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way she dressed and moved . And he might show how h er punishment
was mental rather than physical. Already in
Madness and Civi lization
(1961), wh ere he pointed to the connections between crime and insan–
ity, he indi ca ted how through guilt, the masses could be managed-in
school, hospital, army and factory. Now, he focuses on crime as a social
bond, on its link to madness, and on lawyers and psychiatrists, on
prisons and incarcera tion , in his quest for " visible" and " invisible"
structures o f knowledge tha t rela te them all-in a system tha t produces
the crimin als it n eeds.
Actua ll y, both
Survei ller et punir
and
I, Pierre R iviere, having
killed my mother, my sister, an d m y brother... ,
onl y sharpen and
expand hi s previou s themes, although they deal with a new subj ect.
These works provide the theoreti cal practice h e suggested in
The Order
of Th ings
and in
The Archeology of Know ledge,
where he "demon–
stra ted" how codes of knowl edge can be unveiled, or di scovered. Now'
he applies this "quadri-Iateral of language," as h e discusses the
"archives" o f crime and punishment against the " horizon " supplied
for hi s "archeology." But becau se all the archives interact with each
o ther, he talks about economic, biological or legal production s as
weJl-they' re all sa id to have originated from the new egalita rianism
after the French revolution. And since equal and impersonal punish–
ment had to be developed , Fou cault looks a t the effects o f punishment
as a compl ex social fun ction , a t chastisement as a political tactic and a t
the new " technology of power" as a form of manipulation
to
discour–
age crime, and which is expected
to
provide a source of free labor.
Because power, argues Foucault, depends on knowl edge and on
the restriction of this knowl edge, that is on secrecy, lawyers and judges
construct systems of punishment and of justice that incorporate
medical and psychi a tric expertise. This all ows them, increasing ly,
to
hide behind therapeutic and " humane" verdicts tha t produce delin–
quency, but that also take them off the hook. Foucault would perceive
Patricia Hearst's trial as an exampl e of the legal recon stitution o f a
crime, tha t, in typical fashion , induced her to confess, "spontan–
eously," so tha t the evidence would reconfirm our legal code, and ,
ultimately, medi cal and legal power would become even stronger. This
power is contrasted to former omnipotent and arbitrary rul ers, because
it pretends to be even-handed. But it has its own ubiquitous conse–
quences. Thus Foucault notes tha t the people are now more united
against murderers, but are al so more ambivalent about thieves and
robbers. H e links thi s, among o ther things, to the dislike of the new
and ri sing cl ass of inspectors, and to the fascina tion with murder in
