On Foucault
Michel Foucault erupted onto the intellectual scene at the beginning of the Sixties with his Folie et déraison, an unconventional but still reasonably recognizable history of the Western experience of madness. He has become, in the years since, a kind of impossible object: a nonhistorical historian, an anti-humanistic human scientist, and a counter-structuralist structuralist. If we add to this his tense, impacted prose style, which manages to seem imperious and doubt-ridden at the same time, and a method which supports sweeping summary with eccentric detail, the resemblance of his work to an Escher drawing—stairs rising to platforms lower than themselves, doors leading outside that bring you back inside—is complete.
“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same,” he writes in the introduction to his one purely methodological work, L’Archéologie du savoir, itself mostly a collection of denials of positions he does not hold but considers himself likely to be accused of by the “mimes and tumblers” of intellectual life. “Leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order,” he states. “At least spare us their morality when we write.” Whoever he is, or whatever, he is what any French savant seems to need to be these days: elusive.
But (and in this he differs from a good deal that has been going on in Paris since structuralism arrived) the difficulty of his work arises not from self-regard and the desire to found an intellectual cult only the instructed can join, but from a powerful and genuine originality of thought. As he intends nothing less than a Great Instauration for the human sciences, it is not surprising that he is more than occasionally obscure, or that when he does manage to be clear he is no less disconcerting.
Originally published as “Stir Crazy,” New York Review of Books 24, nos. 21 and 22 (26 January 1978). The book under discussion therein is as follows: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan.
Foucault’s leading ideas are not in themselves all that complex; just unusually difficult to render plausible. The most prominent of them, and the one for which he has drawn the most attention, is that history is not a continuity, one thing growing organically out of the last and into the next, like the chapters in some nineteenth-century romance. It is a series of radical discontinuities, ruptures, breaks, each of which involves a wholly novel mutation in the possibilities for human observation, thought, and action. Foucault first referred to the “precarious splinters of eternity” these mutations produce as épistémès (i.e., “epistemological fields”), later on as historical a prioris, and most recently as discursive formations. Under whatever label, they are to be dealt with “archaeologically.” That is, they are first to be characterized according to the rules determining what kinds of perception and experience can exist within their limits, what can be seen, said, performed, and thought in the conceptual domain they define. That done, they are then to be put into a pure series, a genealogical sequence in which what is shown is not how one has given causal rise to another but how one has formed itself in the space left vacant by another, ultimately covering it over with new realities. The past is not prologue; like the discrete strata of Schliemann’s site, it is a mere succession of buried presents.
In such terms, Foucault sees European history cross-cut by three great fault lines separating what lies on the far side of them from what lies on the near by “pure distances” that are traversed by mere chronology—the blank, external seriality of events. The first of these fissures lies somewhere around the middle of the seventeenth century, and it divides a magical age from a classifying age. In the first period, that of Paracelsus and Campanella, things are related to one another by intrinsic sympathies and antipathies—wine and walnuts, death and roses—that God has stamped onto their faces for all to read. In the second, that of Linnaeus and Condillac, things are related to one another through the use of types and taxonomies—species and genera, speech parts and grammars—directly given in the presented arrangement of nature.
The second fissure occurs toward the beginning of the nineteenth century. It separates the tabular, classifying, Linnaean conception of how reality is composed—with everything in its row and column—from the wholly different one of Marx and Comte in which things are related to one another narratively—seen as foreshadowings and outcomes, causes and consequences. “History,” rather than “Similitude” or “Order,” becomes the master category of experience, understanding, and representation. And the third fissure, which Nietzsche, Freud, and Mallarmé presage, and which we are right now trying to find some way to live through, marks the beginning of the end of this temporalized consciousness and its replacement by some new, strange form of existence not yet completely in view. Foucault alludes to it, often obliquely, in such phrases as “the scattering of the profound stream of time,” “the absolute dispersion of man,” “the return of the masks.”
