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 by Brian Milstein Submitted originally as a final paper for the course "Issues in Moral Theory," Fall 2001, at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research Charles Taylor, Instructor Cite as: Milstein, Brian. "On Reading Discipline and Punish." Unpublished paper, New School for Social Research, New York (accessed on [DATE] at http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/readingdp.html). There are many ways to read Discipline and Punish. The back cover cross-lists it between "philosophy", "history," and "criminology"; in addition to students in these fields, it is widely read by political scientists and sociologists. Commentators have alternately grouped it as a work in "post-structuralism", "critical social theory", and "hermeneutics". This essay is intended to explore the "moral import" of Foucault's famous and controversial history of prisons. It should be noted from the start that this is not intended as a critical work, and although Foucault has surely sustained much criticism for his approaches from contemporaries as diverse as Jurgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Jacques Derrida, Nancy Fraser, and Jean Baudrillard, my intention here will be to simply explicate Discipline and Punish as a kind of "genealogy of morality". This attempt to explore how Foucault's book relates to issues in moral theory is divided into four parts. In Part I, I will try to establish the continuity between Foucault's project and Nietzsche's original Genealogy of Morals. Part II will be dedicated to reconstructing how Foucault uses genealogy to retrace the historical transformation leading up to the establishment of the modern prison. Part III is intended to show how the elements of the genealogy culminate into a critique of the modern penitentiary system. Finally, I will conclude in Part IV by reviewing the book's effectiveness as a critique of modern morality. Foucault characterizes his project in Discipline and Punish as a "genealogy or an element in a genealogy of the modern 'soul'" (29); as such, he aligns himself with the continuation of the Nietzschean project of a "genealogy of morals." The debt owed by Foucault to Nietzsche is of course hard to miss, especially when we consider Foucault's own essay on "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" as well as Nietzsche's Genealogy itself. To be sure, no attempt to explicate the moral implications of Foucault's history of prisons can afford not to take these into account. The Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals is composed of three essays (I am not going to attempt a full-scale summary and analysis of the Genealogy, but rather make a few points that should prove relevant to Foucault's project). The first distinguishes a "master morality" against a "slave morality," the morality of modern Christian civilization. This latter morality arises from the notion of ressentiment (resentment): "in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all -- its action is fundamentally reaction" (GM 37). From this, we find the origins of the opposition between good and evil and its contrast to what Nietzsche deems the more noble and archaic opposition between good and bad. In the second essay, Nietzsche explicates the ideas he associates with "guilt" and "bad conscience" as the consequence of a process by which "man was actually made calculable" (GM 59). It is this essay that could most easily be pinned as the direct forerunner of Discipline and Punish. Here, he ties the implications of a slave morality in with concepts of not just "guilt" and "conscience" but "law" and "punishment". Nietzsche refers to "the oldest and naivest moral canon of justice" as the one that purports "fairness", "good will", and "objectivity" (GM 70), and concludes that the cause for punishment is not so much concern for damage done by the act itself as for the gall to disturb the social order. He compares the law to a contract with a creditor in which "the lawbreaker is a debtor who has not merely failed to make good the advantages and advance payments bestowed upon him but has actually attacked his creditor: therefore he is not only deprived henceforth of all these advantages and benefits, as is fair -- he is also reminded what these benefits are really worth" (GM 71). Nietzsche finds in the very development of such a legal order "a means of creating even greater units of power" (GM 76). Most importantly, however, is Nietzsche's assertion that, in studying the origins and purposes of the practice of punishment (indeed of anything), we observe that "the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart": ...whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous "meaning" and "purpose" are necessarily obscured and obliterated. (GM 77)The implication of this for Nietzsche and later Foucault is clear: punishment may do something other than punish. "Bad conscience" is, for Nietzsche, the consequence of man's entrapment in an organized, "peaceful" society. He introduces us to his hypothesis of "the internalization of man": the process by which society forced man to suppress his instincts and have them "turn inward", and this he points to as the origin of what we call the soul (GM 84). Thus man finds in himself an "instinct for freedom" turned latent (GM 87), and this sets up the stage for the third essay of the Genealogy, which concerns ascetic ideals. Such ideals, which Nietzsche ultimately embodies in the person of the "ascetic priest", aim to "guide the herd" of slave morality. It is the ascetic priests's duty "to render the sick to a certain degree harmless, to work the self-destruction of the incurable, to direct the