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Review: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Middle-Range Research Strategy Author(s): Jonathan Simon Review by: Jonathan Simon Source: Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 25, No. 3 (May, 1996), pp. 316-319Published by: American Sociological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2077440Accessed: 20-05-2015 21:07 UTC

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316 COATEMPORARYSOCOLOGY

edge itself is a social force, as a part of the making of the world, and not always, as in the case of Orientalist studies, in benevolent ways. Said documents how scholarly knowl- edges can become part of a system of social control through constructing and enforcing normalizing identities and social codes. If knowledge is intertwined with power, knowl- edge producers such as sociologists must assume responsibility for their practices. Said presses us to imagine human studies as an elaborated, multilevel type of social reason that incorporates into its practices a reflexiv- ity about its socially "constitutive" role.

References Ahmad, Aijaz. 1992. "Orientalism and After." In In

Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. New York: Verso.

Bhabha, Homi, 1994. "The Other Question: Stereo- type, Discrimination and Discourse of Colonialism." In The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.

Brantlinger, Patrick. 1988. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds. 1993. Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predica- ment. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Carrier, James, ed. 1995. Occidentalism: Images of the West. New York: Oxford University Press.

Clifford, James. 1988. "On Orientalism." In The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Inden, Ronald. 1990. Imagining India. Oxford: Blackwel.

JanMohamed, Abdul. 1983. Manichean Aesthetics. The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Mani, Lata and Ruth Frankenberg. 1985. "The Challenge of Orientalism." Economy and Society 14 (May):174-192.

Mommsen, Wolfgang. 1980. Theories of Imperialism. New York: Random House.

Mutman, Meyda. Forthcoming. Veiled Fantasies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Williams, Patrick and Laura Chrisman, eds. 1994. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press.

Young, Robert. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge.

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Middle-Range Research Strategy

Original review, CS 7:5 (September 1978), by Stanley Cohen: When the intellectual history of our times comes to be written, that peculiarly Left Bank mixture of Marxism and structural- ism now in fashion will be among the most puzzling of our ideas to evaluate.... Of such "historians" (a description which does not really cover his method) Foucault is the most dazzlingly creative.

Toward the end of his 1978 Contemporary Sociology review of Discipline and Punish, Stanley Cohen wrote that it "must be the most stimulating and revealing history of the prisons and punishment ever written." While the book has been widely read in sociology generally, its influence in the narrow but

JONATHAN SIMON School of Law

University of Miami

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, by Michel Foucault. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Pantheon Books, 1977. 333 pp. $12.00 paper. ISBN: 0-679-75255-2.

deep channel of thought on the social significance of punishment (whose genealogy includes de Tocqueville and Durkheim) has been transformative (See Garland 1990). Virtually nothing written in the field since has been able to ignore Foucault's startling way of recounting the place of the prison in the self-interpretation of modernity.

Discipline and Punish offered a stunning reversal of the traditional empirical and

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CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY 317

normative assumption that modern penality, with its quasi-clinical prisons and human- science expertise, was the result of a progressive and humanistic evolution in social consciousness away from the dungeon and the scaffold. In its place, Foucault provided an analysis of the colonization of punishment by the disciplines, a family of techniques for exercising power over individ- ual and assembled bodies with a long history in specialized institutions like the monastery and the military camp. According to Fou- cault, their emergence as a more general technology of power was marked by the transformation of punishment at the start of the nineteenth century and, especially, the rapid growth of the prison as the state punishment of choice.

Within penality, the disciplines promised a fantastic extension of power. The offender was spared the major and minor cruelties of the body, but now was submitted to a more rigorous and comprehensive control over life. Social control abandoned recourse to spasms of spectacular fury in favor of smooth and continuous processes. The widespread dispersal of the disciplines among social institutions was a crucial ingredient, accord- ing to Foucault, in the takeoff of modern industrial capitalism and democratic politics.

Foucault's points were not wholly original. Nietzsche had long ago described the history of punishment as a central locus for creating the obedient and hard-working lastmen of nineteenth-century European society. Erving Goffman (1961) described the prison as a species of total institution that played a more general role in the economy of social power than the purposes of punishment might describe. David Rothman had provided a history of Jacksonian social policy on crime and dependency that reflected important links between the strategy of reformative confinement and the stirrings of democracy and capitalism in post-Revolutionary United States. Likewise, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber had all nodded toward the disciplines as important features of modernity.

