But I am exploring Foucault as he relates to my understanding of military history. What came through most in my writing on this stuff was my lack of historical knowledge. I just don't know enough about history to be able to write comfortably on this stuff. So here is the whole table of contents, and then just chapter 1. More to come.
Part I: Society’s Implicit War from Monarchy to Republic Republic
1. Society's Implicit War: From Managing to Disguising Civilization's Necessary Violence
Monarchical Violence as War
a. The Original Purpose of Standing Armies
b. Torture and the Monarch’s War Against Domestic 'Enemy Troops'
The Shortcomings of Monarchical Violence
c. The Unpredictability of Physical Violence
d. Capitalism and the Need for a New Political Economy
Prisons as Explicit War
e. Discipline as Emerging From Military Institutions
f. Discipline and Prisons in the Abstraction of Judicial Violence
- Hint at the war of representation and discipline
The Idea of the Social Contract as Disguising the Implicit War
h. Politics as the Continuation of War by Other Means: Disciplinary Society as Waging an Implicit War
- Here we need to write about Clausewitz and the potential for battle
2. The Monarch's Explicit Violence and the Government's Implied Discipline: Truth, Power/Knowledge, and Strategies in Torture and Prison
The Strategy of Torture: Bodies and Discourse
a. The Logic of Torture
b. Torture and the Production of Truth
The Centrality of the Body in Both Torture and Discipline
The Strategy of Prisons: Disciplined Bodies and Discourse
d. Discipline and the Production of Truth About Bodies: Power/Knowledge
- This will be good to have examples of all disciplinary practices - schools, hospitals, etc.
e. Prisons as the Central Disciplinary Institution
Prison’s and Open-Strategies
f. Disciplinary Society’s Open-Strategies: The Worker Ants and the Big Picture
g. Criminals as Integral to Society’s Open-Strategies
Part II: Simulational Mindreading and Control in Torture and Discipline
3. Observation and Simulational Mindreading in Relations of Power/Knowledge
a. Power/Knowledge: Social Understanding and Simulation in Relations With Others in General
b. Power/Knowledge and Simulational Mindreading: Torture and Prisons as Enabling Different Ways of Simulating Other People's Thoughts
c. Observation of Torture and Simulational Mindreading
d. Observation and Simulational Mindreading in Disciplinary Society
- Here we just need to establish generally that observation of other, ie power relations, have to involve simulation, and that torture and prison necessitate different types of simulation
4. From Low-level to High-level Mindreading: From The Spectacle of Torture to The Constant Observation of the Panopticon
a. Torture as Mirror and Resonance Based Mindreading
b. The Panopticon as Enabling Abstract and High-Level Mindreading
c. Panoptic Mindreading for Prisoners and Civilians: Structuring Incarceration and its Representation
d. Observation and Controlling Prisoners Through High-Level Mindreading
- The criminal as something to be controlled through direct application on body
e. Abstract Penal Representation and Controlling the Population With High-Level Mindreading
- The population as something to be controlled through application of representations
- In the whole of section 4 we can establish 1. that it is low- to high-level mindreading, and that both enable different forms of control
- in d we can discuss both simulation to anticipate and mindreading to change minds
Part III: The Pragmatics: Being A Guerrilla of Power/Knowledge
5. Politics as the Continuation of War by Other Means and the 'Politics of Ourselves'
a. Disciplinary Society's Power/Knowledge and our Identity
b. War and Ethics
c. Practices of the Self as a War
6. Intellectual Insurrection: Waging Mental War
a. Histories of the Present as Tools for Battle
b. Freedom Within Open-Strategies
c. Meta-Strategic Thinking
d. The Neural War
That table of contents is interesting and I have a lot to do. But here is my general introduction and chapter 1, the intro chapter, finished.
I'm in way over my head here. - 7/21 - 12:58 pm
So, I finished reading Michel Foucault's Discipline & Punish about a month or so ago. A challenging book that I read slowly over the course of a month. For some reason I have a hard time reading Foucault in long stretches. I sometimes worry this detracts from my ability to understand him fully, but I did my best, and I think I have grasped a number of meaningful arguments from the book.
Now let me say that I studied military history in undergrad. I am inclined to think about things in relation to war and military institutions sometimes. So I find it very curious that my analysis of Discipline & Punish is so centered on war. Nevertheless, I think militaristic themes are surprisingly explicitly in the text, and I think it makes sense in the overarching argument of the book.
Also, I have recently decided (in the last month since finishing this book) that I need to pursue military history at the graduate level. Basically that military history will give me certain tools, certain insights, that will be crucial to the philosophy that I want to ultimately pursue. So, what I'm saying is that I am going to become a military historian so that I can become the kind of philosopher I want to. Sounds crazy to me. I still have some time left before I apply to grad school, but military history may be a very worthwhile path.
Anyways, now I'm going to discuss Foucault's Discipline & Punish, with a special focus on violence, war, and military institutions. Foucault's history is only of France, so everything involving kings and government's has to do with the French. But I am just speaking in general terms I guess. I am afraid I am generalizing too much, but I am just getting this out there.
First I'm going to argue generally for this notion of society's implicit war: I'll claim that the growth of stable nation-states corresponds with the establishment of reliable militaries because 'government' and 'the state' is in reality a way of waging an ongoing war.
After that I will turn to Foucault's depiction of the transition from medieval torture to modern penal institutions. This transition depends on the emergence of what Foucault calls a 'disciplinary society': a society in which networks of institutions produce a semi-coherent discourse that forces individuals to transform themselves in certain ways (in other words prisons, schools, hospitals, etc., produce discourses of knowledge that enable modern power relations). This notion of a disciplinary society is closely related to Foucault's well known notion of power/knowledge: there is no use of power without a form of knowledge, and no form of knowledge that is not linked with a form power, they are inseparable. After discussing the ideas of disciplinary society and power/knowledge I'll try to make some claims about how they are related to simulation theory of mind. I'll then elaborate the connection between D&P and simulation by claiming that Foucault's emphasis on the transition from the spectacle of torture the omnipresence of panopticism parallels nicely with Alvin Goldman's distinction between low-level and high-level mindreading. Having (hopefully) connected Foucault and Goldman, I will make some claims about Foucault's practical intention when he refers to 'this insurrection of knowledges against the institutions.' In particular, Foucault means that he is trying to provide us with a set of analytical tools that will let us wage a 'guerilla war' of power/knowledge against the state's discourses of truth. This would involve creative attempts to transcend the limitations of your own thought; it means trying to think things that have never been thought before on a daily basis; challenging the political discourses by exposing their history and specifying their effects; taking an active role in the politics of ourselves; waging an intellectual insurrection in society's implicit war.
