Reading Foucault: An Ongoing Engagement
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12191 |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| Author | David Garland |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 46, NUMBER 4, DECEMBER 2019
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 640±61
Reading Foucault: An Ongoing Engagement
David Garland*
This article is a contribution to the occasional series dealing with a
major book that has influenced the author. Previous contributors
include Stewart Macaulay, John Griffith, William Twining, Carol
Harlow, Geoffrey Bindman, Harry Arthurs, Andre
Â-Jean Arnaud, Alan
Hunt, Michael Adler, Lawrence O. Gostin, John P. Heinz, Roger
Brownsword, Roger Cotterrell, Nicola Lacey, and Carol J. Greenhouse.
From early on in my academic career I have engaged in a one-sided dialogue
with the work of Michel Foucault, and particularly with his book Discipline
and Punish.
1
I have found myself using his ideas again and again, to think
with and to think against ± often in ways that Foucauldian purists find
objectionable.
2
As well as using him in my own work, I have occasionally
written expositional pieces ± about Foucault on punishment, on govern-
mentality, or on `history of the present' ± seeking to explain Foucault's ideas
to myself and to others. Over the years, I have taught courses about his whole
body of work, usually to sociology postgraduates and occasionally to
adventurous law students who find his ideas intriguing, even if their
relevance to black-letter law is tangential and oblique.
In this essay, I will describe some of these encounters and say something
about the book's importance ± above all, its importance to me. In the
process, I hope to show how productive it can be to immerse oneself in a rich
body of ideas with the aim of deploying them, in a suitably modified form, as
a conceptual toolbox of one's own.
640
*New York University School of Law, 40 Washington Sq. South, New York
NY 10012, United States of America
david.garland@nyu.edu
1 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977).
2 I believe that my errant tendency is to sociologize Foucault's philosophical arguments
and to treat his work as part of social theory's ideational repertoire, rather than as a
thing apart. Foucault himself would not, I think, object to this. As he once remarked:
`For myself, I prefer to utilize the writers I like. The only valid tribute to thought . . . is
precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest': M. Foucault, Power/
Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. C. Gordon (1980) 53±4.
ß2019 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2019 Cardiff University Law School
To begin with, let me say something about the book that introduced me to
Foucault and his remarkable oeuvre. Discipline and Punish is, I think,
Foucault's most accessible and most successful book: the work in which this
critical historian of the human sciences truly found his subject. It is also the
work that is closest to the sociology of punishment ± the specialist field in
which I have done much of my own research and writing.
Discipline and Punish is, I would say, a classic on a grand scale: a book
that has become part of the general culture rather than merely a reference-
point for specialists. It is an intricately-woven masterpiece; a complex,
multi-layered text that invites deep engagement and rewards repeated
reading. To say that Discipline and Punish is a classic is not to say that it is
entirely original ± attentive readers will find traces of Weber, Goffman, and
Nietzsche threaded through the analysis. Nor is it without its false claims and
fallacious arguments, as a generation of critics has never tired of pointing
out. But the book has a substratum of solid observation and piercing insight
that lends its theses a forcefulness that is undiminished today, 44 years after
it first appeared. By bringing the history of science to bear on the history of
punishment, and by viewing modern penality through its implications for the
exercise of power, the constitution of knowledge, and the fabrication of
individuals, he established a uniquely generative perspective that simply had
no precedent.
3
Discipline and Punish has a singularity that distinguishes it from other
works of scholarship. For one thing, Foucault's prose has an artistry and an
occasional beauty that sets it apart. The text is replete with vivid imagery;
aphorisms that convey profound insights with a striking turn of phrase, and
dramatic set-pieces that leave a lasting impression. (The opening pages, with
their shocking account of Damiens's torments in the Place de GreÁve, are the
ones everyone knows, but similarly powerful passages recur all throughout
the book.) Learned, su btle passages of clos e historical analysi s are
interspersed with outbursts of rage or derision in a text that is at times
gravely sombre and at others dazzling in its brilliance.
Another singularity is the book's use of concrete historical materials ±
programmatic texts, descriptions of techniques, detailed analyses of practices
± to illuminate philosophical questions about the constitution of the modern
individual, the nature of the human sciences, or the changing character of
justice. Foucault is a meticulous archivist, drawn to the facticity of things.
But he is also a philosopher. And he is at his best when he makes small,
seemingly trivial things speak to larger questions of deep and abiding
significance.
641
3 Unless we count Foucault's own work. Both Madness and Civilization and Birth of
the Clinic contain theses that would be revised and reworked in Foucault's history of
the prison: M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason (1965); M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical
Perception, tr. A.S. Smith (1973).
ß2019 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2019 Cardiff University Law School
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