To this conception of change by radical jumps from one frame to another, Foucault then adds another unusual notion, which, though it can be traced from the beginning of his work, has grown more and more prominent as he has proceeded. This is that all these épistémès, “discourse fields,” or whatever, are not just shapes of thought but structures of power.
Whether they be images of madness, theories of pedagogy, definitions of sexuality, medical routines, military disciplines, literary styles, research methods, views of language, or procedures for the organization of work, the conceptual systems within which an age is immured define its pattern of dominations. The objects of oppression are not generalized entities like “the proletariat,” but madmen, criminals, conscripts, children, machine tenders, women, hospital patients, and the ignorant. And it is not a faceless “ruling class,” but psychiatrists, lawyers, officers, parents, managers, men, physicians, and cultivés—those the historical a priori empowers to set the limits of other people’s lives—who are their oppressors. “Confinement,” in all its particular, discontinuous forms, has emerged as the master obsession of Foucault’s work. For all his radicalism (which is vehement and absolute), his history is neither of class struggle nor of modes of production, but of constraint: intellectual, medical, moral, political, aesthetic, and epistemological constraint; and now he writes at length on judicial restraint. In Surveiller et punir, translated here as Discipline (it should have been Observe) and Punish, he has found his appointed subject and has written his most forceful book.
Foucault begins his effort to unearth the genealogy of the prison, to expose the strata hidden beneath its present expression, at perhaps the most dramatic of his fault lines. This was the shift, between about 1760 and 1840, from the âge de ressemblance, in which torture and execution of criminals were popular spectacles, to the âge classique, in which the lives of criminals were regulated according to timetables in methodized institutions.1 As his image for the first he takes Robert Damiens, a religious crank, who, in 1757, slightly wounded Louis XV with a knife. For his pains, his flesh was torn from him with hot pincers, his wounds salved with molten lead and burning sulphur, his body quartered by horses and some helpful butchers to detach the joints. What was then left of him (some who were there thought him still alive) was reduced to ashes and thrown to the winds, all in the public square before the Church of Paris.
As his image for the âge classique Foucault takes a set of rules drawn up for a “house for young prisoners” in Paris in 1838, rules in their own way hardly more humane than the punishments imposed in Damiens’s time. The Code of 1838 organized the inmates’ day into a minute by minute sequence of work, prayer, meals, education, recreation, and sleep, marked by drum rolls, ordered in squads, and enveloped in silence:
Less than a century separates [the execution and the 1838 code]. It was a time when … the entire economy of punishment was redistributed. It was a time of great “scandals” for traditional justice, a time of innumerable projects for reform. It saw a new theory of law and crime, a new moral or political justification of the right to punish; old laws were abolished, old customs died out. “Modern” codes were planned or drawn up: Russia, 1769; Prussia, 1780; Pennsylvania and Tuscany, 1786; Austria, 1788; France, 1791, Year IV, 1808, 1810. It was a new age for penal justice.
Foucault then traces the many aspects of this great transformation. First, there is the disappearance of punishment as a public spectacle. In essence, this represents the decline of the body as the text upon which punishment was inscribed—on which the sentence was, as with poor Damiens, quite literally written. Public torture—supplice in French, which means something like liturgical torment, ceremonial pain—”made the guilty man the herald of his own condemnation.” The power of the sovereign, and thus his rights, was made legible with racks and sulphur. As all crimes partook of some degree of lèse majesté, were a regicide in miniature, this “theater of hell” was one of the constitutive features of monarchic despotism; and when both the monarchs and public torture left the historical stage they left it together. Instead of the vengeance of princes came the protection of society; instead of the excitements of the scaff old, the quiet of the prison; for writing on the body, molding it to rule.
Most of Foucault’s book is devoted to analyzing the systematization, generalization, and spiritualization of punishment, and its incarnation in the gray mass of the penitentiary—“the intelligence of discipline in stone.” The social forces driving the changes—the heightened concern, in a Europe become urban, bourgeois, and parliamentary, with property crimes as against political ones; the labor discipline problems of nascent industrialism—get only passing attention. Foucault is not much interested in determinants and causes. He concentrates on the organization of what he calls a new economy of punitive power, an economy that had for its aim “not to punish less, but to punish better.”