1. Society's Implicit War: From Managing to Disguising Civilization's Necessary Violence
Here I want to argue that Western 'civilization' as we know it should actually be thought of as an ongoing war of sorts. In particular, I think that we should start recognizing that, nation-states and governments, as we know them, rather than exclusively working towards the good of their citizens, are actually waging a war against segments of 'their own people.' Supposedly we are all part of the same group, the same nation, the same community, but in reality the government is at war with us. They want us to behave in certain ways, and they take steps to be sure that we behave that way. They have just gotten so good at waging this war that we don't even recognize its coercive or violent elements anymore.Also, I have recently decided (in the last month since finishing this book) that I need to pursue military history at the graduate level. Basically that military history will give me certain tools, certain insights, that will be crucial to the philosophy that I want to ultimately pursue. So, what I'm saying is that I am going to become a military historian so that I can become the kind of philosopher I want to. Sounds crazy to me. I still have some time left before I apply to grad school, but military history may be a very worthwhile path.
Anyways, now I'm going to discuss Foucault's Discipline & Punish, with a special focus on violence, war, and military institutions. Foucault's history is only of France, so everything involving kings and government's has to do with the French. But I am just speaking in general terms I guess. I am afraid I am generalizing too much, but I am just getting this out there.
First I'm going to argue generally for this notion of society's implicit war: I'll claim that the growth of stable nation-states corresponds with the establishment of reliable militaries because 'government' and 'the state' is in reality a way of waging an ongoing war.
After that I will turn to Foucault's depiction of the transition from medieval torture to modern penal institutions. This transition depends on the emergence of what Foucault calls a 'disciplinary society': a society in which networks of institutions produce a semi-coherent discourse that forces individuals to transform themselves in certain ways (in other words prisons, schools, hospitals, etc., produce discourses of knowledge that enable modern power relations). This notion of a disciplinary society is closely related to Foucault's well known notion of power/knowledge: there is no use of power without a form of knowledge, and no form of knowledge that is not linked with a form power, they are inseparable. After discussing the ideas of disciplinary society and power/knowledge I'll try to make some claims about how they are related to simulation theory of mind. I'll then elaborate the connection between D&P and simulation by claiming that Foucault's emphasis on the transition from the spectacle of torture the omnipresence of panopticism parallels nicely with Alvin Goldman's distinction between low-level and high-level mindreading. Having (hopefully) connected Foucault and Goldman, I will make some claims about Foucault's practical intention when he refers to 'this insurrection of knowledges against the institutions.' In particular, Foucault means that he is trying to provide us with a set of analytical tools that will let us wage a 'guerilla war' of power/knowledge against the state's discourses of truth. This would involve creative attempts to transcend the limitations of your own thought; it means trying to think things that have never been thought before on a daily basis; challenging the political discourses by exposing their history and specifying their effects; taking an active role in the politics of ourselves; waging an intellectual insurrection in society's implicit war.
1. Society's Implicit War: From Managing to Disguising Civilization's Necessary Violence
In the age of monarchs, though, it was much clearer that government was in many ways at war with its own population. Monarchical governments also wanted to control people. Their best recourse, however, was physical violence. Revolts had to be suppressed, criminals had to be violently pursued, and bands of marauders were regarded as enemy troops, and guns were the best thing they had. The monarch quite explicitly waged war against certain factions of his own population. Social order in the time of monarchy's, therefore, was maintained by an ongoing war against certain parts of society.
Foucault's main purpose in Discipline & Punish is to show how this monarchical, explicit war, has been transformed into an implicit war that is waged through the production of elaborate forms of knowledge about bodies. Contemporary nation-states also seek to control their populations, and violence is often the key factor. Knowledge, however, has become a far more important factor in society's implicit war.
So what I'm going to do in this section is generally establish that both medieval monarchs and contemporary nations wage wars against their own population. And that social order seems to depend on the use of physical violence. It doesn't seem like there could be any sort of stable society whatsoever unless there was a government that monopolized armed force and used it against the portions of the population they didn't like. In other words, using Discipline & Punish I want to claim that all social order depends on physical violence. In the age of monarchs order depended on explicit violence, an explicit war against the home population. In the age of nation-states, however, the violence needed to be disguised, and it had to take on different forms. In the modern era society wages its wars by controlling the different forms of knowledge that people have access to. The modern implicit war is fought through representations of criminality, discourses of discipline that stem not only from prisons, but from schools, hospitals, mental institutions, corporations, so on.
Monarchical Violence as Explicit War
The Original Purpose of Standing Armies
Torture and the Monarch's War Against Domestic 'Enemy Troops'
As I said, the modern state is waging an implicit war, but before the 18th century monarchs waged an explicit war against their people. This is most obvious in the ways that government officials and intellectuals voiced their concerns about criminals and revolutions.
In particular, many people wrote of criminals as if they were enemy troops that they were at war with. Foucault writes, for example, that criminals were perceived to be "quite literally, enemy troops spreading over the surface of the territory, living as they wish, as in a conquered country, exacting levies under the name of alms" (77). Further, one man named Le Trosne wrote of vagabonds "'who live in the midst of society without being members of it', who wage 'a veritable war on all citizens', and who are in the midst of us 'in that state that one supposes existed before the establishment of civil society" (88).
And since criminals were perceived as waging a war against society and the king, the king and the government perceived themselves as waging a war against an internal enemy. "The right to punish, therefore, is an aspect of the sovereign's right to make war on his enemies: to punish belongs to 'that absolute power of life and death which Roman law calls merum imperium, right by virtue of which the prince sees that his law is respected by ordering the punishment of crime'" (48). The maintenance of social order in the age of monarchs, therefore, depended on a war that was waged, by the king, against certain parts of the population (if not the whole population).
Indeed, public torture and execution were meant to be a display of the king's right to take violent revenge on those who disobeyed his will. Foucault claims that public execution "was logically inscribed in a system of punishment, in which the sovereign, directly or indirectly, demanded, decided and carried out punishments, in so far as it was he who, through the law, had been injured by the crime" (53). The crimes, which were explicit acts of war against the king, were met in kind.
Furthermore, public torture works not only to punish the criminal. Public execution was meant to make an impression on those that witnessed it. It was a political ritual that was meant to remind the population of the violence the sovereign was capable of: "The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested.... the crime attacks the sovereign: it attacks him personally, since the law represents the will of the sovereign; it attacks him physically, since the force of the law is the force of the prince." (47). Indeed, Foucault believes public execution belongs to a whole set of political and military practices that build and maintain the sovereign's power: "public execution... belongs to a whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored (coronation, entry of the kind into a conquered city, the submission of rebellious subjects)...." (48). In short, the king waged war against his own people. He used physical violence in public torture and execution to punish criminals and to remind others that he could hurt them too.
To conclude this sections argument I am going to share two final quotations. They just really make it very explicit that Foucault believed that the king of France waged a very explicit war against his subjects. He compared it to terror, and to war."The ceremony of punishment, then, is an exercise of 'terror'" (49). Torture "was that effect of... a power that asserted itself as an armed power whose functions of maintaining order were not entirely unconnected with the functions of war; of a power for which disobedience was an act of hostility , the first sign of rebellion, which is not in principle different from civil war... of a power which, in the absence of continual supervision, sought a renewal of its effect in the spectacle of its individual manifestations" (57).
