Disciplinary Power: Testing the Hobbesian Hypothesis
We have traced the core of Foucault’s theory of power, as presented in dense form in the fourth part of La volonté de savoir. Our next tasks are to develop and refine this analysis by presenting it in more detail, to show how power evolves over time (and how Foucault’s own analysis becomes more nuanced and complex), and to document the empirical evidence that supports this theory. We will be able to accomplish these three tasks through a careful discussion of Discipline and Punish. It is the last of Foucault’s books that can be characterized as a “work of art”—a densely argued, richly layered collection of empirical observations that integrate numerous archival documents into a larger, compelling analysis, one that seduces readers but leaves them vaguely unsatisfied by something that can’t quite be nailed down.1 Before we turn to this text, however, a few observations about Foucault’s theory of power are in order.
First, a caution: Foucault’s analysis of power is complicated because it is articulated at different levels that are simultaneously at play; it can be imagined as a multidimensional and dynamic puzzle whose pieces must be properly positioned. A few distinctions can help keep these levels clear. First, we must maintain a distinction between “power in general” and specific forms or modalities of power. Much of Foucault’s detailed empirical work, the basis for his articulation of power, is devoted to the elaboration of different specific mechanisms through which power is exercised—such as disciplinary power and biopower. Despite their differences, these mechanisms all share certain features in common, which make them mechanisms or forms of power. (Our discussion in the first chapter, highlighting these common characteristics of power, was devoted to “power in general.”) To understand Foucault’s analyses fully, we must be able to recognize both aspects in his empirical descriptions: what specifies a particular technique as this kind of power, and what a particular technique shares with all power, which characterizes power in general or power as such. As we discuss the operation of disciplinary power, we will be simultaneously describing that specific modality and illustrating certain characteristics of any form of power.
Let’s briefly recap the general account of power that Foucault presented in La volonté de savoir.2 Power relations are microprocesses, which must be distinguished from the macro forms in which they often manifest themselves. Such macro forms, which include state sovereignty and domination of one group over another, are constituted out of many particular instances of the microrelations. “It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization” (1976ET, 92).
These microprocesses, these force relations, are strategic relationships. More precisely, “power” is the effect of interactions between unequal positions in the social landscape. “Power’s condition of possibility . . . is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power . . . the latter are always local and unstable” (1976ET, 93). Power circulates through the network of social relations (CdF1976ET, 29). Thus, power is always and “strictly” relational: power relations’ “existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support or handle in power relations” (1976ET, 95). Local and unstable, dependent upon many points in relations of inequality and hence resistance, power relations spring from, or are immanent in, the dispersal of positions in a social space, field, or network.
But power relations are not only produced in the dispersion of the social field; power relations are also productive of the dispersions. “They are not univocal; they define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion of the power relations” (1975ET, 27). The power relations immanent and operative in the social field determine the possibilities of transformation, delimiting the possibilities at each point of confrontation.3
These possibilities are delimited by the dynamics of the power relations—by the interaction of a struggle between one possible movement and a resistance to that movement. Resistance is part of the logic of power relations, internal to power relations. “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (1976ET, 95), or, as Foucault puts it elsewhere, “there are no relations of power without resistances; . . . [resistances] are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised” (DE218.1, 142). The exercise of power inevitably creates—is not possible without—resistance, for it is in this opposition between movement in one direction in a social field and resistance to that movement that power relations become clear. The fact that the social field is altered in one or the other direction illustrates that a relation of power has been in operation. It is in this struggle that the “risks” and “inversions” of power relations are realized. As Foucault put it in 1982, “if there was no resistance, there would be no power relations” (DE358.1, 29).4
In the opening chapter of Discipline and Punish, Foucault presents his general analysis in similar terms. One paragraph in particular, at the heart of the chapter, articulates the core of his theory:
Now, the study of this micro-physics presupposes that the power exercised on the body is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy, that its effects of domination are attributed not to “appropriation,” but to dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings; that one should decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess; that one should take as its model a perpetual battle rather than a contract regulating a transaction or the conquest of a territory. (1975ET, 26)
This single sentence succinctly condenses almost all of the elements of Foucault’s theory of power. Power manifests as strategies and tactics within constantly evolving networks of relations, on the model of a perpetual battle—it is not a contract, privilege, or possession held by one but not another. (That he characterizes it here as a perpetual battle is significant: that the battle is ongoing means that it cannot be won, once and for all, but by the same token, it is never utterly lost. As long as one is living, then, one will be immersed in, subject to, and participating in power relations, and there is always reason for hope.) Hence, he continues, while the distribution of power may occasionally result in temporary states of domination, it “is not exercised as an obligation or a prohibition on those who ‘do not have it’; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them” (1975ET, 27). This investment (which we will explore more fully later, when we look at disciplinary power in particular) is the site and basis for resistance to that very exercise of power, for relations of power “are not univocal” and can even be reversed (1975ET, 27). Foucault then underscores both the generality and the micro character of these relations of power while also distinguishing his analysis from inadequate approaches (like the Marxist and liberal analyses discussed in La volonté de savoir):
This means that these relations go right down into the depths of society, that they are not localized in the relations between the state and its citizens or on the frontier between classes and that they do not merely reproduce, at the level of individuals, bodies, gestures and behaviour, the general form of the law or government; that, although there is continuity (they are indeed articulated on this form through a whole series of complex mechanisms), there is neither analogy nor homology, but a specificity of mechanism and modality. (1975ET, 27)
The preceding paragraphs constitute a summary of what I just described as “power in general”—an account of power that transcends historical periods. This discussion is even more densely articulated than in the dozen or so pages of La volonté de savoir that we discussed in the first chapter, and one other important difference separates these two accounts. While in the latter work Foucault was already beginning to rearticulate his analysis of power in terms of biopower (though still thinking primarily in terms of disciplinary power), here his analysis is exclusively oriented toward disciplinary power. (This is evidenced in part by the way that he speaks here of power’s effects on bodies.) We shall begin our detailed exploration of Discipline and Punish by tracing how that “specific mode of power,” disciplinary power, emerges out of earlier forms.
The opening pages of Discipline and Punish juxtapose two striking—and paradigmatic—images of punishment. The first is a graphic, and often disturbing, eyewitness report of the 1757 execution of the regicide Damiens, who was publicly burned, mutilated, and drawn and quartered. This physically grotesque account is contrasted with an 1838 prisoners’ timetable. Just eighty years after Damiens, prisoners are no longer subject to violent torture; instead, the details of their daily routines are carefully regulated and monitored: rise at six a.m., work for nine hours, a schedule for meals and education, etc. Foucault seems to be making two important points with this juxtaposition.
First, there is a shift in the style of punishment: this juxtaposition marks a redistribution of punitive techniques that corresponds to a shift in the dominant modes of power relations in society. Documenting this shift—from what Foucault terms “monarchical” (or sovereign) modes through a transitional phase (“semio-juridical”) to a new stabilization in which the prison is the paradigmatic form of punishment, a shift that occurred in the century roughly framed by these two opening images—is the principal task of the first two parts of the book. The prison, Foucault argues, is the paradigmatic example of a new mode of power relations: disciplinary power.
These two opening images suggest that Foucault wants to make a further observation, however. This second, disciplinary mode (punishment through imprisonment, through careful regulation and documentation of a prisoner’s each and every activity) perhaps ought to disturb us as much as the first (graphically violent torture). This challenges a certain rhetoric about the reform and “humanization” of punitive practices. “Perhaps it has been attributed too readily and too emphatically to a process of ‘humanization,’ thus dispensing with the need for further analysis” (1975ET, 7). Foucault’s argumentative technique here is similar to that of La volonté de savoir: he identifies an understanding that is “taken for granted” or “received wisdom” and shows that it is a misunderstanding (or at least an only partial and conditional, not essential, understanding)—that beneath it something else is going on, something that is better understood through the lens of power relations—and Foucault thereby recasts our conception of the entire problem. In La volonté de savoir, he called into question the accepted view that sexuality was repressed in the Victorian and post-Victorian ages, arguing on the contrary that there has in fact been an explosion of discourses about sexuality in the West. In Discipline and Punish, the “false” or “misleading” story with which he begins is one of the gradual humanization of punishment:
The reduction in penal severity . . . has been regarded in an overall way as a quantitative phenomenon: less cruelty, less pain, more kindness, more respect, more “humanity.” In fact the changes are accompanied by a displacement in the very object of the punitive operation. (1975ET, 16)
Indeed, with this displacement, punishment seems to penetrate ever more deeply into prisoners’ “souls” by means of their bodies, subtly shaping and molding their habits, actions, and behavior—and this is paralleled by similar transformations in other social institutions, notably schools, factories, and the military.
This recasting or revisioning of fundamental social problems is one of Foucault’s most compelling philosophical contributions—and it is part of why his new theory of power is so important. His reframing of the power relations at work in social relations, in the prison or sexuality, not only effects a new understanding of the particular truism challenged in a given volume; it also suggests that this lens of power relations is indispensable for a complete, or even adequate, social analysis. It also creates a new conceptual space in which to confront and articulate an ethics. And Foucault’s own ethical orientations and principles will evolve and be recast in response to the evolution of this understanding of how power works.
That the story of the humanization of punishment is a mask for other, perhaps more sinister, transformations of punitive techniques in particular and social relations in general becomes clear as Foucault analyzes and explains the process of transformation from one established, coherent modality of power, which Foucault terms “sovereign,” through transitional, hybrid forms (“semio-techniques”), to a new modality, “modern” or “disciplinary” power. Indeed, Nancy Fraser, one of Foucault’s most incisive critics (we’ll look at her criticisms in Chapter 4), maintains that “Foucault’s most valuable accomplishment consists of a rich empirical account of the early stages in the emergence of some distinctively modern modalities of power” (Fraser 1981, 17). (The term “modality” here means a predominant or general form of power relations. If Foucault’s theory asserts that certain microrelations are constitutive of all relationships of power, ancient and modern, then what is distinct in a particular modality is that certain of those microrelations and techniques are more explicitly or predominantly exercised in the macrorelations between individuals, societies, and states.) Our aim is to trace Foucault’s analysis of this “redistribution” of power relations from one regime or modality to another, thereby demonstrating two claims about Foucault’s theory: first, that the general analysis given above is not unique to the contemporary, modern regime, and second, that there is a solid empirical basis for his theory.