For all their apparent humanitarianism—to Foucault so much incidental music—the great penal reformers of the latter half of the eighteenth century, Beccaria, Marat, Bentham, etc., were basically concerned, he writes, to “insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body.” After the Revolution, “Society” replaced “Sovereignty” as the legitimacy that criminality challenged (and parricide replaced regicide as the ultimate crime of which all other crimes were little versions). The social body more than acquiesced in this shift, in which the main agency of penetration became the formal code. The power to punish was divided into articles and printed up in sectioned texts, and thus made less arbitrary, better defined, and more coherent.
Punishment was also made more pervasive (“no crime must escape the gaze of those whose task it is to dispense justice”); more empirical (“the verification of the crime must obey the general criteria for all truth”); more practical (“for punishment to produce the effect [this from Beccaria] it is enough that the harm that it cause exceed the good that the criminal has derived from the crime”); and more specific (“all offenses [and penalties] must be defined, … classified, and collected into species from which none of them escape, … a Linnaeus of crimes and punishments”). And, most portentous of all, punishment was made didactic:
In physical torture, the example was based on terror: physical fear, collective horror, images that must be engraved on the memories of the spectators, like the brand on the cheek or the shoulder of the condemned man. The example is now based on the lesson, the discourse, … the representation of public morality. It is no longer the terrifying restoration of sovereignty that will sustain the ceremony of punishment, but the reactivation of the code, the collective reinforcements of the idea of crime and the idea of punishment. In the penalty, rather than seeing the presence of the sovereign, one will read the laws themselves. The laws associate a particular crime with a particular punishment. As soon as the crime is committed, the punishment will follow at once, enacting the discourse of the law and showing that the code, which links ideas, also links realities.… This legible lesson, this ritual recoding, must be repeated as often as possible; the punishments must be a school rather than a festival; an ever-open book rather than a ceremony.
Two questions, the central ones of his study, are then posed by Foucault. First, if we accept this shift to a tabular, taxonomical view of crime as an array of specific varieties of resistance to the natural order of society—crime as a catalogue of social perversities—how did the prison become virtually the sole mode of punitive response? And, second, since the prison did in fact become established as the punishing institution, what became of it after the onset of the historicizing épistémè during the last century? What has the modern persuasion, the one we are more or less still living with, or struggling against, made of the institution of prison?
The first question is all the more intriguing because it was not the intention of the classical reformers that the prison should become the nearly universal penalty for major crimes. On the contrary, they wanted the multiplicity of off enses to be matched by a multiplicity of punishments. Exile or transportation, corvée, branding, house or city arrest, reparation, fines, conscription, loss of various sorts of civil rights, various sorts of public shaming—“a whole new arsenal of picturesque punishments”—were, along with the more familiar torture and execution, to be part of a table of penalties connected to a table of crimes in an exact and visible logic of natural justice.
But in a few short decades, imprisonment (which had not before been an important mode of long-term punishment and was associated, like the Bastille, with tyranny and kings) came to replace them all to the point that one exasperated reformer could complain to the Constituent Assembly: “If I have betrayed my country, I go to prison; if I kill my father, I go to prison—every imaginable offense is punished in the same uniform way. One might as well see a physician who has the same remedy for all ills.”
Foucault traces this unforeseen consequence of the new dispensation to its didactic force: the very existence of the legible lessons in the ever-open school book of the new codes imposed the need for a schoolroom (and a schoolmaster) to assure that they got properly learned. Minds were to be altered, and the prison became the machine for altering them. Jails, once dungeons where miscreants were kept while awaiting trial, occasionally to rot while doing so, now became reformatories where souls were reshaped and citizens made. The Walnut Street Prison, set up by (who else?) Philadelphia Quakers in 1790, was one of the first, most thoroughgoing, and most influential examples of what soon became the dominant model—“the house of correction,” in which a combination of disciplined productive labor, a strictly organized, cot-to-messhall-and-back existence, and unceasing exposure to moral instruction was intended to “effect a transformation of the individual as a whole—of his body and of his habits by the daily work he is forced to perform, of his mind and his will by the spiritual attentions that are paid to him.”
