Breaking the Pendulum with Michel Foucault: Modern Punishment Beyond Docile Bodies

• In Event: Crime, Law and Deviance Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 1: Punishment and Criminal Justice Reform

Abstract

Contemporary penal change is often explained as an institutionally mediated outcome of political, cultural, and social transformations that alternate between poles of affinity for retributive and rehabilitative penal measures. The retributive approach to punishment is typically associated with heightened symbolic significance and the generation of conflict, whereas the rehabilitative approach is linked to austerity and the creation of docile bodies that are less inclined to resist. This explanatory framework has recently been critiqued for embodying a “pendular perspective,” which, despite its prevalence in the field, exhibits analytical limitations in acknowledging the persistent presence of symbolic charge and conflict within modern punishment, traits especially evident in penal measures targeting marginalized populations and in the context of the global South. Drawing from Michel Foucault's work in the early 1970s, this article conceptualizes punishment as a discursive act and presents it as a means to transcend the pendular perspective on penal change. It argues that modern punishment, including in its rehabilitative forms, remains symbolically charged and capable of fostering conflict because it enacts a comprehensive moral horizon for subjectivation. This horizon includes not only docile bodies, but also oppositional and consensus-challenging positions such as delinquency, insurrection, resistance, and counter-conduct. Consequently, penal change would arise from the need to articulate a new set of conflictual subjective positions, which, in turn, have not significantly changed since the dawn of modernity in Western societies.

Authors

• Jade Gonçalves Roque, University of Sao Paulo

• Marcos César Alvarez, University of São Paulo