EARLY ARTICULATIONS: THE 1974 COLLÈGE DE FRANCE COURSE
Before immersing ourselves in Discipline and Punish, however, we can see the broad outlines of the argument initially sketched in his 1973–1974 Collège de France course, Psychiatric Power (CdF74). There, Foucault began to trace the redistribution from “sovereign” to “disciplinary” power by looking at a very particular example—the emergence of psychiatry as a discipline and a branch of medical science at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This work anticipates his argument about the redistribution of power in Discipline and Punish; it also highlights certain limitations of his early hypotheses and the development of his thought. It behooves us therefore to note briefly how he presented the problem in these lectures. Indeed, here too Foucault is debunking myths of “humanization” in favor of analysis in terms of power relations. Liberating the mad from their chains (as the early psychiatrist Philippe Pinel, one of Foucault’s principal examples in this course, famously did for the prisoners at Bicêtre),5 Foucault tells us, “is not exactly a scene of humanism” (Foucault even adds here, “and of course everyone knows this”) but rather “the transformation of a certain relationship of power that was one of violence . . . into a relationship of subjection that is a relationship of discipline” (CdF74ET, 29).
Foucault’s task in this course is to reassess the emergence of psychiatric practice, and his argument is that this specific historical transition is best understood in terms of, and as based upon, power relations: “The mechanism of psychiatry should be understood starting from the way in which disciplinary power works” (CdF74ET, 41). “So what is organized in the asylum,” he notes, “is actually a battlefield” (CdF74ET, 7). A few pages later, he defines “battle”: “What is established, therefore, is a battle, a relationship of force” (CdF74ET, 10). (These “relations of force,” we should recall, constitute the fundamental elements of Foucault’s understanding of power.) There are two important things to note in this characterization of psychiatric practice as a battle. First, Foucault here uses this insight to critique his own earlier analyses of madness and asylums in History of Madness (1961)—his emerging emphasis upon power relations grows out of a process of autocritique. (He also uses the occasion to criticize several mistaken frameworks for understanding the birth of psychiatry, frameworks that emphasize representations, institutions, and the family as organizing concepts. This parallels the way that he begins his theory of power in La volonté de savoir by first identifying mistaken, or partial, accounts of power.) Second, in this initial, tentative study, Foucault is only looking at a very specific case (psychiatric practice), and he speaks of the relations between doctor and patient as “battles,” that is, as specific engagements. Later, as this analytical approach demonstrates its incisiveness, he will generalize the model from specific cases to power relations and social relations as a whole. (This is, in large part, the work of Discipline and Punish and La volonté de savoir.) He will then speak of power not in terms of battles but rather of “war”—the larger, strategic field within which specific “battles,” institutions, individuals, and fields of experience are given significance. For example, in the Collège de France course of 1976, he notes that “if power is indeed the implementation and deployment of a relationship of force . . . shouldn’t we be analyzing it first and foremost in terms of conflict, confrontation, and war?” (CdF76ET, 15). This is the background for his famous suggestion that Clausewitz’s aphorism should be inverted, that politics be understood as the continuation of war.6
Foucault’s explicit analysis of these modalities of power is presented in the first four lectures of the 1973–1974 course. Power, he proposes, should be considered as the basis upon which discursive practices are formed. One of his guiding questions is: “How can this deployment of power [in psychiatric practice], these tactics and strategies of power give rise . . . to a game of truth?” (CdF74ET, 13). He goes further to suggest some general hypotheses: “what is essential in all power is that ultimately its point of application is always the body. All power is physical, and there is a direct connection between the body and political power” (CdF74ET, 14).
In the second lecture, Foucault identifies one incident in particular as a critical illustration of the transition from sovereign to disciplinary power: the madness of King George III, who was treated by Sir Francis Willis in 1788–1789. To treat the king, Willis had him held in an isolated palace, away from family and courtesans. All the trappings of royalty were removed. The king was told that “he is no longer sovereign, but that he must henceforth be obedient and submissive” (CdF74ET, 20). Two pages, both physically much stronger than the king, attended to his needs but also kept watch and reminded him of his subservience, restraining him when necessary. On occasion, the pages even had to clean the king forcibly, first stripping him and throwing him on the bed. The doctor, who directed the treatment, received detailed reports from the pages but was rarely present himself. Eventually, the doctor declared, this method “produced a sound cure without relapse” (CdF74ET, 20).7
Here in microcosm, Foucault notes, we see the shift from sovereign to disciplinary modes of power clearly enacted.
I think the confrontation between George III and his servants—which is more or less contemporaneous with the Panopticon—this confrontation of the king’s madness and medical discipline is one of the historical and symbolic points of the emergence and definitive installation of disciplinary power in society. (CdF74ET, 41)
Indeed, the techniques that Willis used in the treatment (isolation, subservience, constant observation, etc.) will be reproduced in asylum practice in the nineteenth century. (Bentham’s Panopticon Writings, which Foucault describes here as “the most general political and technical formula of disciplinary power” [CdF74ET, 41], were published in 1791.) The scene of George III’s treatment is a particularly striking image precisely because it is the sovereign himself who is brought under disciplinary control by the treatment. This image might also remind us of the opening scenes of Discipline and Punish, contrasting the execution of Damiens and the prison timetable. Foucault notes that the image of the pages’ forcible cleaning of the king, for example, represents an inversion of a scene of sovereign power, “the scaffold, the scene of public torture” (CdF74ET, 25).
We can quickly review Foucault’s analysis of the power of sovereignty, his initial characterization of disciplinary power, and his overview of the transition from the first modality to the second. Sovereign power has, on Foucault’s account here, three principal characteristics. First, the sovereign and subject are linked by two asymmetrical relationships. On the one hand the sovereign exacts a levy (tax, tribute, etc.) from subjects; on the other, the sovereign also makes certain expenditures for the subjects (gifts for marriages or births, expenditures for festivals or war, etc.). These are asymmetrical because, first, they are not equal or reciprocal acts (the levies usually exceed the expenditures), and second, they are all determined and executed by the sovereign’s agency. Also, these relationships achieve only a temporary, discontinuous control over the subjects: taxes must be paid each year, for example, but the vassal is otherwise largely free to do what he will.
Second, sovereign power takes its justification from a “founding precedence,” a past event (victory at war, birth or marriage, divine right, etc.) that grounds its authority. So, its authority “is given once and for all but, at the same time, is fragile and always liable to disuse or breakdown” (CdF74ET, 43). Sovereign authority is therefore maintained by occasional reenactment in ceremonies (bowing before the king, public execution of criminals, etc.), but these ceremonies often carry a threat of violence, “which is there behind the relationship of sovereignty, and which sustains it and ensures that it holds” (CdF74ET, 43).
The third characteristic that Foucault identifies about relations of sovereign power is that “they are not isotopic” (CdF74ET, 43). This means that “they do not constitute a unitary hierarchical table with subordinate and super ordinate elements . . . they are heterogeneous and have no common measure” (CdF74ET, 43). The multiple relationships within a sovereign modality (fiefholder/serf, priest/parishioner, king/vassal, etc.), while analogously structured, cannot be reduced or assimilated to each other. Sovereignty can also be exercised with respect to lands or roads as on humans. An important consequence of this heterotopy is that sovereign power tends not to individualize its subjects. On the other hand, sovereign power does individualize the sovereign himself: “there must be a single, individual point which is the summit of this set of heterotopic relationships” (CdF74ET, 45). One consequence of this acute individualization of the king is that “kingship” must survive the death of the king, thus producing a curious multiplication of the king’s body.8
Sovereign power does not entirely disappear once disciplinary power becomes the dominant modality of power. On the contrary, “forms of the power of sovereignty can still be found in contemporary society,” in the family (CdF74ET, 79). Describing the family as a “cell” of sovereignty within discipline, Foucault notes how it shares these characteristics of sovereign power: “maximum individualization on the side of the person who exercises power” (the father), establishment of the bond in a past event (marriage or birth), and heterotopic relationships (CdF74ET, 80).
This is, by Foucault’s own admission, only a very schematic characterization of sovereign power. Nevertheless, it is one of his most explicit and extended discussions of the power of sovereignty.
Discipline, Foucault notes, has a history—it is a specific modality of a general micropower that emerges within and then supersedes sovereign power. Foucault begins his analysis by contrasting it point by point to his description of sovereign power. Discipline does not employ an asymmetrical levy and expenditure but rather aims at “an exhaustive capture of the individual’s body, actions, time, and behavior” (CdF74ET, 46). Second, and hence, discipline does not function through occasional rituals and ceremonies; on the contrary it aims for “continuous control”: “one is perpetually under someone’s gaze, or, at any rate, in the situation of being observed” (CdF74ET, 47). Similarly, discipline does not look to a prior founding event for its justification but rather to the future, “to a final or optimum state” (CdF74ET, 47). Thus discipline is aimed at a constant increase in the forces available to be controlled and used. Third and finally, disciplinary power “is isotopic, or at least tends towards isotopy” (CdF74ET, 52). Foucault delineates what this “isotopy” means: every element has a defined place within the system, with sub- and superordinate elements; movement within the system (up or down) is carefully regulated; different sub-systems are ultimately compatible, able to be linked to each other in a larger, global system; and finally, “the principle of distribution and classification of all the elements necessarily entails something like a residue. That is to say, there is always something like ‘the unclassifiable’” (CdF74ET, 53). This last feature is very important: “This will be the stumbling block in the physics of disciplinary power. That is to say, all disciplinary power has its margins” (CdF74ET, 53).