The monarch's ability to observe and control society was limited, so public tortures has to have an effect on public consciousness, it was meant to make people remember the spectacle of torture and then anticipate the sovereign's reaction if they were to break the law. In other words, witnessing public torture makes you realize you could experience that pain if you offended the sovereign in a similar way. Don't break the government's rules and they wont declare war on you.
At some point in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, public torture ceased to be a thing, incarceration became the main juridical tool, and the monarch's explicit, violent war transformed into society's implicit, knowledge-saturated, discursive war. Next I am going to explore two factors in the change from explicit to implicit war: the problems with excessive physical violence (revolution), and the rise of capitalist economies.
The Shortcomings of Monarchical Violence
The Unpredictability of Physical Violence
First things first, the monarch's explicit war became a big problem when violent revolutions began happening. Public torture, it seems, often turned into a general riot in which the criminal, the executioner, or other government figures could be killed. Torture had the tendency to stir up more violence. People would witness a public execution and people would end up rioting or revolting. Foucault says that, "[t]he public execution is now seen as a hearth in which violence busts again into flame" (9).
Foucault claims that these revolts represent the crowds rejection of the sovereign's power. While these public displays of violence may have been necessary, Foucault also describes their collapse into rioting: "In calling on the crowd to manifest its power, the sovereign tolerated for a moment acts of violence, which he accepted as a sign of allegiance, but which were strictly limited by the sovereign's own privileges. Now it was on this point that the people, drawn to the spectacle intended to terrorize it, could express its rejection of the punitive power and sometimes revolt" (59). Indeed, he says"one finds many examples when the agitation was provoked directly by a verdict and an execution: small, but innumerable 'disturbances around the scaffold'" (60).
Further, the social unrest caused by torture could create stronger bonds among people with revolutionary sentiments. Revolutionary groups began to gain strength around these torture riots. Foucault writes that at these riots the"solidarity of a whole section of the population... was constantly expressed.... And it was the breaking up of this solidarity that was becoming the aim of penal and police repression. Yet out of the ceremony of the public execution, out of that uncertain festival in which violence was instantaneously reversible, it was this solidarity much more than the sovereign power that was likely to emerge with redoubled strength" (63). Revolts became so frequent that "the physical confrontation between the sovereign and the condemned man must end; this hand-to-hand fight between the vengeance of the prince and the contained anger of the people, through the ediation of the victim and the executioner, must be concluded" (73). In other words, the king begins to lose power by displaying excessive violence, and the people are becoming radicalized into response to violence. New ways of controlling people, new ways of waging war, had to be found.
It started to seem as though "in this violence... tyranny confronts rebellion; each calls forth the other. It is a double danger. Instead of taking revenge, criminal justice should simply punish" (74). The unpredictability of physical violence, therefore, demanded that violence be limited and disguised by a clearly articulated, naturalized, and socially represented punishment.
Capitalism and the Need for a New Political Economy
So, I just told you that revolts were getting out of control and violence displayed in torture was increasing those violent outbreaks. Furthermore, a new economic system was also developing that made the control of bodies a greater priority, and made economic resources a great focus. Crime was beginning to revolve not around murder but property, goods. Foucault claims "offences against property seem to take over from crimes of violence; theft and swindling, from murder and assault" (75). The punishments followed in kind: they began to deprive people of personal and economic freedom. The focus shifted from attacking the body to depriving of money, freedom, and most importantly, a matter of modifying the mind, but that is for later. Capitalism effected this whole process.
Furthermore, this prompted changes across the whole social body. Indeed, the switch from violent crime to economic crime is part of a larger process in which society transforms into a disciplinary society: "the shift from a criminality of blood to a criminality of fraud forms part of a whole complex mechanism, embracing the development of production, the increase of wealth, a higher juridical and moral value placed on property relations, stricter methods of surveillance, a tighter partitioning of the population, more efficient techniques of locating and obtaining information: the shift in legal practices is correlative with an extension and refinement of punitive practices" (77).
In concluding this section I am telling you that the rise of capitalist economies helped usher in an age in which the government could no longer wage an explicit war against their population; the government had to control the population in ways that lined up with the new capitalistic economy. Incarceration and discipline therefore became the dominant penal methods, and torture became a thing of the past. "With the new forms of capital accumulation, new relations of production and the new legal status of property, all the popular practices that belonged, either in silent, everyday, tolerated form, or in a violent form, to the illegality of rights were reduced by force to an illegality of property.... the economy of illegalities was restructured with the development of capitalist society" (87). Property becomes more important, the body less important, and therefore discipline that works without recourse to violence, but works rather through deprivation of personal, political, and economic freedom.
So capitalism contributed to the rise of disciplinary society. But what caused it? Where did the model of discipline come from? How did discipline emerge from nothing? What was the first institution to try and discipline bodies?
In this subsection 'The Shortcomings of Monarchical Violence' I have tried to argue that the unpredictability of torture and the rise of capitalist economies made the Monarch's explicit violence ineffective and dangerous. The king or the government could now be totally overthrown in a violent revolt if they engaged in public torture and execution. The war against his own population, therefore, had to be reconfigured. Social order could no longer be maintained through excessive displays of physical violence. New methods had to be created that could instill discipline in society with observation and the production of knowledge. The explicit war had to be made implicit. Prisons were the eventual result of this. So how does the prison system help wage war?
Prisons as Implicit War
In this section I'm going to explore how the prison system plays a role in society's implicit war. What role does it play in establishing discipline in society that can disguise the violence that is involved in social order. First I'm going to discuss military institutions and how they contributed to the model of discipline that would eventually govern many institutions. Then I'm going to talk about how, when applied to penal institutions, is able to mask and legitimate the government's use of force. Then I'm going to discuss the idea of the social contract and how it plays a part in disguising the implicit war. Lastly I'm going to summarize the whole section and offer some thoughts on the overarching notion of implicit war. That will cap off the introductory section of the first chapter. From there I will move on to chapter two, which will specify how both the explicit war and implicit war are waged through truth and knowledge about bodies. That section will allow me to establish the connections between truth, observation, and power. From there I will move on to establish the relationship to simulation theory of mind, and then from there the pragmatics. So, here we go, on to finish the section on Prisons as War.
Bodily Discipline as Emerging From Military Institutions
Now seeing as how the overarching argument of this whole piece is that social order is maintained by an internal war that operates through discipline, it seems appropriate that military institutions would provide the original model for the coercion of bodies. This also lines up with things I have heard about Weber, and how he regarded the Prussian army's influence on government (in that he thought they provided an ideal bureaucratic model). Foucault also makes this point quite clear: that the military provided the ideal model for the forms of discipline that were later adopted by educational, medical, and economic institutions.
In his opening chapter to the section titled "Discipline" Foucault immediately discusses the new levels of discipline attained by military institutions in the eighteenth century. He claims that by "the late eighteenth century, the solider has become something that can be made out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit; in short, on has 'got rid of the peasant' and given him 'the air of the soldier'" (135). In other words the soldier is now something that can be crafted, molded, created from a peasant. The military allows people to notice for the first time how plastic people are and how much they can be modified by disciplinary coercion.
