by Gary Gutting
But if madness has been silenced, how has Foucault become, as he so obviously is, fascinated by its voice? From the only way in which madness has manifested itself since the end of the 18th century: ‘in the lightning-flash of works such as those of Hölderlin, of Nerval, of Nietzsche, or of Artaud’ (MC, 278), the great mad artists of the last two centuries. We have already noted the connection between the theme of mad artists and Foucault’s interest in avant-garde art. In both cases, his idea is that probing the limits of reason will reveal truths that are not rationally accessible.
This idea reflects a tension that pervades The History of Madness and erupts especially at the beginning and the end. In his preface (dropped in the second edition) and in his conclusion, Foucault suggests that his is a history ‘of madness’ in the sense of a subjective, not an objective genitive; that, in other words, he is somehow writing from the standpoint of the mad themselves, not just showing how the mad have been perceived by the sane. In fact, the six hundred pages between the preface and the conclusion deal almost exclusively with the latter perception. But we should not let this quantitative imbalance obscure the fact that ‘madness in itself’ is a central presence in this book.
Foucault insists on this presence because, at this stage, he is writing in opposition to the Enlightenment. Like Horkheimer and Adorno (in their Dialectic of Enlightenment some 20 years earlier), he has realized that the reason that was supposed to liberate us has itself become the primary instrument of our domination. The violent sarcasm of his rhetoric is a direct assault on the pretensions of reason, and his heroization of the mad aims to set up an alternative to the regime of reason. This alternative is the irrationally transgressive experience lived by the mad and evoked in the works of mad artists.
The problem with this move is the inadequacy of the ‘experience’ to which it appeals. As Foucault himself put it in a brief self-critique at the beginning of The Archaeology of Knowledge: ‘Generally speaking, [The History of Madness] accorded far too great a place, and a very enigmatic one too, to what I called an “experience”, thus showing to what extent one was still close to admitting an anonymous and general subject of experience’ (AK, 16, translation modified). As I see it – without pretending to say this is just what Foucault had in mind – the inadequacy is at least three-fold. First, there is the core truth of Kantianism: an experience, simply to be an experience, must have an object that it encounters as part of a world in which the object has a specific intelligibility. As a result, there is no coherent sense to an experience that is not informed by conceptual structures that define a space of reasons and hence norms of rationality. Second, the experience allegedly lived by the mad would be an ahistorical constant, passed on unchanged from period to period, unaffected by the forces that transform the human world. Foucault’s strongly historical understanding has no place for such an autonomous experience. Finally, even if, contrary to the first two points, such an experience is possible, its radically amorphous, merely transgressive nature makes it entirely inadequate as a basis for the sort of specific political actions needed for effective opposition to systems of domination. Successful action requires a specific programme that cannot be grounded in the unstructured explosion of madness. A revolution requires controlled demolition-work, not random lightning flashes.
Foucault may have never entirely freed himself from his fascination with this arational experience. But he did eventually realize that it was not a meaningful alternative to Enlightenment reason. This shows up in his rejection of ‘the blackmail of the Enlightenment’ (‘What Is Enlightenment?’, EW III, 312), which he understands as the insistence that ‘one has to be “for” or “against” the Enlightenment’ (EW III, 313). Here he now sees that ‘the Enlightenment’ is ‘a set of political, economic, social, institutional, and cultural events on which we still depend in large part’ and that, as a result, ‘constitutes a privileged domain for analysis’ (EW III, 312). Viewed this way, the Enlightenment is like the air we breathe – an integral part of our existence that is too close to be an object of our choice, for or against. We can and must, instead, engage with it through ‘a series of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible’ (EW III, 313). Reason is part of what we are, although a part that requires constant analysis and adjustment. But there is no sense to the global challenge to reason that Foucault envisaged in his History of Madness.
The romance of a ‘voice’ of the mad can still have a role in our grappling with reason, but only as a generic reminder that we should never be entirely satisfied with our current deployment of reason. Just as the concept of truth serves as a caution that even claims we have ‘justified to the hilt’ might turn out to be false, so the idea of madness serves as a caution that what we currently regard as rational may someday turn out to be irrational. But for the later Foucault this entirely general caution has no specific significance in our wrestling with the reason that the Enlightenment has made part of our historical fate.
In the essay on Canguilhem mentioned in the last chapter, Foucault developed a new concept that provides the specificity that the experience of the mad lacks. This is the notion of ‘error’, understood as a particular deviation from the norms of our epistemic environment. Although errors have typically been regarded as simply negative – as failures to reach the truth – Foucault notes that this is so only relative to a particular conceptualization of reality. From a broader perspective, what is an error in one framework of knowledge may turn out to be the seminal truth in developing a new framework of knowledge. For example, Copernicus’s thought that the Earth moves around the Sun is an error in the purely negative sense in the world of Aristotelian and Ptolemaic astronomy. But it becomes the basis for the new astronomy of the 17th century. In this way, knowledge must itself be understood as a form of error.