A distinction is in order here. In a 1977 interview, Foucault will famously note that “power is ‘always already there,’ that one is never ‘outside’ it, that there are no ‘margins’ for those who break with the system to gambol in” (DE218.1, 141), apparently contradicting this 1973 claim. The point of the 1977 claim is that we can never find ourselves in a situation that is totally free from or immune to power relations—we are never “outside” power. (We could quite legitimately read this as a critique of certain utopian visions or of something like Jürgen Habermas’s “ideal speech situation.”) But, and this is the point of Foucault’s 1973 remark, while we can never be free of power as such, we can resist, escape, or be freed from any particular form or instantiation of power, including particular modes of disciplinary power. Thus, there is no contradiction. As Foucault immediately clarifies in the 1977 interview:
But this does not entail the necessity of accepting an inescapable form of domination or an absolute privilege on the side of the law. To say that one can never be “outside” power does not mean that one is trapped and condemned to defeat no matter what. (DE218.1, 141–142)
Thus, disciplinary power’s “margins”—as Foucault refers to them here in 1973—are an important locus of resistance to disciplinary power—and we saw in Chapter 1 that this resistance is a fundamental, even constitutive, feature of all kinds of power. And in the dialectic of hope and despair that motivates Foucault’s ethical vision, these margins are clearly an important source for hope, even as the all-encompassing ambition of a disciplinary system (a consequence of its isotopy) could seem to be a cause for despair.
In the fourth lecture, Foucault briefly summarizes the rise of discipline to become the dominant modality of social power. It began, too, in the margins of sovereign power—as islands or pockets within the general sovereign modality—forming principally within religious communities; these islands “functioned positively” and supported the general regime of sovereignty, but “they also played a critical role of opposition and innovation” (CdF74ET, 64). Beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, disciplinary power began to extend beyond religious communities and to “colonize” other areas of social life. They did this first within the context of religious orders—Foucault’s examples here are schools, overseas colonies, and the confinement of vagrants, prostitutes, and others. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then, disciplinary techniques become independent of religion and stand alone, as it were—disciplinary practices in armies, factories, mines, and workshops illustrate this transition. Finally, in the nineteenth century, disciplinary power makes its first appearance as a general form, in the practice of psychiatric power: “what appeared openly, as it were, in the naked state, in psychiatric practice at the start of the nineteenth century, was a power with the general form of what I have called discipline” (CdF74ET, 73).
Foucault illustrates this disciplinary modality of power with a discussion of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (which Foucault will take up in further detail in Discipline and Punish). He notes here that:
It seems to me that the panoptic mechanism provides the common thread to what could be called the power exercised on man as a force of work and knowledge of man as an individual. So that panopticism could, I think, appear and function within our society as a general form; we could speak equally of a disciplinary society or of a panoptic society. (CdF74ET, 79)
A number of important themes and examples for the next decade of Foucault’s thought are already present in this course. Consider one particularly interesting observation about the early disciplinization of schools:
We find the mould, the first model of the pedagogical colonization of youth, in this practice of the individual’s exercise on himself, this attempt to transform the individual, this search for a progressive development of the individual up to the point of salvation, in this ascetic work of the individual on himself for his own salvation. (CdF74ET, 67; my italics)
The phrase I have highlighted here—“this practice of the individual’s exercise on himself”—marks an example and a line of inquiry that Foucault will continue to pursue long after his theory of power has been more fully elaborated. In fact, this exercise upon oneself will become a case study, the history of which will take Foucault to ancient Greek and Roman practices (as well as the early Christian practices that he alludes to here) and will provide the historical background for the development of his ethics. Just as in this course he began with a reconsideration of—in fact, a gestalt shift in relation to—his earlier perspectives on the institution of the asylum, Foucault will bring a new perspective to bear on this phenomenon, too.
Other key insights can be seen in utero in this course, as well. He recognizes in psychiatric power a structure that he will soon apply more broadly: relationships of power are the basis for “the construction of institutional structures, the emergence of discourses of truth, and also the grafting or importation of a number of models” (CdF74ET, 26). Still, there remains a tension, an incomplete formation, in his analysis at this point. He claims that “what is essential in all power is that ultimately its point of application is always the body” (CdF74ET, 14). Notice the strong, absolutist tone: “essential,” “all power,” “ultimately,” “always.” This characterization is overdrawn, too crude. In the next years, Foucault will be able to articulate his understanding of power with much greater refinement. His understanding of the contrast between sovereign and disciplinary power, too, is not yet fully articulated:
There are two absolutely distinct types of power corresponding to two systems, two different ways of functioning: the macrophysics of sovereignty, the power that could be put to work in a post-feudal, pre-industrial government, and then the microphysics of disciplinary power . . . (CdF74ET, 27)
Foucault does not yet see that sovereign power, too, is constituted by micropowers; likewise, he doesn’t yet see that discipline has macropowers. (This latter insight will not come for several more years and will be the focus of Chapter 3.) Foucault’s survey at this point provides the general outline and structure for his developing argument about the historical redistribution of power, but in 1973–1974, it is clearly only rudimentarily articulated.
THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW MODALITY: FROM “SOVEREIGN” TO “DISCIPLINARY” POWER
Our brief review of Foucault’s 1973–1974 characterization of the transition from “sovereign” to “disciplinary” modalities of power nicely prepares us to see how he refines, expands, and develops that account in Discipline and Punish. To begin, let’s briefly look at how the book is organized as a whole. Discipline and Punish consists of four parts, each subdivided into chapters. The first part, “Torture,” consists of two chapters: the first provides a condensed overview of the argument of the book as a whole, as well as a theorization of power relations; the second chapter presents in more detail certain key features of the sovereign modality. Part 2, “Punishment,” looks at the emergence of unstable, transitional modes of power: the first of two chapters here emphasizes how these transitional forms emerge out of the sovereign form; the second emphasizes how the modern modality itself emerges from these transitional forms. Parts 1 and 2 together tell the story of redistribution that we will focus upon now. The third part, “Discipline,” constitutes an analysis of the central mechanisms or techniques of disciplinary power. We’ll look at Part 3 in more detail later in this chapter, when we more fully articulate Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power. The fourth and final part of the book, “Prison,” examines this paradigmatic example of disciplinary power and suggests the extent to which this new modality has shaped the landscape of society, painting a bleak portrait that seems to resemble Weber’s “iron cage.” Part 4 is quite interesting, first because it shows the limitations of Foucault’s theorization at this point (it works from the incorrect hypothesis that disciplinary power by itself constitutes the full range of power relations in society), but also because, given this incorrect hypothesis, it raises important issues for what I have termed Foucault’s larger Hobbesian hypothesis and for questions of hope and despair at the heart of his work. We will return to these themes later, as well.
Foucault begins in Chapter 2 of Part 1 with an articulation of the “logic,” or mechanisms, of sovereign power. A number of shifts—in perspective as well as in presuppositions—are recognizable in these new analyses. Whereas he had focused on psychiatric practice in his earlier analyses, here he focuses on penal practices as paradigmatic of the functioning of power. While he continues to recognize the importance of the body in the exercise of power relations, he no longer speaks in the reductive, universalizing language we noted earlier (“essentially,” “always,” etc.); this allows him to articulate a broader, theoretically more inclusive and useful analysis of power. And finally, Foucault begins to integrate micro- and macroanalyses as he describes the sovereign mode of power—sovereign power is no longer presented as merely a macro form, and Foucault turns to the microlevel in order to articulate its techniques. In the 1974 Collège de France course, Foucault had described the transition from sovereign to disciplinary power as “the transformation of a certain relationship of power that was one of violence . . . into a relationship of subjection that is a relationship of discipline” (CdF74ET, 29). In Discipline and Punish, that sovereign relationship of violence is made concrete and specific—Foucault refers to the importance of torture within the legal and penal manifestations of sovereign power. He will thus analyze the micropolitics of torture at multiple levels: as the form of punishment itself but also as a vehicle for the legal establishment of truth (thus as a mechanism on both sides of the legal operation, the establishment of guilt and the punishment of it), and, finally, as the linchpin that binds these legal practices to political practices that maintain and reinforce the authority of the sovereign.
At the beginning of his discussion of torture, Foucault acknowledges that it was not the only means of punishment in the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, it was a central technique, symbolically significant, and, as he notes, “every penalty of a certain seriousness had to involve an element of torture, of supplice” (1975ET, 33). And at its basis, “torture is a technique” (1975ET, 33). This technique is characterized by three criteria: torture produces pain, the production and the pain are regulated, and “torture forms part of a ritual” (1975ET, 34). The ritual thus constituted through torture is itself bifocal: on the one side, this ritual targets the criminal—“it must mark the victim,” the traces of the pain record the infamy of the crime upon the criminal’s body; on the other side, this ritual speaks to the entire community or kingdom of the sovereign’s power—“public torture and execution must be spectacular, it must be seen by all almost as its triumph” (1975ET, 34). Thus, “in the ‘excesses’ of torture, a whole economy of power [that is, sovereign power] is invested” (1975ET, 35). That economy of power is made evident in both foci, in other words, at both the micro- and the macro levels.
At the micro level, the level of the individual, torture is at the heart of both the punishment and the investigation. It applies itself directly to an individual’s body, one person at a time. That torture constitutes a significant part of punishment is amply illustrated by the case of Damiens, with which Foucault opened the book. Its role in investigation merits further elaboration. Confession constituted one of the strongest proofs of guilt, so “judicial torture,” the use of torture in order to produce a confession, played an important, if dangerous, part of an investigation. It bears certain elements of the épreuve, a test or trial to determine guilt, and constitutes a kind of duel between the examiner and the accused. Here we see the possibility of resistance even in such an extremely lopsided power relation: “the examining magistrate . . . had a stake in the game . . . ; for the rule was that if the accused ‘held out’ and did not confess, the magistrate was forced to drop the charges. The tortured man had won” (1975ET, 40–41). If an accused could bear the pain, the accusation would be reversed.
