Magazine: Social Science Journal, July, 1991
DISCIPLINE AND DETERRENCE: RETHINKING FOUCAULT ON THE
QUESTION OF POWER IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY
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This article considers how Michel Foucault's analysis of disciplinary
power might be reformulated and extended to account for significant
transformations in the mechanisms of social control in contemporary,
postmodern societies. Despite several interesting efforts to apply
Foucault's conception of discipline to social control issues in the
sociological and criminological literature, such efforts have for the
most part misinterpreted his position. This article suggests a more
adequate reading of Foucault's conception of discipline as a
multipricity of minor coercive techniques which taken together
constitute one of multiple schemes for exercising power under given
historical social conditions. With regard to the multiple dimensions of
power, I shall argue, noting recent criticisms of Foucault's work by
Jean Baudrillard, that the exercise of power in contemporary or
postmodern societies involves not only mechanisms of discipline, but of
deterrence as well.
To what extent is discipline the characteristic mode of social control
in late modern or postmodern societies, i.e., societies of the present?
I raise. this question in reaction to an interesting theoretical debate,
now entering its second decade, provoked by Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault's influential study of carceral
technologies at the beginning of the modern age.(n1) Among the diverse
topics of that debate have been the role of imprisonment in the 20th
century, the history of its development, its uses and representations,
successes and failures, and the changing calls for its reform. These
might be called the debate's penal, or better, institutional concerns.
But at another level, its topic is power, a topic which in the last
several years has been revitalized by postmodern theory, specifically
with regard to how to conceptualize what may be significant
transformations in the mechanisms through which power is exercised
today. At issue here is Foucault's thesis that contemporary Western
societies can be characterized as "disciplinarian," and that discipline,
as a strategy for normalizing individual conduct or administering the
affairs of social collectivities, has become the general formula for
domination in these societies.(n2)
A number of divergent positions have emerged from this debate: that the
disciplinary tactics of the modern prison have dispersed into the wider
non-earceral environment--into, for example, the system of public
welfare, community-based corrections, treatment centers, and private
business.(n3) that discipline is losing or has lost its usefulness today
as a strategy of penality or, more broadly, social control,(n4) or
finally, that the very conditions of possibility for the exercise of
disciplinary power, as Foucault conceives it, have collapsed or no
longer exist in technically advanced, information-based societies.(n5)
One purpose of this essay is to suggest that some of the contributors to
this debate, particularly those attracted to Foucault's work from
sociology and criminology, have either misrepresented his claims or have
failed to appreciate the flexibility of his analysis of discipline.
Instead, they have tended to force Foucault's work into alignment with
relatively narrow institutional or ideological concerns, things which in
feet interested him only indirectly. On the other hand, those who have
criticized Foucault from a position more his own have done better in
drawing attention to some important theoritical distinctions regarding
contemporary power relationships. Among the latter group, I believe Jean
Baudrillard has presented the most interesting and useful argument--
roughly, that "deterrence" has supplanted disciplinary strategies
oriented to the problem of exercising power in contemporary, postmodern
societies--even though it too, as we shall see, is based on an
interpretation of Foucault that attributes to him a position on power
which is not in fact his own.
A second and more positive aim is to suggest how, in Discipline and
Punish, Foucault was moving toward a far more open conception of
discipline as a "multiplicity within a multiplicity:" i.e., both a
multiplicity of minor coercive techniques, and a social field which
together with other social fields in history comprise multiple forms, or
"diagrams," of power. Here I shall rely heavily on an interpretation of
Foucault developed elsewhere.(n6) But I shall use it to argue that the
exercise of power in contemporary societies, and in the institutions of
those societies, is a matter of both discipline and deterrence, or
conversely, that power as it tends to be exercised today is a matter of
neither one of these methods exclusively. I do not mean that both
together exhaust the present possibilities of exercising power, only
that an analysis of power relations which could account for contemporary
forms of domination and subjugation must at a minimum allow for both.
But before we can reach this point, it will be necessary to reexamine
what Foucault means by "discipline."
THE DIAGRAM OF DISCIPLINE
Foucault does not begin his analysis by providing us with a universal
formula for discipline. Rather, he describes a profusion of minor
techniques (the disciplines), of the most diverse origin and application,
and asks how, over a period extending from the 17th to the early 19th
century, they come to produce something like the "blueprint of a general
method" of domination.(n7) In Discipline and Punish, Foucault traces
three converging historical developments: the birth of a detailed
"political anatomy" of the body, the diffusion of a mechanics of
normalization and individualization, and panoptic surveillance.
Beginning in the 17th century and throughout the 18th century, a number
of forces coalesce around the body to increase its power and capacity
for work. A whole micro-physics of distributing spaces, serializing
movements, combining and ranking behaviors is organized on an
unprecedented scale to transform bodies and their relations to one
another into a generalized productive machinery--obedient, economical,
and efficient. Supplementing these are a whole set of techniques for
training the individual to conform to a norm, utilizing "corrective"
mechanisms that coerce by means of continuous examination and
hierarchical observation. Behind everything looms the figure of the
Panopticon, Bentham's ideal prison or "inspection house," whose concrete
operation depends on an art and mechanics of discreet surveillance, but
whose formal principle--and here perhaps Foucault comes closest to an
abstract formula for discipline--is to impose a particular form of
conduct on a human multiplicity.(n8)
To multiply the powers of bodies by transforming them into a passive
machinery, to measure their conduct against a norm, to subject them to
continuous supervision: taken together, these projects come to
constitute responses to the general "problematic" of how power can be
exercised at the beginning of the modern age. They become, over time,
the object of specialized knowledge and interests--in criminology,
psychiatry, pedagogy, administration--and the locus of social struggles
for the reform of disciplinary institutions.
It might be said, as Deleuze has noted, that in the abstract sense,
discipline for Foucault is like a "diagram" or schema of the forces that
create individuals, differentiating and separating them from a confused
mass of bodies, composing and realigning their relations and turning
them into a productive order.(n9) Foucault first invokes the notion of a
diagram in reference to Bentham's plan for the Panopticon, but it is
clear from passages like the following that it has a significance beyond
its application to the prison:
. . . the Panopticon . . . is the diagram of a mechanism of power
reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle,
resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and
optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may
and must be detached from any specific use.
It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but
also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the
insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a
type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in
relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of
centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and
modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals,
workshops, schools, prisons.(n10)
The Panoptic diagram thus becomes something like a general diagram of
the disciplines, the map of what Foucault will come to call a
"disciplinary society." A diagram should not be confused with an
ideological formation or a representation which masks the truth of
social relations and stands apart from them, nor does it precisely
define the structure of those relations. It is neither a utopian
configuration nor a Weberian ideal type.(n11) For Foucault, a diagram is
embedded in the very social relations it constitutes, as an immanent
cause. Deleuze notes that Foucault thinks of a diagram as something like
an "abstract machine" that sets processes in motion, giving a form to
unformed matter and finalizing various functions (e.g., education, care,
enforced work)(n12) It is an unstable historical formation, neither
universal nor the totality of social relations, but rather the form of a
changing amalgam of localized events and processes. When Foucault
invokes the diagram of a "disciplinary society," he is referring to the
generalization of a multiplicity of techniques that have separate and
relatively independent developments throughout the 17th and 18th
centuries--in schools, military hospitals, armies, workshops--but which
at the turn of the 19th century begin to freely circulate, traversing
the social body in the form of standardized procedures for making power
relationships function in the most diverse social settings. One could
say that discipline for Foucault is a form of power, but more precisely,
it is a generalized response to the question of how power can be
exercised to address the manifold problems of production and control
which arise in the modern age.
