Foucault, Discipline and Punish
I’d like discuss the issue of agency in Discipline and Punish.
The reaction of my Historiography class, which I gladly re-read this book for, was somewhat mixed. One student argued that “Foucault dismisses personal responsibility and the willful choice of an individual to commit a crime.” Meanwhile, another argued that Foucault’s departure from Marxism “is evidenced by assigning a sense of free will to the individuals discussed…”
This isn’t a new debate. Since his rise to academic prominence in the US, at least, people have been debating whether Foucault presents a view of people trapped in multivalent matrices of power that leave them with little or no agency or choice, or if his work represents a radical imbuing of power to all, even those traditionally considered to be powerless in society.
Is this a view of a world where we are constantly being disciplined, punished, and robbed of choices, or is it one where the subaltern can not only speak, but act? Personally, I fall into the latter camp. I’m going to try to explain why here.
The key to this view, to me, is Foucault’s construction of power. He describes power as a “perpetual battle,” as a thing “…exercised rather than possessed, , it is not the ‘privilege’, acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions- an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the positions of those who are dominated.” (26-27)
The traditional concept of power coming from the top down, embodied physically in the figure of the king, with what Foucault repeatedly describes as his “super-power,”* (e.g., 57) is out the window. Where popular notions of power had been forces like Newtonian gravity, Foucault’s power is like quantum physics—unpredictable, unstable, constantly shifting, everywhere, and appearing in quantities too small to see. Foucault discusses “infra-penalty” and “infra-politics,” (pgs 214 & 222) concepts that, along with his concept of power, likely are the main source for Robin Kelley’s concept of infra-politics—political acts on a small scale taken up by the supposedly powerless.
It may be easier to take an optimistic view of power when looking at the “bad old days” of torture, when you’re looking at this book. Foucault almost puts the criminal and the king on equal footing (47-48) in his argument that the criminal’s power to break the law is a direct affront to the power of the king, whose will is law. It’s harder to see this sort of power at work later in the book, with the advent of modern penal reform. Part of this is probably a result of having to spend a lot more time inside prisons, after punishment ceased being a public spectacle and became a cloistered, private affair between the state and the body—or the soul—of the individual subject.
Yet even under the régime of panopticism, there is hope in Foucault’s construction of power. Think of it this way: the utility of the panopticon is based on its efficiency—the uncertainty of whether one is being watched leads to an internalization of discipline, and thus to the disciplining of one’s self. As this technology increased, it spread out, became more generalized, and became a prevalent method of social control.
But the beauty part of this is, most of the time, we are policing ourselves. We discipline ourselves. This means that within the modern world of discipline and biopower, if one feels denied the opportunity to exercise ones agency, all one really needs—most of the time—is the strength and the courage to stop doing the work of the warden for him, and go out and do what you want.
Because Foucault is essentially a Neitzchian. That’s why he writes genealogies rather than histories or metaphysics.
Of course, it’s also why Chomsky dismissed him as “amoral” after their televised debate, but I’ve just opened a couple cans of worms I don’t have the time or space to close right now.
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*I don’t have the book in French, but I have a suspicion that this term is a translation of puissance supérieure—a phrase that gives a sense, again, of top-down-ness. Just a thought, really.
Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
Braudel’s first volume of “The Mediterranean” is a great work of
scholarship. It certainly displays a great mastery of a variety of
topics, a knowledge that is notable in both its depth and breadth. It’s
also a logical inclusion in the syllabus of an historiography class, as
Braudel is fundamentally attempting to shift the focus of what had been
previously considered historical thought—a trend that would only proliferate in the next
half-century, ending in the current state of affairs, where the
sub-disciplines of History are so numerous and compartmentalized that
sometimes it seems they can hardly recognize one another.
Braudel attempts to refocus the discipline, which he seems to see as
overly focused on the political, military, and biographical. His
response is to produce a work that moves from the socio-geographic to
the socio-economic and demographic. It’s definitely well-written,
well-researched, and full of those curious tidbits that keep a reader
interested when reading a rather dry history text.
While my attention
wandered at times, I found the book intensely interesting at others.