At the macro level, torture is the conduit that ties these penal practices of investigation and punishment to larger social and political forces and publicly illustrates the extent of the monarch’s power. First, Foucault notes, “the right to punish . . . is an aspect of the sovereign’s right to make war on his enemies: to punish belongs to ‘that absolute power of life and death . . .’” (1975ET, 48, quoting Muyart de Vouglans). This phrase is significant for the development of Foucault’s understanding of power relations: it is also the starting point for his introduction of the term “biopower,” in Part 5 of La volonté de savoir and in his 1976 Collège de France course. (We shall examine how he introduces and revises this term in Chapter 3.)
Second, punishment—and in particular, public execution—also performs a symbolic function, restoring and reenacting the monarch’s authority: It “has a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. . . . [It] belongs to a whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored” (1975ET, 48). The public display of a king’s power—in the case of Damiens, for example, to rend his body limb from limb, to inflict intense pain—serves to remind the populace that the monarch is “in control” and to undo any damage to his reputation that a crime may have caused. It served “to make everyone aware, through the body of the criminal, of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign. The public execution did not re-establish justice, it reactivated power” (1975ET, 49). In making “everyone” aware, this serves as a social restraint, an exercise of the king’s authority not only on the criminal, but on all those subject to his power who may witness or hear of the punishment. It thus constitutes a “political operation” (1975ET:53). In short, it was a vehicle for the maintenance of sovereignty. This political operation that reinscribes the sovereign’s power for all to see is a macro-level manifestation of sovereign power, realized through the very same mechanisms (torture and punishment) that inhabited its micro-level phenomena. Foucault summarizes the macro-level aspects of sovereign power in the final paragraph of this discussion:
It was the effect, in the rites of punishment, of a certain mechanism of power: of a power that not only did not hesitate to exert itself directly on bodies, but was exalted and strengthened by its visible manifestations . . . of a power which, in the absence of continual supervision, sought a renewal of its effect in the spectacle of its individual manifestations; of a power that was recharged in the ritual display of its reality as “superpower.” (1975ET, 57)
The “continual supervision” that Foucault mentions here is the form that disciplinary power will take. He is thus contrasting these two different modalities of power: in sovereign power, the masses are controlled not by being themselves under surveillance but rather by witnessing the exercise and effects of the monarch’s power. There is also an important similarity in these two modalities: in both cases, the macroeffects emerge from practices that are fundamentally micropractices. The monarch’s power is renewed for all his subjects through the visible application of it upon only one, the criminal. So we can perhaps understand why, at this point in his analysis, Foucault mistakenly understood all macro-level relations of power to be grounded in micro-level power relations.
Though it certainly was not the only, or even the most common, form of punishment, torture thus functioned as paradigmatic for the exercise of sovereign power. It thus functions for Foucault’s analyses as the microtechnique that undergirds the larger sovereign modality, and it is a key for our understanding of the operation of sovereign power. “If torture was so strongly embedded in legal practice, it was because it revealed truth and showed the operation of power” (1975ET, 55). It revealed the truth and showed the operation of power in particular investigations when an accused’s guilt or innocence hung in the balance, and it also revealed the truth and showed the operation of the king’s sovereignty itself. It thus allows us to see not only how sovereign power is distinct from disciplinary power but also (and just as importantly) how they share a common fundamental relational structure. One important example of this commonality is in the relationship between knowledge and power at the heart of any sort of power relations. Torture, whether as a means for determination of guilt or as the vehicle for punishment (and thus for a reinscription of the “truth” of the sovereign’s authority), is a technique in which relations of truth or knowledge and relations of power are intimately, indeed, essentially, interwoven and mutually productive. Foucault adds here: “We shall see later [in his discussion of disciplinary power in Part 3] that the truth-power relation remains at the heart of all mechanisms of punishment and that it is still to be found in contemporary penal practice—but in a quite different form and with very different effects” (1975ET, 55; my italics). This sentence is, in many ways, a key for our understanding of the entire book: A basic characteristic of all power relations—essential for our understanding of, but not unique to, the contemporary disciplinary modality—is this truth-power relation. So Foucault is underlining the claim that his analysis of power relations is a general analysis while noting that this does not elide the important differences in modalities’ forms and effects (and hence in the form that our ethical responses to these modalities ought to take).
The practice of torture at the heart of sovereign power also constituted an important site of resistance to that power, a point of resistance in both phases or aspects of the manifestation of power. We already saw how an accused man, by refusing to confess under torture, could overturn any other evidence that had been gathered and thereby escape conviction. At the macro level, too, resistance was possible in the exercise of sovereign power. Crowds did not always respond to these public manifestations of power with the appropriate awe and submission—sometimes the rituals would backfire: “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 . . . executions could easily lead to the beginnings of social disturbances” (1975ET, 61). The public would sometimes respond with sympathy or solidarity for the criminal, rejecting the authority that the execution was meant to demonstrate, and so the very mechanism for asserting monarchical authority could become “a political danger” (1975ET, 63). Indeed, “out of the ceremony of the public execution, out of that uncertain festival in which violence was instantaneously reversible, it was this solidarity much more than sovereign power that was likely to emerge with redoubled strength” (1975ET, 63; my italics). This mechanism at the heart of sovereign power, then, proved to be dangerous, unstable, and ultimately driven to a fundamental transformation—a transformation, in fact, of the very modalities by which power was exercised and a movement away from this sovereign form.
Recall that Foucault began this book by questioning the “received wisdom” that punishment was becoming more humane. Here we see a “political” explanation for the transformation of punitive techniques, an explanation in terms of the power relations at play: sovereign power was ultimately unstable and self-defeating. As Marx would put it, a new social order emerges out of the contradictions of the old order (cf., for example, Marx 1859, 4–5).9 Here Foucault gives us an alternative explanation for the transformation of penal practice away from torture and toward imprisonment—an explanation grounded in an analysis of power relations at the core of social interactions.
How, then, is sovereign power as the principal modality of the exercise of power transformed into—or, rather, displaced and superseded by—disciplinary power? Foucault traces this development in Part 2 of Discipline and Punish. What Foucault describes is a two-part transformation. The first is a movement from the modalities of monarchical or sovereign power to a transitional phase, in which they are displaced by what Foucault called “semio-techniques.” Then these “semio-techniques” are superseded by “a new politics of the body” (1975ET, 103), namely, disciplinary power. In the two chapters of Part 2, Foucault examines these processes through two lenses. Chapter 1, “Generalized Punishment,” articulates the perspective of the theorists and reformers; Chapter 2, “The Gentle Way in Punishment,” looks at the practice of punishment, tracing the rise of the prison as the principal instrument. Finally, he closes by merging these two lenses and showing how the practice and the theory were interdependent.
These historical transformations date from either side of the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. These events are framed by the two opening images of the book, the 1757 execution of Damiens and the 1838 prison timetable. Foucault has little to say in this book about the origins of sovereign power. At times, he seems to imply that “it was ever so”; at others, he seems to recognize that it, too, emerged from earlier modalities. He will have little of significance to say about the origins of sovereign power until later—first in the 1976 Collège de France course, where he will look at the development of monarchical forms, in particular in light of Henri de Boulainvilliers’ theories, then more extensively in his surveys of early Christian monastic practices in the first centuries C.E. But his dating of the transformation from sovereign to disciplinary power in his study of the prison correlates with his earlier analyses in the 1974 Collège de France course on psychiatric power. Indeed, his analysis of penal techniques gives us an even clearer picture of the practices and techniques of discipline, and of the process by which it came to be predominant, than did his earlier studies of psychiatry. Discipline and Punish argues that disciplinary power became the new dominant modality in the heart of the nineteenth century and continues as such in the present day.
Indeed, this is why understanding disciplinary power is a necessary prolegomena for a Foucauldian ethics. An ethics must address its actual circumstances, and the techniques of disciplinary power constitute a very important, if not the only, part of our contemporary social situation. Or as Foucault put it in the first chapter of the book, this history of the prison “as an instrument and vector of power . . . this whole technology of power over the body that the technology of the ‘soul’ . . . fails either to conceal or to compensate” is intended as “the history of the present” (1975ET, 30, 31). This “history of the present” is a project that takes its structure from the Kantian project of interrogating Enlightenment and its motivation from an implicitly ethical attitude.10
I noted a few moments ago that this transformation of power is framed by a public execution and a prison timetable—the opening images of the book. Foucault observed in tracing this shift in power’s modes that “it is understandable that the criticism of the public execution should have assumed such importance in penal reform: for it was the form in which, in the most visible way, the unlimited power of the sovereign and the ever-active illegality of the people came together” (1975ET, 88–89). An important feature of the transformation is a reversal of these two poles—the sovereign and the common people—as the focus of the apparatuses of power shifts from the former to the latter. The opening pages (73–82) of Part 2 give us a schematic of the underlying transformations.
