Change in the Regime of Power

[Jacques-Louis David's rendering of Napoleon's coronation]

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault traces the genealogy of social control, specifically the ways in which the State has disciplined (made manageable, kept in line, made to obey) its populace (usually by punishing)—whether in confronting criminality, disease, (preparation for) war, (economic) production, education, . . .—activities in general that required participation of or implicated the collective. Foucault traces the changing system of power from the time of the king (sovereign/monarchical power) (1650-1789) to the assumption of the social contract (social reformist / juridical power) (1780-1820) to the beginnings (rooted in the (Neo)classical age) of modern social control (disciplinary power) (1820-1968). (See “Social Power Chart” by John Protevi.) The last is still especially pertinent to our time.

An important thing to note from the previous regimes is the reason for their suspension, that is to say, the motivation for the transformation. Reviewing official records, witness accounts, and crime literature—all of which Foucault vividly recounts—Foucault underlines the cruelty and terror of sovereign punishment—whose means, after all, was public (and judicial) torture (see part I). This contrasts with the methods instituted at the time of the social contract. The so-called social/juridical reformers made punishment proportionate to the crime (at one stroke getting rid of monarchical excess and justifying punishment), paving the way for what Foucault refers to as a “gentle way in punishment” (92).

In interpreting the change, Foucault is skeptical of the intent of the social reformers. He does not buy into the view that, as the social contract came to be (accepted as its basis), the State grew merciful toward and could suddenly mount concern for the accused—who, after all, comprised part of its citizenry. Far from any humanitarian concern, Foucault argues that the motivation for the systemic change was in fact purely strategic. Sovereign punishment (in its excess) had simply exposed itself— made itself vulnerable—to challenges to its authority (as when witnesses started to express sympathy for the tortured accused and indignation at the administrative torturers), which, in turn (naturally!), led social reformers—to maintain the State’s hold on society—to devise a new—better, more subtle yet more effective—economy of power.

In Foucault’s words:

[The change] was an effort to adjust the mechanisms of power that frame the everyday lives of individuals; an adaptation and a refinement of the machinery that assumes responsibility for and places under surveillance their everyday behavior, their identity, their activity, their apparently unimportant gestures; another policy for that multiplicity of bodies and forces that constitutes a population. What was emerging no doubt was not so much a new respect for the humanity of the condemned—torture was still frequent in the execution of even minor criminals—as a tendency towards a more finely tuned justice, towards a closer penal mapping of the social body. Following a circular process, the threshold of the passage to violent crimes rises, intolerance to economic offenses increases, controls become more thorough, penal interventions at once more premature and more numerous” (78) (my emphases).

The implication, then, is that every such systemic transformation is motivated by such—or similar—strategic intent. Hence the skepticism.

Foucault locates/identifies such systemic shifts (in the regime of power (to exercise social control)) whenever an “entire economy of punishment [which, after all, betrays disciplining] is redistributed” (7). On the way from sovereign power to social reformist power, the said changes/redistributions are: torture as a public spectacle disappears as well as “the body as the major target of penal repression”; punishment becomes hidden as “it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness”; following from this is the fact that what discourages crime becomes no longer “the horrifying spectacle of public punishment” but “the certainty of being punished” (as such, “justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice” and in fact “the execution itself is like an additional shame that justice is ashamed to impose on the condemned man”); judgment (the passing of the sentence) becomes portrayed not as “the desire to punish [. . . but as being] intended to correct, reclaim, ‘cure’” (7, 8, 9, 10).

What all this implies is that there has been a shift in focus, a change in the object (and objective) of punishment. Foucault articulates this dramatically when he says that the target is no longer the body; it becomes the soul (16). This has important consequences (reinforcing the conclusion that social control, rather than more humanitarian, has only become more effective). As Foucault explains, “Certainly the ‘crimes’ and ‘offenses’ on which judgment is passed are juridical objects defined by the code, but judgment is also passed on the passions, instincts, anomalies, infirmities, maladjustments, effects of environment or heredity; acts of aggression are punished, so also, through them, is aggressivity; rape, but at the same time perversions; murders, but also drives and desires” (17). In other words, judgment is passed no longer merely on the crime (the offense, the offender, and the law) but on a whole set of other factors: (possible) explanations (for the action), (psychological) motivations, (inherited) traits, (aggravating) circumstances (ticks), etc.—in other words, the (nature of the) individual him/herself—as Foucault appropriately terms it, the soul (18).