Again, Foucault claims that the military was one of the first institutions to provide models for discipline, and in particular, the measurement of time. He writes of the Prussian military reforms of the eighteenth century, "this regulation of the time of an action that was so important in the army and which was to be so throughout the entire technology of human activity: the Prussian regulation of 1743 laid down six stages to bring the weapon to one's foot, four to extend it, thirteen to raise it to the should, etc." (154). The model of instructing a solider to use a rifle showed that efficiency of movement could be achieved, that people could be timed and taught to do things faster, provided a way of measuring time that Foucault believes penetrates the entire social body. Indeed, in section two I'll talk about the measurement of time and how it fits into modern disciplinary society.
But here I still want to show that Foucault believed the military was the first and strongest form of discipline. He says that the ways that discipline controls time, bodies, accumulation and duration "emerge most clearly in military organization" (157). Further, military organization provided the mechanistic model of organization, "the unit – regiment, battalion, section and, later, 'division' – became a sort of machine with many parts, moving in relation to one another, in order to arrive at a configuration and to obtain a specific result. What were the reasons for the mutation?" (162). People could conceptualize organizations as large, interrelated systems, and the military may have done it first.
The invention of new military technology also played a role in bringing about modern models of discipline: "the invention of the rifle: more accurate, more rapid than the musket, it gave greater value to the soldier's skill; more capable of reaching a particular target, it made it possible to exploit fire-power at an individual level; and, conversely, it turned every soldier into a possible target, requiring by the same token greater mobility; it involved therefore the disappearance of a technique of masses in favour of an art that distributed units and men along extended, relatively flexible mobile lines" (163). Thus Foucault concludes, "Discipline is no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, of extracting time from them and accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine" (164). Discipline becomes the construction of a machine that runs like an army.
The organization of these institutions was actually conceptualized in military terms, tactics, and command being the most important. Foucault writes, "Tactics, the art of constructing, with located bodies, coded activities and trained aptitudes, mechanisms in which the product of the various forces is increased by their calculated combination are no doubt the highest form of disciplinary practice" (167). Not only does the military provide the strongest model for disciplining individual bodies (with tactics), but it also provides a model of command. Disciplinary power functions on "a precise system of command" for which military hierarchical structure may have been a model.
So this is a quotation heavy section, but I think because it is an important theme, and something Foucault stresses. In this last section I have tried to show that the disciplinary techniques that Foucault believes permeated society stem originally from forms of military organization. Now I'm going to discuss how prisons used these models of discipline wage a war.
Discipline and Prisons in the Abstraction of Judicial Violence
When physical violence has become too dangerous and economically unsound, the government had to find ways of controlling the population that were more reliable and less blatantly violent. Foucault proposes that many institutions adopted 'disciplinary' practices. Schools, hospitals, workshops, and prisons all adopted a model of organization that maximized surveillance, closely monitored time and movement, and labeled and explored each individual person. In essence, these institutions started establishing large bodies of knowledge that allowed for bodies to be regulated more precisely. Foucault believes that these knowledge building, disciplinary societies allowed social control to take on a new form. It led Foucault to conclude the knowledge and power are inseparable. He speaks of power/knowledge, and I'll have plenty to say about that in a little bit. Right now, in this section, I just want to argue that the switch to modern prison based systems still amounts to a war. In order to pursue this question I need to examine how it is that legal punishment becomes conceptually disassociated from the violence it relies on. As Foucault says, in the modern age, "Punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process." As a result, "it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness.... As a result, justice no longer rakes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice" (9). I want to know if it is still war even though it has successfully distanced itself from its necessary violence. Much of Foucault's discussion of the prison system confirms that it retains an element of violence, and that it constitutes a war that is being waged by the government against it's own people.
Prison's are able to avoid a violent reputation partly due to the transition to capitalism. Foucault writes that "offences against property seem to take over from crimes of violence; theft and swindling, from murder and assault" (75). Because crime is becoming less violent and more economic, prison's are able to endorse a similar form of punishment. Many people noted that the legal system's lack of violence was due to greater 'leniency'. Foucault, however, argues that this 'leniency' simply reflects the government's new priorities – namely, the preservation of bodies for the use in the economy. Foucault says the development of leniency was part of "a double movement by which, during this period, crimes seemed to lose their violence, while punishments, reciprocally, lost some of their intensity, but at the cost of greater intervention" (75). So is the prison system really less violent? or does it still constitute a war?
Foucault agrees. He claims that there is still "a trace of 'torture' in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice – a trace that has not been entirely overcome, but which is enveloped, increasingly, by the non-corporal nature of the penal system." Because the body itself is no longer physically destroyed by judicial punishment people believe that it no longer involves the use of violence. The war, however, is being waged on an even deeper level, because it has become"a punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations" (16). The prison system is above all meant to produce a body of abstract knowledge that transforms violence and coercion into a set of institutions meant to transform individuals.
Society's war against its own population, therefore, has been abstracted by the modern prison systems. We still have violent means of coercion all around us, we just aren't tapped into it. Prisons disguise this implicit war by naturalizing it, abstracting it, making us believe that is accomplishing a certain goal, rehabilitating a certain set of people with certain 'problems' or 'illnesses'. I'll have a whole section on power/knowledge, so for now in this section I just need to establish that prisons have managed to make the social war more abstract, and have therefore disassociated prisons from violence. It is still a form of war, however. It is still a means of battling certain parts of the population.
Next I'm going to discuss the notion of the social contract and how it has functioned as a way of conceptualizing, masking, abstracting, the constant war that society is engaged in. After that I'll summarize the whole chapter and wrap up the major argument about the warlike nature of peace and order. After that I'll specify the ways that the war is waged (open-strategies, modifying forms of simulation), and my practical suggestions.
The Idea of the Social Contract and Disguising the Implicit War
In the previous section I wanted to establish that prison systems effectively disguise the violence that society uses. It seems, however, that the force wielded by the government is more often legitimized with the idea of the social contract. In this section I want to draw on some of Focault's reflections on the social contract. Ultimately, I want to refute the notion of the social contract because I think it is a way of explaining away the violence that constitutes social order. Who signed this contract with the government? Since when did we agree to give up our power to revolt? Weren't people coerced into not revolting? Weren't people killed for revolting? Perhaps this notion of the social contract was only conceptualized after people were already coerced into these 'democratic' situations? Since when does the government concede things to us? Since when does the government act in everyone's best interest? Never, because that isn't how government got its start. It started as a group of people waging violent war against other people living near them. Their explicit war was eventually transformed into an implicit war, and the social contract was a nice way of explaining it.
The social contract supposedly offered a way for the government and the people to have a healthy relationship with power and violence. Often people associate the social contract with the rise of something like 'humanism' or a concern for the welfare of people. This might be true, but Foucault believes that humanism and the social contract are inadequate for describing modern power relations. Humanism, as we like to think of it, is only a matter of repositioning the economy of power: "If the law must now treat in a 'humane' way an individual who is 'outside nature' (whereas the old justice treated the 'outlaw' inhumanely), it is not on account of some profound humanity that the criminal conceals within him, but because of a necessary regulation of the effects of power. It is this 'economic' rationality that must calculate the penalty and prescribe the appropriate techniques. 'Humanity' is the respectable name given to this economy and to its meticulous calculations" (92). Government had to abandon violent penal methods because the threat of revolution was too great. Humanism merely is a rationalization of this modification of penal methods, which was 'economic' in its logic.