ressentiment of the less severely afflicted sternly back upon themselves...and in this way to exploit the bad instincts of all sufferers for the purpose of self-discipline, self-surveillance, and self-overcoming" (GM 128). In Nietzsche's schema, the ascetic ideal operates as a system of rules guiding practices of psychological repression and internalization; the sublimated "instinct for freedom" causes in him "physiological depression" for which the priest directs them back to the psychological-moral domain (see GM 130ff). Man is to be satisfied instead with the "petty pleasures" of a "slight superiority" of "doing good" and "being useful" (GM 135). In modern times, science is, according to Nietzsche, the successor to the ascetic priest at least insofar as they rest on the same foundation: "a certain impoverishment of life is presupposed in both of them -- the affects grown cool, the tempo of life slowed down, dialectics in place of instinct, seriousness imprinted on faces and gestures..." (GM 154). "Modern science" is for Nietzsche "the most unconscious, involuntary, hidden, and subterranean ally" of the ascetic ideal, and thus rejects it as its "opponent" (GM 155). We once again see a baton held out to Foucault, who will take the indictment of the human sciences much further. In sum, we can detect two features in the Genealogy of Morals that Foucault will pick up to execute his history of the French penal system. The first is the concept of internalization, the process by which historical development impresses itself upon the instincts of man so as to induce a physiological depression. The second is the discontinuity between "the origin of a thing" and "its eventual utility" as systems of power shift. Foucault reinterprets and outlines the interaction of these correlative processes in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History". Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. "History," writes Foucault, "is the concrete body of a development, with its moments of intensity, its lapses, its extended periods of feverish agitation, its fainting spells; and only a metaphysician would seek its soul in the distant ideality of the origin" (NGH 145). In his analysis of Nietzsche, Foucault attempts to define genealogy as a philosophy of history by distinguishing various forms of characterizing the "origin" (Ursprung). He emphasizes two forms which he believes denote the proper aim of genealogy: one connoting "descent" (Herkunft), and the other "emergence" (Entstehung). Descent according to Foucault "seeks the subtle, singular, and subindividual marks that might possibly intersect...to form a network that is difficult to unravel" (NGH 145). It implies a multiplicity of beginnings that cannot be attributed to a single cause or intention. It emphasizes rather the effects of numerous events that seem marginal on the surface but converge to produce a unique effect or consequence; the domain of such effects, states Foucault, is the body: The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. (NGH 148)This aspect of the genealogical enterprise can be considered as an application of Nietzsche's hypothesis of internalization to the study of history. Emergence, on the other hand, designates the arising and interaction of "a series of subjugations". It is the aspect of genealogy that correspond precisely to Nietzsche's assertion that there is repeated discontinuity between a thing and its current purpose. Foucault sees this to imply the imposition of outside forces on to an existing domain that transforms it in terms of its location in a network of objects, ideas, and utilities, which Nietzsche calls a "mastering" and Foucault "subjugation". Introduced by this concept of emergence, then, is a view of history not as a seamless continuity but as an ongoing progression of "struggles". History moves according to a "hazardous play of dominations" riddled by an endless succession of discontinuities which he would later interpret in terms of "strategies and tactics". Genealogy as emergence is to trace "the history of morals, ideals, and metaphysical concepts, the history of the concept of liberty or of the ascetic life; as they stand for the emergence of different interpretations, they must be made to appear as events on the stage of historical process" (NGH 152). With dual aspects of descent and emergence, genealogy can be conceived of as a "wirkliche Historie" ("effective history"), a history "without constants". Genealogy aims to make anthropological universals problematic by placing "within a process of development everything considered immortal in man" (NGH 153). It has the ability to analyze events as a play of forces and a usurpation of power and language (NGH 154). But most importantly, it claims to free the study of historical meaning from metaphysics and renders it "explicit in its perspective and acknowledge its system of injustice" (NGH 157). Quaeritur. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault wants to continue Nietzsche's project of a "genealogy of morals" as a "genealogy of the modern soul". One can already see that, from a philosophical-methodological standpoint, the very concepts of "genealogy", "morality", and "soul" are inextricably connected, and in a particular way; the notions "power", "discontinuity", and "subjection" should also be added to this constellation. It is precisely the purpose of genealogy to uproot preconceptions not only about origins and historical meaning, but, through such, to expose the very anthropological assumptions about man that inform our understandings of morality, right, freedom, goodness, and being. In terms of contemporary moral theory, Foucault's genealogical project can be conceived of as a critical project in ethics with a view to morality, insofar as the former can denote questions of "good being" and the latter of "right action". Some points need to be made on this distinction. Regarding ethics: Questions of ethics tend to take the form "What is a good thing to be?" The ethical life concerns the every-day of life, our habits, feelings, desires and passions. The moral philosophers of Ancient Greece associated the "good life" with the life of virtue (or the "four cardinal virtues" as they were known). Ethics prefigures moral action as a state of body and soul (or mind), and is rooted in being. Yet genealogy in the Nietzschean-Foucauldian sense aims precisely to shatter historical conceptions of being as the illusion of an oppressive metaphysics. Genealogy explodes the ethical life by casting the body into a world of struggle and subjugation. The soul is determined in turn by the historical play of forces that induce internalization and illusion; it no longer represents the immortal and unified in humanity but the product of suppressed instincts. The implications genealogy has for ethics (as arising in being) follows into the domain of morality. The toll subjugations take on the body and the soul have correlative consequences in behavior. Moral action is therefore the consequence of a specified interrelationship between the soul and power -- an interrelationship that can be considered analogous to a kind of quasi- or pseudo-voluntarism, insofar as moral action derives from an ethic of obedience. The obedient soul portrayed in genealogy however is not to a real god but to a system of power and control, to an "illusion" that situates the body in the tumultuous play of strategies and tactics. Genealogy shows us a morality set up to determine the body in its utility. Genealogy is at the core a political doctrine that is explicit in the ubiquity of its skepticism and is, consequently, profoundly effective as a tool for moral critique. On the other hand, it seems utterly useless when the task at hand is no longer a question of critique but of programmatic justification. If any system of moral thought that is put into practice must have a history, and anything with a history is a potential target of genealogical criticism -- genealogy at least seems to assume from the start that any system of moral imperatives implies a regime of illusion and subjugation. This does not necessarily mean that no such system is possible, but genealogy may have to stand on the sidelines for it; it is an open question whether or not a moral system can be put into practice which would effectively resist its value-flattening techniques. Nor is genealogy useful, in principle, when in comes to the critique of moral systems in the abstract or as a future "plan"; if the system cannot be tied down to a historical procession in practice, genealogy finds itself without a medium on which to unleash itself. Genealogy by itself serves as a poor basis for a general philosophy; it is perhaps best conceived as a moral-philosophical tool for historical critique. Its potential lies in its ability to explode previously undetected assumptions and prejudices and open up new forms of awareness, and periodically reinforces the need for caution for the moral philosopher and the political planner. I feel that Foucault's Discipline and Punish, being one of the most exemplary demonstrations of genealogy in action, should be read in this way. | ||||||||||||||
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Foucault's Objective. One can envision Foucault's project as having four successive stages. He seeks to, first of all, analyze the removal of punishment from the public view by tracing not only its transformation from a "public spectacle" to "the most hidden part of the penal process", but also the disappearance of "judicial torture" and the systems of reasoning that accompanied it (DP 9-16). Secondly, he wants to show how the target of punishment shifted from the "body" to the "soul" (with the body as "intermediary") as part of a process of "humanization" of punishment (DP 11-17). Thirdly, he seeks to demonstrate how "crime" as the object of penal practice has changed along with the penal practices themselves, such that it is not the mere act or breakage of the law but "passions, instincts, anomalies, infirmities, maladjustments, effects of environment or heredity" that come under the judicial lens (DP 17-19). Finally, Foucault wants to show how the very act of judgment has transformed over the course of the nineteenth century, how the proliferation of "expert" knowledges in the human sciences have swarmed the process of judgment with smaller judgments by psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, social workers, prison officials, minor judicial officials, education experts, and the like (DP 19-23). The power to judge has become fragmented and entangled among a plethora of subsidiary methods and discourses that constitute what he calls a "scientifico-legal complex": "Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems. It fate is to be redefined by knowledge" (DP 22). In order for his study to be effective, Foucault insists we must resist studying "only the general social forms," and instead follow several methodological precautions: we must recognize punishment (1) "as a complex social function" and (2) "as a political tactic"; we should (3) look for a "common matrix" within which to understand the histories of both "penal law" and the "human sciences" (i.e., "make the technology of power the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system and of the knowledge of man"); finally, we should (4) see if this shift in the object of penal practices (from the "body" to the "soul") is "the effect of the way in which the body itself is invested by power relations" (DP 23-24). Foucault believes we can recognize a certain "political economy" of the body in which penal systems are situated: "This political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which need is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated, and used); the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body" (DP 25-26). He argues, furthermore, that such a subjection need not be attained by means of repression, violence, and ideology, but also by means that are "direct" and "material", that are "calculated, organized, and thought out" -- a kind of "'knowledge' of the body that is not the science of its functioning, and a mastery of its forces that is more than its ability to conquer them". At the same time, Foucault stresses that this "political technology of the body" is rarely continuous or systematic and cannot be traced as originating in a single institution or "state apparatus": "In spite of the coherence of its results, it is generally no more than a multiform instrumentation". It is for this reason that we cannot trace it to a single or conceptually unifiable discourse at the "macro" level of society; coming from innumerable and disparate points, such a form of subjection can only be analyzed as these multiple techniques converge on the body -- as the operation of a micro-physics of power (DP 26). It is with this in mind that Foucault goes on to make his most famous declaration that power and knowledge are constitutive of one another, and that "the subject who knows, the objects to be known and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and their historical transformations." For the purposes of his study this has important implications: To analyse the political investment of the body and the micro-physics of power presupposes, therefore, that one abandons -- where power is concerned -- the violence-ideology opposition, the metaphor of property, the model of contract or of conquest; that -- where knowledge is concerned -- one abandons the opposition between what is "interested" and what is "disinterested", the model of knowledge and the primacy of the subject. (DP 28)What Foucault believes we should be looking at instead at what he calls the "anatomy" of the "body politic": a constellation of mechanisms, techniques, and elements that advance and reinforce power-knowledge relations that "invest" bodies as subjects of power and objects of knowledge. It is the convergence of these power-knowledge "tactics" upon the condemned man that formulate a "non-corporal" reference point that Foucault describes as the "soul" characterized as "the effect and instrument of a political anatomy" (DP 29-30). "Economies" of Power. It is important to keep in mind that Foucault offers up his history of the French penal system not as a general theory of society but as a description of a political anatomy. This political anatomy is contextually specific and historically bound -- he offers no doctrine of how power relations must function given knowledge x, nor how knowledges obtain given power relation y. The place operated by a power-knowledge matrix is always a function of its "use", of what is served by its maintenance and proliferation; this aspect of analysis is central to the genealogical method as understood by both Foucault and Nietzsche. It is important to note how this contextual disjuncture within the formation of power-knowledge matrices is described by Foucault in terms of "economies". Dozens of times throughout the text, we find mentions of "the political economy of the body", "the economy of power", "the economy of punishment", "the economy of illegalities", "the economy of the power to punish", "the political economy of the power to punish", as well as the economies "of continuity and permanence", "of expenditure and excess", "of suspended rights", "of interests", "of publicity", "of visibility", "of time and gesture", "of activities and organic control", and "of the mechanisms of surveillance" -- and this list is not exhaustive. These frequent allusions to economies and economic models reflect a specific kind of rationality, "an economic or technical rationality for [the] mystical calculus of the infinitesimal and the infinite" (DP 140). These economies are specific to the micro-physics of power, and are decipherable from the view of the body upon which their effects come together; they represent an interplay of strategies and tactics over time by which the effects of power are rendered sharper, more acute. At the same time, they are of limited domain: such economies arise from and presuppose their institutional settings in terms of the dispositions and distributions of the individuals who are their subject, and their "use" presupposes a larger network of both "macro" as well as "micro" power relations for which they are articulated to serve. The power relations brought about by such economies, then, are neither mysterious nor totalizing, nor do they exist in a vacuum; insofar as they are tied to a kind of "technical rationality", they are also subject to explication and critique. These economies also signify points at which "power" meets "counter-power" or resistance; they are the genealogical sites of what Foucault referred to as emergence, that "place of confrontation" where the eruption of forces "leap from the wings to center stage" (NGH 149-150). One must thus read these economic or game references as the very building blocks of Foucault's genealogical approach that will determine the objects of their domain in their respective "utilities". From the Ancien Regime to the Rise of Prisons. In the background of Foucault's history of