All this gives Foucault's method in Discipline and Punish a maximum of
flexibility. It would be the worst mistake to interpret his work as an
effort to assign some absolute status to discipline as a form of power.
In the first place, discipline always creates gaps, spaces of free play
which embody new possibilities for struggle and resistance. This follows
from Foucault's belief that power is always relational, and that
resistance is a necessary feature of any power relationship.(n13) Second,
the diagram of discipline refers to only one possible mode of the
exercise of power, although for Foucault it is a dominant mode of
modernity, one which has the potential to invest, if never the entire
social field, at least a significant part of it. But the fact remains
that just as diagrams are multiplicities, so are there multiple diagrams-
-we might say that discipline for Foucault is a "multiplicity within a
multiplicity." Other diagrams can mix with or coexist alongside the
disciplinary diagram, supplement it, or replace it as the dominant form.
Conversely, the diagram of discipline can substitute for older, formerly
dominant, forms of power. Foucault claims that if disciplinary power has
a model, it is the plague, which quarantines the infected individual
behind closed doors and regulates, in multiple ways, the smallest
details of his life.(n14) Sovereign societies of the past, on the other
hand, possessed an entirely different diagram of power, organized around
entirely different mechanisms--not disciplinary power, which quietly
combines and multiplies forces through instituting a strict regimen of
conduct, but the power of exile, which acts by the division and
exclusion of forces and takes the segregation or isolation of the leper
as its model.(n15) Such models are, in fact, fictions, and we should
not expect to find any social circumstances which embody them in their
pure form. The important point is that Foucault's method allows for as
many diagrams as there are social fields in history, each one an
unstable and evolving multiplicity, and each producing its own regimes
of truth and power.(n16)
Foucault never claims that discipline is an exclusively modern
phenomenon, an interpretation which derives from the mistaken view that
his intention is to focus on significant gaps or discontinuities in the
history of power and knowledge.(n17) Discipline didn't suddenly emerge
in the late 18th century; Foucault is quite clear in noting that earlier
ages were familiar enough with its uses--in monasteries, armies,
workshops. Rather it expanded its scope and refined its tactics, took on
new objects and formed general strategies, responding to the massive
demographic, economic, and politico-judicial changes that swept over
Europe during this time and which posed new problems for the productive
control of social relations.
On the other hand, Discipline and Punish is sometimes read as an attempt
by Foucault to say something about the nature of contemporary power
relationships, and then immediately criticized for failing in this aim
because most of the book is limited to a description of disciplinary
strategies in the 18th and 19th centuries. But this is not a fair
criticism either. Foucault never intended in Discipline and Punish to
write about the current situation, only to isolate certain historical
themes and problems that might be useful for understanding--and possibly
transforming--power relations as they exist today.(n18)
Misinterpretations of this sort probably account for why some analyses
of modern disciplinary strategies in the so-called "social control"
literature in sociology and criminology appear strained whenever they
attempt to mark their distance from Foucault. One recent case in point
is the influential "dispersion of discipline" thesis developed by
Stanley Cohen.(n19) Cohen argues that we are now living in what appears
to be a reversal of the first great transformation in social control
which Foucault described in Discipline and Punish. This reversal is
characterized by a breakdown of the old ideological consensus about the
desirability of centralized control and the confinement of deviants in
early 19th century penality. But Cohen notes that rather than signalling
an end to discipline as a mechanism of control, this breakdown coincides
with its liberation from the narrow confines of the penal system--hence
his phrase "dispersion of discipline." To support his case, Cohen notes
how prison reform ideologies of the 1960's--the various calls during
that period for decentralization, decarceration, delegalization or
deprofessionalization--merely fostered or served as alibis for an
extension of the disciplinary regime imposed by 19th century penal
institutions into the wider society in the form of community corrections
programs, treatment centers, neighborhood watch organizations, etc.--a
process of "widening the net and thinning the mesh" in which ever more
persons are subjected to disciplinary forms of coercion.(n20)
In the first place, it should be pointed out that in Discipline and
Punish Foucault had already described the tendency of penal reform
discourse to perpetuate, refine, and extend the very system of controls
which it seeks to reform.(n21) This is not at all anything new, but is
in fact contemporaneous with the institution of carceral practices in
the late 18th century. For Foucault, even radical changes in penal
ideology for the most part only mean business as usual. It is difficult
to distinguish any real difference between Foucault and Cohen on this
point (as I think Cohen himself would readily admit). The "reversal"
Cohen refers to, if it is to have any significance at all, must concern
not just an ideological reorientation to the problem of discipline, but
the actual decentralization of disciplinary techniques and their
subsequent dispersal into the wider society. But again, Foucault
provides a number of illustrations of this very process at work early in
the 19th century. Cohen's analysis for the most part ignores Foucault's
extended discussion of the "swarming of the disciplines" and his remarks
about how the carceral system from the very beginning effected a
transport of penitentiary techniques from the penal institution to the
wider society.(n22) Cohen may be right to point out that disciplinary
tactics and the institutions that employ them have changed in the latter
part of the 20th century, but the "dispersion" of discipline is a
strategic phenomenon that has its origins in an earlier age and not in
the 1960's. Cohen's "great reversal" is, I think, at best a misleading
concept. At worst, it based upon a highly selective reading of Foucault.
In a contrasting argument, Anthony Bottoms claims that correctional
practice in the late 20th century is characterized by strategies which
rely more on preventative or juridical rather than disciplinary
controls. He argues that recent evidence compiled from court statistics
indicates that the trend in modern i has been away from strategies that
focus on the normalization of individual thought and conduct--here
Bottoms uses the term "soul-training" to summarize what Foucault meant
by discipline--toward those which function to divert whole categories
of offenders away from the system of incarceration.(n23) In the limited
context of an analysis of penal institutions, this argument is
persuasive enough and has some value in drawing our attention to an
important goal of contemporary correctional practice. But to challenge
Foucault on his own ground, Bottoms would need to inquire into the
possibility that prevention has become a general formula of domination
over and beyond its specific application in penal contexts. More
troubling is Bottoms's effort to categorically restrict Foucault's
analysis of discipline to the practice of "soul-training." We shall see
below in our discussion of "big-power" that Foucault did not intend the
concept of discipline to be exhausted in a notion of individual training-
-whether of the body or the soul--and that the kinds of preventative
strategies which Bottoms views as necessary to the control of whole
categories of persons is in fact accounted for by Foucault. To be fair,
Bottoms is ready to admit that disciplinary methods still play a very
important role in contemporary social control strategies. But he fails
to appreciate the flexibility of Foucault's diagrammatic analysis and
succumbs to the general temptation to reduce the multiplicity of
disciplinary strategies which Foucault describes to a single category.
I shall return to these arguments again below as examples of
contemporary sociological approaches to social control or penality that
have reworked Foucault's analysis of discipline to fit better into their
own ideological and institutional concerns. To date, they have either
misunderstood or have had little to add to the general analysis of power
Foucault develops in the early pages of Discipline and Punish. On the
other hand, researches of this kind owe much to Foucault for opening up
to the social sciences a number of possibilities for describing modern
conditions and effects of power.