Further, Foucault believes that we need to give up on the notion of the social contract. He writes that in order to understand modern power relations we have to abandon "the violence-ideology opposition, the metaphor of property, the model of the contract or of conquest;...." (28). This is because modern penal practices depend more on the coercion of individuals. We are not rehabilitating individuals to fit in with our social model, we are coercing individuals into thinking of themselves and others in certain ways:"And, ultimately, what one is trying to restore in this technique of correction is not so much the juridical subject, who is caught up in the fundamental interests of the social pact, but the obedient subject, the individual subjected to habits, rules, orders, an authority that is exercised continually around him and upon him, and which he must allow to function automatically in him" (128-9).
The body is still the ultimate place where power is exercised. The social contract is a nice idea, it sounds warm and cozy and makes society sound like a good old time where we all agree to be certain ways and give up certain rights to gain certain rights. But whatever, I don't buy it. Neither does Foucault: "The real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical libraries. The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power; panopticism constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion" (222). In other words, the body still must be disciplined, people must still be controlled. But violence doesn't get it done anymore. And the 'social contract' sure as hell doesn't get it done. But the panopticon – the perfect tool of constant surveillance – makes it possible to coerce and discipline bodies without violently destroying them.
So I've told you the social contract doesn't adequately describe power relations. And I have told you that violence is still the fundamental thing in the modern judicial system. Now I'll summarize this section, cap this chapter off with a redoubled explanation of how society is waging an implicit war.
Politics as the Continuation of War by Other Means: Disciplinary Society as Waging an Implicit War
Now, I have just sketched out generally Foucault's depiction of the transition from torture to prison. The monarch waged an explicit war against his own people, and displayed his personal revenge against offenders in public spectacles of torture. In the modern age, after monarchs, the war against segments of the own population is able to go implicit. The monarch's violence became unpredictable in its tendency to cause a revolution, and it was no longer economically sound with the rise of capitalist economies. New methods of control had to be found, new ways of waging war against the home population had to be conceptualized. The military itself provided a ready made model of discipline that could be applied to many other social institutions (like hospitals, schools, police forces, prisons, etc.). The prison gave rise to an abstract body of knowledge that was able to disassociate the use of penal justice from the violence that it relied on. As a result, judicial practices are no longer thought of as explicitly violent, the war is now implicit. Further, the notion of the social contract functioned to further hide the violent and coercive nature of modern institutions. Now, lastly, I want to cap this first chapter by clarifying this notion of implicit war, and offering some evidence that Foucault, and others, regard society as waging a war against its own population, albeit in a new form.
The prison systems wage their war against society with the support of a whole series of other institutions that are medical, educational, and legal in nature. More or less, all of these institutions fall under the locus of the state. They are political institutions in the broadest sense – they regulate relations of power between individuals. While originally the monarch's war was explicit, this series of institutions also wages an implicit war of sorts. Foucault writes that the transition from the explicit to the implicit war was a gradual process, but one that always includes violence and war. He writes that "from fiscal illegality to customs illegality, to smuggling, to looting, to the armed struggle against the government's taxation agents, then against the soldiers themselves and, finally, to rebellion, there was a continuity, in which it was difficult to mark the frontiers;...." (83). In other words, both the monarch's violence and the governments institutional apparatuses are a way of waging war.
Indeed, even this transition from an explicit war to an implied war waged by a network of institutions took force to implement. Foucault writes that "although the new criminal legislation appears to be characterized by less severe penalties, a clearer codification, a marked diminution of the arbitrary, a more generally accepted consensus concerning the power to punish..., it is sustained in reality by an upheaval in the traditional economy of illegalities and a rigorous application of force to maintain their new adjustment" (89). This transition to a 'less violent' judicial system is driven primarily by violence itself.
Furthermore, some Frenchmen of the eighteenth century thought of criminals as enemy troops, and as their struggle against them as a form of war. One Frenchmen, for example, wrote, "'Every malefactor, by attacking the social rights, becomes, by his crimes, a rebel and a traitor to his country; by violating its laws he ceases to be a member of it; he even makes war upon it. In such the case the preservation of the state is inconsistent with his own, and one or the other must perish; in putting the guilty to death we slay not so much the citizen as the enemy'" (90). This new war against crime, however, differs from the monarch's war in its justifications.
Foucault discusses how the monarch's war was always an individual declaration of war that pitted the sovereigns body against the body of the condemned. Modern penal practice, however, involves a set of institutions that collectively declare war against an individual without saying so explicitly: the modern war of institutions is implicit. Foucault concludes, "The right to punish has been shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defence of society. But it now finds itself recombined with elements so strong that it becomes almost more to be feared. The malefactor has been saved from a threat that is by its very nature excessive, but he is exposed to penalty that seems to be without bounds. It is a return to a terrible 'super power'. It brings with it the need to establish a principle of moderation for the power of punishment" (90).
Foucault again describes this transition from monarchy to republic, and explains how these systems of punishment functioned in different ways. "We have, then, the sovereign and his force, the social body and the administrative apparatus; mark, sign, trace; ceremony, representation, exercise; the vanquished enemy, the juridical subject in the process of requalification, the individual subjected to immediate coercion; the tortured body, the soul with its manipulated representations, the body subjected to training. We have here the three series of elements that characterize the three mechanisms that face one another in the second half of the eighteenth century. They cannot be reduced to theories of law (though they overlap with such theories), nor can they be identified with apparatuses or institutions (through they are based on them), nor can they be derived from moral choices (through they find their justification in morality). They are modalities according to which the power to punish is exercised: three technologies of power" (131). Interestingly, Foucault notes that there are three major forces that interact to produce disciplinary society. Theories of law provide a body of knowledge, while institutional apparatuses implement them, and while moral systems enact them on an individual level.
This new system of punishment, however, operates much more generally in the social body. So many institutions contain traces of this new disciplinary style. Our society has effectively become a carceral society, a society centered on prisons and incarceration. Foucault writes that "a whole set of regulations and by empirical and calculated methods relating to the army, the school and the hospital, for controlling or correcting the operations of the body" (136). These methods of controlling the body, which reach their apex in prison systems, are spread throughout all of society. All of society functions based on a series of institutions that control behavior through the production of knowledge."The human body," Foucault claims, "was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it" (138).
The generality of these disciplinary mechanisms, and their realtioship to war in general, could be seen in educational institutions too. Many institutions adopt the model of war and armies, and they therefore behave like war. In Jesuit Colleges, for example, classes competed among themselves, 300 in a whole class split into groups of 10. "The general form was that of war and rivalry; work, apprenticeship and classification were carried out in the form of the joust, through the confrontation of two armies; the contribution of each pupil was inscribed in this general duel; it contributed to the victory or defeat of a whole camp; and the pupils were assigned a place that corresponded to the function of each individual and to his value as a combatant in the unity group of his 'decury'" (146). This example makes it clear that the model of war permeated society in many different ways – our most prominent institutions use war and the military as a model for conduct.