prisons is, of course, "the spectacle of the scaffold" meant to represent a very different economy of punishment under the Ancien Regime. This economy he reads as "an entire poetics" (quoting Vico) expressed in terms of "ordeal", "war" and "struggle" on one hand, and "ceremony", "ritual" and "liturgy" on the other. Foucault finds it notable that, in stark contrast to our own times, the entire process of investigation and condemnation was conducted in relative secrecy while the carrying out of judgment to its finality was made into a public spectacle: "The secret and written form of the procedure reflects the principle that in criminal matters the establishment of truth was the absolute right and the exclusive power of the sovereign and his judges. ...the 'sovereign power' from which the right to punish derived could in no case belong to the 'multitude'" (DP 35-36). The gathering of proof thus took place in privacy according to a specific set of rules and procedures intended to set the stage for the confession, in which "the accused himself took part in the ritual of penal truth" (DP 38). For Foucault, the gathering of the confession by way of "judicial torture" played out as a kind of "game": "...as such, it was linked to the old tests and trials -- ordeals, judicial duels, judgments of God -- that were practised in accusatory procedures long before the techniques of the Inquisition. Something of the joust survived, between the judge who ordered the judicial torture and the subject who was tortured; the "patient"...was subjected to a series of trials, graduated in severity, in which he succeeded if he "held out", or failed if he confessed. (DP 40)In this judicial game, Foucault notes a "strange economy" in which penalty is used as a means and "in which the ritual that produced the truth went side by side with the ritual that imposed the punishment" (DP 42). This duality continues through the point of condemnation, through the carrying out of a public execution that is "to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual" (DP 47). Foucault narrates the spectacle of the scaffold as a tale by which "a momentarily injured sovereign is reconstituted" (DP 48). The ceremony brings with it an important aspect of "revenge" by the sovereign power, but it is also a demonstration in truth -- the truth of the condemned man's guilt, the truth of the victory of justice, the truth of the terrifying power of the sovereign. It portrays the truth of the judicial game played out to its "inevitable" finality (if the suspect went free, there was no spectacle). The economy of the power to punish in the Ancien Regime was an economy of "excess", of what Foucault calls "surplus power" or "super-power". Foucault argues that the shift from the "old" economy of the power to punish to the "modern" one cannot be understood without reference to "external" social and historical contexts: the old form was at least in part "the effect of a system of production in which labour power, and therefore the human body has neither the utility nor the commercial value that are conferred on them in an economy of an industrial type" (DP 54). Changes in these contexts no doubt played a decisive role in the motivation to reform. Yet Foucault also stresses how the collapse of the old way in punishment derives from the system itself: "In these executions, which ought to show only the terrorizing power of the prince, there was a whole aspect of the carnival, in which rules were inverted, authority mocked and criminals transformed into heroes" (DP 60). He demonstrates how the very mechanisms of the "spectacle of the scaffold" permitted communicative and semiotic loopholes for disorder and rebellion; it was a growingly evident inadequacy in the economy of power itself that inaugurated its demise -- it ultimately proved unable to securely produce its demonstration of "juridico-political" truth. Outbursts and disturbances from both the crowd of spectators and the condemned himself evolved into micro-acts of rebellion; changing social circumstances led people to publicly question the reasonableness of sentencing practices as being unjust, iniquitous, or disproportionate (DP 61-62). People came to fear the unrestrained violence of the crown and to identify with the condemned -- the political semiotics of the old system of punishment was no longer tenable: "in the last resort, the executions did not, in fact, frighten the people" (DP 63). The "old" regime of jurisprudence could no longer purport a legitimate "use". The reformers of the eighteenth century attributed the failure of the old system to "a bad economy of power" tied to the fragmentation and disorder of jurisdictions, excesses of penal practices, and a general increase of corruption in the distribution of offices. They sought rather to develop a system that, on one hand, could stand in opposition to the excesses of the Ancien Regime and, on the other hand, could utilize a growing knowledge of the population and a tighter "mapping" of the social body. With the development of new forms of socio-economic stratification and organization, Foucault notes a transformation in discourses on crime such that they now concerned the protection of property and of the social order. This new form of punishment will focus on the criminal as a deviant actor within society who is to be judged as simultaneously alien to it -- as the individual violator of a "social contract". Foucault depicts the point of transformation as a choice between two paradigms of "individualization". The first is what he calls a "punitive city" model based on a kind of "social contract" rationality. This model is intended to treat the criminal as the violator of a pact, one who stands not in