One of the greatest achievements of critical theory is its claim that Enlightenment progress is a myth. Michel Foucault's work introduced a wide range of historical concepts that deepened these earlier concerns. His use of the 'reversal' is of particular interest for historians and theorists, regardless of their political orientations. "Reversal' flips commonly held beliefs on their head by examining their opposite. Foucault's genealogy of torture in Discipline and Punish (1975) is a sharp demonstration of this. Its mode of presentation is genealogy - the history of a subject through discourses of thought. While Foucault's 'reversal' is similar to Marxist dialectics, his analysis of micro-power in torture reveals aspects of bourgeois ideology that traditional Marxist theory failed to illuminate. In this post, I will dissect the main points and concepts of the first section in Discipline and Punishment and its relation to the creation of consent for bourgeois torture.
Michel Foucault's primary aim in Discipline and Punishment was to consider the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle starting at the end of the 19th century. Foucault questions the 'humanization' of this process, arguing that it had more to do with consolidating ruling class power. As he states, "the body as the major target of penal repression disappeared." Punishment became hidden. The focus of the public spectacle shifted towards the trial and the sentence of the criminal. In this way, Foucault uncovers the repressive side of Enlightenment ideals such as Rousseau's social contract and Locke's theory of natural rights.
Punishment became centered on suspending rights rather than inflicting physical pain. Foucault points out that "The body now serves as an instrument of intermediary; if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as a property." In essence, punishment became an "economy of suspended rights." Additionally, the public image of state repression was obscured with the introduction doctors, wardens, physiologists, officials, and guards who mediated state repression under the guise of public service. The division of labor in the production of punishment was presented as progress and advancement of technical expertise. Its reversal disguised state terror. The means of punishment became the restriction of life, rather than physically marking the body with torture.
Before the spectacle began to disappear, the French Revolution presented the guillotine as a revolutionary model for punishment. The guillotine was an abstraction of the law. Rather than inflict pain or marks on the body, it simply deprived the right of the convicted to exist. Its simplicity and reduction of technical expertise was radical. Covering the head of the condemned was introduced so that punishment no longer focused on the individual, but the crime itself. Foucault contends that the 18th century initiated the "age of sobriety in punishment." Punishment shifted from the body to the soul.
Even more, punishment became a judgment of the individual's past, present, and future:
Certainly the 'crimes' and 'offenses' on which judgment are 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.The crime was not the focus of judgment; the soul was. The more maddened the criminal, the less guilty the judgement. The sentencing went as far as to anticipate the criminal's future acts of transgression. While every case now carried with it the possibility of insanity, judges did more than judge. They provided an assessment of one's normality.
The effect of these changes in bourgeois legal thought was the proliferation of an entire state machinery of repression. Experts abounded. Decision making came less and less from the all mighty sovereign - i.e. Kings, parliaments. Decision making power was delegated to middle class professionals in order to absolve the ruling class of its cruelty and barbarity, which was inflicted on the lower classes to maintain order. This is precisely the moment where Michel Foucault introduces his concept of 'knowledge-power':
We should admit rather that power produces knowledge... knowledge and power directly apply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.While Foucault's assertion that power is itself derived from knowledge is debatable, what this does suggest is that knowledge systems are the most effective way to justify dominance. Complex terms and knowledge obfuscate our understanding of the role of repressive institutions in society. Police jargon comes immediately to mind as an example. 'Broken windows' policing, 'stop and frisk,' and 'community stakeholder' reduce the ability of citizens, especially poor people of color, to challenge poor policing practices, as their real purpose is unclear. The Manichean world view that strangles the institution of policing makes dialogue nearly impossible. Many cops share no common language with ordinary citizens who view social problems through lens other than good versus evil. While the 'soul' is not itself ideological, perceptions of one's soul are.
The spectacle of the scaffold is Foucault's second main concern in this section. As he indicates, every penalty had to involve a degree of torture in the 18th century. "Torture is a technique; it is not a mere expression of lawless rage," but it must produce a degree of pain to be torture.
Death-torture was one form of punishment in the 18th century. it involved bringing endless suffering upon the victim that produced the feeling of an endless number of deaths. The contradiction of death-torture is that while it seeks to cleanse the body of the crime, it ends up leaving permanent marks. The visual of the tortured body reveals the truth of the crime. Until the 18th century, judges were permitted to use lies, false promises, and ambiguous words to entrap the accused. This was to establish and demonstrate their sovereign power over the masses. The establishment of ruling class power was made clearer by the fact that the testimony of witnesses carried different weights depending on the stature of the witness. Class domination was naked in the 18th century. There was no immediate need to conceal it.
Still, there was a spiritual element to punishment. If the condemned survived torture, he or she lived. For the lower classes, this was this false promise from the all-mighty made the judicial institution tolerable. Because of this, the torture was not risked if the guilty of the accused was certain. In this case, he or she was swiftly put to death. Classical torture was "a physical challenge that must define the truth; if the patient was guilty the pain that it imposes are not unjust, but it is also a mark of exculpation if he is innocent." The ritual of torture became a battle of truth. He who held out the longest demonstrated exceptional personal will, which was a testament to one's soul. There was no clear demarcation between guilty and innocent, but degrees of guilt and degrees of innocence. From this, the necessity of punishment arose. The public execution was the moment of truth.
At its core, the public execution was a demonstration of ruling class power. The crime was perceived to be an injury to the sovereign power of the ruling class. The only way to reconstitute this power was through torture. As Foucault points out: "...by breaking the law, the offender has touched the very person of the prince; and it is the prince - or at least those to whom he has designated his force - who seize upon the body of the condemned man and displays it marked, beaten, broken." Royalty perceived the act of crime personally as an injury to his kingdom. Plainly, this was an act of terror. These punishments against the sovereign's person hood were not defined. They were improvised to fit the redress of ruling class power. Enlightenment thought designated this penal code as an 'atrocity' for its public openness, failing to foresee the irony of the term's origins and history. Atrocity is first and foremost a ruling class crime.
Discipline and Punishment is an indispensable book for Marxists. It adds a micro-level approach to our structural analysis of capitalism that is desperately needed to reinvigorate the tradition of Marxism. Unfortunately, many Marxists dismiss the 'post-structuralism' of Foucault seeing it as a repudiation of Marx. This error stems from the lack of work that has been done to synthesize Marx and Foucault. Reading Foucault's earlier works such as Discipline and Punishment shows that the Marx's influence is undeniable. Jacques Bidet's book Marx and Foucault is one of the first to present this work in detail. he shows just how often Foucault and Marx filled in each other's gaps. A more serious reexamination of Foucault is still needed. Foucault reminds us that progress is questionable and technical knowledge constitutes a form of power. We need to return collective property, action, and knowledge if we are to deepen our challenge of ruling class power.
Comments
Post a Comment