The transformations in penal practice reflected, Foucault notes, “an effort to adjust the mechanisms of power that frame the everyday lives of individuals” (1975ET, 77) and manifested “as a tendency towards a more finely tuned justice, towards a closer penal mapping of the social body” (1975ET, 78). These efforts and tendencies were motivated not through a concern for humanitarian treatment but rather for efficiency and effectiveness. “The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power” (1975ET, 79). Thus “the paralysis of justice was due not so much to a weakening as to a badly regulated distribution of power, to its concentration at a certain number of points and to the conflicts and discontinuities that resulted” (1975ET, 79–80). Therefore, “penal reform was born at the point of junction between the struggle against the super-power of the sovereign and that against the infra-power of acquired and tolerated illegalities” (1975ET, 87). The manifestation of the sovereign’s power in displays such as a public execution often prompted, as we discussed earlier, resentments or rebellion, sympathies with the convict; it also left many others free to do as they pleased far from the authorities’ eyes. “This dysfunction of power was related to a central excess: what might be called the monarchical ‘super-power’” (1975ET, 80). The very characteristics that enabled a sovereign form of power to be exercised also served to undermine its authority, to lead to arbitrariness in the administration of punishment, as some crimes would go unpunished. “By placing on the side of the sovereign the additional burden of a spectacular, unlimited, personal, irregular and discontinuous power, the form of monarchical sovereignty left the subjects free to practice a constant illegality; this illegality was like the correlative of this type of power” (1975ET, 88). Many common people would find that their rights—especially property rights among a growing mercantile class—were left unprotected by the sovereign power, thus prompting a movement of reform:
The reform of criminal law must be read as a strategy for the rearrangement of the power to punish, according to modalities that render it more regular, more effective, more constant and more detailed in its effects; in short, which increase its effects while diminishing its economic costs . . . and its political cost (by dissociating it from the arbitrariness of monarchical power). The new juridical theory of penality corresponds in fact to a new “political economy” of the power to punish. (1975ET, 80–81)
This rearrangement, expressed in eighteenth-century theories of reform, created a new network of relations and marked “a new strategy for the exercise of the power to punish” (and note how Foucault has articulated this in terms of his own general analysis or theory of power—in terms of strategies and exercise of power), a strategy that aims “to make of the punishment and repression of illegalities a regular function, coextensive with society; not to punish less, but to punish better; to punish with an attenuated severity perhaps, but in order to punish with more universality and necessity; to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body” (1975ET, 82). The task of the penal theorists, reformers, and critics was “in short, to constitute a new economy and a new technology of the power to punish: these are no doubt the essential raisons d’être of penal reform in the eighteenth century” (1975ET, 89). Indeed, as Foucault tries to show us in this history, they were remarkably successful in this project.
To make punishment more effective, the reformers argued, it must be capable of touching every criminal act, so that everyone and every crime is assured of its “just deserts.” The techniques that were proposed to achieve such a correspondence between crime and punishment Foucault called “semio-techniques,” since they constituted a “technique of punitive signs” in which any crime would be accompanied, like a word with its meaning, by its punishment (1975ET, 94). Foucault spells out a number of the key principles underlying these reforms: “the rule of minimum quantity,” “the rule of sufficient ideality,” “the rule of lateral effects,” “the rule of perfect certainty,” “the rule of common truth,” and “the rule of optimal specification” (1975ET, 94–98). We needn’t dwell on the details of these rules but should note that they contribute to an increasing supervision of the general population, so that each and every crime could be appropriately punished—we are thus clearly on the road toward disciplinary power.
This discourse provided, in effect . . . a sort of general recipe for the exercise of power over men: the “mind” as a surface of inscription of power, with semiology as its tool; the submission of bodies through the control of ideas; the analysis of representations as a principle in a politics of bodies that was much more effective than the ritual anatomy of torture and execution. (1975ET, 102)
One important consequence of these techniques is an increase in individualization: “the codification of the offences-punishments system and the modulation of the criminal-punishment dyad go side by side, each requiring the other. Individualization appears as the ultimate aim of a precisely adapted code” (1975ET, 99).
These reforms, these “semio-techniques,” however, remained very theoretical—they still needed to be conjoined in penal practice with techniques that might actually achieve these targets. Prisons were not the reformers’ preferred method; nevertheless, detention quickly became the principal means of punishment. A number of penitentiary models emerged—in Belgium, in England, and in Philadelphia in the United States—that would facilitate the realization of these theoretical goals. In these models, over a period of roughly twenty years, the prison emerged as a central and, ultimately, virtually the only institution for punishment, in part because it allowed for a closer supervision of convicts but also because it would allow a very precise metering of punishment to crime: some acts would require days of detention, others months or years. Prisons serve to hide the power to punish behind walls (in contrast to the very public display in executions); it also served to reorient punishment upon convicts’ bodies—the very bodies whose liberties were restricted, who were trapped behind bars.
The scaffold, where the body of the tortured criminal had been exposed to the ritually manifested force of the sovereign, the punitive theatre in which the representation of punishment was permanently available to the social body, was replaced by a great enclosed, complex and hierarchized structure that was integrated into the very body of the state apparatus. A quite different materiality, a quite different physics of power, a quite different way of investing men’s bodies, had emerged. (1975ET, 115–116; my italics)
Note that in this evolution, the sovereign has been supplanted by the “state”—this will be important for Foucault’s later analyses; note also Foucault’s use of the guiding metaphor of physics for his analyses of different modes of power. This new “physics of power” also led (“both as a condition and as a consequence”) to the development of new kinds of knowledge about individuals (1975ET, 125). “A whole new corpus of individualizing knowledge was being organized that took as its field of reference . . . the potentiality of danger that lies hidden in an individual and which is manifested in his observed everyday conduct. The prison functions in this as an apparatus of knowledge” (1975ET, 126).
Foucault had sketched this analysis in the 1974 Collège de France course:
We could say, if you like, that there is a kind of juridico-disciplinary pincers of individualism. There is the juridical individual as he appears in these philosophical or juridical theories [which Foucault traced from Hobbes in the preceding paragraph]: the individual as abstract subject, defined by individual rights that no power can limit unless agreed by contract. And then, beneath this, alongside it, there was the development of a whole disciplinary technology that produced the individual as an historical reality, as an element of the productive forces, and as an element also of political forces. This individual is a subjected body held in a system of supervision and subjected to procedures of normalization. (CdF74ET, 57)
Here we see the two sides of this individualization—the juridical theory and the penal practice—explicitly paired. That pairing, as the more detailed analysis in this part of Discipline and Punish shows, is only in the process of being worked out at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is the product of two connected but ultimately independent historical developments.
In Part 2 of Discipline and Punish, Foucault has outlined three different “ways of organizing the power to punish”: monarchical law (or sovereign power), the reforming jurists’ vision, and “the project for a prison institution” (1975ET, 130, 131). The latter two, the reformers’ semiological project and the prison project, although they both challenged the sovereign modality, were far from identical—and a struggle between them marks the transitional period as sovereign power waned. Eventually, Foucault argues, the prison model would win out. Despite important divergences between the practice of prisons as penal institutions and the reformers’ initial visions (in particular, the prisons’ emphasis on bodies rather than ideas), their semio-techniques were to be taken up into a penitentiary model that became the dominant form for punishment in the nineteenth century. The integration of these two alternative mechanisms of punishment provided the key elements of disciplinary power and marked its emergence as the new paradigmatic form of social power (1975ET, 256).
DISCIPLINARY POWER
“Discipline is a political anatomy of detail” (1975ET, 139). Discipline is, in other words, power at the microscopic level, power at the level of discrete individuals. In a 1976 lecture that Foucault gave in Brazil, he defined discipline as “basically the mechanism of power through which we come to control the social body in its finest elements, through which we arrive at the very atoms of society, which is to say individuals” (DE297.1, 159). This inverts the monarchical model and focuses its attention, its apparatuses of knowledge and power, not on the majesty of the sovereign but on each one of the individuals that constitute “the masses.” “How to oversee someone, how to control their conduct, their behaviour, their aptitudes, how to intensify their performance, multiply their capacities, how to put them in the place where they will be most useful: this is what discipline is, in my sense” (DE297.1, 159). This shift in focus was the end toward which the reformers’ efforts were ultimately oriented. He elaborates in Discipline and Punish that the techniques of disciplinary power
were always meticulous, often minute, techniques, but they had their importance: because they defined a certain mode of detailed political investment of the body, a “new micro-physics” of power; and because, since the seventeenth century, they had constantly reached out to ever broader domains, as if they tended to cover the entire social body. (1975ET, 139)
This orientation to detail, to individuals’ corporal and mental habits, constitutes, Foucault notes, an application of power at the tactical level. It also marks a significant shift in focus away from the sovereign as the locus of power’s manifestation and to the individuals who constitute “the masses,” to each and every one of those who are trained in schools, who work in factories, who serve in the army, or who commit crimes and are punished in prisons. Thus, “disciplines mark the moment when the reversal of the political axis of individualization—as one might call it—takes place” (1975ET, 192).
“‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology” (1975ET, 215). Discipline is a micropower: it focuses on the infinitesimal. This does not mean that it focuses on individuals; rather, it focuses on specific behaviors, postures, attitudes, outlooks—the elements that constitute one’s individuality. (We’ve already discussed the analogy to physics; here we can see why Foucault also suggests the analogy to anatomy: like the subatomic particles that constitute a molecule, but also like organs and cells that constitute the body, these are the elements that make an individual a social being. Thus, “discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise” [1975ET, 170].) An individual’s character is—at least in part but perhaps in its entirety—thus constituted by these various and interwoven techniques and relations of power. In Part 3 of Discipline and Punish Foucault analyzes how these techniques work together to constitute individuals as “docile bodies.” We shall look at a few paradigmatic examples and then see how these tactical techniques of disciplinary micropower operate.
The soldier, the student, and the prisoner are each paradigmatic examples of disciplined individuals. They serve not only to illustrate how disciplinary practices condition individuals but also to underscore Foucault’s claim that prisons are not exceptional but typical of larger social norms and practices. These three examples thus support the claim that the Foucauldian analysis of power encompasses social practices in general, not just penal practices.
Indeed, Foucault opens his discussion of discipline in Part 2 with an analysis of the soldier. Whereas in the seventeenth century, the soldier was considered a natural type (one whose body and disposition, which communicated strength and courage, were well-suited for fighting), “by the late eighteenth century, the soldier has come to be something that can be made” (1975ET, 135). These two contrasting images of the soldier, corresponding to two different historical periods, parallels and maps onto the two juxtaposed images of Damiens and the prison timetable. The “making” of a soldier—turning anyone, of any body type or character, into a fighting machine—was effected through a series of training and conditioning: “posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning slowly into the automatism of habit” (1975ET, 135). This image of the soldier is especially important because Foucault will explore and test the hypothesis, implicit in a vision of a disciplinary society as well as Foucault’s own emphasis on power relations at the heart of social interactions, that politics be considered as a species of war. (We’ll take this up in more detail later.) Furthermore, the soldier is a paradigmatic example of discipline because the soldier is housed, indeed, formed, in military camps, which served as a kind of “ideal model” for a disciplinary milieu (1975ET, 171). Finally, the image of the soldier also illustrates the importance of the body as a locus of disciplinary techniques: rather than merely destroying it (as in the case of Damiens), it can be shaped, molded, and conditioned, thereby shaping and molding the “soul,” too.