THE PRISON
Discipline, for Foucault, cannot be identified with any particular
institution. This may seem surprising in a book which spends so much
time talking about the prison and its strategies of control. But if
Foucault refers to the prison, it is always in relation to prior
concerns: how imprisonment came to be taken in the 19th century as the
ideal means for punishing infractions in society; how strategic forms of
knowledge developed around and rationalized this procedure; how the
arbitrary power to punish invested in the sovereign ruler prior to the
18th century was gradually transformed into a penitentiary system with
its own unique forms of coercion.(n24) Before Discipline and Punish is
about the prison, it is about the question of how power can be exercised,
of how discipline comes to be accepted as a mechanics of control that
can cut transversally across all institutions, linking them together and
making them function in new ways.(n25) For the prison is not singled
out as the only possible model for discipline. Rather, it is the
concrete assemblage that, because of its extreme concentration of
disciplinary methods, comes closest to embodying the ideals expressed in
this model. If we understand this, it is not so difficult to comprehend
why Foucault ends his analysis in Discipline and Punish with a
commentary on the Mettray prison colony, an exemplar of the 19th century
penality which represents the completion (and not the origin) of the
disciplinary diagram in the form of a system of incarceration:
Were I to fix the date of completion of the carceral system, . . . the
date I would choose would be 22 January 1840, the date of the official
opening of Mettray . . . Why Mettray? Because it is the disciplinary
form at its most extreme, the model in which are concentrated all the
coercive technologies of behavior.(n26)
For Foucault, the institution of the prison "fixes" multiple relations
of disciplinary power (the same can also be said of educational,
military, religious, or economic institutions). Better, it is the
visible effect of a certain integration of power relations, an effect
which simultaneously serves to differentiate the prison from other
institutions and to make a continuous circulation of disciplinary
techniques among them possible. It is true that Foucault says that in
the 19th century prisons come to resemble schools, factories, hospitals,
etc., which in turn all resemble the prison.(n27) But this does not
prevent the prison and other institutions from being relatively
autonomous formations with their own objects and modes of functioning.
Further, the prison itself is an unstable, fluid form. Throughout most
of the 18th century it was a rather marginal institution for punishing
crimes, and may become so once again. There is nothing to suggest that
discipline necessitates incarceration when other techniques would be
better adapted to the control of infractions in society.(n28)
When seen from Foucault's perspective, the prison institution emerges as
a microcosm of minor processes whose operations are situated on a
different level than ideology, or in this case the formal prescriptions
of penal law. Whereas penal law forms a system of representations geared
to the classification of crimes, the prison sets into motion an entire
technology or machinery of production.(n29) It is a machine designed to
make the offender and his conduct visible, and therefore "calculable."
While it is true that penal law might be said to evolve alongside the
prison, they have two distinct histories. Their developments are uneven
and at times contradictory, and it is the job of analysis to unravel the
problematic of their multiple points of intersection over time.
In view of the fact that neither penal institutions nor penal law
constitute privileged points of departure for Foucault's analysis of
discipline, it is unfortunate that all too often it is precisely from
these points that his critics in the social control literature launch
their attacks. The result, I think, has been a restriction of the debate
to topics that only tangentially concerned Foucault and a redirection of
attention away from important questions about diagrammatic features of
power relations in contemporary society. We've seen that to support his
claim that preventative rather than disciplinary technologies constitute
the major form of social control in modern society, Bottoms compiles
statistics from the outcomes of court cases which show a proportional
decline in the use of imprisonment as a method of punishment in relation
to the increasing use of other, noncarceral, methods--fines, deferred
sentences, victim compensation, etc.(n30) Cohen, on the other hand, also
begins his analysis with a reference to the system of incarceration,
working outward from this point to the quasi- or extra-penal environment
into which he claims its methods have diffused--the system of halfway
and quarterway houses, parole offices, juvenile detention facilities,
welfare agencies, treatment centers, and so forth.(n31)
There is nothing wrong with such approaches per se, but it is not how
Foucault poses the problem. If we situate the analysis of discipline at
the level of penal law, we fail to thematize the multiplicity of
disciplinary techniques. If we situate the analysis of discipline at the
level of the institution, we are prone to confuse cause and effect. In
the latter case, we must say that disciplinary technologies do not so
much diffuse outward from the prison as the prison itself is the effect
of process of diffusion, or more accurately, the concrete form of a
diffusive process which passes through it and which both anticipates and
antedates it. Such analyses also tend to substitute a function of the
institution for that which makes it possible to function. For Foucault,
it is not that the function of prisons, in the sense of a purpose or end,
is discipline (or training, rehabilitation, correction, etc.). If that
that were the case, it could easily be argued that the prison does not
"function" at all, and that judged by these standards it is a hopeless
failure (and indeed, many criminologists have noted just this fact).
Foucault, on the other hand, is not so much concerned with admonishments
about the failure of the prison or the recurring calls for its reform,
which have dogged the prison since its beginning (such might be part of
the ideological discourse of criminology for which Foucault has little
patience).(n32) Rather when he speaks, as he occasionally does in his
discussion of the Panoptic diagram, about the function of the prison, it
is not in terms of its purpose, but rather of the prison as a function--
of power relations--and as a mechanism through which power relations
themselves become finalized functions (e.g., of correction,
rehabilitation, punishment, therapy, etc.):
The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange
between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power
relations functions in a function, and of making a function through
these power relations.(n33)
Abstractly considered, the institution of the prison has no special or
exemplary status. Except for the fact that here one can find
disciplinary methods concentrated in their most extreme form, the prison,
like other institutions, is an effect of multiple power relations which
themselves are in turn functions of broader historical forces (I shall
return to this point below). What is of primary concern for Foucault is
not the institution, but the diagram of power, the abstract panoptic or
disciplinary machine itself as it traverses those institutions and sets
them in motion.
BIO-POWER AND THE CONTROL OF THE POPULATION
It is only when Foucault's critics turn aside from their institutional
concerns to focus on the whole micro-economy of discipline that truly
interesting arguments begin to emerge. Some commentators have noted a
shift from 19th century tactics which had as their object the production
of individual capacities--a political anatomy of the body--to the use of
measures designed for the control of whole categories of persons. Mass
surveillance, the decentralization of social control, the development of
computerized matching and profiling systems, and the widespread use of
probabilistic or insurial models in the public and private spheres are
variously cited as as evidence of a move away from a disciplinary
diagram of power toward a diagram whose object is diffuse and situated
on a macro-level.(n34) But in fact, Foucault has argued much the same
thing in other places.(n35)
In Discipline and Punish, we recall, the abstract formula of discipline
(or more accurately, the disciplines) was to impose a form of conduct on
a multiplicity of particular individuals. There Foucault had
concentrated on minute and detailed exercises of power over a limited
number of bodies confined to a relatively small space--the classroom,
the barracks, prison cells. But in later work, he turned to consider
controls of a more administrative nature, whose objects were large
multiplicities (or entire populations) distributed over wide areas--
controls directed, in political and economic domains, to "problems of
birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration."(n36) In
the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault invokes the
sphere of "big-power" or "big-politics," the form of power exercised not
just over the individual's life but over life in general, and with its
own attendant forms of knowledge--demographic, probabilistic,
distributional--oriented to the evaluation of the relation between
resources and inhabitants, the accumulation of capital, and the general
expansion of the productive forces.(n37)
If, in The History of Sexuality, big-power becomes for Foucault another
general formula for domination, it is not because he thinks a new
diagram of power has succeeded a disciplinary one. He notes that
techniques for the control of entire populations were both
contemporaneous with and geared into those whose object was the
political investment of the body. Considered abstractly they form not a
totality, but a dualism, or better, a bipolar continuum of a
multiplicity of material relations whose principle is the "power over
life:" disciplinary power--control over the living body--and
administrative power--control over the living population:
In concrete terms, starting in the seventeenth century, [the] power over
life evolved in two basic forms; these forms were not antithetical,
however; they constituted rather two poles of development linked
together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of these
poles . . . centered on the body as a machine [and] its disciplining . .
