The spectacle of Discipline and Punish: The tableau, the diagram and the calligram

Abstract

This article returns to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in order to consider its continued relevance for thinking about the representation of incarceration today beyond categories of ‘spectacle’ and ‘surveillance’. In order to rethink the text in relation to contemporary scholarship on visual criminology, it will explore the visual elements of Discipline and Punish in more detail via the concepts of the ‘tableau’ and the ‘diagram’ found in Gilles Deleuze’s Foucault. These concepts will be supplemented by the notion of the ‘calligram’, drawing on Foucault’s 1968 essay ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ in order to explore what is at stake in current representations of incarceration via a specific engagement with offender art. Evoking Jacques Rancière’s notion of curiosity as a critique of the ‘intolerable image’, the article will suggest ways in which the relationship between the academic scholar qua ‘penal spectator’ and the ‘represented’ incarcerated subject can be reconfigured to produce a more critical, empathetic and socially responsible engagement with such representations.