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PARTISAN REVIEW
popular lyrics-lyrics that glorify the criminal who, posthumously,
expiates his sins. Still, he doesn't treat these facts in the customary
causal, historical fashion: they're productions of knowledge–
knowledge that Foucault undercuts and rearranges.
It is impossible to describe his versatility, the richness of his
mental gymnastics, or the abstruseness of his presentation, in a short
review. He jumps from economic productions to productions of crime
and delinquency, from personalized old-style executions to modern
electric chairs, from the art of punishment to the technology of
representation, from ·the economy of pain to the expiation of crime
through work, and from Philadelphia's Walnut Street prison to the
allocation of space and time inside all prisons. And he talks of the
substitution and the decomposition of space and time, of hierarchic
surveillance in "cellular" prisons-an invention Tocqueville brought
back from America. Everything is grist for his mill of knowledge, in
our scientific and rational "era of man." For Foucault perceives crime
and its management as corollaries of modern economic production,
whose adjuncts are coercion, docility and regimentation that turn
people into cases.
In such a society, says Foucault, the deviant is singled out, so that
the celebration of Patricia Hearst's trial serves to hide the disciplinary
society wi th its centralized police force under the guise of equal
treatment and rational authority. When, for example, he relates the
organization of prostitutes (from their health inspection, to houses, to
"regulated" passages through prisons) to financial profit from illicit
sexual pleasure that is funnelled back into society, when he illustrates
how morals were lost as moralization increased, or when he shows how
the delinquent milieu was in complicity with puritanism in profiting
from repressed sexuality only to "recover" that profit later on, then he
is at his best. Political expediency, bourgeois pretension and power
itself, he concludes, confuse the art of rectifying with the right to
punish, and allow power-hungry judges to hand down "therapeutic"
sentences that help to perpetuate the norms of corrupt power along
with the crimes.
Foucault's devastating indictment of this power, I believe, is the
strongest argument in favor of all his books. This is the theme that
emerges in the end, after all the philosophical trimmings and the criss–
crossing intellectualizations have been peeled off. Yet the "peels"
themselves provide many insights. Of course, Foucault's very refusal to
stick to a single discipline, his insistence on including everything,
makes not on ly for the plausibility and range of his project, but also for