. The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body [whose]
supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and
regulatory controls: a big-politics of the population.
. . . these two techniques of power . . . were to be joined . . . in the
form of concrete arrangements that would go to make up the great
technology of power in the nineteenth century.(n38)
Does the bipolar nature of the "power over life" create a problem for
Foucault's concept of "disciplinary societies?" Can the diagram of
discipline which Foucault first invoked in Discipline and Punish now
refer to both sides of the dualism, the techniques of the body and those
of the population? That is, is "big-power" a form of discipline? Deleuze,
who perhaps knew Foucault's thought on these matters best among all his
commentators, writes:
"When the diagram of power abandons the model of sovereignty in favor of
a disciplinary model, when it becomes the `big-power' or `big-politics'
of population, controlling and administering life, it is indeed life
that emerges as the new object of power" (italics mine).(n39)
This would suggest, against Foucault's critics, that the diagram of
discipline cannot be uniquely identified with a micro-physics of the
body, with techniques of training or normalization, or hierarchical
observation, but refers also to a mechanics of administration. And
certainly, the body does not disappear as the locus of an investment of
power when Foucault refers to big-power. The scale of control is
expanded and decentralized, and a different problematic of the relation
between power and knowledge is posed insofar as discipline no longer
entails confinement of bodies to limited spaces. Foucault had in fact
already begun to develop these ideas in Discipline and Punish, and The
History of Sexuality merely carries it to a higher level. The notion of
big-power, the control over whole categories of persons--what Foucault
will call the "species body"--is not incompatible with the concept of a
disciplinary society.(n40) Rather, in supplementing Foucault's analysis
of the political anatomy of the body--of the disciplines--it imparts to
the concept of a disciplinary society its fullest expression.
THE PANOPTICON
The meaning of "discipline," in short, is for Foucault neither
coextensive with "the disciplines," nor is it identical with power
relations in general, which are always socially and historically
embedded, multiple, localized, and diffuse. But what about the figure--
the diagram--of the Panopticon Foucault invokes in Discipline and
Punish? If Foucault claims that power itself does not reduce to this
figure, in it he at least appears to provide us with a metaphor for a
very important kind of power--the power of supervision and surveillance,
of making human conduct calculable and its motivations "transparent." Is
panoticism, as a technology of power perfected in the 19th century, a
viable historical image for understandinging power relationships as they
exist in late modern societies?
For Foucault, panopticism is both a mechanism of supervision and a
strategy of truth. As a mechanism of supervision, it operates by means
of discreet surveillance within a fixed space, recording the slightest
movements and changes in attitude. As a strategy of truth, it probes the
surface of the body and "brands" it, marking it off from other bodies
according to a binary logic (separating healthy from diseased, sane from
insane, delinquent from normal, young from old, etc.).(n41) In the late
18th and early 19th century, panopticism emerges as a response to the
problems of control posed by criminal activity, insanity, ignorance and
disease in modem urban societies. And since panopticism is valuable as a
generalizable strategy of control, its effect is to blur the boundaries
that once served to distinguish older mechanisms of control. The prison,
the asylum, the school, the hospital: all become, to a greater or lesser
degree, surveilling institutions under the image of the plague, all loci
of the individualizing (subjugating) effects of power.
Foucault notes that as a disciplinary apparatus, the Panopticon reverses
all the principles of confinement which applied to the dungeon
(deprivation of light and the hiding of the "prisoner") except
enclosure.(n42) It is a system of light, a systematic play of
visibilities and invisibilities facilited by the architectural
arrangement of its parts and whose ideal is transparency. Its major
effect is to induce within those confined there a reflective
consciousness of their permanent, or more accurately, potential
visibility. A single observer stationed in the central guardtower of
Bentham's Panopticon can efficiently monitor the entire group of
prisoners confined along its periphery. The tower functions to mask the
observer's presence (or absence), since it is designed to allow seeing
out but not seeing in. Although it is continually visible to the inmates
from their cells, they are unable to verify the fact of their
observation. Thus, in terms of actual effects, the exercise of power
within the Panopticon is rendered invisible and non-corporeal; ideally,
inmates enclosed within would not need to be continually supervised by a
human observer--the watchtower alone, signalling the ever present
possibility of observation, would be sufficient to insure their
passivity. Foucault notes that the Panopticon is therefore "light" in
another sense. Because inmates virtually police themselves in panoptic
contexts, power can "throw off its weight." As Bentham envisaged it, the
perfection of panoptic power should tend to render all overt use of
power unnecessary. Panopticism would assure the automatic and subtle
functioning of power insofar as the observed are "caught up in a power
situation of which they themselves are made to be the bearers.(n43)
THE END OF PANOPTIC SPACE?
As a mechanism of discipline, panoptic power functions by means of
detailed inspection and examination. The image it invokes of continuous
surveillance seems apropos of the kinds of disciplinary possibilities
opened up by modern electronic media, particularly television, whose use
in discreetly monitoring social transactions is now commonplace in a
variety of settings, both public and private. In an interesting argument,
however, Baudrillard has claimed that panoptic--and by extension,
disciplinary --principles do not apply to televisual media, which cannot
be thought of precisely as an apparatus of inspection:
The eye of TV is no longer the source of an absolute gaze, and the ideal
of control is no longer that of transparency. The latter still
presupposes an objective space (that of the Renaissance) and the
omnipotence of a despotic gaze. This is still, if not a system of
confinement, at least a system of scrutiny. No longer subtle, but always
in a position of exteriority, playing on the opposition between seeing
and being seen, even if the focal point of the panopticon may be
blind.(n44)
Despite the great temptation to invoke an analogy between panoptic and
televisual systems, Baudrillard insists that the development of
television signals the end of panoptic space. As a system of detailed
inspection and examination, the panoptic apparatus is perfectly suited
to the functions of normalization and individualization, to recording
small deviations from an established model of conduct (Bentham, for
example, had noted that the Panopticon makes an ideal laboratory for
conducting experiments). For Baudrillard, on the other hand, television
effectively dispenses with the model, and with it the oppositions
between activity and passivity, subjectivity and objectivity, center and
periphery, on which panoptic space is grounded. More accurately,
television does not transform individuals into passive objects (docile
bodies), but, by virtue of its capacity to reproduce images, into their
own models, both reversing and cancelling panoptic power and creating a
"hyperspace" where it is no longer possible to distinguish between the
model and its object. The result, for Baudrillard, is no longer a system
of surveillance, but one of deterrence (which, ultimately, signals a
dissipation of disciplinary power):
[With TV one switches] over from a panoptic apparatus of surveillance
(of Discipline and Punish) to a system of deterrence, where the
distinction between active and passive is abolished. No longer is there
any imperative to submit to the model, or to the gaze. "YOU are the
model". . . Such is the slope of hyperrealist sociality where the real
is confused with the model. . . A turnabout of affairs by which it
becomes impossible to locate an instance of the model, of power, of the
gaze, of the medium itself, since you are always already on the other
side. No more subject, focal point, center or periphery, but pure
flexion or circular inflection . . . the dissolution of TV into life,
the dissolution of life into TV.(n45)
The notion of a system of deterrence is important in the general context
of the question posed at the beginning of this article, and I shall
return to it below. For now, I only wish to draw attention to the fact
that Baudrillard is alternately sympathetic and unfair to Foucault in
the two passages quoted above. Unlike some of Foucault's critics, he
realizes that panopticism cannot be reduced to or identified with a
system of confinement or particular institution.(n46) That is, he
recognizes that it is important to distinguish in Discipline and Punish
between the Panopticon as an apparatus of incarceration and the diagram
of panopticism, which need not entail confinement. But the point of
Foucault's analysis escapes him when he identifies the panoptic diagram
with a system of "scrutiny" or the "objective gaze" (or more generally
with a systematic play between seeing and being seen which functions
even when the panopticon is "blind"). We might recall here that Bentham
believed that panoptic arrangements, to the extent that they were
capable of effecting the internalization of the power relationship, do
not require the constancy, or even necessarily the presence, of a gaze.