The second paradigmatic figure, the student, illustrates how this “soul” or “mind” comes to be conditioned. Like the soldier, a student can be trained and conditioned to certain behaviors, through techniques of observation and pressure to conform. Schools—from elementary through higher levels—are reorganized in the nineteenth century to facilitate this kind of surveillance, and examinations constitute the culmination of many disciplinary techniques. Students’ desks are arranged in the classroom so that students can be ordered—alphabetically by name, by class rank, or by some other standard—and regular examinations measure each student’s progress in learning prescribed material. “The examination in the school was a constant exchanger of knowledge; it guaranteed the movement of knowledge from the teacher to the pupil, but it extracted from the pupil a knowledge destined and reserved for the teacher . . . the age of the ‘examining’ school marked the beginnings of a pedagogy that functions as a science” (1975ET, 187). The student thus embodies what Foucault here calls “the power of normalization” (though, as we shall see in Chapter 3, he will significantly revise his understanding of normalization in 1978): “the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to render the differences useful” (1975ET, 184).
The third paradigmatic image of discipline is the prisoner—which should come as no surprise, given that Discipline and Punish is a history of, as its subtitle indicates, “the birth of the prison.” Many of the various techniques and mechanisms of disciplinary power developed or were perfected in penal practice, and the prison and the prisoner represent a focal point where multiple trajectories and techniques would intersect. Indeed, as Foucault suggested at the end of Part 2, penal mechanisms and reforms were instrumental in the transition from sovereign to disciplinary modalities. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, which Foucault presents as an almost perfect architectural expression of disciplinary power, was most widely employed in the design of prisons (though Bentham had in fact intended the panopticon for much wider social application). As Foucault notes, “at the heart of all disciplinary systems functions a small penal mechanism” (1975ET, 177).
Given these three paradigmatic examples of disciplined individuals, what do they share in common? What are the characteristics of disciplinary power? In each of the three cases, a personage is shaped, certain behaviors are encouraged or suppressed, in part by placing the individual in a carefully regimented situation—the military camp, the school classroom, or the prison cell—and in part by conditioning the individual’s behavior so that certain responses become habitual or automatic. For this conditioning to be successful, a detailed knowledge of the individual becomes necessary, so that progress can be measured and the desired results obtained.
Foucault details three principal characteristics of disciplinary power: hierarchized observation, normalizing judgment, and the integration of these two elements in examinations. These three aspects of disciplinary power produce what Foucault calls “docile bodies,” habituated to act or think in certain ways. Power and knowledge are thus interwoven into a tight fabric and become mutually productive, and individuals’ own subjectivity is, at least in part, a product of the kinds of power relations that have shaped them. Thus has emerged, Foucault suggests in Discipline and Punish, a new “micro-physics” of power that has supplanted sovereign power as the dominant mode of social power, a modality whose dominance continues to the present day. This microphysics is composed of “a multiplicity of minor procedures,” “humble modalities,” and “simple instruments” (1975ET, 138, 170). The three techniques—observation, normalization, and examination—are just such simple instruments, whose combination nevertheless can produce a network of profound scope and power.
The first element is hierarchical observation: “the exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation” (1975ET, 170). Through “multiple and intersecting observations” (1975ET, 171), individuals’ behaviors can be carefully monitored and thus controlled. To be most effective, these observations must be both complete and discrete. Both of these goals, completeness and discreteness, can be advanced through architecture, designing spaces to facilitate complete observation while masking the observers, and through social practices and hierarchies; ultimately, architecture, practices, and hierarchies can be integrated into a unified institution. Supervision and surveillance are key elements of this observation—in, for example, factories, workshops, and classrooms—and can be linked to other “productive” tasks, such as the training of students or soldiers and the exploitation of workers’ labor. In the classroom, for example, “surveillance . . . is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not as an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that is inherent to it and which increases its efficiency” (1975ET, 176). These techniques, simultaneously increasing discipline and productivity, function throughout the economy and every other aspect of society as a whole. And these observational techniques conform to Foucault’s general analysis of power relations and how power is exercised: “The power in the hierarchized surveillance of the disciplines is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery” (1975ET, 177).
But observation in and of itself is insufficient; it provides a grid and a set of data about those who are observed, but it does not specify how the behaviors of the observed are to be altered. A second element of disciplinary power is required—normative judgment.
The workshop, the school, the army were subject to a whole micro-penality of time (latenesses, absences, interruptions of task), of activity (inattention, negligence, lack of zeal), of behavior (impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle chatter, insolence), of the body (“incorrect” attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness), of sexuality (impurity, indecency). (1975ET, 178)
These normative judgments, these “micro-penalities,” function through “a double system: gratification-punishment” and thus make possible
a number of operations characteristic of disciplinary penality. First, the definition of behaviour and performance on the basis of the two opposed values of good and evil . . . we have a distribution between a positive pole and a negative pole; all behavior falls in the field between good and bad marks, good and bad points. Moreover, it is possible to quantify this field and work out an arithmetical economy based on it. (1975ET, 180)
We can first note that this normative judgment is thereby linked to and builds upon the hierarchical observation, which provides the data to determine what sort of behavior the student, worker, or soldier has demonstrated. Furthermore, Foucault notes here, it links these micropractices with larger macropatterns, “an arithmetical economy.” (This unidirectional linkage is important because it contributes to the “bleak” outlook of Part 4 and is the central “problem” that Foucault will correct in his later analyses of biopower—all of which will be discussed below.) When normative judgment and hierarchical observation are thus united,
the disciplinary apparatuses hierarchized the “good” and the “bad” subjects in relation to one another. Through this micro-economy of a perpetual penality operates a differentiation that is not one of acts, but of individuals themselves, of their nature, their potentialities, their level or their value. (1975ET, 181)
Hierarchical observation conjoined with a set of normative judgments serves to distribute and differentiate the “individuals themselves.” “The perpetual penality that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes” (1975ET, 183). This normalization functions in two directions: it pressures each individual to be just like everyone else—to be more like the norm—and it brings greater specificity and attention to each individual, by locating that individual within the grids of observation and evaluation. “The power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another” (1975ET, 184).
These two disciplinary techniques—observation and normalizing judgment—are united in the third paradigmatic technique: the examination, which “will have the triple function of [a] showing whether the subject has reached the level required, [b] of guaranteeing that each subject undergoes the same apprenticeship and [c] of differentiating the abilities of each individual” (1975ET, 158; my brackets). Thus,
the examination opened up two correlative possibilities: firstly, the constitution of the individual as a describable, analyzable object . . . in order to maintain him in his individual features, in his particular evolution, in his own aptitudes or abilities, under the gaze of a permanent corpus of knowledge; and secondly, the constitution of a comparative system that made possible the measurement of overall phenomena, the description of groups, the characterization of collective facts, the calculation of the gaps between individuals, their distribution in a given “population.” (1975ET, 190)11
Foucault’s point is that disciplinary power works to create and constitute “individuals”: “The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called ‘discipline’” (1975ET, 194).
An important point to observe here is the all-encompassing character of disciplinary power, methods, and institutions. Foucault has consistently described discipline as constituting a “perpetual penality”—one that is constant and uninterrupted. This consistency and completeness suggest two corollary observations. First, it suggests an inescapability, a network closed in both space and time in which we all are trapped, defined by the techniques and methods of disciplinary power. A second corollary is that “all resistance is futile.” Indeed, in Part 4 of Discipline and Punish, Foucault is effectively developing and testing both of these corollary hypotheses—within the enclosed space of a prison (and, by implication within the other institutions of society),12 can discipline constitute a “complete and austere” “carceral society”? However, these corollary implications are in fact mistaken, as should be clear if we recall the characteristics that Foucault has identified of power in general. First, power is not merely repressive but profoundly productive. To be sure, disciplinary power as described here “produces” normalized individuals. But the system is not (and could not be) perfect—it also produces other, nonconforming, abnormal individuals. Resistance is a constituent element without which power relations cannot obtain. And so, as Foucault puts it in “Power and Strategies,” a 1977 interview,
It seems to me that power is “always already there,” that one is never “outside” it, that there are no “margins” for those who break with the system to gambol in. But this does not entail the necessity of accepting an inescapable form of domination or an absolute privilege on the side of the law. To say that one can never be “outside” power does not mean that one is trapped and condemned to defeat no matter what. (DE218.1, 141–142)
Though we cannot step “outside” of power, though disciplinary techniques may impose a “perpetual penality,” there is still (and of necessity) space for resistance. Not every individual will be successfully normalized. Resistance to any particular application of power—in various forms and guises—will continue to emerge, all along the continuum.13
We must also ask another very important question, however: where do these norms come from? How do the values by which individuals are to be classified and evaluated come to be adopted and justified? These questions will ultimately push Foucault toward a fuller articulation of what constitutes ethics and will challenge the apparent completeness of this disciplinary analysis. His answer at this point seems to be reductive, explaining these norms in terms of the power relations that obtain in and frame a given situation. So the schoolmasters, factory owners, or military leaders will determine what norms, what ideals, those who are observed and judged will be conditioned to adopt. Indeed, Foucault will recognize the importance of these questions about the origins of norms in his 1978 Collège de France course (as he also realizes that all macro forms of power may not be reducible to the disciplinary micro forms):
Disciplinary normalization consists first of all in positing a model, an optimal model that is constructed in terms of a certain result, and the operation of disciplinary normalization consists in trying to get people, movements, and actions to conform to this model, the normal being precisely that which can conform to this norm, and the abnormal that which is incapable of conforming to the norm. In other words, it is not the normal and the abnormal that is fundamental and primary in disciplinary normalization, it is the norm. That is, there is an originally prescriptive character of the norm and the determination and the identification of the normal and the abnormal becomes possible in relation to this posited norm. Due to the primacy of the norm in relation to the normal, to the fact that disciplinary normalization goes from the norm to the final division between the normal and the abnormal, I would rather say that what is involved in disciplinary techniques is a normation rather than normalization. Forgive the barbaric word, I use it to underline the primary and fundamental character of the norm. (CdF78ET, 57)
Disciplinary power, as a technique, presupposes a given norm, in terms of which its subjects are sorted into normal and abnormal categories. The giving and specification of those norms is prior to the exercise of discipline in the cultivating of those norms—in effect, the norms are determined by the contexts, the institutions and their aims, in which they are applied. Thus, in a school, the “normal” student is one who obeys teachers’ directives and learns the assigned material; in a factory, “normal” workers are docile and perform their tasks efficiently. But we can (and should) still ask, how did these norms come to be adopted? Indeed, this question is an absolutely essential element of Foucault’s conception of the “critical attitude,” itself a central aspect of Foucault’s ethics: “‘How not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of these principles, in view of such objectives, and by the means of such methods, not like that, not for that, not by them?’” (OT-78-01.1, 384).