This idea of knowledge-as-error is a specific and effective counterpart to Foucault’s earlier embrace of the transgressive experiences of the mad (and, more generally, of avant-garde art). Error is itself a kind of transgression, a violation of the boundaries set by our conceptual environment. It is a localized and mundane version of the cosmic lightning flashes of madness. But what error lacks in metaphysical drama is more than compensated by its historical effectiveness. Precisely because it represents a specific deviation from particular norms, rather than a unfocused revolt against the very idea of normativity, error effects a practical change of the world we live in, not an aesthetic escape from it. In the end, Foucault subordinates the ecstasy of madness to the ironic satisfaction of (creative) error.
Chapter 8
Crime and punishment
The power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.
On 5 January 1757, Robert Damiens, 42 years old and a former soldier in the French army, rushed up to Louis XV with a knife and inflicted a light wound. He surrendered without a struggle and claimed that he had only intended to frighten, not kill, the king. Nonetheless, he was found guilty of regicide (indeed, parricide, since the king was the father of his people) and executed less than two months later. The execution was public, with a large crowd attending, and spectacularly brutal. Foucault opens Discipline and Punish with excruciating details, taken from eyewitness accounts, of how Damiens was drawn and quartered. Without stopping to comment on the horrifying text, he abruptly switches to another document, from 1837, just 80 years later, which states the rules for a detention centre for young offenders in Paris: ‘The prisoner’s day will begin at six in the morning in winter and five in the summer. They will work for nine hours a day throughout the year. Two hours a day will be devoted to instruction. Work and the day will end at nine o’clock in winter and at eight in the summer’ (cited in DP, 6). After citing this and 11 similar rules, Foucault finally ventures a comment: ‘We have, then, a public execution and a time-table’ (DP, 7).
Two exemplary modes of punishment: the first occurred late enough in the Enlightenment to attract considerable criticism, but it typified the pu
nishment of criminals in Europe until about the middle of the 18th century; the second represented the new, ‘gentler’ way of punishment, the product, it would seem, of a more civilized, more humane approach to punishment. On Foucault’s account, this second stage eventually led to the full-blown modern system of what he calls ‘discipline’.
Is the new idea – roughly, to imprison rather than to torture – the enlightened, progressive development it thinks it is? Foucault has his doubts, suggesting that the point was ‘not to punish less, but to punish better’ (DP, 82).
He begins by outlining the contrasts between modern and premodern approaches. There are four major transitions:
(1) punishment is no longer a public display, a spectacular demonstration to all of the sovereign’s irresistible force majeure, but rather a discrete, almost embarrassed application of constraints needed to preserve public order.
(2) What is punished is no longer the crime but the criminal, the concern of the law being not so much what criminals have done as what (environment, heredity, parental actions) has led them to do it.
(3) Those who determine the precise nature and duration of the punishment are no longer the judges who impose penalties in conformity with the law, but the ‘experts’ (psychiatrists, social workers, parole boards) who decide how to implement indeterminate judicial sentences.
(4) The avowed purpose of punishment is no longer retribution (either to deter others or for the sake of pure justice) but the reform and rehabilitation of the criminal.
Foucault does not deny that no longer ripping criminals apart is an advance. But the darker converse of the ‘gentler’ way is its penchant for total control. On one level, this is signalled by a switch from brutal, but unfocused, physical punishment to less painful but more intrusive psychological control. Premodern punishment violently assaults the criminal body, but is satisfied with retribution through pain; modern punishment demands an inner transformation, a conversion of the heart to a new way of life. But this modern control of the soul is itself a means to a more subtle and pervasive control of the body, since the point of changing psychological attitudes and tendencies is to control bodily behaviour. As Foucault puts it, for the modern age, ‘the soul is the prison of the body’ (DP, 30).
The most striking thesis of Discipline and Punish is that the disciplinary techniques introduced for criminals become the model for other modern sites of control (schools, hospitals, factories, etc.), so that prison discipline pervades all of modern society. We live, Foucault says, in a ‘carceral archipelago’ (DP, 298).
So, for example, the distinctive features of modern disciplinary control are apparent in the new approach to military training, the training designed to make ordinary people willing and able to kill the enemy. Premodern training centred on finding good material to begin with: men who had strength, good bearing, natural courage, etc. and then motivating them in a general way through pride and fear. But modern soldiers are produced through intense and specialized training, even if they are not initially especially fit. Boot camp ‘makes’ you a soldier. It’s not a matter of the natural attractiveness of a model or an actor; the point is not to look like a soldier but to actually be a soldier – something that requires systematic training.