opposition to the king but to society as a whole; the criminal is to be punished in a way specific to his violation; further, punishment will be public in such a way that the punished criminal will be linked to the law that was broken: "In the penalty, rather than seeing the presence of the sovereign, one will see the laws themselves" (DP 110). These punishments will have the additional function of "educating" and deterring the public: "in counterpoint with all the direct examples of virtue, one may at each moment encounter, as a living spectacle, the misfortunes of vice" (DP 113). This idea of the "punitive city" never went far with regard to becoming a reality, but it reflects an important opposition on the basis of its very rationality to a second alternative that was ultimately adopted. Imprisonment was seen as a double-foul: first, it was seen as pointless to impose the same punishment on all offenses -- it made more sense to aim for a punishment that fit the crime as directly as possible; second, imprisonment was seen as "branded by abuses of power" in the old regime (DP 114-120). Foucault offers up the rise of the prison system not as the logical and "humane" successor to the excesses of absolute monarchy, but as an anomaly of political rationality. The Disciplinary Society. Foucault traces the rise of the prison to political concerns arising from economic and social imperatives. In the context of a new differentiation of the systems of production, labor, and commerce, as well as of the currency of an accompanying system of social mores that combined Christian ethics with the utility of man as an economic animal, "homo oeconomicus", the prison system arose as a system aimed at reconstructing the individual as a useful member of society. The upshot of Foucault's argument will be that this implies the development of a certain knowledge of the individual from the perspective of "a political investment of the body" bound up with its "economic use" (DP 125, 25-26). This will be an economy of punishment that targets not the body, as in the Ancien Regime, nor behavior, as in the "punitive city", but the "soul". Within the prison we find a concentration of methods and techniques called "disciplines" that define Foucault's "micro-physics of power". These disciplines are not the product of grand theories, but consist rather of "small acts of cunning endowed with a great power of diffusion, subtle arrangements, apparently innocent, but profoundly suspicious" (DP 139). Foucault's examples come from military training, schools, hospitals, and factories, and they include arts of distributing individuals, controlling activity, modulating time, and economizing the individual as "an element in a machine" (see DP 141-169); the result is the creation of an "individuality" that is "cellular", "organic", "genetic", and "combinatory" by the respective operations of drawing up tables, prescribing movements, imposing exercises, and arranging "tactics" (DP 169). The success of these operations is assured, furthermore, by the use of methods of (1) "hierarchical observation", which permits the economic distribution of a gaze over subjugated bodies, (2) "normalizing judgment", which certifies the reduction of individuality to specified systems of classification and conformity, and (3) "examination", which effectively combines the former two into a comprehensive system that renders individuals as both intelligible and susceptible to judgment (see DP 170-192). It is with this constitution of "disciplinary powers" in mind that Foucault introduces the Panopticon as an ideal instrument intended "to induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power" (DP 201). "Panopticism," writes Foucault, "is the general principle of a new 'political anatomy' whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline" (DP 208). He finds in the Panopticon the "formula" for a "generalization" of power that not only restricts communication and deters behavior, but produces them vis-a-vis a mechanism of "subtle coercion". The extension of all these disciplinary techniques in their economized form constitutes what Foucault calls "the disciplinary society" (DP 209). Disciplinary institutions ensure the "utility" of individuals while extending the effects of their functioning beyond their immediate enclosures; at the same time, they are supplemented by the establishment of "the police apparatus" which monitors their effectiveness throughout society (DP 213). The ensemble of disciplinary mechanisms function as what Foucault calls a "counter-law"; the economies according to which they operate is not a necessary consequence of laws, codes, and norms ruled upon at the "macro" level of power, although a connection is always present. These techniques are, from the perspective of politics as a grand scheme, circumstantial; yet their operation "on the underside of the law" permits them to be "a machinery that is both immense and minute, which supports, reinforces, multiplies the asymmetry of power and undermines the limits that are traced around the law" (DP 223). These techniques serve to constitute the "disciplinary individual" that is the object of the modern penal system. | ||||||||||||||