Foucault explicitly claims that the military served as a model of discipline that was then superimposed on society as a whole. "In the great eighteenth-century states," he argues, "the army guaranteed civil peace no doubt because it was a real force, an ever-threatening sword, but also because it was a technique and a body of knowledge that could project their schema over the social body" (168). In addition to bearing physical violence, the military also provides a model of discipline and control of bodies. This imposition of military standards on the rest of society becomes even clear when Foucault says, "The classical age saw the birth of the great political and military strategy by which nations confronted each other's economic and demographic forces; but it also saw the birth of meticulous military and political tactics by which the control of bodies and individual forces was exercised within states" (168). The rise of modern military forces has great implications for the general structure of society.
Foucault believes that this military society has been overlooked by many philosophers and historians. He criticizes them for relying too readily on the notion of the social contract. "Historians of ideas," he writes, "usually attribute the dream of a perfect society to the philosophers and jurists of the eighteenth century; but there was also a military dream of society; its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal social contract, but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will but to automatic docility" (169). Indeed, legal philosophers attempted to build a model of a just society, but that is only part of the story: "While jurists or philosophers were seeking in the pact a primal model for the construction or reconstruction of the social body, the soldiers and with them the technicians of discipline were elaborating procedures for the individual and collective coercion of bodies" (169). Modern society as we know it is far more warlike than we typically recognize.
Although the new legal systems enforced their punishments with less violent methods, they still implicitly or explicitly made reference to violence, battle, and war. As a result, schools, hospitals, and prisons all adopted the military model of organization. Observation became more important than anything else, and the production of knowledge and discipline began to rule people more than explicit violence. Just because the state's use of violence is now implicit, however, does not mean that it is no longer at war. Just because 'politics' as we know it seems to have established internal 'peace' and thus gotten rid of 'war', doesn't mean that politics is not in itself a form of war. For this is exactly what Foucault claims. "It may be that war as strategy is the continuation of politics (Clausewitz). But it must not be forgotten that 'politics' has been conceived as a continuation, if not exactly and directly of war, at least of the military model as a fundamental means of preventing civil disorder. Politics, as a technique of internal peace and order, sought to implement the mechanism of the perfect army, of the disciplined mass, of the docile, useful troop, of the regiment in camp and in the field, on manoeuvres and on exercises"" (168, I added the bracket that says Clausewitz, cause that what he is referencing). This new system of institutions that governs out political lives successfully hides the physical violence that it requires. All of our social order depends on the government's ability to hurt people, to kill people.
I find it interesting that Foucault hints at Clausewitz. In some essays from Power/Knowledge he discusses Clausewitz's work even more explicitly. I'll perhaps turn to that later. But for now I want to share something about Clausewitz that Foucault never mentions. I am going to use this to answer the question, what does it mean to be at war? If society is waging a permanent war against its own population, how do we know? What does it mean to be at war.
Well, Clausewitz says you are at war if there exists the potential for battle. If battle could possibly happen, then you are at war. Because there have been wars in which there was no battle (but it was still a war) you need a definition that can accommodate this fact. So, this definition leaves room for that. We are at war if there exists the possibility for battle.
Now let me ask you this: at what point in our society is there not the potential for battle? At what point could we kill someone and not expect men with guns to respond? At what point can we break the law and not expect for someone with guns to come for us? Why is it that when two men show up at a bank with assault rifles, dozens of men with guns and bigger guns show up. Why does the SWAT team show up whenever something bad happens. Because in our society there is always the potential for battle, there is always the possibility that someone will come do battle with you if you want to do it. And we, therefore, are always at war with our own government. We have been pacified into peace, a forgetful peace in which we don't remember this violence that is all around us, keeping us all in line.
In conclusion, all political power rests on the ability of a nation to make war, even if it means making war against their own population. In this section I have argued that society is indeed waging a war against its own population. That we, as subjects of legal power, are at war with the state. The only thing is that the state had to find a better way of waging this war against us. Torture was sloppy and unpredictable, revolutions got out of control, bodies became too important in the economy. Fortunately (for those in power), military institutions provided a perfect model of discipline that could be spread to the rest of society. This allows the penal institutions to build up a disciplined and abstract body of knowledge that distanced the prison systems from the violence that is inherent to their maintenance. Further, the notion of the social contract helped stabilize this new implicit war being waged by our disciplinary society. Lastly, I summarized the argument in this section. The model of war and military institutions pervades our society. And this is because our nation-state is inseparable from a state of war. The state is at war with us, and always will be.
From here I have quite a lot of writing left to do. This is chapter 1 of 6. In the next section I am going to explain more precisely how these two different types of war, torture and prisons, are waged. In particular, I am going to discuss how they exercise power, wage their war, through forms of representation and discourse.
The Original Purpose of Standing Armies
In this section I want to establish something that is fundamental to the rest of the argument, and something that I don't think most people think about. The idea is that prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, standing militaries in Europe were meant to suppress internal rebellion just as much as they were meant to fight international wars. In the age of monarchies violent riots and revolutions were a very real possibility. The monarch's standing military forces, therefore, were very actively used to violently suppress internal rebellions. It is as if the king was constantly waging a war against his own people. Even when revolutions lulled, the king's authority still depended on his monopoly on armed force. In short, monarchs explicitly waged war against their own people, and standing military forces, which we think of in terms of 'national security', were originally intended to violently suppress revolutions and ensure the monarch's power.
All I'm trying to say right here is that military forces were originally instruments of internal coercion. Further I think their original purpose is not clear in most people's minds, and we have therefore lost touch with the intense violence that is inseparable from what we know as social order. There is still a lot of violence that is exercised by the government to maintain social order today? So what? I'm not sure about the so what. Just seems like people don't think about militaries in this way anymore, because it is different now. We mostly obey the laws, the big guns come out for international war, but there are still guns at home that are pointed at us. Society still rests on the implicit threat of violence. Everyone knows that if we do something the government doesn't like then someone with a gun is gonna come get us. It is this possibility for battle, and our knowledge of that possibility, that really seems to keep people in line these days. The government's war against us is implicit now. But that isn't how it used to be. The war waged by the government against their own people used to be very explicit, very obvious. Let me elaborate on this a bit more.
All I'm trying to say right here is that military forces were originally instruments of internal coercion. Further I think their original purpose is not clear in most people's minds, and we have therefore lost touch with the intense violence that is inseparable from what we know as social order. There is still a lot of violence that is exercised by the government to maintain social order today? So what? I'm not sure about the so what. Just seems like people don't think about militaries in this way anymore, because it is different now. We mostly obey the laws, the big guns come out for international war, but there are still guns at home that are pointed at us. Society still rests on the implicit threat of violence. Everyone knows that if we do something the government doesn't like then someone with a gun is gonna come get us. It is this possibility for battle, and our knowledge of that possibility, that really seems to keep people in line these days. The government's war against us is implicit now. But that isn't how it used to be. The war waged by the government against their own people used to be very explicit, very obvious. Let me elaborate on this a bit more.
