Bars and stripes

Bars and stripes

Michel Foucault, West Berlin Technical University, 1978

Book Details

Michel Foucault

THE PUNITIVE SOCIETY

Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973
Edited by Bernard Harcourt and translated by Graham Burchell
340pp. Palgrave MacMillan. £27.
978 1 403 98660 3

The thinking and rethinking that led Michel Foucault to write his finest book

DAVID GARLAND

Le Collège de France, founded in 1530 and located in Paris's Latin Quarter, is one of France's elite institutions. It is a public institution of higher education but it enrols no students and grants no degrees. Instead, it requires its professors to give an annual course of lectures – free of charge and open to all – reporting on their on­going research. Michel Foucault, who was admitted to the Collège in 1970 as professor of "The History of Systems of Thought", took this obligation very seriously, preparing his lectures with exquisite care and presenting them to a packed amphitheatre at 5:45 pm each Wednesday from January to March. His lectures were intense, austere performances. Reading aloud from his prepared text, he made little concession to the oral form, refraining from informality and permitting himself a minimum of levity or improvisation. For ninety minutes at a time, he would set out historico-philosophical questions, summarize his archival findings, and outline explanatory hypotheses, speaking to his hundreds of auditors – many of whom were academic tourists come to hear the famous maître penseur – as if he were addressing a small group of fellow specialists. He evidently regarded these lectures as a specific kind of production: not working drafts, not thinking aloud but a completed scholarly performance of a certain kind. And indeed, mimeographed transcripts of lecture recordings soon circulated, samizdat-style, bringing the first results of Foucault's new thinking to eager audiences in France and abroad.

The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973, adroitly translated from the French by Graham Burchell and expertly edited by Bernard Harcourt, is composed of thirteen lectures that were delivered in the spring of 1973 by Foucault while he was working on what would become his most famous book, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, published in February 1975 and translated as Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison two years later. To read these lectures today is to be reminded of the remarkable impact that Foucault's genealogies of penal power had when they first appeared – among students of punishment his ideas quickly came to define a whole climate of opinion – and to reflect on their continuing relevance in light of the changes that have occurred in the forty years since.

The texts published here have been reconstructed using Foucault's original lecture notes and a transcript of cassette recordings made by one of his course auditors. These are presented together with Foucault's own course summary, a context-setting essay by Harcourt, and a foreword by François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, the general editors of the series in which the book appears. That series recently completed the French language publication of all thirteen of the lecture courses Foucault delivered between 1970 and 1984 (on topics ranging from The Birth of Biopolitics to The Government of the Self and Others) and all but two of these have now been published in English. We await the appearance of Penal Theories and Institutions from 1971–2 and Subjectivity and Truth from 1980–81.

If one begins by reading Foucault's "course summary" – with its references to "discipline", "panopticism" and "a history of relations between political power and bodies"– one gets the impression that the Punitive Society lectures are a working draft for the famous book that would soon follow. But the summary misleads. Written after the lectures had been delivered, it anticipates the new thinking of Discipline and Punish more than it reflects the lectures that were actually presented. Characteristically, the ever-creative Foucault develops his ideas in the process of summarizing them, presenting concepts and arguments that first took shape towards the end of his lectures rather than being present throughout. (Readers of L'Archéologie du savoir will recall he did much the same thing in that book: transforming the "archaeological" method of discourse analysis he had used in his previous studies in the very act of explaining it.) As it turns out, there are interesting differences between the analyses set out in the lectures and those that Discipline and Punish would sub­sequently make famous: differences that make The Punitive Society worthy of close attention.

The Punitive Society sets out to solve a historical puzzle. Why, between 1790 and 1830, did the penitentiary prison suddenly become the dominant form of punishment in France and throughout the Western world? (Discipline and Punish addressed this same basic problem, but framed and resolved it differently.) The rapid and widespread rise of imprisonment at the end of the eighteenth century is, Foucault says, a significant historical fact because the new penitentiaries had no exact precedents (earlier prisons were not designed to reform their inmates); because such institutions were not "deducible" from legal theory nor proposed by penal reformers; because the new prisons were, from the start, dysfunctional but persisted anyway; and because the penitential emphasis of the new prisons was not specific to them alone but was to become a "general dimension of all the social controls that characterize societies like ours".

To understand the birth of the prison, Foucault sets aside the broad concept of "exclusion" which had informed his earlier study of madness in order to think more precisely about the forms and functions of concrete penal practices. Noting that the same penalties and penal aims appear in different eras but that they operate differently depending on the historical matrix in which they function, he proposes that we focus our inquiries on a new object of analysis which he identifies as "the level of penal tactics". In order to understand the birth of the prison, we must stop trying to explain it by reference to the history of law or penal theory – in whose terms it appears altogether anomalous – and view it instead in relation to power structures and penal tactics. Penality, in this conception, is not the expression of an ideology: it is the relay of a certain kind of power.