The notion that the scheduled life engenders virtue goes back at least as far as the monastery, but, Foucault argues, it was reconstructed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, not only by the more avant-garde varieties of Protestantism, but by the rise of well-drilled armies, rationalized workshops, regularized schools, and routinized hospitals—“complete and austere institutions” all. Behind them all lay the attempt to render men orderly by keeping them in order, an effort that implied constant, detailed, aggressive surveillance, a tireless gaze alert to the least irregularities. The inspection, the examination, the questionnaire, the register, the report, the dossier become the chief tools of domination because they are the chief means by which those who maintain discipline keep watch on those who, supposedly anyway, benefit from it.
So far as the prison is concerned, these tendencies—the tabular view of order, the reforming view of punishment, and the view of power as surveillance—come together in that most chilling of eighteenth-century imaginings: Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.
This “cruel, ingenious cage,” in which all the occupants, each alone in his cell, invisible to the others, can be ceaselessly observed from a central tower—the prisoner totally seen without ever seeing, his guardian totally seeing without ever being seen—is not, Foucault says, a dream building. It is “the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form, … a figure of political technology.” Tough it was designed to reform prisoners, it could serve as well “to treat patients, to instruct school-children, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work.” Worse yet, whereas the classical age never quite managed actually to build it, the modern age, with a different conception of what criminality is and expanded resources for the scrutiny of human behavior, has very nearly done so.
If the Linnaean épistémè established the prisoner as a person to know, the succeeding épistémè—the sort of outlook we associate with Comte—provided the means for knowing him: “the human sciences.” The criminal becomes the delinquent—not some hapless rogue who has merely committed a classifiable offense, but a historical person whose entire pattern of life has taken an aberrant course. His biography, his psychology, his sociology, even his physique or his head shape, all become relevant to knowing him, that is, to determining the causes of his behavior; and so toward the second part of the nineteenth century the age of the case history and of criminology was born. It was not the crime itself that was central now, or even, in the proper sense, the criminal; it is the system of forces that has conspired over time to produce a “dangerous person.” Delinquency does not, like robbery, point to something irregular an individual has done; but, like perversion, to something unacceptable he has become.
The prison, once a place to await the torturer’s attention, then a drill-ground for moral calisthenics, now becomes an institute for scientifically imposing normality on damaged lives. Or rather, the prison has this function added on to it, for here, as elsewhere in “archaeology,” the later strata do not destroy the earlier ones but overlay them. The final edifice—what Foucault, to distinguish it from the dungeon and the reformatory, calls the “carceral”—is rather like one of those cathedrals that have been built up around the frame of a temple, itself erected on the stones of a sacrifice site.
“Criminology,” that hybrid of psychiatry, sociology, medicine, pedagogy, political science, and social work, comes to form the field of juridical discourse, introducing yet another “new economy” of the punitive power—one essentially technocratic, a business of experts. The conception of law as command or statute is replaced by the conception of it as a norm. Judges, “as if ashamed to pass sentence,” are possessed of “a furious desire … to judge, assess, diagnose, recognize the normal and abnormal and claim the honour of curing, … [to] pass ‘therapeutic’ sentences and recommend ‘rehabilitating’ periods of imprisonment.” And, as this “immense appetite for medicine” and for “the chatter of criminology” spreads to everyone from the parole officer to the turnkey, the scholarly and the punitive meanings of the word “discipline” become ominously fused:
[We see] the growth of the disciplinary networks [of the human sciences], the multiplication of their exchanges with the penal apparatus, the ever more important powers that are given to them, the ever more massive transference to them of judicial functions; now, as medicine, psychology, education, public assistance, “social work” assume an ever greater share of the powers of supervision and assessment, the penal apparatus will be able, in turn, to become medicalized, psychologized, educationalized.