Foucault elaborates:

The question is no longer simply: ‘Has the act been established and is it punishable?’ But also: ‘What is this act, what is this act of violence or this murder? To what level or to what field of reality does it belong? Is it a phantasy, a psychotic reaction, a delusional episode, a perverse action?’ It is no longer simply: ‘Who committed it?’ But: ‘How can we assign the causal process that produced it? Where did it originate in the author himself? Instinct, unconscious, environment, heredity?’ It is no longer simply: ‘What law punishes this offense?’ But: ‘What would be the most appropriate measures to take? How do we see the future development of the offender? What would be the best way of rehabilitating him?’ A whole set of assessing, diagnostic, prognostic, normative judgments concerning the criminal have become lodged in the framework of penal judgment. Another truth has penetrated the truth that was required by the legal machinery; a truth which, entangled with the first, has turned the assertion of guilt into a strange scientifico-juridical complex” (19).

Hence, “the sentence that condemns or acquits is not simply a judgment of guilt, a legal decision that lays down punishment; it bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization” (20-1) (my emphasis). In this, the “soul” plays an important role. Hence the (lasting) potency of the concept. Hence, as Foucault argues:

It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished—and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains, and corrects. [. . . ] This is the historical reality of this soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint. This real, non-corporal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power. 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. But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technical intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body” (29-30) (my emphases).

The (concept/notion of the) soul, in other words, as the (ontological entity created (by the exercise of (social reformist) power) for the) body’s normalization.

With the emergence of disciplinary power (following social reformist power), focus is turned back to the body—this time both “as object and target of power,” both in “the anatomico-metaphysical register”—in which its functioning is explained (where it is treated as an intelligible body)—and “the technico-political register”—in which it (is made to) submit(s) so as to be used (i.e. it is treated as a useful body) (136). What joins this “analyzable body to the manipulable body” is (the goal of) docility, i.e. the making of the body docile, that is to say, a body “that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” by virtue of it being analyzed/known (136).

Unlike previous regimes (that treated the body), for disciplinary power, “it [is] a question not of treating the body, en masse, ‘wholesale,’ as if it were an indissociable unity, but of working it ‘retail,’ individually; of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of the mechanism itself—movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity: an infinitesimal power over the active body” (137) (my emphasis). In other words, not only does the individual (body) for the first time emerge as the prime locus of analysis (for knowledge), the controls exercised upon it (by (the exercise of) power) gain intensity as they focus on infinitesimal details at the same time as the control (i.e. the exercise of power) “implies an uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of the activity rather than its result and [. . .] is exercised according to a codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement” (137). These “meticulous, often minute, techniques” paying equally meticulous attention at equally minute details Foucault calls “a ‘new micro-physics’ of power,” “acts of cunning, not so much of the greater reason that works even in its sleep and gives meaning to the insignificant, as of the attentive ‘malevolence’ that turns everything into account” (139) (my emphasis).

The object of control, moreover, is “no longer the signifying elements of behavior or the language of the body [i.e. the realm of representations and symbols], but the economy, efficiency of movements, their internal organization [i.e. the very operations (of the body) themselves]” (137). Foucault calls the methods “which made possible the meticulous control of the[se] operations [. . .], which assured the constant subjection of its forces and imposed upon them a relation of docility-utility” disciplines (which he distinguishes from slavery, service, vassalage, and monastic disciplines) (137). (Hence the term disciplinary power for the regime.)

Again, the target/goal is the docile body, a project (an “art,” a “political economy,” a “mechanics of power”) “directed not only at the growth of [the body’s] skills, nor at the intensification of its subjection, but at [the connection of both, i.e.] the formation of a relation that in the mechanism makes [the body] more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely” (137-8). In other words, the injunction to “Learn something, be able—but obey! (to learn more, obey more . . .).” This involves “defin[ing] how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do as one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines” (138). Not only the result, as it were, but the very process. Not only what, but how. “Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies” (138).

There is an irony central to this operation (of discipline). Foucault explains:

Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an ‘aptitude,’ a ‘capacity,’ which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection. [. . .] Disciplinary coercion [thus] establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination” (138) (my emphases).

As with the transformation from sovereign to social reformist power, the humanitarian intent and merits of the turn to disciplinary power are debatable. What Foucault makes clear, however, is (as with the turn to social reformist power), as it is transformed, power is only increased—both in its efficiency and effectiveness (i.e. its economy). That is to say, power is only exercised on a greater and more intense scale (wider scope, better means) at the same time as it is able to create more and greater results (greater success).

Now, Foucault does not necessarily correlate a specific value judgment with this description. Power—and, in the form that it takes in this context, disciplinary power (as it is exercised in specific disciplines)—(as Protevi stressed again and again in his Spring 2006 lectures at LSU) is not necessarily good or bad. The judgment of that would depend on how power is appropriated, that is to say, for what and how exactly power is used/exercised. This may just be a misunderstanding central to some criticisms of Zizek, as when he praises the “fascist” discipline of the 300.