Why then, did nineteenth-century penal systems adopt the prison and its techniques of penitential confinement? To answer this question, Foucault shifts the scope of inquiry, viewing this development as one event among others within a larger transformation of the structure of social controls. He tells us that in late eighteenth-century France, England and America, new practices of moralization began to take shape, focused on the supposed dissoluteness of the labouring classes. (In a passing remark, he proposes that someone write a "history of laziness", linking shifts in the perceived failings of the poor to changes in the mode of production.) Emerging first in civil society, in the activities of Societies for the Reform of Manners and Societies for the Suppression of Vice and in the work of Quaker and Methodist organizations, and then in a series of state enactments, these efforts generated a panoply of new controls – workers' records, workers' savings books, vagrancy laws, private police in the ports, and so on – that subjected the working population to intensified scrutiny and a daily moral accounting. The result, Foucault says, was the emergence of a "punitive society" characterized by mechanisms of supervision and punishment that aimed to moralize compliant subjects and shunt recalcitrant ones off to prison.

"To understand a society's system of morality", Foucault says, "we have to ask the question: where is the wealth?" And to explain moral change, he insists we should look not to philosophers like Kant but to practical men like the police reformer Patrick Colquhoun, who understood that the advent of commercial society required a new kind of moral training in the workplace and the penal system.

The spread of capitalist production and exchange meant that a great deal of wealth was no longer fixed in place but instead circulated in the form of commodities, rendering it vulnerable to depredation by the property-less workers who handled it in factories, docks and warehouses. This problem was compounded by the widespread existence of what Foucault calls "illegalisms" – customary practices that violated the letter of the law but had long been tolerated by officials because of the mutual benefits of collusive evasion. In the nineteenth century, these illegalisms increasingly took the more pointed form of popular resistance to wage contracts and exploitative working conditions – with the result, Foucault says, that this new "worker illegalism" prompted the development of "a whole repressive system".

In the new capitalist society, where wealth was exposed and depredations widespread, a more intense control of conduct was required. According to Foucault, these were the considerations that established a new "connection between morality and penality". Henceforth, the target of punishment would be "not just the infractions of individuals, but their nature, their character". (The new science of criminology would later medicalize these moral concerns, converting the sinning individual into the criminal type.) The result was a new and more thoroughgoing mode of regulation – one that sought not to deter criminal acts but to transform ­individuals. And as these mechanisms of supervision and punishment became pervasive, so the punitive society was born.

According to Foucault, the new prisons formed the end-point of coercive processes that were traced throughout the punitive society, and embodied the new penitential techniques in a concentrated form. But how did these institutions emerge? In Discipline and Punish, Foucault would argue that the new prisons encapsulated a series of disciplinary techniques – techniques targeting the body that had originated in schools, monasteries, factories and barracks and which had, by the late eighteenth century, become so widespread that they were, in effect, society's preferred means of exercising power. But in The Punitive Society lectures, the story is different. Here Foucault asserts that the modern prison emerged as a religiously charged moral enterprise – a penitentiary, first developed by the Quakers – and he devotes a good deal of attention to the associated ideas that crime is a sin and that punishment should aim at the inner transformation of the prisoner.

But how could an institution associated with a small religious sect, in a specific geographic region, so quickly become generalized? ­Foucault's answer – which owes something to Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – is that the penitentiary prison became aligned with capitalism's need to moralize workers and with the penitential practices that were becoming characteristic of capitalist society.

More specifically, what enabled the prison's take-off at this historical moment was its focus on the control of time, and the affinity of this concern with the control imperatives of capitalist production. Unlike the diverse penalties suggested by penal reformers, imprisonment was modulated along a single dimension: that of time. Prison sentences were measured in temporal units just as the wage contract was calibrated in units of labour-time. The prison was, Foucault tells us, uniquely suited to an emerging society in which "capitalist power clings to time, seizes hold of it, makes it purchaseable and usable".

So Foucault's explanation for the prison's rapid rise is to be found not in legal or penological theory but instead in the economic figure of the wage form and the new control problems faced by the bourgeoisie. According to Foucault, the "prison-form" and the "wage-form" are "historically twin forms". They emerge together and are linked by an elective affinity – a shared focus on the regulation of time and the moral control of the worker. And the term that Foucault repeatedly uses to describe carceral confinement – "sequestration" – works to reaffirm this connection, linking the commercial practice of confiscating assets with the practice of incarcerating an offender to punish a crime.