But Discipline and Punish recast all these themes amid brilliantly interpreted examples (albeit ones ungrounded in any systematic historical framework). While disputing some or even most of Foucault's substantive claims in Discipline and Punish, scholarship on punishment has been influenced in three

directions by the book and its model of research. First, away from the observation study of contemporary penal practices and toward a blending of historical subjects and ethnographic forms of analysis. Foucault focused for the most part on the last portion of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, yet few who read the book missed the salience of the present. His use of historical documents seemed far more akin to the narratives of the ethnographers of social control like Goffman Second, away from a view of the prison as an ideological system operating primarily through represen- tations on the individual and collective imagination and toward a view of the prison as a surface for the effective exercise of power over individual bodies and groups. Third, away from assuming a central role for the state as the key actor in the evolution of punishment, and toward a focus on technol- ogies of power developed in state and nonstate settings and circulating among them.

When the first U.S. edition of Discipline and Punish appeared in 1977 it seemed poised to have an influence on political activism as well as on scholarship. Starting in the 1960s, "labeling theory" had led many criminologists to reappraise the expansive claims of treatment-oriented penology. A New-Left criminology coming out of the United Kingdom and the United States in the late 1960s also succeeded in foregrounding the class content of much of liberal penal ideology. These academic critiques were matched for a time by a wave of prison unrest and by the development of popular links between prisoner groups and activists repre- senting disempowered minorities on the outside (Foucault participated in such a nexus in France during the same period). By the mid- 1970s judges and state legislatures opened themselves to legal and philosophical arguments about the penal system. Courts dropped some of their historical deference to penal authority, and allowed prisoners, through their lawyers, to compel officials to explain and rationalize their decisions. A number of states abandoned the indetermi- nate sentence and the very idea of rehabilita- tion. Both of these reform movements responded to precisely the features of disci- plinary punishment that Discipline and Punish identified: the intrusive demands to

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318 CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

penetrate into the subjectivity of the of- fender; the legal power given to experts to individualize sentences; the deceptive denial of the punitive elements remaining in penal practice. One prominent criminologist even cited Foucault in support of his proposal to restore corporal punishment as a replace- ment for the prison (Newman 1983).

Almost two decades later, little remains of the radical politics of prisoners' rights or of judicial due process reform. The shift by state legislatures away from rehabilitation has continued, but quickly leaped over the kind of ethical libertarian position that Foucault's thought might have informed, in favor of a massive "get tough" approach that has yet to run its course. The peno-correctional author- ities, whose foundations of knowledge and power Discipline and Punish described so chillingly, have continued to lose power, but recent years have witnessed an unprece- dented expansion of imprisonment, with more than three times as many Americans behind bars as in 1977. The disciplinary focus on normalization of offenders has been replaced by the mission of providing long- term warehousing of populations with little place in the economy (Cohen 1985, Feeley and Simon 1992). The new system shares little of the skepticism about political author- ity that a Foucault-inspired recasting of penality might have encouraged.

While punishment, even after Discipline and Punish, is of only minor interest to most sociologists, the book's influence on a partic- ular field is central to its wider influence as a research strategy that moves to fundamental theoretical questions about social order and subjectivity through specific contexts and institutions. Indeed, the influence of Disci- pline and Punish on sociology stems directly from its powerful internal critique of penol- ogy.

By the late 1970s, stirred by their readings of Thomas Kuhn on scientific paradigms, and by both foreign and domestic alternatives to Parsonian social theory, many sociologists found themselves engaged in a discussion about the limits of the scientific model of inquiry. Were human sciences capable of "normal science" or were they destined to a kind of permanent scientific revolution in which first principles remain open for discussion at all times? If the social sciences required a distinct methodological orienta-

tion that wed them to problems of interpre- tation, where did that leave the ambitions of social science to shape social policy? Disci- pline and Punish galvanized and transformed this discussion, for several reasons.

First, it was a book about the relationship between power and social science. Second, Foucault's method was itself a radical form of cultural interpretation that combined fea- tures of both structuralism and phenomenol- ogy (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982), the leading methodological alternatives for sociologists seeking a path away from positivism. Third, the story that Discipline and Punish told reversed the assumptions of the interpretive critique of positivist sciences. According to Foucault, the constitution of an objective science of humanity had as much to do with the deployment of successful techniques of power as it did with better intellectual models. If medicine has established itself as a real science, it was, at least in part, because it has established strategies for objectifying human beings. Even as dubious a field as criminology underwent epistemological hard- ening as it managed to anchor itself in the prison. After Discipline and Punish, the question of whether a true social science was possible had to be recognized as a fundamen- tally political question.