One thing that particularly grabbed my interest was the section on mail
and couriers on pages 355-371, as it seemed to give a much deeper
background to something I found interesting in Habermas’s “Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere,” but which Habermas unfortunately
glossed over in a matter of a few paragraphs.
Another was his repeated
use, in his socio-geographic description of the mountain ranges of the
Mediterranean, of the word “civilization.” Unlike Prescott a hundred
years earlier, Braudel seems to use the word in a very value-neutral
sense, as a complex that includes both positive features like improved
quality of life, refinements, etc., but also features negative
qualities, such as greater and more widespread despotism, heightened
class disparity, corruption of the clergy, etc. It seemed a very modern,
progressive view.
All of this aside, however, I had an overall negative response to the
book. It seemed to me that Braudel was over-reaching with this work—he
created a book with an impossible scope, and thus inevitably, the result
is mixed at best. To attempt a history of such a large area is a very
difficult task, and to do so through multiple lenses, without a single
unifying grand narrative or theoretical structure, seems downright
foolhardy. The result is a book that is meandering, at time confusing,
and desultory in its organization and evidence.
While it may or may not
have been the author’s decision, not indexing the first volume within
the first volume seems to me to be a horrible decision, one that reduces
the use of the book as a reference, while the complaints I’ve listed
above make it highly unlikely I’ll ever decide to re-read the book at
leisure.
That said, as someone who is very interested in historical cultural
geography, the book fascinated me, as it seems to represent just that,
in its nascent state, before the birth of cultural theory and cultural
history.
W. H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico
This book, while it is certainly limited by Prescott’s particular time,
place, worldview, etc. must also be admitted
to be quite amazing, if only for its perniciousness.
I was talking
about my homework with one of my roommates, and when I said that I was
reading an eighteenth century account of the conquest of Mexico, he
immediately responded, “Oh, so you must be reading Prescott!” It turns
out he read the book in Spanish when he was in university in Argentina.
He said Prescott is quite well-known throughout South America, and is
actually quite celebrated in Peru, the conquest of which is the subject
of another of his books.
Not bad for a half-blind man who never left Boston while writing about
South American history over 150 years ago.
Prescott’s biases are pretty obvious, and pretty strong. He's definitely working within his century's racial logic, with his construction of
“civilization” as a tiered structure, where, for example the Aztecs rate
above North American Indians, but below the Chinese, who in turn are
lower than Western culture.
But there’s something that several of my classmates said or intimated that I
don’t completely agree with—or at least that I see as an
oversimplification. While Prescott is obviously a little too forgiving
of Spanish transgressions against Native peoples, and a little too
dismissive of the sophistication of Native cultures, I think it’s
problematic to say that he’s not damning of the Spanish at times.
Honestly, I think that Prescott is fairly cynical about a lot of Spanish
activities in the conquest, especially taking into account his time. His
interpretation of Spanish conversions of the Indians, for example. He’s
not willing to forgive some transgressions that others may have.
Given his time and place, Prescott was bound to have lived around a
decent amount of anti-Catholic bias, and this seems to have rubbed off
on his interpretation of some Spanish activities.
I’d wager that the
book might be even more damning of the Spanish if it had been published
five or ten years later, after the influx of Irish immigrants into
Boston. Keep in mind that Prescott’s grandfather, given his age and
class, likely would have participated in Guy Fawkes day in Boston as a
young man, with its burning of effigies of the Pope and the Devil.
If anything, Prescott is forgiving of the Spanish, not because of an
affinity or like-mindedness, but because he sees among them a few “great
men,” of the sort believed to be the makers of history in that time.
Cortez is certainly one of them, by Prescott’s estimation. Queen
Isabella seems to be another—the expulsion of 1492 being glossed over in
a single sentence. (p. 157) He briefly comments on the barbarism of the
early years of the Inquisition, but the final effect, the expulsion,
gets a gloss.
Contrasting his portrayal of Cortez throughout the book with that of Las
Casas at the end of Book 2 is a good way to see the bias toward “great
men” with epic stories. Cortez is almost something out of a Greek myth,
or a superhero. While he was admirable, however, “Las Casas, in short,
was a man.”(275-276.)
