Foucault Dp Parti

===Part One: Torture. Section 1. The body of the condemned===

Excellent summary paragraph (16.5):

The reduction in penal severity in the last 200 years is a phenomenon with which legal historians are well acquainted. But, for a long time, it has been regarded in an overall way as a quantitative phenomenon: less cruelty, less pain, more kindness, more respect, more 'humanity'. In fact, these changes are accompanied by a displacement in the very object of the punitive operation. Is there a diminution of intensity? Perhaps. There is certainly a change of objective.

The change BTW is from body to soul. Foucault seems to be getting at the fact that during this period there emerged new "sciences of man" and that this changed our collective sense of what a person is and that with this came changes in how "we" should handle those who break the rules, stray too far from the norm, etc. A part of what seems to animate Foucault is that with science involved, what we do to criminals is legitimated in a new way. Consider this passage:

Psychiatric expertise, but also in a more general way criminal anthropology and the repetitive discourse of criminology, find one of their precise functions here: by solemnly inscribing offences in the field of objects susceptible of scientific knowledge, they provide the mechanisms of legal punishment with a justifiable hold not only on offences, but on individuals; no only on what they do, but also on who they are, will be, may be. 18.8

The ultimate summary, though, is on page 23

This book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of the new power to judge; a genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications, and rules, from which it extends its effects and by which it masks it exorbitant singularity.

There we have it. Correlative history — by this he seems to mean that he's going to illustrate a whole bunch of historical transformations (e.g., punishing the body gives way to judging the soul) and claim that they are correlated (not statistically, but in the sense of all being manifestations of the same underlying shift). The "scientifico-legal complex" — the interaction of science and law that is his bogey-man and the launching point for the concept of the connection between knowledge and power. Finally, he sees the power to punish as having increased excessively and, at the same time, to have become more and more invisible.

The section ends with a page and a quarter (30-31) on which Foucault summarizes the whole project. For him, "prison revolts" (which I think he is thinking of both literally and figuratively) are revolts against a fundamental fact: the materiality of the prison environment is "an instrument and vector of power" — the prison stands for a whole regime of the power of "the state" over the body of the individual. It is continuous with — that is, it's a manifestation of the same underlying process as — the way we measure and categorize people's mental health, measure and categorize children in schools, measure and categorize employees at work, etc.