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Demystifying the Panopticon. While the Panopticon is no doubt the most famous (and perhaps also the most disconcerting) of Foucault's metaphors for power in modern societies, it would be misleading to think of it as defining. It would further more be false to assume that he intended the Panopticon or the prison to be a metaphor for society as a whole. Foucault offers us the Panopticon as a technique that economizes the investment of power-knowledge relations on the body. We must take note, however, that it can only function as a technique within the particular power-knowledge complex for which it is employed. It is but an instrument; the Panopticon by itself is worthless unless there exists a corpus of knowledge to inform it of its use: "Sure, we have everyone under our all-encompassing gaze, but what are we looking for? What norm or anomaly are we evaluating?" The political effectiveness of the Panopticon must thus be derived from something over and above itself. Power does not exercise as its own end; it comes from innumerable points, but "thin air" is not one of them. Indeed, Foucault's purpose in raising the issue of "panopticism" is not simply to say "there is power", nor even that this power can be automatic and penetrating, but that it can be employed in the form of a technology that links an "intention" or "utility" of sorts directly to the body as an investment of power with regard to knowledge. The dependency of a given technique of power-knowledge on what Foucault as a genealogist would call its "use" puts it, in at least one sense, in a category with the body: both are constituted in their position and relation to each other with regard to some strategy of "utility". The next question to be asked, then, is what is this utility? The Genealogical Utility of the Prison. "The prison," writes Foucault, "an essential element in the punitive panopoly, certainly marks an important moment in the history of penal justice: its access to 'humanity'" (DP 231). Foucault finds the prison to be endowed with an "economico-moral self-evidence" whose civility over more "barbaric" or "archaic" forms of punishment consists in an ability to equate and reduce all offenses to the same punishment but varied only in its duration: "There is a wages-form of imprisonment that”enables it to appear as a reparation" (DP 232; cf. GM 71). In addition, it was always assumed from the point if its inception that the prison would not be merely a mechanism for levying punishment but for "reforming individuals" (DP 233). Such a reformation is to be conducted vis-a-vis techniques involving isolation (both of the prisoners from the outside world and from one another), a work regimen, and "modulation of the penalty" (the alleviation of punishment if one "shows progress" or "is good"); these mechanisms are aimed to morally resocialize the individual and reproduce him "according to the general norms of an industrial society" (DP 242). Yet Foucault stresses the importance of the fact that the prison is an "autonomous" institution working in isolation from society at large; further, the exacerbation or modulation of penalties of inmates is not a procedure under the direct supervision of legal authorities -- there is, in fact, always a characteristic level of "arbitrariness" which gives rise to what Foucault describes as the "excesses" of the "carceral" (as distinguishable to the "judicial"; DP 246-247). This excess in moral-economic disciplinary technique over punishment (i.e., the initial sentence) is what determines it as "penitentiary" (DP 248). What the penitentiary adds to the punitive mechanism is a requisite "knowledge of the individual", an additional system for analyzing and judging the inmate, for determining his motivation, his drive, his criminal nature; the result is what Foucault calls a "curious substitution": whereas it was a convicted offender that was sent by the courts to the prison, upon arrival, this offender is to be objectified in a new way as a delinquent. The delinquent is distinguishable from the offender in that he is to be characterized not by his offense, for which he was sentenced by the courts, but by his life, and his life becomes the target of the penitentiary mechanism (DP 251). The "science" of criminology is born here as the study of delinquents, their biographies, typologies, moralities, abnormalities, and their "potential danger" to society (DP 251-254). It is the individual as a delinquent who becomes established and reflected on as the project of the punitive system and the "penitentiary sciences". With the mature establishment of penitentiary technique comes a whole expansion and reification of its mechanisms; Foucault points out, however, that it "was denounced at once as the great failure of penal justice" (DP 264). He argues that, since the very establishment of the prison system (and in some ways earlier), there has been a constant set of accusations leveled at it. Critics have argued since the early nineteenth century that the prison system does not reduce crime, increases recidivism (cases of repeat offenders), produces lives of delinquency, organizes criminality, subjects inmates upon release to living conditions conducive to recidivism, and causes destitution to the inmates' families (DP 264-268). In response to what Foucault calls a "monotonous critique of the prison" there has been a similarly monotonous set of replies in the form of "the reintroduction of the invariable principles of penitentiary technique"; he writes that "for a century and a half the prison had always been offered as its own remedy: the reactivation of the penitentiary techniques as the only means of overcoming their perpetual failure; the realization of the corrective project as the only method of overcoming the impossibility of implementing it" (DP 268). It is upon the point of the apparently stubborn failure of the prison that Foucault sharpens his genealogical gaze and suggests that ...perhaps one should reverse the problem and ask oneself what is served by the failure of the prison; what is the use of these different phenomena that are continually being criticized; the maintenance of delinquency, the encouragement of recidivism, the