For Bentham, the internalization of power relations which becomes
possible with panoptic systems, at least ideally, transforms subjects
into "models" of their own conduct; that is, they become, ultimately of
their own accord, "models prisoners. Now it is true that Foucault does
not approach the problem of panoptic supervision in the same way Bentham
did, i.e., he is not concerned with the psychological question of how
power relations are internalized. And it is also true that a
consideration of the multiple techniques for making something visible or
opening it to inspection constitutes a major part of Foucault's
discussion of panopticism. But if Foucault emphasized the importance of
the gaze in describing panopticism, it was always with a view to other
problems: first, of the standardization of multiple techniques--the
concrete operations--for partitioning space and ordering temporal
relations (i.e., imposing form on the multiplicity of human conduct),
and second, of linking these operations to the forms of discursive
knowledge which direct that gaze and give it its object.(n47) However
essential the gaze--whether seeing, blind, or the systematic play of
visibilities--may appear as a condition of panoptic power, it is never
placed at the center of Foucault's concerns, but is itself one of the
effects of power, or rather one of multiple focal points where power is
diffracted and functionalized. What is at issue here is not so much the
role of the gaze in effecting control as a question about Foucault's
method: of rigorously describing relations of power, as it were, from
the inside, and proceeding by way of this description to an "exterior"
through which these relations are dispersed and deployed in concrete
institutional assemblages.(n48)
For Baudrillard, however, it is no longer possible to speak of an
"exterior." Television (and ultimately all electronic media) collapses
the polar opposition between interior and exterior, an opposition, he
claims, lies at the heart of the disciplinary diagram and of power
itself. This, he claims, is a no longer a technology aimed at the
control of the body or even the population, but a technology of
reproducible images and information, i.e., of simulation; not a
condition of generalized surveillance, but a "simulacra of spaces" in
which it is no longer possible to distinguish what is interior from what
is exterior and whose principle is holographic, not exclusionary or
combinatory. Thus, it would not be right to say, as we might for a
surveillant apparatus, that TV "watches" or "controls" you, since you
are the TV, you are the image!(n49) In such a situation, discipline
gives way to a generalized deterrence: a situation of permanent
stalemate and meaningless provocation in which the difference between
superior and inferior forces necessary to constitute the power
relationship itself disappears.
Although I think this is a provocative argument and contains some
genuine insights into the key role played by the mass media in (post)
modern societies, I also think Baudrillard misunderstands Foucault on at
least two points. First, Baudrillard comes very near to identifying the
disciplinary or panoptic diagram with power per se, something which
Foucault, with his notion of multiple diagrams, clearly never intended.
Even worse, he chastises Foucault for failing to realize that power is
not everything, for (inadvertently) invoking power as a principle of
reality or truth, forever the last term of analysis, despite the many
historical guises it can don:
. . . something happened at the level of power which Foucault cannot
grasp once again from deep within his genealogy: for him the political
has no end, but only metamorphosis from the `despotic' to the
`disciplinary'.... This may constitute enormous progress over the
imaginary order of power which dominates us--but nothing has changed
concerning the axiom of power . . . Power, then is still turned toward a
reality principle and a very strong principle of truth. . . Foucault can
thus describe to us the successive spirals of power, that last of which
enables him to mark its most minute terminations, although power never
ceases being the term, and the question of its extermination can never
arise.(n50)
But in fact Foucault never believed that power was a homogeneous all-
embracing principle of reality, a position which, if it were true, would
indeed make everything power. Rather, power is heterogeneous, multiple,
and always born of something else, viz., of social and historical
transformations which continuously transpose the problem of how power is
to be exercised.(n51) Foucault does not argue that power is everything,
only that in the modern age power seems to come from everywhere. This
hardly commits one to the position that power cannot be exterminated. On
the other hand, it gives another sense to what Foucault means by the
"exterior" of power. The "exterior" is what exceeds power; it is the
multiplicity of forces from which power relations are born. On this
point, Baudrillard, despite his assertions to the contrary, and Foucault
are not so far apart. Baudrillard also speaks, in another place, of an
"exterior"--an "outside" of power--when he refers to the force of
seduction overcoming power.(n52) In any case, Baudrillard's claim that
power for Foucault never ceases "being the term," in the sense of a
reality or truth principle--an ontological affirmation--is a
misunderstanding. For Foucault, to conceive of power in such a way would
merely return and confine us to an analysis of the Law, a methodological
orientation he spent a great deal of time in Discipline and Punish
trying to distance himself from. Taking the example of the prison,
Foucault notes:
To make an analysis of power in terms of an ontological affirmation
would have meant to question oneself as to what penal law is and to
deduce the prison from the essence itself of the law which condemns the
crime. Instead, I was attempting [in Discipline and Punish] to reinsert
the prison within a technology which is the technology of power, but
which has its birth in the 17th and 18th centuries, that is, when an
entire series of economic and demographic problems poses once again the
problem of what I have called the economy of power relationships.
Could the feudal type systems or the systems of the great administrative
monarchies still be considered valid when it is a question of irrigating
the power relationships in a social body whose demographic dimensions
.... are those which they have become? All of this is born out of
something else: and there is no Power, but power relationships which are
born incessantly, as both effect and condition of other processes . . .
It is precisely the heterogeneity of power which I wanted to demonstrate,
how it is always born of something other than itself.(n53)
One other point deserves brief mention. In his critique of Foucault,
Baudrillard often appears to be describing the features of a
discontinuous process, one in which the diagram of discipline disappears
and is replaced completely by a generalized system of deterrence. This
way of thinking is foreign to Foucault (despite his followers' repeated
references to him as a philosopher of discontinuity). If the abstract
notion of historical discontinuity ever interested Foucault, it was only
as a site on which the problem of continuity itself was posed. Foucault,
as we have seen, did indeed maintain that no diagram was absolute and
that it could be replaced or succeeded by another. But he also
recognized that a history of diagrams would not reveal any neat breaks,
but rather a complex deployment of forces which continually pass into
one another and of which some, in any given historical period or for any
given society, would emerge to define dominant relationships of power
while others might recede to the margins. For Foucault, sovereign forms
of power did not simply disappear in the late 18th century with the
perfection of the disciplines, even if they did slip below a certain
threshold where they could no longer function as the primary mode of
exercising power. Even if we could modify Baudrillard's argument
somewhat (as I shall attempt to do below) and assert that deterrence has
become a general strategy for domination in (post)modern societies, it
would not be because discipline has disappeared.(n54) Alternately, we
cannot say that deterrence was something unknown in earlier times. David
Garland has noted how deterrence (along with retribution) was a
cornerstone of 19th century Victorian penal representations,(n55) and
Foucault has shown its significance with regard to 18th century
"semiotic techniques" whose goal was to impress the certainty of swift
punishment on all potential offenders.(n56) There is no necessary
antithesis or historical discontinuity between deterrent and
disciplinary diagrams. Rather, they have two different histories with
multiple points of connection, contiguity, and friction which are
revealed only by an examination of the concrete forms and particular
relations in which they are embodied.