A DISCIPLINARY INSTITUTION
Discipline and Punish closes with a striking image, what Foucault terms—in a clear allusion to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s contemporaneous work on Soviet labor camps and prisons, or gulags14—the “carceral archipelago” (1975ET, 286). This carceral archipelago constitutes a paradigmatic symbol of what Foucault calls “the disciplinary society,” “the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body” (1975ET, 209). A different example of disciplinary power at work in the construction of a nineteenth-century carceral society would perhaps be useful here. Kenneth M. Stampp, in his 1956 study of American slavery, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, shows how disciplinary techniques were deployed in the management of slaves.15 The institution and practice of slavery in the thirty years prior to the American Civil War illustrate how these disciplinary techniques could underpin an entire society and economy. “Let us say that discipline is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a ‘political’ force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force” (1975ET, 221). Slavery was the system in which people of African descent were deprived of political and civil rights while their useful labor force was simultaneously exploited to the fullest extent possible: slavery marked slaves’ bodies, “their social status, their legal status, and their private lives—but they felt it most acutely in their lack of control over their own time and labor” (Stampp 1956, 86).
Just as discipline marked a new vision of the soldier, no longer someone “born” with natural endowments but “something that can be made” (Part 3 of Discipline and Punish opens with this image [1975ET, 135]), so too
A wise master did not take seriously the belief that Negroes were natural-born slaves.16 He knew better. He knew that Negroes freshly imported from Africa had to be broken into bondage; that each succeeding generation had to be carefully trained. . . . In most cases there was no end to the need for control. (Stampp 1956, 144)
This disciplinary control was effected through slave codes enacted into state laws, which “rigidly controlled the slave’s movements and his communications with others,” often specifying the forms of observation and surveillance to be employed (“under the supervision of white men, and not left to the sole direction of slave foremen”) and what sorts of behaviors were to be banned—reading and writing, preaching, traveling off the plantation without a pass, and various behaviors that could constitute “insolence”—including “‘a look, the point of a finger, a refusal or neglect to step out of the way when a white person is seen to approach . . . [which] if tolerated would destroy that subordination, upon which our social system rests’” (208).
Stampp identifies five steps in the process of disciplining slaves. First of all “was to establish and maintain strict discipline” (144). This was effected through what Foucault has called the “disciplinary techniques,” through careful observation and individualization of all the slaves on a plantation, with incentives and punishments tailored to each individual’s situation. Second, a sense of personal inferiority, particularly with respect to whites, had to be implanted in slaves’ self-consciousnesses to discourage impudence or indocility (145). Thus, slaves are simultaneously situated on a hierarchy, and their behaviors and aspirations—their subjectivities—are normalized. “The third step in the training of slaves was to awe them with a sense of their master’s enormous power” (146). This third step more closely resembles the sovereign forms of power, illustrating how these different modalities can be adapted and integrated within a predominantly disciplinary framework. Fourth “was to persuade the bondsmen to take an interest in the master’s enterprise and to accept his standards of good conduct” (147). Slaves must, in other words, internalize the enslavers’ norms of behavior and values, just like prisoners in a panoptic institution. Finally, slaves must be given to under stand “their helplessness, to create in them ‘a habit of perfect dependence’ upon their masters” (147).
To achieve the “perfect” submission of his slaves, to utilize their labor profitably, each master devised a set of rules by which he governed. These were the laws of his private domain—and the techniques which enabled him to minimize the bondsmen’s resistance to servitude. The techniques of control were many and varied, some subtle, some ingenious, some brutal. (143)
Frederick Douglass, in his first autobiography, recounts an incident in which these disciplinary techniques effectively turned him into a docile subject:
I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there [to a new farm with a slave-breaking overseer], but a few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute! (Douglass 1845, 49)
As Stampp documents and Douglass recounts, the disciplinary techniques of slavery often employed physically brutal, even cruel methods. “Physical cruelty . . . was always a possible consequence of the master’s power to punish. . . . [But t]he great majority preferred to use as little violence as possible” (Stampp 1956, 178). The use of cruelty as one of the enslavers’ tactics thus constituted part of a “political technology of the body” (1975ET, 26). Indeed, this reflects the disciplinary character of the power exercised over slaves—the point of this kind of power is to find just the right amount or just the right kind of force to compel or induce a particular behavior. This is reflected in what Foucault terms the “military dream of society” embodied in discipline:
Its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal social contract, but to permanent coercions, not to fundamental rights, but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will but to automatic docility. (1975ET, 169)
Discipline’s ultimate goal would be the elimination—or rather, the taming, harnessing—of any resistance: “It must master all the forces that are formed from the very constitution of an organized multiplicity; it must neutralize the effects of counter-power that spring from them and which form a resistance to the power that wishes to dominate it” (1975ET, 219). Of course, discipline is not always successful; it is never entirely free from resistance. Anyone familiar with Frederick Douglass’s story knows that the moment recounted above was the nadir of his experience: his love of freedom and his will to resist were later rekindled; he successfully escaped from slavery to a free state and became one of the most powerful voices of the abolitionist movement.17 Indeed, as Stampp documents, slaves employed a number of techniques—individual and collective, subtle and overt—to resist enslavers’ power. Escape—whether a genuine attempt to leave the South entirely, or to rejoin family from whom one was removed, or simply for a respite from the disciplinary regime of the enslaver and overseers—was an important and often (at least somewhat) successful resistance technique: “Sometimes these escapes resembled strikes, and master or overseer had to negotiate terms upon which the slaves would agree to return” (Stampp 1956, 113). At other times, enslavers would choose to reunite a slave with his or her family rather than be troubled by repeated attempts to escape or return to family. A perpetual problem in the antebellum South was the ongoing, continuous threat of slaves’ resistance, which the enslavers were never able to eliminate: “The masses of slaves, for whom freedom could have been little more than an idle dream, found countless ways to exasperate their masters—and thus saw to it that bondage as a labor system had its limitations as well as its advantages” (97).
In its most extreme form, slaves’ resistance manifested in armed insurrections and rebellions. But, as Stampp observed, “in truth, no slave uprising ever had a chance of ultimate success, even though it might have cost the master class heavy casualties” (140).
This impulse to resist and to seek freedom will be an important touchstone for Foucault’s ethics. But as Stampp noted, slaves “longed for liberty and resisted bondage as much as any people could have done in their circumstances, but their longing and their resistance were not enough even to render the institution unprofitable to most masters. The masters had power and . . . they developed an elaborate technique of slave control” (140). American slaves’ experience in the antebellum South thus raises a question that Foucault’s “Hobbesian hypothesis” must confront: is it possible for all resistance—some spontaneous, subversive, undisciplined, or unnormalized behavior—to be eliminated or controlled in a complete and carceral institution or society? This is the question behind Part 4 of Discipline and Punish.
“ALL HOPE ABANDON YE WHO ENTER HERE”
Foucault concludes Part 3 (his presentation of the emergence of disciplinary power) with this summation:
On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social “quarantine,” to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of “panopticism.” Not because the disciplinary modality of power has replaced all the others; but because it has infiltrated the others, sometimes undermining them, but serving as an intermediary between them, linking them together, extending them and above all making it possible to bring the effects of power to the most minute and distant elements. It assures an infinitesimal distribution of the power relations. (1975ET, 216)
This suggests that disciplinary power has in fact “infiltrated” the whole of society, creating a closed web of interwoven micropowers. It may seem that Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power serves principally to demonstrate, as Tocqueville phrased it a little over a century earlier, that “formerly, tyranny used the clumsy weapons of chains and hangmen; nowadays even despotism, though it seemed to have nothing more to learn, has been perfected by civilization” (Tocqueville 1835, 255). The bleak implication—the “Hobbesian hypothesis,” as I characterized it in the Introduction—is that the exercise and flow of power in and of itself is sufficient to explain the functioning of modern society writ large and the individuals that constitute it. Indeed, Part 4 develops this implication further, examining how the prison has become a “complete and austere” carceral institution—mirroring, perhaps, and indisputably connected with the larger society—that is reinforced and perpetuated even by the criticisms meant to undermine it.