Confessions of a Logocentrist
Having read Staley's Computers, Visualization, and History: How New Technology Will Transform Our Understanding of the Past
I have to say, I always thought I was a pretty visual person. I'm a cartoonist by avocation. I diagram and sketch every paper before I begin to write it. I'm a product of the "MTV Generation,"1 which according to Staley, is much more visually than textually oriented. Moreover, my main historical interests are visual: visual culture, history of media, cultural geography. I rely in my research on a multitude of visual primary sources. I have been known to incorporate maps, lithographs, and photos into a number of my paper, interspersed with letters, news items, etc.
Yet on almost every page of this book, I found myself saying "no" to the author at least once. I patently reject much of what's being said. I don't think it would be progress for professors to begin accepting collages as historical research, rather than papers.
Let me backtrack a bit and also say that I wanted to like this book. I really, really did. I don't come to this program with a background in History: I began with literary theory, which took me to cultural theory, which took me to cultural history. I was delighted to be reading a book that actually engages with works I've read and enjoyed-- Stephen Pinker, Douglas Hofstadter, Barthes, Foucault, hints at Derrida and even Saussure. (I actually listed all these authors in the bibliography of my senior thesis, years ago...)
I should be in my element with this book-- a nice change from my constant intimidation in the face of History, with all it's secrets of historiography and "thinking like an historian." He talks about the impact of technology on the potential capabilities of maps-- a concept that delights and excites me. And yet I found myself arguing with the author at every turn, digging my heels in, refusing to accept his most basic premises.
I have lots of piddling little arguments with the book-- as I mentioned before, probably at least one per page. But I'll just go into my two biggest issues here.
First, I simply cannot accept that visualizations can be employed in a manner that uses the same depth of analysis that prose can. I may be mistaken-- I'm new to this, as I said-- but I was under the impression that the discipline of History was about the interpretation of past events, not simply about churning data relevant to past events. Interpreting the past inherently means dealing with contingency, inchoate data, and abstraction. This is precisely the kind of stuff that words do better than images. Images concretize and give the illusion of forming complete wholes. Language is constituted of slippage, double meanings, uncertainties-- it is simply better for addressing questions that cannot be answered, but deserve to be asked.
This kind of leads to my second main objection. I don't buy his whole notion that visualizations can show simultaneity better than prose. The simple fact is, the human brain isn't very good at comprehending simultaneity. Most people can't even look at a grouping of like objects and immediately perceive the number when there are more than five objects in the field. Look at those stupid commercials for Vonage. You can't actually watch the person in the foreground because your eyes are drawn to the person in the background. Of course, the person in the background is doing something distracting, so there's that. But try reading Derrida's Glas, or listening to The Velvet Underground's "The Murder Mystery". The human brain focuses on one item at a time. Even Staley's example of the triangle, circle, and square of varying sizes, labeled A, B, and C, cannot be comprehended in a single glance, simultaneously. Rather, the eye reads it from left to right, just as when reading text, and takes in one item at a time.
While Staley insists that prose is "one dimensional," I don't buy it. While you cannot read more than one word at a time, the mind moves around within the sentence, the paragraph, and the book or article as a whole while in the process. The method of input may be one-dimensional, but the experience is certainly multidimensional. An active reader will flip back and forth through a book when engaged, double-checking things, re-reading passages that have suddenly become relevant or suspect. If I am right in my assumption that visualizations won't be useful unless "read" as a sum of individual parts, how is this so different?
Don't get me wrong-- I'll keep using maps and pictures in my work. I'd love to be able to develop an interactive map of, say Boston Common. But I don't think that any such map could replicate or surpass the level of analysis that can be conveyed in writing. It's still supplemental to me.
There's lessons to be taken from the book, and things to think about. But overall, I think that Staley, who describes himself as a "futurist" in his about-the-author section, is too given to the hyperbole and pie-in-the-sky optimism of tech-boomers.
Maybe that's the most surprising thing of all-- that the book was published, not in the midst of the speculative and naive technology boom of the late nineties, but in 2003, long after that bubble burst.
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1I was two years old when MTV went on the air. I'm as MTV Generation as they come. As a sidenote, if the MTV generation is so anti-reading, as we've been hearing ever since that term was coined (probably when I was four), why does MTV now have its own book imprint?