Discipline and Deterrence
Too much in our experience of contemporary society speaks against
Baudrillard's thesis that deterrence marks an end in any sense of the
disciplinary diagram. In fact, what is most disturbing about
contemporary societies is that we can find almost too many examples of
what Foucault called the disciplinary technologies of bio-power--random
drug testing, disease monitoring in the population, life support systems,
genetic engineering, in vitro fertilization--in short, the whole
administrative apparatus for regulating health and sexuality in the
population. Moreover, the description of the disciplines Foucault offers
us in Discipline and Punish--i.e., the training of the body, meticulous
orderings of space and time, the attention to the infinitesimal details
of conduct--seems also widely to conform to our present experience.
On the other hand, we might argue, with Baudrillard but without having
to abandon Foucault, that since the middle of the 20th century (to fix a
somewhat arbitrary date) a number of important events have intervened
which have made it necessary to pose once again the problem of the
economy of power relationships, and in such a way that the old
disciplinary strategies are either redeployed to serve a new deterrent
function or increasingly marginalized. It is becoming more evident, to
take just a few examples, that the development of nuclear arsenals, the
changeover to an information-based consumer economy, growing
uncertainties about the global environment, political terrorism, etc.--
that all these events have given rise today to new questions about how
power can be exercised: questions whose resolution depends on the
development of new institutional mechanisms and new forms of discursive
knowledge that embody deterrent, and not just disciplinary, aims. The
import of these developments, I think, is that we must supplement
genealogical research of the type Foucault was engaged in (i.e., on the
prison, the clinic, and the asylum) with similar kinds of research on
data banks, think tanks, undercover operations, marketing organizations,
securities and insurance firms.(n57) And part of this task would be to
extend Foucault's critique of criminological, psychiatric, and medical
knowledge by tracing their complex relations to the fields of
statistical inference, profiling, information theory, risk analysis,
game theory, technical forecasting, futures research, and the whole
array of simulation strategies.
Foucault, to be sure, was not unaware of either the contemporary
significance or the historical roots of these developments. He draws our
attention in The History of Sexuality to the emergence of probabilistic
methods in the 19th century as a means of forecasting trends in the
population.(n58) And it would be difficult to find a more appropriate
description of forty years of living under the shadow of nuclear war
than when he notes that "what might be called a society's `threshold of
modernity' has been reached when the life of a species is wagered on its
own political strategies."(n59)
Although there are many places in the History of Sexuality that might
indicate what Foucault had in mind was indeed what we commonly mean by
"deterrence," the general context remains one of discipline, expanded to
encompass the issues of bio-power and the control over life. But there
are a number of reasons to believe that such developments raise problems
for the economy of power relations that, while related to those of
discipline, are nonetheless conceptually distinct. The following appear
to me to be the most relevant of those distinctions.
With discipline, the problem of power is that of producing and
finalizing functions within a human multiplicity, to maximize utility
through the strategic ordering of spatial and temporal relations,
ultimately to foster or disallow life itself. With deterrence, on the
other hand, we might say that the problem is one of reintroducing an
asymmetry between opposing forces which have evolved too close to a
point of equivalence or parity, or to a saturation point where it is no
longer possible to increase their respective utilities. We need to be
clear on this point, for it is easy here to confuse the ideology of
deterrence with its practice, and it is the latter in which we are most
interested.(n60) As an ideology, deterrence claims as its goal the
strategic balance of power relations, which translates into a form of
mutual restraint. Here deterrence represents itself as a logic of
equivalence, and as a means of insuring peace and stability by the
threat of mutual retaliation. But the actual practice of deterrence is
something entirely different and follows not a logic of equivalence, but
one of expansion and contraction--the expansion of opposing forces
asymtotically to a point where each threatens to disappear, followed by
an indefinitely prolonged "laying down of arms." The equivalence of
forces is not a goal, not even a practical goal, but a problem of the
economy of power relations for which deterrence becomes a general
solution. What must be deterred (prevented, delayed) is not, as the
ideology of deterrence would suggest, the exercise of power but,
somewhat paradoxically, the inability to exercise power. (For deterrence
never really aims for a balance of power. The reproduction of deterrent
practices is only possible given an asymmetry of power relations, no
matter how small.) The paradigm case, of course, is 40 years of the arms
race which has culminated in the current policy of the Superpowers with
regard to nuclear weapons. In one way, the issue here does concern the
"end" of power, at least in the sense of asking the question how power
can be exercised in a situation where its actual exercise would lead to
mutual annihilation. Since reaching a point of parity in the 1960's, the
problem of Superpower relations has increasingly become one of finding
ways to recapture the utility of these weapons. (Paul Virilio has called
deterrence the "last ideology" since the threat of nuclear retaliation
in kind as a means of insuring general peace and security is no longer
perceived as credible or realistic.)(n61) Hence, it should come as no
surprise that today the question of how power can be exercised is
articulated today, at least in the sphere of international relations, in
terms of disarmament rather than the endless multiplication of forces
which have lost their capacity to be used.(n62)
If the abstract formula of discipline is to impose a form of conduct on
a human multiplicity, the formula for deterrence is to dissuade through
the use of simulations of impending harm or risk (e.g., the scenario of
nuclear holocaust, environmental impact assessments, profiles of the
"typical" or potential criminal, disease carrier, etc.).(n63) Deterrence
is a technology of signs and information (though this does not exclude
its operation on bodies or species); of the reproduction of models
(which does not discount its effect on conduct). There are other
differences. Where discipline aims at certainty (Bentham's "inspection
house" was also a house of certainty), deterrent strategies aim at the
randomization of potential outcomes, the calculation of probabilities,
and the assessment of risks--certainty, even as an ideal, is ruled out
from the beginning. If discipline serves as a "corrective" for behavior--
i.e., to align conduct more closely to the norm--deterrence serves as a
disinclination to depart from a norm already embodied in action: it is
not, for example, the criminal who must be deterred, but the law-abiding
citizen. Where discipline sets forces in motion, deterrence indefinitely
postpones the equivalence of forces. Here again, the case of nuclear
deterrence serves as a paradigm, but this is only because it is the most
concentrated and extreme form of a whole multiplicity of tactical
maneuvers--of postponement, disinclination, destabilization, etc.--that,
like the disciplines in the 1 8th century, have evolved into a general
mechanism of domination, and which today pervades the most diverse
institutional settings.