Prisons, which emerge as the virtually exclusive form of criminal punishment, Foucault argues, attempt to constitute “complete and austere” institutions that would regulate every aspect of prisoners’ lives within a web of disciplinary observation. In the process of creating this space of punishment, the “object” of criminal justice shifts, from an act, “the crime,” to an actor, a personage, “the delinquent.” Thus the criminal is constituted as a knowable individual whose history and past are linked to one’s current behavior and outlook. In this way, the scope of prisons’ impact goes beyond their walls to infiltrate society as a whole. This disciplinary personage, the “delinquent,” organizes the whole of criminal justice, from trial courts to police investigation, to parole and reform institutions. “What [the penitentiary apparatus] must apply itself to is not, of course the offence, nor even exactly the offender, but a rather different object . . . the delinquent. . . . It is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him” (1975ET, 251). “Now the ‘delinquent’ makes it possible to join the two lines and to constitute . . . an individual in whom the offender of the law and the object of a scientific discourse are superimposed—or almost—one upon the other” (1975ET, 256).18
The delinquent is but one example of a larger phenomenon—the constitution of individuals through these power relations’ effects upon their bodies and habits. As Foucault will later define it, this “is a form of power that makes individuals subjects” in two senses, subject to others’ control and bound to one’s own identity, both of which “suggest a form of power that subjugates and makes subject to” (DE306.4, 331). This has implications for the whole of society: “The history of the punitive power would then be a genealogy or an element in a genealogy of the modern ‘soul’ . . . the present correlative of a certain technology of power over the body” (1975ET, 29). Indeed, “on this reality-reference, various concepts have been constructed and domains of analysis carved out: psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, etc.; on it have been built scientific techniques and discourses, and the moral claims of humanism” (1975ET, 29–30).
The disciplinary society as realized in the architecture and operation of prisons constitutes a “meticulous observation of detail . . . for the control and use of men . . . [composed of] a whole set of techniques, a whole corpus of methods and knowledge, descriptions, plans, and data. And from such trifles, no doubt, the man of modern humanism was born” (1975ET, 141). (We cannot help but hear echoes of the closing pages of The Order of Things, where Foucault imagines this “man” to be “an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end” [1966ET, 387].)
Nevertheless, prisons—at the center of the disciplinary grid that constructs our individuality—seem consistently to fail at the task they were ostensibly created to accomplish, namely, reducing crime. “For the prison, in its reality and visible effects, was denounced at once as the great failure of penal justice” (1975ET, 264). Imprisonment leads most directly to recidivism, to an increase in crime. But even this “failure” is an element in its overall success. Indeed, Foucault argues—and here we can see the extent to which prisons have infiltrated other institutions—the only apparent response to our “solution” for reformers’ critiques of prisons is “more prisons.” So he asks,
Is not the supposed failure part of the functioning of the prison? Is it not to be included among those effects of power that discipline and the auxiliary technology of imprisonment have induced in the apparatus of justice, and in society in general, and which may be grouped together under the name of “carceral system”? (1975ET, 271)
And the disciplinary techniques that can be perfected within the prison, too, can be seen more and more widely distributed throughout society—in education, in factories, in the military, in the ways we perceive others in daily life—which parallel the various institutions connected in their functioning to the prison:
It is this complex ensemble that constitutes the “carceral system,” not only the institution of the prison, with its walls, its staff, its regulations and its violence. The carceral system combines in a single figure discourses and architectures, coercive regulations and scientific propositions, real social effects and invincible utopias, programmes for correcting delinquents and mechanisms that reinforce delinquency. (1975ET, 271)
Thus, it seems, society is progressively becoming more and more imprisoning—a Weberian “iron cage” within whose inescapably tentacular grasp we have no other choice but to despair. “Discipline makes possible the operation of a relational power that sustains itself by its own mechanism and which, for the spectacle of public events, substitutes the uninterrupted play of calculated gazes” (1975ET, 177). Two elements here suggest this bleak, despairing outlook: First, that this power “sustains itself by its own mechanisms,” and second, that it places us within an “uninterrupted play” of gazes. A power that is uninterrupted and self-sustaining seems to offer little opening for resistance. Nancy Fraser succinctly articulates this reading:
Michel Foucault was the great theorist of the fordist mode of social regulation. Writing at the zenith of the postwar Keynesian welfare state, he taught us to see the dark underside of even its most vaunted achievements. Viewed through his eyes, social services became disciplinary apparatuses, humanist reforms became panoptical surveillance regimes, public health measures became deployments of biopower, and therapeutic practices became vehicles of subjection. From his perspective, the components of the postwar social state constituted a carceral archipelago of disciplinary domination, all the more insidious because self-imposed. (Fraser 2003, 160)
If Fraser’s view is correct, then Foucault’s analysis of power seems to leave us little alternative but despair. Remember, however, that we should interpret this hypothesis as a thought experiment: this conclusion is precisely what is being tested—whether disciplinary power can entirely explain social organization. Foucault here is testing the limits of this hypothesis by trying to explain the individual entirely as a correlate of power relations, as not only socially constituted but constructed exclusively through the effects of power, and thus entirely predictable. If such an explanation were to succeed, if it provided a complete and total—an uninterrupted and self-sustaining—analysis, then it would offer a very bleak portrait, one echoing that of, for example, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. But this thought experiment leads us to the contrary conclusion. For even if individuals (and, he will later add, states)19 are “correlates” of power relations, it does not follow that they are entirely and exclusively the product of power relations. For correlates can be productive as well as derivative; correlatives can have other sources from which they are constituted besides power relations. Foucault’s thought experiment functions as a sort of modus tollens (if P then Q, and not Q, therefore, not P, where P is a social analysis exclusively in terms of power relations and Q is a closed, inescapable carceral society and a subject constituted entirely through power relations). Foucault’s discussion of the prison in the concluding chapters of Discipline and Punish is testing the hypothesis that all power reduces to discipline and that it encompasses all social interactions. But such a reductive analysis is too tight, and it fails—the closed system won’t hold. Discipline—or, more generally, power—cannot be the sole analytical framework for an understanding of social relations. This insight is similar, to draw another analogy to physics, to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which states that no mathematical system can be fully expressed in a closed set of axioms. As Foucault explained in a 1984 interview, “I had to reject a priori theories of the subject in order to analyze the relationships that may exist between the constitution of the subject or different forms of the subject and games of truth, practices of power, and so on” (DE356.4, 290). This experimental Hobbesian reduction was methodologically necessary in order to discover how the theoretical landscape could be opened up without naïvely presupposing some other, more attractive view of the subject and society. That the social system cannot be reduced to a “disciplinary society” thus leaves open at least a thread of hope—a path for investigation—to counter its apparently bleak portrait.
This experiment indicates new directions for Foucault’s analysis—directions that he will take in the Collège de France courses immediately following a sabbatical year: First, Foucault realized that discipline is inadequate and incomplete as a description of power—not all modern power is disciplinary—and so he will articulate a new focus on macropowers as irreducible to, independent of, micropowers. Second, building upon the first new direction, this reframing of power will make possible a more definitive escape from the Hobbesian hypothesis—a way to posit ethical precepts without a naïve or false sense of foundations, because an analysis exclusively in terms of power is inadequate. As Foucault will (revisionistically) assert in a 1978 interview with Duccio Trombadori, “I’ve never argued that a power mechanism suffices to characterize a society” (DE281.2, 293).
Though many have understood Foucault’s message in Discipline and Punish to echo Dante’s inscription over the gates of Hell, “All hope abandon ye who enter here” (where “here” would mean our modern society), the real message of Discipline and Punish is closer in spirit to Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation in Democracy in America: “I do think that . . . if we despair of imparting to all citizens those ideas and sentiments which first prepare them for freedom and then allow them to enjoy it, there will be no independence left for anybody . . . but only an equal tyranny for all” (Tocqueville 1835, 315). In other words, Foucault’s analysis of power relations is an important one of “the ideas and sentiments which first prepare [citizens] for freedom.” And as Sandra Bartky observes about the coming to be of a feminist consciousness,
This picture is not as bleak as it appears; indeed, its “bleakness” would be seen in proper perspective had I described what things were like before. Coming to have a feminist consciousness is the experience of coming to see things about oneself and one’s society that were heretofore hidden. This experience, the acquiring of a “raised” consciousness, in spite of its disturbing aspects, is an immeasurable advance over that false consciousness which it replaces. (Bartky 1990, 21)
Discipline and Punish’s analysis of the micropowers at work in the new punitive regime of discipline is better than the preceding misunderstanding of these power dynamics. Indeed, a reduction of all power to discipline is not possible, but the recognition of discipline as one of the modes of power marks an important contribution:
I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way that is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and one that implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists in taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. (DE306.4, 329)
Foucault’s articulation of disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish does demonstrate the central importance—even ontological necessity—of resistance within and for power relations. And it is on the basis of that understanding of power relations (as, for Bartky, on the basis of a feminist consciousness) that a new agenda for action—an ethics—can be articulated.
But first, we must follow Foucault’s intellectual trajectory and see how this Foucauldian analysis of power will be opened up and supplemented. Foucault closes Discipline and Punish with the note that it “must serve as a historical background to various studies of the power of normalization and the formation of knowledge in society” (1975ET, 308). Indeed, Foucault will use this work as the background, the frame, for his subsequent work on “the power of normalization,” which he terms biopower (CdF78ET, 9)—and which will in turn contextualize, reassess, and qualify or “soften” the understanding of power presented here. Nancy Fraser, after painting her bleak portrait of the Foucauldian outlook, asserts that we need “to creatively transform Foucauldian categories to account for new modes of ‘governmentality’ in the era of neo-liberal globalization” (Fraser 2003, 161). (Her own sketched proposal of a form this might take is what she calls “flexibilization,” “a process of self-constitution that correlates with, arises from, and resembles a mode of social organization” [169].) Foucault accomplished just such a “creative transformation” of his account of power in the years immediately following Discipline and Punish—and this transformation was largely completed in his 1978 course at the Collège de France. He will recognize a new facet or aspect of power relations, biopower, which marks a critical new element and rearticulation of his own theory of power and will thus complete the overall analysis of power within which Foucault’s ethics emerges.