Reading/Thinking Foucault; The ‘new’ body of the condemned

by Matt Dewey

It is sometimes difficult to read Foucault, after reading so many references to his work in the course of a social science education, and not immediately search somewhere in his books, within some strange sentence or agitating prose, an answer to his most blinding contradiction... “How can he both universalize the domination of subjectless power and still leave space for the empowerment of marginalized voices? How can, or why would, subjects which are the effects of power also subvert it (Haber, H., Beyond postmodern politics, 1994, pg. 97-98)? This problematic has be reified and reified to the point of becoming academically passé in its treatment, merely skipped over in progressive arguments of social reconstruction (as in the case of media reform) and identity politics in order to validate new forms of intellectual, social, and political domination...

...this is unfortunate- that Foucauldian arguments get only so far until we loose a vocabulary to speak about emancipation, and that it is this ‘brain worm’ that arrests my reading of Foucault (is this because of a power relation?); there are other important ideas... his critical approach of ‘genealogy’ or tracing the development of ideas and meaning we’ve historically accepted as self evident, for instance that ‘the idea of a ‘truth’ that exists outside cultural production, which we now accept as invalid, resonates in contemporary human studies...

In the first chapter of Discipline and Punishment, we are introduced to the relationship the body has with history, or more specifically modes of production, and in turn, how that relationship has affected the justifications for the types of punishments administered to those deemed criminals:

“...the penitentiary, forced labour and the prison factory appear with the development of the mercantile economy. But the industrial system requires a free market in labour... the role of forced labour in the mechanisms of punishment diminishes accordingly and ‘corrective’ detention takes its place (pg. 25)”.

...here it seems also worth mentioning that the types of ‘acts’ considered or defined as ‘criminal’ get there justification as well from certain modes and rationalizations of production and accumulation...The illegal and therefore untaxable drug trade and its overwhelming race and class representations in US prisons may be one example...

Foucault then on pg. 26, refers again to the significance of ‘modes of production’ and the idea of the body by stating; ‘the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body’. This seems to be reminiscent of post colonial studies in that colonial power is at its most powerful when it no longer needs to show or articulate a sense of force or violence on those it subjugates; hegemonically they self regulate. It is here that Foucault begins to articulate the ‘all encompassing’ or ‘ubiquitous’ nature of power by characterizing it as a function of an entire network of social relations and institutions (a micro-physics of power, pg 26)

“...this power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who, ‘do not have it’; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them; it exerts pressure upon them, just as they themselves, in their struggle against it, resist the grip it has on them. This means that these relations go right down into the depths of society...” (pg. 27).

... Foucault also says that power is ‘exercised rather than possessed’, not a ‘privilege, acquired or preserved...but the overall effect of strategic positions (pg 26) and as much as this maybe accurate in some instances it does not seem to take into account that theses strategic positions are exclusive in many respects to members of elite socio-economic classes. Preservation of power and status and the acquisition of more of both, in many instances constitute the political and economic agendas of this class, however consciously or unconsciously callous or apparent the deliberation is. In this ‘ubiquitousness’ of Foucault’s power it seems important to contrast this idea with the way in which, for instance, ‘modes of production’ and ownership are physically organized- typically in the modern age, in top-down hierarchies. It seems as well that within such organizations, or maybe within different social organizational contexts all together, power is not so inconspicuously manipulative but overtly and visibly modulating (Galloway, A.,’ The Exploit’, 2007). In other words, maybe there isn’t an implicit, all encompassing ‘force’ acting through us and upon us in order to get us to behave certain ways, but a political-economic system that simply and overtly takes and rewards where it most benefits its reproduction (this seems to make just as much sense given Foucault’s suggestions of a ‘subjectless power’ and postmodernism attempts to decentralize the subject also). As well, Cornell West has explained in many places that there are certain realities or truths (power relations) that black people in America cannot deny or suggest exist merely in ‘strategic positions’; the power of racism does not necessarily need such ‘strategic positions’ in order to control, exclude, train and oppress. I can’t help but think that just as the ‘specters’ of ‘big brother’ are personified and exercised in the everyday operations of social relations, that it is equally shadowy to assume, with events such as the War on Terror or the Patriot Act, that there isn’t such a controlling entity, exclusive, subjective and with calculated affectations of power...

On the bottom of page 27 Foucault suggests his most grand theory, one that he will outline in the years to come more specifically in a book of writings entitled, Power/Knowledge. The relation ship between power and knowledge for Foucault is that one ‘directly implies’ the other:

…that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations (pg27).

…This quote along with a similar one that continues on pg. 28, seem to perfectly describe the college experience, and in particular to my major, the prevalence of certain types of communication study. Along these lines, the idea power itself seems to imply a type of control, whether manipulative or modulating, of social processes; in effect, a control, either physically or ‘psychically’, over the behaviors of others. In order to thwart potential revolution by the masses it is important to legitimize the control and this legitimization becomes the logic and forms of institutions (Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, 1975). The imprint of these institutions of ‘civil training’, the sight, place, or ‘element’ where it affects us it characterized by Foucault as the ‘soul’ (pg29), or he adds, the ‘psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, etc.’ If this is true, then we are simply unable to rescue ourselves…and this is, I think, the new form of prison Foucault is talking about; one without walls or guards, and no hope to escape and we are the new bodies of the condemned...