Torture and the Monarch's War Against Domestic 'Enemy Troops'
As I said, the modern state is waging an implicit war, but before the 18th century monarchs waged an explicit war against their people. This is most obvious in the ways that government officials and intellectuals voiced their concerns about criminals and revolutions.
In particular, many people wrote of criminals as if they were enemy troops that they were at war with. Foucault writes, for example, that criminals were perceived to be "quite literally, enemy troops spreading over the surface of the territory, living as they wish, as in a conquered country, exacting levies under the name of alms" (77). Further, one man named Le Trosne wrote of vagabonds "'who live in the midst of society without being members of it', who wage 'a veritable war on all citizens', and who are in the midst of us 'in that state that one supposes existed before the establishment of civil society" (88).
And since criminals were perceived as waging a war against society and the king, the king and the government perceived themselves as waging a war against an internal enemy. "The right to punish, therefore, is an aspect of the sovereign's right to make war on his enemies: to punish belongs to 'that absolute power of life and death which Roman law calls merum imperium, right by virtue of which the prince sees that his law is respected by ordering the punishment of crime'" (48). The maintenance of social order in the age of monarchs, therefore, depended on a war that was waged, by the king, against certain parts of the population (if not the whole population).
Indeed, public torture and execution were meant to be a display of the king's right to take violent revenge on those who disobeyed his will. Foucault claims that public execution "was logically inscribed in a system of punishment, in which the sovereign, directly or indirectly, demanded, decided and carried out punishments, in so far as it was he who, through the law, had been injured by the crime" (53). The crimes, which were explicit acts of war against the king, were met in kind.
Furthermore, public torture works not only to punish the criminal. Public execution was meant to make an impression on those that witnessed it. It was a political ritual that was meant to remind the population of the violence the sovereign was capable of: "The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested.... the crime attacks the sovereign: it attacks him personally, since the law represents the will of the sovereign; it attacks him physically, since the force of the law is the force of the prince." (47). Indeed, Foucault believes public execution belongs to a whole set of political and military practices that build and maintain the sovereign's power: "public execution... belongs to a whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored (coronation, entry of the kind into a conquered city, the submission of rebellious subjects)...." (48). In short, the king waged war against his own people. He used physical violence in public torture and execution to punish criminals and to remind others that he could hurt them too.
To conclude this sections argument I am going to share two final quotations. They just really make it very explicit that Foucault believed that the king of France waged a very explicit war against his subjects. He compared it to terror, and to war."The ceremony of punishment, then, is an exercise of 'terror'" (49). Torture "was that effect of... a power that asserted itself as an armed power whose functions of maintaining order were not entirely unconnected with the functions of war; of a power for which disobedience was an act of hostility , the first sign of rebellion, which is not in principle different from civil war... of a power which, in the absence of continual supervision, sought a renewal of its effect in the spectacle of its individual manifestations" (57).
The monarch's ability to observe and control society was limited, so public tortures has to have an effect on public consciousness, it was meant to make people remember the spectacle of torture and then anticipate the sovereign's reaction if they were to break the law. In other words, witnessing public torture makes you realize you could experience that pain if you offended the sovereign in a similar way. Don't break the government's rules and they wont declare war on you.
At some point in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, public torture ceased to be a thing, incarceration became the main juridical tool, and the monarch's explicit, violent war transformed into society's implicit, knowledge-saturated, discursive war. Next I am going to explore two factors in the change from explicit to implicit war: the problems with excessive physical violence (revolution), and the rise of capitalist economies.
The Shortcomings of Monarchical Violence
The Unpredictability of Physical Violence
First things first, the monarch's explicit war became a big problem when violent revolutions began happening. Public torture, it seems, often turned into a general riot in which the criminal, the executioner, or other government figures could be killed. Torture had the tendency to stir up more violence. People would witness a public execution and people would end up rioting or revolting. Foucault says that, "[t]he public execution is now seen as a hearth in which violence busts again into flame" (9).
Foucault claims that these revolts represent the crowds rejection of the sovereign's power. While these public displays of violence may have been necessary, Foucault also describes their collapse into rioting: "In calling on the crowd to manifest its power, the sovereign tolerated for a moment acts of violence, which he accepted as a sign of allegiance, but which were strictly limited by the sovereign's own privileges. Now it was on this point that the people, drawn to the spectacle intended to terrorize it, could express its rejection of the punitive power and sometimes revolt" (59). Indeed, he says"one finds many examples when the agitation was provoked directly by a verdict and an execution: small, but innumerable 'disturbances around the scaffold'" (60).
Further, the social unrest caused by torture could create stronger bonds among people with revolutionary sentiments. Revolutionary groups began to gain strength around these torture riots. Foucault writes that at these riots the"solidarity of a whole section of the population... was constantly expressed.... And it was the breaking up of this solidarity that was becoming the aim of penal and police repression. Yet out of the ceremony of the public execution, out of that uncertain festival in which violence was instantaneously reversible, it was this solidarity much more than the sovereign power that was likely to emerge with redoubled strength" (63). Revolts became so frequent that "the physical confrontation between the sovereign and the condemned man must end; this hand-to-hand fight between the vengeance of the prince and the contained anger of the people, through the ediation of the victim and the executioner, must be concluded" (73). In other words, the king begins to lose power by displaying excessive violence, and the people are becoming radicalized into response to violence. New ways of controlling people, new ways of waging war, had to be found.
It started to seem as though "in this violence... tyranny confronts rebellion; each calls forth the other. It is a double danger. Instead of taking revenge, criminal justice should simply punish" (74). The unpredictability of physical violence, therefore, demanded that violence be limited and disguised by a clearly articulated, naturalized, and socially represented punishment.
Capitalism and the Need for a New Political Economy
So, I just told you that revolts were getting out of control and violence displayed in torture was increasing those violent outbreaks. Furthermore, a new economic system was also developing that made the control of bodies a greater priority, and made economic resources a great focus. Crime was beginning to revolve not around murder but property, goods. Foucault claims "offences against property seem to take over from crimes of violence; theft and swindling, from murder and assault" (75). The punishments followed in kind: they began to deprive people of personal and economic freedom. The focus shifted from attacking the body to depriving of money, freedom, and most importantly, a matter of modifying the mind, but that is for later. Capitalism effected this whole process.
Furthermore, this prompted changes across the whole social body. Indeed, the switch from violent crime to economic crime is part of a larger process in which society transforms into a disciplinary society: "the shift from a criminality of blood to a criminality of fraud forms part of a whole complex mechanism, embracing the development of production, the increase of wealth, a higher juridical and moral value placed on property relations, stricter methods of surveillance, a tighter partitioning of the population, more efficient techniques of locating and obtaining information: the shift in legal practices is correlative with an extension and refinement of punitive practices" (77).