Discipline and Punish itself could be read, however, as offering its own rather bald claims to be a kind of scientific theory. Foucault wrote of "disciplinary society." He seemed to be offering a social theory that put power in the central place occupied in other theories by class struggle or secularization. From this reading the influence of Discipline and Punish has been surprisingly thin. The theory of power, if there is one, has not been widely elaborated or applied. Its critics among social theorists have raised serious questions as to whether Foucault's theory (or what they reconstruct of it) can account for enduring forms of domination.

Far more influential, however, is Discipline and Punish as a model for an empirically engaged and politically relevant form of social theory. Foucault was philosophically trained, but Discipline and Punish consisted largely of provocative and revealing interpre- tations of practices and discourses, and not of highly abstract analytic procedures. More- over, his account, especially in the era of prison political struggle, had obvious rele-

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CONTFEMPORARYSOCIOLOGY 319

vance for strategic political thinking, not just vague promises of validating norms. In this sense, Discipline and Punish provides an example of what might be called a postmod- ern version of middle-range theory. As a model for how to gain useful purchase on the present, Discipline and Punish offered a license for scholars to operate in the context of specific institutional and cultural fields, as well as a set of methodological tactics for deconstructing policies and institutional pro- grams. Thus, it shared with Robert Merton's (1968) quintessentially influential version of middle-range theory a commitment to engag- ing practices on the same scale practices confront people, and to focusing on effects rather than ideologies.

What Foucault did not share with Merton was the latter's aspiration of accumulating regional explanations into a global one. In that sense, and although he would have rejected the term, his research model is a postmodern one that accepts strategic if not epistemological limits to the scope of knowl- edge. Foucault should not be read as rejecting macro frameworks in preference

for micro frameworks, but rather of insisting that the same voice not attempt to cover all registers. His works can certainly be stretched into a kind of global social theory, but with results that seem surprisingly thin. It's worth noting that almost all of Foucault's work situates itself at the level of particular institutions, and it is here that his insights are sharpest and most effective. In that sense, Discipline and Punish really is a book about the birth of the prison.

References Cohen, Stanley (1985). Visions of Social Control:

Crime, Punishment, and Classification. New York: Polity.

Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow (1982). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Herme- neutics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Feeley, Malcolm and Jonathan Simon (1992). "The New Penology: Notes on the Emerging Strategy of Corrections and its Implications," 30 Criminology 449.

Garland, David (1990). Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social theory. Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press.

Newman, Graeme (1983). Just and Painful: A Case for Corporal Punishment. New York: MacMillan.

Prometheus Rebounds

HARRIET FRIEDMANN

Erindale College, University of Toronto Original review, CS 4:3 (May 1975), by Michael Hechter:

The Modern World System is a visionary work ... more an aesthetic creation than a scientific one.... This may be one of the most important theoretical state- ments about development since the time of Max Weber.

Almost a decade after volume 1 of The Mod- ern World-System (TMWS), Immanuel Waller- stein (1983:75) wrote, "Historical capitalism has been, we know, Promethean in its aspira- tions." The same can be said for Immanuel Wallerstein. More than two decades ago he opened questions later blazed across head- lines, and the subject of fast-breeding aca- demic journals. If sociology has kept pace with "globalization" of the world economy, it is to the credit of the institutional and intellectual

The Modemn World-System: Capitalist Agricul- ture and the Origins of the European World- economy in the Sixteenth Century, Vol. 1, by Immanuel Wallerstein. New York: Academic Press [1976] 1980. 244 pp. $65.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-12-78595-X. $40.00 paper. ISBN: 0-12785- 924-1.

leadership initiated in 1974 by his remarkable study of the sixteenth century.

