possessed by any one particular agent – it is “diffuse rather than concentrated, discursive rather than purely coercive, and constitutes agents rather than being deployed by them.” That is to say that power is actively accepted, negotiated, defined, and refined by its constituents.
CONNECTION- John Locke made similar statements which reveal that “power” as such is inert, and that it is human discourse which agrees upon which is perceived as dominant: Fire has a ‘power’ to melt gold, yet gold has the ‘power’ to be melted.
Foucault argues that the rapid transition from 18th to 19th Century punishment began as a means of evening the distribution of punishment. The sovereign standards were deemed disproportional by the public, and therefore ineffective and uncontrolled. The desire to punish and humiliate remained, but it became more even and orderly. Hence public chain gangs.
More strictly regimented and controlled punitive institution were the natural progression, as this reinforced the notion of a general, evenly distributed punishment which enforced the notion of a collective power structure rather than a singular sovereign power. Prison schedule and architecture constructed "mini-theatres" of punishment which emphasized the notion of publicizing the criminal's secret to the most profound degree possible.
Constant surveillance, identification based upon codes distributed by the public, internal super-public power structures which mirrored optimal external public power structures. All manners of publicizing criminal behavior, and constituting a structural discourse which sated the public by reinforcing its own relevance the societal meta-discourse.
By studying the expressions of power on every level in prisons, Foucault found parallels in all manner of architectural, cultural, behavioral, theoretical, theological, philosophical, educational, and even hypothetical structures. Again and again he found manners in which the public rendered itself a meaningful discursive expression.
Power is not necessarily a negative thing -- Foucault considered himself an optimist! If what we have been calling power is simply an agreed-upon notion in the collective discourse, then it can be manipulated and "fixed" by adjusting our discursive methods.