Foucault Citations
• The Punitive Society

References for Theme: The Punitive Society

• Foucaul, Michel
• The Punitive Society. Lectures at the Collège de France 1972-1973 (2015)

  (p.173) What is dangerous is the worker who does not work hard enough, who is lazy, who gets drunk, that is to say everything by which the worker practices illegalism, not in this case on the body of the employer’s wealth, but on his own body, on the labor-power that the employer considers he owns, since he has purchased it with wages and because it is the worker’s duty to offer his labor-power on a free market.Consequently, anything that may affect not only the accumulated capital of bourgeois wealth, but the worker’s body itself as labor-power, anything that may steal it from use by capital, will be considered as...

• Foucault, Michel
• The Punitive Society. Lectures at the Collège de France 1972-1973 (2015)

  (p.173) At the same time that the bourgeoisie is establishing the civil code that is to govern the contract between owners, it defines a Penal Code whose function will be, on the face of things, to sanction violations of the contract, but more profoundly, to reach back as far as possible to this source of immorality that calls into question the worker’s body and its relationship to wealth, profit, and the law, and to constitute, no longer a contract, but a habit: to the owner’s contract will have to correspond the worker’s good habits.Now, at the time this plan is emerging so clearly, we can see the difficulty: on...

• The Punitive Society. Lectures at the Collège de France 1972-1973 (2015)

  (p.187) wealth is, above all, an apparatus of production in relation to which the worker’s body—now directly in the  presence of this wealth that does not belong to him—is no longer merely the locus of desire, but is now the source of labor-power, which must become productive force. It is precisely at this point of the transformation ofphysical strength into labor-power and its integration into a system of production, which will make it a productive force, that a new illegalism is formed which, like that of depredation, concerns the relationshipbetween the worker’s body and the body of wealth, but the point of application of which is no longer...

• The Punitive Society. Lectures at the Collège de France 1972-1973 (2015)

  (p.189) Certainly, the nineteenth century did not invent idleness, but one could write a whole history of laziness, that is to say not of leisure activities—which is how idleness has been codified, institutionalized, as a certain way of distributing non-work across the cycles of production, integrating idleness into the economy by taking it up and controlling it within a system of consumption—but of the ways one evades the obligation of work, steals labor-power, and avoids letting oneself be held and pinned down by the production apparatus. Now, if a history of laziness is possible, it is because it is not at issue in the same way in the different struggles...

• The Punitive Society. Lectures at the Collège de France 1972-1973 (2015)

  (p.196) the system of the permanent checking of individuals is neither of the order of the test, nor of the inquiry. Or rather, it is like a permanent test, with no final point. It is an inquiry, but before any offence, apart from any crime. It is an inquiry of a general and a priori suspicion of the individual. We can call examination this uninterrupted, graduated, and accumulated test that permits a control and pressure at every moment, that makes it possible to follow the individual in each of his steps, to see if he is regular or irregular, orderly or dissipated, normal or abnormal. Effectuating this constant division,...

• The Punitive Society. Lectures at the Collège de France 1972-1973 (2015)

  (p.203-204) In the first half of the nineteenth century there was a whole enterprise of confinement, of lodging the working class in barracks and, apart from the apparatus of production, in a whole series of non-productive institutions such as, for example, pedagogical institutions: crèches, schools, orphanages; correctional institutions: agricultural colonies, reformatories, prisons; therapeutic institutions: homes, asylums. All these institutions could provisionally be grouped together in terms of confinement.A whole activity of research runs through this production of utopias. Architectural research: for resolving the problem of how to construct an establishment such that optimum supervision is assured; architecture of the inverted theater, where the aim is to ensure that the maximum number of...

• The Punitive Society. Lectures at the Collège de France 1972-1973 (2015)

  (p.205) In the classical age, individuals are controlled and tied down first of all by their membership of castes, communities, and groups, like the jurandes, corporations, guilds, and professional bodies. By belonging to a certain social body, the individual was thereby, first of all, caught up in a set of rules that directed and possibly sanctioned his behavior, and then, in another way, through the group itself, he was caught within an instanceof supervision that did not differ from the group in question. In other words, the group, with its rules and the supervision it exercised, was a sort of endogenous instance of control. From the nineteenth century, on the...

• The Punitive Society. Lectures at the Collège de France 1972-1973 (2015)

  (p.208) the function of the apparatus in relation to marginality is quite different from the monotonous system of classical confinement: it is not a matter of marginalizing at all, but of fixing within a certain system of the transmission of knowledge, of normalization, of production. Certainly, these apparatuses have a function of marginalization; but they marginalize those who resist. The school in which children are confined is such that the majority is supposed to connect up to a certain apparatus of the transmission of knowledge, and thosewho are resistant to this transmission are marginalized. The machine works in order to demarginalize, and marginalization is only a side effect. The most...

• The Punitive Society. Lectures at the Collège de France 1972-1973 (2015)

  (p.210-211) The control of time is one of the fundamental points of the hyper-power organized by capitalism through the State system.† Even apart from the institutions of concentrated sequestration, school, factory-prison, reformatory—in which the employment of time is an essential component […]— the control, management, and organization of the life of individuals [represents] one of the main things established at the beginning of thenineteenth century. It was necessary to control the rhythm at which people wanted to work. When individuals were paid by day, one had to make sure that they did not take their leave when they wanted. It was necessary to hunt down festive revelry, absenteeism, gambling, and notably...

• The Punitive Society. Lectures at the Collège de France 1972-1973 (2015)

  (p.72) the introduction inside the prison of the general principles governing the economics and politics of work [outside] contradicts all of the penal system’s previous functioning. What we see appearing through these two forms is the introduction of time into the capitalist system of power and into the system of penality. Into the system of penality: for the first time in the history of penal systems, one no longer punishes through the body or through goods, but through time to live. What society will appropriate to punish the individual is the time leftto live. Time is exchanged against power. [And] behind the wage-form, the objective of the form of...

• The Punitive Society. Lectures at the Collège de France (2015)

  (p.232-233) the problem of feudal society was to assure the extraction of rent through the exercise of a sovereignty that was, above all, territorial; the problem of industrial society is to see to it that the individual’s time, which is purchased with wages, can be integrated into the production apparatus in the forms of labor-power. It is necessary to ensure that what the employer buys is not empty time, but indeed labor-power. In other words, it is a matter of constituting the individual’s time of life into labor-power. Which leads to this conclusion: if it is true that the economic structure, characterized by the accumulation of capital, has the property...