There is no need to abandon Foucault's general analysis of power in all
this. It might appear, from the above distinctions, that discipline in
Foucault's sense connotes a certain "potency" of power, whereas
deterrence, insofar as it invokes the notion of parity in power
relations, means that power is thereby rendered impotent. But because
power for him is always an effect, or more accurately a multiplicity of
effects, and always an attempted answer to a situation in which the
exercise of power is problematic, Foucault has always consistently
maintained the void at the heart of all power, and particularly the
power to discipline:
Power is not omnipotent or omniscient--quite the contrary! If power
relationships have produced forms of investigation, of analysis, of
models of knowledge, etc., it is precisely not because the power was
omniscient, but because it was blind . . . If it is true that so many
power relationships have been developed, so many systems of control, so
many forms of surveillance, it is precisely because power was always
impotent.(n64)
Here Foucault offers the most profound clue for understanding not only
disciplinary societies, but deterrent societies as well. The status
afforded to deterrent techniques today--so many methods for the
manipulation of signs, of dissuasion, postponement, and disinclination--
perhaps arises from a similar impotence of power, an impotence reflected
in a contemporary way of life that resists postponing any outcome, and
that in seeking immediate results is disinclined toward nothing.
CONCLUSION
Discipline and deterrence do not exhaust the list of diagrammatic
possibilities for the exercise of power in contemporary, postmodern
societies. We have seen that Foucault, in invoking the concept of a
discipline, never intended that it be taken to describe the totality of
power relationships possible within given historical social field.
Foucault was not a philosopher or historian of totality, but of
localized events, of minor techniques for combining forces, creating
orders of rank, serializing time and compartmentalizing space. To this
we have suggested adding those techniques which serve to deter through
postponing the equivalence of forces, through the manipulation of images,
simulation and modeling, end the diverse strategies of dissuasion and
disinclination.
>From all the foregoing, it should be clear that the use of the concept
of a "disciplinary society," no less than the concept of a "deterrent
society," can serve only as general approximations or even fictions, and
given Foucault's commitment to the principle of the multiplicity of
power relations it is perhaps unfortunate that on occasion he chose to
speak in such global terms. I do think that if it is possible at all
today to articulate a general (or generalizable) formula for domination,
it would refer to both discipline and deterrence as mixed strategies,
and that all institutions, considered from the point of view of their
development, would exhibit characteristics of both to varying degrees.
To impose a form of conduct on a human multiplicity, and to postpone the
potential equivalence of forces: such might be a contemporary formula
for domination. At best, however, this would only be a minimal and
provisional formulation: the former, because nothing in principle
prohibits the coexistence of multiple diagrams of power, and the latter,
because a micro-level, genealogical description of deterrent practices
remains to be written.(n65)
In this sense, the foregoing analysis of deterrence has been overly
schematic and serves primarily to illustrate that the question of how
power can be exercised admits of multiple answers. But this is enough of
a gain to justify the effort expended on developing a somewhat
provisional formulation of the problem of deterrence. Once we can admit
that multiple diagrams of power are possible, and that each diagram
itself refers to multiple techniques which have the potential to escape
their specific institutional applications and circulate freely across
the social body, the analysis of power relations gains immeasurably in
terms of scope and flexibility. Here we owe much to Foucault for opening
so many new fields of investigation. At the same time, it is impossible
to underestimate the difficulty of describing concretely how micro-
relations of power emerge against the background of changes that are so
near to us historically; such a description is always, in some sense,
the work of the future. Here we encounter that form of blindness which
results from being enmired in the present, from the present always being
one step ahead of us, too close to permit us to grasp what might be
significant transformations in question of how power can be exercised.
NOTES
(n1.) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
(New York: Vintage, 1979). Hereafter referred to as DP. In this article,
I shall be looking at only a small fraction of that debate. The
literature on not only Discipline and Punish but all of Foucault's works
has grown tremendously over the last decade, and it is impossible to
summarize it here. I draw the reader's attention, however, to the
following writings which have some bearing on the present topic: Nancy
Fraser, "Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative
Confusions," Praxis International I (1981): 272--287, David Hoy (ed.),
Foucault: A Critical Reader (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Michael
Walzer, "The Politics of Michel Foucault," Dissent (1983), pp. 481--490;
Stephen David Ross, "Foucault's Radical Politics," Praxis International
5 (July 1985): 131--144, David Garland, Punishment and Welfare: a
History of Penal Strategies (Brookfield, Vermont: Gower, 1985); and
Michelle Perrot (ed.), L'impossible prison: Reserches sur le systeme
penitentiaire au XIX siecle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980). My
interest here is limited primarily to the reception of his remarks
regarding discipline in sociological and criminological circles and to
an evaluation of his position vis-a-vis recent criticisms raised by the
French social philosopher Jean Baudrillard.
(n2.) Throughout this article I shall use the terms "late modern society,
" "postmodern society," "contemporary society," "present-day society,"
etc., somewhat interchangeably as glosses for major social, political,
technological, and cultural transformations that have occurred in the
West since roughly the middle of the 20th century. I do not intend to
take part here in what I perceive to be an increasingly sterile debate
over whether or not we have entered a "postmodern" era. While not
without a certain critical value, such terms all too quickly become
conceptual blinders which restrict theoretical flexibility and divert
our attention from the real task of describing concrete social
relations.
(n3.) Cf. Stanley Cohen, "The Punitive City: Notes on the Dispersion of
Social Control," Contemporary Crisis 3 (1979): 339--363; Stanley Cohen,
Visions of Social Control (Cambridge: Policy Press, 1985); C. Shearing
and P. Stenning, "From the Panopticon to Disneyworld: The Development of
Discipline," Pp. 335--349 in Perspectives in Criminal Law, edidted by
Anthony N. Doob and Edward L. Greenspan (Aurora, Ontario: Canada Law
Book, Inc.).
(n4.) Cf. Anthony Bottoms, "Neglected Features of Contemporary Penal
Systems," Pp. 166202 in The Power to Punish: Contemporary Penality and
Social Analysis, edited by David Garland and Peter Young (New Jersey:
Humanities Press). Also in the same volume the essay by Thomas Mathiesen,
"The Future of Control Systems: The Case of Norway," Pp. 130--145.
(n5.) Cf. Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra," in
Simulations (New York: Semiotexte, 1983).
(n6.) Specifically, in Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1986). Much of what follows owes considerably to
Deleuze's excellent explication of Foucault's analysis of power in
Discipline and Punish and related works.
(n7.) DP, 138.
(n8.) And thus we might speak of a third sense of "multiplicity" we can
locate in Foucault, viz., the multiplicity of the object of discipline.
Cf. DP, p. 205; and Deleuze, p. 34.
(n9.) Ibid.
(n10.) DP, p. 205.
(n11.) Cf. Foucault's remarks regarding the Panoptic figure in
"Questions of Method: An Interview with Michel Foucault," Pp. 108--110
in After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, edited by Kenneth Baynes,
et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).
(n12.) Deleuze, Pp. 36ff.
(n13.) See his article "The Subject and Power" Pp. 219--226 in Michel
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert L.
Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
It is also instructive to note that in this same essay Foucault denies
that the aim of his later works was to develop the general foundations
of a theory of power.
(n14.) DP, Pp. 195ff.
(n15.) DP, p. 198
(n16.) Deleuze, pp. 35, 85. In other works, Foucault also speaks of a
"pastoral" mode of power in which subjects are compelled, once again in
multiple ways which coexist' with other technologies of power, to speak
the truth of their being.
(n17.) Cf. Foucault's remarks in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews
and Other Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 111; also in
"Questions of Method: An Interview with Michel Foucault," op. cit, p.
103.
(n18.) Cf. Foucault's remarks on this point in "The Question of Power,"
p. 190 in Focault: Live (New York: Semiotexte, 1989).
(n19.) Cohen, "The Punitive City: Notes on the Dispersion of Social
Control," and Visions of Social Control, op. cit.