Disciplinary training is distinctive first because it operates not by direct control of the body as a whole but by detailed control of specific parts of the body. To teach soldiers to care for and shoot a rifle, we break the process down into an ordered succession of precise steps. It’s not just a matter of showing them the entire operation and saying ‘Do it like this.’ The focus is not merely on the results to be achieved, of seeing that, one way or another, the soldier does what we desire. The point is rather to achieve the results through a specific set of procedures. We don’t just want you to shoot the gun at the enemy; we want you to hold it just this way, raise it to your shoulder this way, sight down the barrel this way, pull the trigger this way. In short, it’s a matter of micro-management. Foucault sums up the modern approach to discipline by saying that it aims at producing ‘docile bodies’: bodies that not only do what we want but do it precisely in the way that we want (DP, 138).
Docile bodies are produced through three distinctively modern means. Hierarchical observation is based on the obvious fact that we can control what people do merely by observing them. The watchtowers along city walls are a classic example. But modern power has raised the technique to a new level. Previously, architecture was an expression of the privileged status of those in power, either to display their magnificence (‘the ostentation of palaces’) or to give them a vantage point to overlook their subjects or enemies (‘the geometry of fortresses’) (DP, 172). But modern architecture builds structures that fulfill the functional needs of ordinary people and at the same time ‘render visible those who are inside’. So, for example, the tiered rows of seats in a lecture hall, or well-lit classrooms with large windows and wide aisles, not only facilitate learning; they also make it extremely easy for teachers to see what everyone is doing. Similar techniques are at work in hospital rooms, military barracks, and factory work floors, all examples of ‘an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, … to make it possible to know them, to alter them’ (DP, 172).
11. Panoptic prison design, Illinois State Penitentiary, 1954
For Foucault, the ideal architectural form of modern disciplinary power is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a proposal for maximizing control of prisoners with a minimal staff. Although prisons approximating the Panopticon were not built until the 20th century, its principle has come to pervade modern society. In the Panopticon each inmate is in a separate cell, separated from and invisible to all the others. Further, the cells are distributed in a circle around a central tower from which a monitor can look into any cell at any given time. The principle of control is not the fact but the possibility of observation. The monitor will actually look into a given cell only occasionally. But the inmates have no way of knowing when these occasions will arise and so must always assume that they are being observed. The result is that we ‘induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’ (DP, 201).
A second distinctive feature of modern disciplinary control is its concern with normalizing judgment. Individuals are judged not by the intrinsic rightness or wrongness of their acts but by where their actions place them on a ranked scale that compares them to everyone else. Children must not simply learn to read but must be in the 50th percentile of their reading group. A restaurant must not merely provide good food but be one of the top ten establishments in the city. This idea of normalization is pervasive in our society. On the official level, we set national standards for educational programmes, for medical practice, for industrial processes and products; less formally, we have an obsession with lists that rank-order everything from tourists sites, to our body weights, to levels of sexual activity.
Normalizing judgment is a peculiarly pervasive means of control. There is no escaping it because, for virtually any level of achievement, the scale shows that there is an even higher level possible. Further, norms define certain modes of behaviour as ‘abnormal’, which puts them beyond the pale of what is socially (or even humanly) acceptable, even if they are far from the blatant transgressions that called for the excessive violence of premodern power. The threat of being judged abnormal constrains us moderns at every turn.
12. Foucault with actors during the filming of Moi, Pierre Riviere
Finally, the examination combines hierarchical observation with normative judgment. It is, Foucault says, ‘a normalizing gaze [that] establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them’. The examination is a prime locus of modern power/knowledge, since it combines into a unified whole ‘the deployment of force and the establishment of truth’ (DP, 184). It both elicits the truth about those (patients, students, j
ob candidates) who undergo the examination and, through the norms it sets, controls their behaviour.
The examination also reveals the new position of the individual in the modern nexus of power/knowledge. It situates individuals in a ‘network of writing’ (DP, 189). The results of examinations are recorded in documents that provide detailed information about the individuals examined and allow power systems to control them (for example absentee records for schools, patients’ charts in hospitals). On the basis of these records, those in control can formulate categories, averages, and norms that are in turn a basis for knowledge. The examination turns the individual into a ‘case’ – in both senses of the term: a scientific example and an object of care (and, of course, for Foucault, caring implies controlling). This process also reverses the polarity of visibility. In the premodern period, the exercise of power was itself typically highly visible (military presence in towns, public executions), while those who were the objects of knowledge remained obscure. But in the modern age the exercise of power is typically invisible, but it controls its objects by making them highly visible. And the highest visibility now belongs to those (criminals, the mad), whose thick dossiers are maintained and scrutinized by armies of anonymous and invisible functionaries.