But that’s just the half of it. Once created, the carceral mode of punishment becomes “the greatest support” in spreading this normalizing power to the entire social body, creating what Foucault, excitement mounting, calls “the carceral archipelago.” Here Foucault borrows an image he has not really earned and makes an equation that will not in fact balance out. “The judges of normality are present everywhere,” he cries. “We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social worker’ judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based.”
In this new sort of “panoptic society”—one with many highly trained observers in many well-equipped towers keeping watch on an enormous variety of supposed delinquents—“the formation of… insidious leniencies, unavowable petty cruelties, small acts of cunning, calculated methods, techniques, ‘sciences’… permit the fabrication of the disciplinary individual.” We are far away now from “the country of tortures, dotted with wheels, gibbets, gallows, and pillories.” And far away, too, from the chaste disciplines of Walnut Street. We are—Foucault’s tone tightens to bitter rage—in “the carceral city” where “the prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons.”
Perhaps. But the steady rise in rhetorical shrillness as one approaches the present raises the question of how securely Foucault, and the reader, can sustain an “archaeological” attitude toward an épistémè not yet buried, especially when he is so passionately determined to bury it. Politically committed to a continuous guerrilla war against the various islands of the carceral archipelago (“We must engage it on all fronts—the university, the prison, the domain of psychiatry—one after another, since our forces are not strong enough for a simultaneous attack”),2 Foucault does not deal with the jails—schools, factories, asylums, barracks, hospitals—among which he lives in the same way as he deals with those he must reconstruct. The jails he lives among he wants to level, one by one, which may or may not be a good idea. But the making of ruins is a rather different sort of enterprise, involving rather different sorts of emotions and producing rather different sorts of perceptions, from excavating them:
We strike and knock against the most solid obstacles [the “all fronts” passage continues]; the system cracks at another point; we persist. It seems that we’re winning, but then the institution is rebuilt; we must start again. It is a long struggle; it is repetitive and seemingly incoherent. But the system it opposes, as well as the power exercised through the system, supplies its unity.
It is worrisome that such writing today reads less like café talk than it did even six short years ago. And one begins to suspect that we are faced with a not altogether simple, descriptive tracing of the genealogy of the prison through the various kinds of discourse that have characterized it, from Robert Damiens to Son of Sam. After so much uncovering of archaeological sites and fixing of sequences, we seemed to be faced with a kind of Whig history in reverse—a history, in spite of itself, of The Rise of Unfreedom.
Obsessed with the constraining mechanisms of modern life, Foucault has lifted them into a horrific figure for the whole of it—the panoptic society, the carceral city—and then sought to see what lies beneath such a fine monstrosity. Seen that way, the past appears as an ascending spiral of discontinuous, “humanized,” but nevertheless more and more malefic power concentrations—“micro-fascisms,” as someone has called them—eventuating, at length, in the horror we know. This horror is the state to which the past—which, according to Foucault, is not supposed to be able to produce anything but itself, and that in a sort of random walk—can now be seen to have somehow led. Like some constitutional liberal spying out the first, faint signs of modern liberty in the German forest or the Roman Law, Foucault finds the first, not all that faint, signs of modern constraint in the spectacle tortures of the Old Regime and the didactic disciplines of the âge classique.
What this demonstrates, of course, is that he has not escaped so completely from the vulnerable épistémè of historicism as he might like or imagine. The emerging contemporary épistémè that he characterizes as the “new metaphysical ellipse”—“a theatre of mime with multiple, fugitive, instantaneous scenes in which blind gestures signal to each other”—is not yet wholly here.3 But perhaps like half-revolutions, half-escapes are enough, and will suffice. It is just such a half-escape, whatever he intended, that makes Discipline and Punish so fascinating. For although it puts the past at a great distance, showing it as caught in its own discourse, it also appropriates the past for its own current arguments. As with so many prisoners, of so many kinds, it is not getting out but wanting out that generates in Foucault a strange and special vision.