Wallerstein in 1974 forged a deeply influential perspective by merging American sociology with French social history. His importation of the Annales school into U.S. sociology compares with Parsons's early importation of Max Weber. He reconnected American sociology with a boldly original elaboration of themes from European schol- arship. His accomplishment reflected a unique

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Article Contentsp. 316p. 317p. 318p. 319

Issue Table of ContentsContemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, Vol. 25, No. 3 (May, 1996) pp. i-ix+293-440Front Matter [pp. ]Erratum: Featured Essays [pp. vii]Erratum: Book Review [pp. vii]From the Editor's Desk [pp. ix]Featured EssaysTen Most Influential Books of the Past 25 YearsHow to Become a Dominant American Social Scientist: The Case of Theda Skocpol [pp. 293-295]A Classic of Its Time [pp. 296-299]Geertz's Ambiguous Legacy [pp. 299-302]A Different Poststructuralism [pp. 302-305]The Gendering of Social Theory: Sociology and Its Discontents [pp. 305-309]What's Race Got To Do With It? [pp. 309-313]Empire and Knowledge: More Troubles, New Opportunities for Sociology [pp. 313-316]Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Middle-Range Research Strategy [pp. 316-319]Prometheus Rebounds [pp. 319-322]Women's Bodies and Feminist Subversions [pp. 322-325]

Sociological Visions and RevisionsReview: untitled [pp. 325-328]Review: untitled [pp. 328-331]Review: untitled [pp. 331-333]

ReviewsSocial HierarchiesReview: untitled [pp. 334-335]Review: untitled [pp. 335-336]Review: untitled [pp. 336-337]Review: untitled [pp. 337-339]Review: untitled [pp. 339-340]Review: untitled [pp. 340-341]Review: untitled [pp. 341-342]Review: untitled [pp. 342-344]Review: untitled [pp. 344-345]

Political Processes and InstitutionsReview: untitled [pp. 345-347]Review: untitled [pp. 347-348]Review: untitled [pp. 349-350]Review: untitled [pp. 350-351]Review: untitled [pp. 351-352]Review: untitled [pp. 352-353]Review: untitled [pp. 353-354]Review: untitled [pp. 354-356]Review: untitled [pp. 356-357]Review: untitled [pp. 357-358]

MacrosociologiesReview: untitled [pp. 358-359]Review: untitled [pp. 359-360]Review: untitled [pp. 361-362]Review: untitled [pp. 362-365]Review: untitled [pp. 365-368]Review: untitled [pp. 368-370]Review: untitled [pp. 370-371]Review: untitled [pp. 371-372]

Urban Sociology and Community StudiesReview: untitled [pp. 372-374]Review: untitled [pp. 374-375]Review: untitled [pp. 375-376]

Life Course: Stages and InstitutionsReview: untitled [pp. 376-378]Review: untitled [pp. 378-380]Review: untitled [pp. 380-381]Review: untitled [pp. 381-382]Review: untitled [pp. 382-383]

Criminology, Deviance, LawReview: untitled [pp. 384-385]Review: untitled [pp. 385]Review: untitled [pp. 385-386]Review: untitled [pp. 386-388]Review: untitled [pp. 388-389]Review: untitled [pp. 389-390]Review: untitled [pp. 390]

Organizations, Occupations, and MarketsReview: untitled [pp. 391-392]Review: untitled [pp. 392-394]Review: untitled [pp. 394-395]Review: untitled [pp. 395-396]Review: untitled [pp. 396-397]Review: untitled [pp. 397-398]

MicrosociologiesReview: untitled [pp. 398-400]Review: untitled [pp. 400-401]Review: untitled [pp. 401-402]Review: untitled [pp. 402-403]

Sociology of CultureReview: untitled [pp. 403-406]Review: untitled [pp. 406-407]Review: untitled [pp. 408-409]Review: untitled [pp. 409-410]Review: untitled [pp. 410-411]Review: untitled [pp. 411-412]Review: untitled [pp. 412-413]Review: untitled [pp. 413-414]Review: untitled [pp. 414-415]Review: untitled [pp. 415-416]

Medical SociologyReview: untitled [pp. 416-418]Review: untitled [pp. 418-419]Review: untitled [pp. 419-420]Review: untitled [pp. 420-421]Review: untitled [pp. 421-422]Review: untitled [pp. 422-423]

Theory and MethodsReview: untitled [pp. 423-424]Review: untitled [pp. 425-427]Review: untitled [pp. 427-428]Review: untitled [pp. 428-430]Review: untitled [pp. 430-431]

Teaching, Research, and Reference MaterialsReview: untitled [pp. 431-432]

Commentary [pp. 433-434]Publications Received [pp. 435-439]Back Matter [pp. ]