transformation of the occasional offender into a habitual delinquent, the organization of a closed milieu of delinquency. (DP 272, my emphasis)The genealogical key lies in asking what "is hidden beneath the apparent cynicism of the penal institution", an institution which consists in not merely punishing the offender but in subjecting him, as a delinquent, to "a whole series of 'brandings'" (DP 272). If this is the case, punishment has no doubt a "use" that is not actually to punish or to counter crime, but to "differentiate" illegalities and provide them with "a general economy" (DP 272). Foucault locates this use in the very rise and transformation of "popular illegalities" that can be characterized by their insertion and articulation in political and social struggles: the revolutions of 1789 and 1848, stratification effects in processes of industrialization, labor movements, and "workers' vagabondage" contributed to a new conception of criminality. This movement of criminality inscribed in social conflict lent to a "great fear" by some of those others who are "criminal and seditious as a whole"; in other words, crime was to be viewed as the vocation not of everybody but of a particular class, from the "bottom" of the social ladder (DP 275). The upshot, according to Foucault, is that delinquency re-posits criminal law as an instrument by which the order espoused by "the few" is protected from that "bastardized" outsider class: "crime is itself due to the fact that one is in society as an alien" (DP 276). Prison thus succeeds in reproducing scattered and occasional offenders as a delinquent class that can be supervised and subjugated, rendered politically harmless, and kept economically and socially dependent on the interests of dominant groups (DP 276-280). Delinquency, according to Foucault, also permits a general surveillance of the population by way of, on one hand, informants who report to the police and permit a mapping of a whole range of activities throughout the social body, and, on the other hand, by way of systems of documentation and classification to be interpreted, reinterpreted, and put to additional use by the police and social scientists (DP 281). It is additionally the mechanism by which "morality" is to be linked to "class" (DP 285). Finally, delinquency legitimates the very processes that produced it: the fear of the "criminal" makes acceptable and induces the need for more police, more prisons (DP 286). | ||||||||||||||
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Foucault traces a "genealogy of the modern soul" as a successive interplay of various economies of power, in which one can detect the descent of a soul internalized as a delinquent vis-a-vis the economic emergence of penal mechanisms (utilized as instruments of disciplinary power) and knowledges of individuals (utilized as discourses of subjection). As Foucault writes, "This disciplinary technique exercised upon the body had a double effect: a 'soul' to be known and a subjection to be maintained" (DP 295). Mechanisms of disciplinary techniques inscribe themselves on the body in a way targeted at compromising the ethical freedom of the individual. His "soul" is the product of multiple forces of subjection; his objectification as a delinquent (or even "fear" of being a delinquent) determines his place, his role, what he is to be. Good being is disciplined being. The morality of disciplinary man is thus his utility as an element within a strategically produced "political anatomy", determined surreptitiously in relation to the abnormality of the delinquent reprobate. It is a "slave morality", to be sure. The normalizing technology made acute by penitentiary techniques extends itself beyond the immediate venue of the prison throughout the entire social body. Foucault notes, for example, how these technologies have generalized the very meaning of law-breaking or crime such that it is no longer the act itself nor even the offence to the social order but "the departure from the norm, the anomaly" that is at focus (DP 299). Moreover, the modern discourse on the power to punish has been naturalized such that its techniques are both tolerable and acceptable, and the successful production of delinquents has made them appear even necessary and desirable (DP 301-303). "The problem," Foucault states, "lies...in the steep rise in the use of these mechanisms of normalization and the wide-ranging powers which, through the proliferation of new disciplines, they bring with them" (DP 306). Foucault thus employs a Nietschean-style genealogy to effectively deconstruct the modern penal system as an ensemble of power-knowledge technologies; it is an exercise in moral critique that identifies modern morality with the normalizing effects of industrial society. Discipline and Punish is explicit and unrelenting in its moral-political stance. Being an exercise in a genealogy of morality, however, it is devoid of suggestions on how to replace the faulty paradigm with a better one; genealogy thus must be recognized as limited in that it seems only to be able to prescribe "what not to do". It is unsustainable as a philosophy by itself, but is best kept as a specialized tool for moral and metaphysical critique, for problematizing what has been assumed to be "natural", "immutable", or "self-evident". The question of what to do instead is left as another matter entirely.
Foucault, Michel. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Routledge, 1988. Schacht, Richard, editor. Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. University of California Press, 1994. Schneewind, J.B. The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
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