(n20.) Cohen, "The Punitive City," op. cit., p. 346ff.
(n21.) DP, p. 264ff.
(n22.) DP, p. 211ff., 298ff.
(n23.) Bottoms, op. cit.
(n24.) Foucault, "What Calls for Punishment," p. 280 in Foucault Live
(New York: Semiotexte, 1989).
(n25.) Deleuze, op. cit., p. 26.
(n26.) DP, p. 293.
(n27.) DP, p. 228.
(n28.) DP, Pp. 305--306.
(n29.) DP, p. 271ff.
(n30.) Bottoms, op. cit., Pp. 161--173.
(n31.) Cohen, Visions of Social Control, op. cit.
(n32.) DP, Pp. 265--268.
(n33.) DP, Pp. 206--207; also in Deleuze, op. cit., p. 36.
(n34.) cf. Bottoms, op. cit., and Mathiesen, op. cit. Also Gary Marx,"
I'll Be Watching You: Reflections on the New Surveillance," Dissent 22
(1986): 26--34; Gary Marx, "The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove," in The
Social Fabric: Dimensions and Issues, edited by James F. Short, Jr.
(Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1986); Gary Marx and N. Reichman,
"Routinizing the Discovery of Secrets: Computers as Informants,"
American Behavioral Scientist 2 (1984); David Burnham, The Rise of the
Computer State (New York: Random House, 1983). Mathiesen suggests that
the extension of control to entire categories of persons represents a
significant departure from the use of disciplinary measures that
Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish. Marx and Burnham, on the
other hand, remain closer to Foucault's analysis but develop their
respective theses about the dispersion of social control in relation to
specific surveillant technologies rather than the more general problem
of discipline.
(n35.) Cf. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (New York:
Vintage, 1980). Hereafter referred to as HS.
(n36.) HS, p. 140.
(n37.) HS, Pp. 138--140. Also Deleuze, p. 72.
(n38.) HS, 139, 140.
(n39.) Deleuze, op. cit., p. 92.
(n40.) HS, op. cit., p. 139.
(n41.) DP, p. 199.
(n42.) DP, p. 200.
(n43.) DP, p. 201.
(n44.) Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra," op. cit., p.52.
(n45.) Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra," Pp. 53--55.
(n46.) Cf. Deleuze's remarks in Foucault, p.42.
(n47.) It is relevant in this context to note that Foucault himself
denounced the subtitle of his earlier work, The Birth of the Clinic: An
Archaeology of the Gaze. This was not because Foucault thought the
problem of making something visible to the gaze--of supervising and
scrutinizing--was unimportant, but rather that in this book it was given
too much emphasis at the expense of an analysis of discursive systems
and the part they play in social control. Cf. Deleuze on this, op. cit.,
p. 49f.
(n48.) Cf. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 43.
(n49.) Baudrillard, op. cit., p. 53. We should note that Baudrillard
does not confine his discussion of simulation to the electronic media.
Television is rather only the most ready example of this process.
Throughout his later works, he provides a number of interesting and
illuminating examples of the implosion of "real" events or spaces into
simulated modds--wilderness and game preserves, amusement parks, museum
exhibits, archaeological sites, advertisements, even whole cities--
examples intended to show modern man's fascination and seduction by
"signs of the real" and by the images and models which have, by their
very reproducibility, become more real than the real itself.
(n50.) Baudrillard, "Forget Foucault", op. cit.
(n51.) Cf. Foucault, "The Question of Power," op. cit., 185--187.
(n52.) Although a discussion of Baudrillard's concept of "seduction" is
beyond the scope of the present essay, cf. his book Seduction (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1990). esp. Pp. 45--49.
(n53.) Foucault, "The Question of Power," op. cit. 186, 187.
(n54.) Given his position on the end of power, Baudrillard hesitates to
call deterrence a strategy or form of domination. Cf. Simulations, p.60.
(n55.) David Garland, Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal
Strategies (Brookfield, Vermont: Gower, 1985), Pp. 16--17.
(n56.) DP, 94, 104ff.
(n57.) Some of this work is already being done, although the majority of
it to date has been confined to institutional forms of analysis. In
particular cf. Gary Marx, Undercover: Police Surveillance in America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); James R. Beniger, The
Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the
Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986);
and David Burnham, op. cit., The Rise of the Computer State.
(n58.) HS, p. 140.
(n59.) HS, p. 143. (n60.) Baudrillard would claim that today this
distinction is rapidly becoming impossible to make. Certainly the
contemporary practice of deterrence has become so infused with the
language of game-theoretic dilemmas, simulated decision-making, and
scenarios of risk that the differences between the model and the reality
of deterrence are increasing difficult to specify. Nevertheless, I feel
the distinction is still useful on the material level, not necessarily
as a point of critique, but rather to draw attention to the fact that
deterrence at least for the present still operates by a method which
runs counter to its stated logic.
(n61.) Paul Virilio, Pure War (New York: Semiotexte, 1983) p. 56.
(n62.) Cf. Baudrillard, Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), Pp. 190--191.
(n63.) Traffic police in Florida, over the last few years, have begun to
routinely use computer generated profiles of drug dealers to stop,
search, and detain travellers using the major Interstate highway in that
state. Arrest statistics provide the data for these profiles, forming
composites of the "typical" drug dealer's car, race, age, gender,
companions, etc. Profiling and matching systems are not only becoming
routine investigative tools in the criminal justice system. Their use is
common in targeting consumers, tax evaders, welfare cheats, health risks,
etc., and with the development desktop computers, it has become a
relatively easy matter, despite many attempts at regulation, to share
information gathered by formerly separate public and private
organizations to create even more comprehensive profiling and matching
systems. All these developments "deter" in the general sense suggested
above, i.e., they insure against a potential equivalence of forces (of
private citizens and police, disease and its treatment, etc.). At
present, we lack a comprehensive and detailed historical description of
the origins of these deterrent practices. For information on the current
situation, however, one should read the works by David Burnham and Gary
Marx noted above. Cf. also K. Laudon, Dossier Society: Value Choices in
the Design of National Information Systems (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986); J. Shattuck, "In the Shadow of 1984: National
Identification Systems, Computer Matching, and Privacy in the United
States," Hastings Law Journal (July 1984), Pp. 991--1005; Office of
Technology Assessment, Federal Government Information Technology:
Electronic Surveillance and Civil Liberties (Washington, DC: GPO, 1985);
Office of Technology Assessment, The Electronic Supervisor: New
Technology, New Tensions (Washington, DC: GPO, 1987). For more
philosophical or literary impressions of deterrence and surveillance,
cf. Peter Sloterdijk, The Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), esp. p. 329 ff.; Friedrich
Durrenmatt, The Assignment: Or, On the Observing of the Observer of the
Observers (New York: Random House, 1988); Guy Debord, The Society of the
Spectacle (Detroit: Black and White Press, 1983).
(n64.) Foucault, "The Question of Power," op. cit., Pp. 183--184. I
think this quote illustrates just how close Foucault is to precisely the
kinds of positions Baudrillard himself espouses, despite the latter's
attempted criticisms of him.
(n65.) Although Baudrillard's work contains a number of examples to
indicate what such a description might involve.
[*] Direct all correspondence to: William Bogard, Department of
Sociology, Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA 99362. Telephone: (509) 527-
5122
~~~~~~~~
By WILLIAM BOGARD[*], Whitman College
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Source: Social Science Journal, 1991, Vol. 28 Issue 3, p325, 22p.
Item Number: 9609036763
