With reference to ONE OR MORE writers studied on this module, discuss how Post_War fiction AND/OR poetry enacts forms of resistance AND/OR rebellion
Introduction
The carceral system completion = the beginning of the modern method of punishment
'The chief and deputies at Mettray had to be not exactly judges, or teachers, or foremen, or non-comissioned officers, or 'parents' [...] they were in a sense technicians of behaviour, engineers of conduct, orthopaedists of individuality. Their task was to produce bodies that were both docile and capable; they supervised the nine or ten working hours [...] they directed the orderly movements of groups of inmates, physical exercises, miltiary exercises, rising in the morning, going to bed at night, walkis to the accompaniment of bugle and whistle.[...] Training was accompained by permanent obervation; a body of knowlege was being constantly built up from the everyday behaviour of the inmates.'**
The function of a prison is to restrict and limit movement. The everyday act of movement becomes a privilege, not a right. An act to be observed and monitored.
Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that a work entitled 'The lonliness of the Long Distance Runner' uses the body's movement through space to problematize the supposed reformatory aim of twentieeth-centry incarseration.
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'Punishment, if I may so put it, should strike the soul rather than the body'.
This is reflected in the move towards reformationary aim of Borstals.
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Own conception of what makes an 'Honest' man.
Can control my body, but CANNOT CONTROL MY MIND.
Control of Smith's Body
Cannot control Smith's mind
Use of body to demonstrate lack of control over mind. Failure of the reform system.
J
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“The disappearance of public executions marks the decline of the spectacle; but it also marks the slackening of the hold on the body.”
Yet, the abandonment of the body becomes the attempt to occupy the mind as the criminal is now made to feel shame, rather than pain. Modern society is “ashamed” of bodies; it tries to “correct” them, to make them “better” through discipline.
it is the conviction itself that marks the offender with the unequivocally negative sign: the publicity has shifted to the trial, and to the sentence; the execution itself is like an additional shame that justice is ashamed to impose on the condemned man; so it keeps its distance from the act, tending always to entrust it to others, under the seal of secrecy
Justice is relieved of responsibility for it by a bureaucratic concealment of the penalty itself.” Judges claim that they have no “desire to punish” but want to “correct, reclaim, ‘cure’ “the accused (as if to say: “we’re really good people”).
Foucault suggests that the rise of justice as an “autonomous sector” is tied to the effort to hide the State’s authorship (authority) of punishment. Government officials do not seem “responsible” for punishment because it looks as if a separate, specialized institution, rather than individuals, caused punishment to occur.
You might want to compare this to commodity fetishism, where the commodity seems to carry value without any help from humans.
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‘come and make speeches to us about sports being just the thing to get us leading an honest life and keep our itching finger-ends off them shop locks and safe handles and haurgrips to open gay meters. They give us a bit of blue ribbon and a cup for a prize after we shagged ourselves out running or jumping, like racehorses, only we don’t get so well looked after as racehorses, that’s the only thing.’ - 2.
‘leading an honest life’ = reformation of the ‘soul’.
Object of the cup for a prize valued over the laboured who earnt it / responsible for habitation and not punishment.
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You should think about nobody and go your own way, not on a course marked out for you by people holding mugs of water and bottles of iodine in case you fall and cut yourself so that they can pick you up--even if you want to stay where you are--and get you moving again.
And if I had the whip-hand I wouldn't even bother to build a place like this to put all the cops, governors, posh whores, penpush- ers, army officers, Members of Parliament in; no, I'd stick them up against a wall and let them have it, like they'd have done with blokes like us years ago, that is, if they'd ever known what it means to be honest, which they don't and never will so help me God Al- mighty – 5.
Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can't help being one. You can't deny that. And it's best to be a rebel so as to show 'em it don't pay to try to do you down
collective
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want to reform the 'soul' is expressed and problematised through the consistent dicussion of 'honesty'.
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And when the governor kept saying how 'we' wanted you to do this, and 'we' wanted you to do that, I kept looking round for the other blokes, wondering how many of them there was. Of course, I knew there were thousands of them, but as far as I knew only one was in the room.
bodily reference to honest body
Be honest. It's like saying: Be dead, like me, and then you'll have no more pain of leaving your nice slummy house for Borstal or prison. Be honest and settle down in a cosy six pounds a week job. Well, even with all this long-distance running I haven't yet been able to decide what he means by this, although I'm just about beginning to--and I don't like what it means
But it's true because I know what honest means according to me and he only knows what it means according to him: I think my honesty is the only sort in the world, and he thinks his is the only sort in the world as well. That's why this dirty great walled-up and fenced-up manor house in the middle of nowhere has been used to coop-up blokes like me.
At least old Hitlerface the plain-clothes dick was honester than the governor, because he at any rate had had it in for me and I for him,
And if I had the whip-hand I wouldn't even bother to build a place like this to put all the cops, governors, posh whores, penpush- ers, army officers, Members of Parliament in; no, I'd stick them up against a wall and let them have it, like they'd have done with blokes like us years ago, that is, if they'd ever known what it means to be honest, which they don't and never will so help me God Al- mighty.
If you play ball with us, we'll play ball with you." (Honest to God, you'd have thought it was going to be one long tennis match.) "We want hard honest work and we want good athletics," he said as well. "And if you give us both these things you can be sure we'll do right by you and send you back into the world an honest man."