In these lectures, the explanatory framework that Foucault employs is a Marxist functionalism that views the emergence of penitential controls as "the mode of production provid[ing] itself with the instruments of a new political power"; the function of which is "to connect up time, the body, the life of individuals, to the process of production and the mechanisms of hyper-profit". But being Foucault, he takes care to distinguish himself from conventional Marxist positions and particularly from the then-fashionable theses on ideology developed by Louis Althusser, with whom Foucault had studied at the École Normale Supérieure. Foucault emphatically rejects the concept of ideology and any methodology that reads texts for their hidden meanings, insisting that meanings are neither hidden nor unsaid but are in fact available for inspection on the surface of actors' statements. He insists on treating discourse not as a mystification, or an emanation of something more real, but instead as a vector in a field of force, a power to be understood in its strategic functioning. "Every point at which power is exercised is, at the same time, a site of formation, not of ideology but of knowledge" and "where epistemologists [a lightly veiled reference to Althusser] see only poorly controlled ideological effects, I think it is possible to see perfectly calculated, controlled strategies of power".

These glancing encounters with unnamed theorists are characteristic of Foucault's mode of theorizing, both in the lectures and elsewhere. Though Foucault is often described as a "theorist" he is far from being a theory-builder in the conventional sense. He is, instead, a pragmatic thinker who conceptualizes and re-conceptualizes phenomena according to the problem at hand, adapting his theoretical toolbox in the process. In most of these lectures, there is little overt theorizing. Instead, Foucault narrates concrete historical events and episodes, proposes genealogical inquiries, and suggests low-level socio-historical explanations that stick close to the material. At one point early in the lectures, he proposes that society might be characterized as a kind of "civil war" – an ongoing struggle between groups that invests all social relations and social norms with elements of power and conflict. But this turns out to be a theoretical dead-end, and the notion is later dropped. More fruitfully, he uses the final lecture of March 28 to talk explicitly, for the first time, about the conception of power he has been using: a conception that opposes itself to the orthodoxies of Marxism by insisting that power is not possessed – but is, instead agonistic and relational; that it is not localized in the state but rather suffused throughout society; that it does not "guarantee" the mode of production but, in fact, constitutes the relationships that make production possible; that power does not work through ideology but instead is articulated with, and operates through, knowledge; and, more positively, that power is normalizing, shaping habits and creating consciousness. At the end of this lecture he notes that when sociologists study social norms and consciousness, they are in fact dealing with the covert relations of power that suffuse the social surface and constitute social relations: "What characterizes the social . . . is nothing other than the system of disciplines, of constraints. Power is exercised through the system of disciplines, but so that it is concealed and appears as that reality called society" – an observation that reveals just how all-encompassing Foucault's concept of power is at this point.

By the time of Discipline and Punish, Foucault had largely abandoned the Marxist approach, together with the concept of sequestration and the prison-form/wage-form argument. And though the control of time continued to feature, it was now characterized as a legacy of the monastery – and one strand of the web of disciplines – rather than a form of control imposed by the bourgeoisie. More generally, Foucault's account of causation ceases to be so class-based and conspiratorial and becomes more pluralistic, more anonymous, and more non-intentional. In The Punitive Society, social classes struggle to moralize other classes. In Discipline and Punish, actors have mostly dropped out of sight, the passive voice dominates, and power-knowledge relations proliferate. Instead of property-protecting projects launched by the bourgeoisie we learn of the silent, anonymous emergence of disciplinary techniques. Instead of a "punitive society" designed to control workers and align them with production and profit we witness the pervasive spread of discipline, embodied in the architecture and routines of modern institutions. In the lectures, Foucault describes pentitential projects directed at the workers; by the time of ­Discipline and Punish these have become ­disciplinary technologies, normalizing us all.

The Punitive Society is, for the most part, a work of historical sociology, analysing the emergence of new practices of supervision and punishment and the social uses to which they were put. Discipline and Punish is, in contrast, a more philosophical work. Its focus is not so much on economic change and the struggle to establish adaptive controls as on the new rationalities of power, new human sciences, and the constitution of the modern individual. Instead of a history of punishment, it presents a genealogy of "the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases". In the later work, it is the cognitive aspects of penal power that are foregrounded – the individualized knowledge produced by ­surveillance, inspection and examination; the science of criminology; the normalizing concerns of modern law – rather than the struggles of one class to control and exploit another. It is an account focused not on the sociological uses of penal power but on penal power's rationalities and technologies. Its central concern is to anatomize modern power together with the human sciences and forms of knowledge that render it possible. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault moves back onto his own terrain – that of the historian of the human sciences, their practical surfaces of emergence, and their philosophical implications – and leaves behind the analysis of social process and historical causation.

This shift of perspective proved productive. Foucault was tremendously insightful when it came to the description of technologies of power-knowledge, analysing diagrams of power reduced to their ideal forms. But he was less good on their actual uses and functioning: here he exaggerates, he ignores resistance, he neglects variation, and he has little to say about institutional supports and social foundations. It is Foucault the philosopher, the archaeologist of discourse, the historian of systems of thought who is penetratingly original in his insights, not Foucault the sociologist. Discipline and Punish is Michel Foucault at his best: the book in which our most important genealogist of the human sciences has truly found his subject. The Punitive Society is the story of the thought processes – the thinking and relentless rethinking – that eventually led him there.