In concluding this section I am telling you that the rise of capitalist economies helped usher in an age in which the government could no longer wage an explicit war against their population; the government had to control the population in ways that lined up with the new capitalistic economy. Incarceration and discipline therefore became the dominant penal methods, and torture became a thing of the past. "With the new forms of capital accumulation, new relations of production and the new legal status of property, all the popular practices that belonged, either in silent, everyday, tolerated form, or in a violent form, to the illegality of rights were reduced by force to an illegality of property.... the economy of illegalities was restructured with the development of capitalist society" (87). Property becomes more important, the body less important, and therefore discipline that works without recourse to violence, but works rather through deprivation of personal, political, and economic freedom.
So capitalism contributed to the rise of disciplinary society. But what caused it? Where did the model of discipline come from? How did discipline emerge from nothing? What was the first institution to try and discipline bodies?
In this subsection 'The Shortcomings of Monarchical Violence' I have tried to argue that the unpredictability of torture and the rise of capitalist economies made the Monarch's explicit violence ineffective and dangerous. The king or the government could now be totally overthrown in a violent revolt if they engaged in public torture and execution. The war against his own population, therefore, had to be reconfigured. Social order could no longer be maintained through excessive displays of physical violence. New methods had to be created that could instill discipline in society with observation and the production of knowledge. The explicit war had to be made implicit. Prisons were the eventual result of this. So how does the prison system help wage war?
Prisons as Implicit War
In this section I'm going to explore how the prison system plays a role in society's implicit war. What role does it play in establishing discipline in society that can disguise the violence that is involved in social order. First I'm going to discuss military institutions and how they contributed to the model of discipline that would eventually govern many institutions. Then I'm going to talk about how, when applied to penal institutions, is able to mask and legitimate the government's use of force. Then I'm going to discuss the idea of the social contract and how it plays a part in disguising the implicit war. Lastly I'm going to summarize the whole section and offer some thoughts on the overarching notion of implicit war. That will cap off the introductory section of the first chapter. From there I will move on to chapter two, which will specify how both the explicit war and implicit war are waged through truth and knowledge about bodies. That section will allow me to establish the connections between truth, observation, and power. From there I will move on to establish the relationship to simulation theory of mind, and then from there the pragmatics. So, here we go, on to finish the section on Prisons as War.
Bodily Discipline as Emerging From Military Institutions
Now seeing as how the overarching argument of this whole piece is that social order is maintained by an internal war that operates through discipline, it seems appropriate that military institutions would provide the original model for the coercion of bodies. This also lines up with things I have heard about Weber, and how he regarded the Prussian army's influence on government (in that he thought they provided an ideal bureaucratic model). Foucault also makes this point quite clear: that the military provided the ideal model for the forms of discipline that were later adopted by educational, medical, and economic institutions.
In his opening chapter to the section titled "Discipline" Foucault immediately discusses the new levels of discipline attained by military institutions in the eighteenth century. He claims that by "the late eighteenth century, the solider has become something that can be made out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit; in short, on has 'got rid of the peasant' and given him 'the air of the soldier'" (135). In other words the soldier is now something that can be crafted, molded, created from a peasant. The military allows people to notice for the first time how plastic people are and how much they can be modified by disciplinary coercion.
Again, Foucault claims that the military was one of the first institutions to provide models for discipline, and in particular, the measurement of time. He writes of the Prussian military reforms of the eighteenth century, "this regulation of the time of an action that was so important in the army and which was to be so throughout the entire technology of human activity: the Prussian regulation of 1743 laid down six stages to bring the weapon to one's foot, four to extend it, thirteen to raise it to the should, etc." (154). The model of instructing a solider to use a rifle showed that efficiency of movement could be achieved, that people could be timed and taught to do things faster, provided a way of measuring time that Foucault believes penetrates the entire social body. Indeed, in section two I'll talk about the measurement of time and how it fits into modern disciplinary society.
But here I still want to show that Foucault believed the military was the first and strongest form of discipline. He says that the ways that discipline controls time, bodies, accumulation and duration "emerge most clearly in military organization" (157). Further, military organization provided the mechanistic model of organization, "the unit – regiment, battalion, section and, later, 'division' – became a sort of machine with many parts, moving in relation to one another, in order to arrive at a configuration and to obtain a specific result. What were the reasons for the mutation?" (162). People could conceptualize organizations as large, interrelated systems, and the military may have done it first.
The invention of new military technology also played a role in bringing about modern models of discipline: "the invention of the rifle: more accurate, more rapid than the musket, it gave greater value to the soldier's skill; more capable of reaching a particular target, it made it possible to exploit fire-power at an individual level; and, conversely, it turned every soldier into a possible target, requiring by the same token greater mobility; it involved therefore the disappearance of a technique of masses in favour of an art that distributed units and men along extended, relatively flexible mobile lines" (163). Thus Foucault concludes, "Discipline is no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, of extracting time from them and accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine" (164). Discipline becomes the construction of a machine that runs like an army.
The organization of these institutions was actually conceptualized in military terms, tactics, and command being the most important. Foucault writes, "Tactics, the art of constructing, with located bodies, coded activities and trained aptitudes, mechanisms in which the product of the various forces is increased by their calculated combination are no doubt the highest form of disciplinary practice" (167). Not only does the military provide the strongest model for disciplining individual bodies (with tactics), but it also provides a model of command. Disciplinary power functions on "a precise system of command" for which military hierarchical structure may have been a model.
So this is a quotation heavy section, but I think because it is an important theme, and something Foucault stresses. In this last section I have tried to show that the disciplinary techniques that Foucault believes permeated society stem originally from forms of military organization. Now I'm going to discuss how prisons used these models of discipline wage a war.
Discipline and Prisons in the Abstraction of Judicial Violence
When physical violence has become too dangerous and economically unsound, the government had to find ways of controlling the population that were more reliable and less blatantly violent. Foucault proposes that many institutions adopted 'disciplinary' practices. Schools, hospitals, workshops, and prisons all adopted a model of organization that maximized surveillance, closely monitored time and movement, and labeled and explored each individual person. In essence, these institutions started establishing large bodies of knowledge that allowed for bodies to be regulated more precisely. Foucault believes that these knowledge building, disciplinary societies allowed social control to take on a new form. It led Foucault to conclude the knowledge and power are inseparable. He speaks of power/knowledge, and I'll have plenty to say about that in a little bit. Right now, in this section, I just want to argue that the switch to modern prison based systems still amounts to a war. In order to pursue this question I need to examine how it is that legal punishment becomes conceptually disassociated from the violence it relies on. As Foucault says, in the modern age, "Punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process." As a result, "it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness.... As a result, justice no longer rakes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice" (9). I want to know if it is still war even though it has successfully distanced itself from its necessary violence. Much of Foucault's discussion of the prison system confirms that it retains an element of violence, and that it constitutes a war that is being waged by the government against it's own people.
Prison's are able to avoid a violent reputation partly due to the transition to capitalism. Foucault writes that "offences against property seem to take over from crimes of violence; theft and swindling, from murder and assault" (75). Because crime is becoming less violent and more economic, prison's are able to endorse a similar form of punishment. Many people noted that the legal system's lack of violence was due to greater 'leniency'. Foucault, however, argues that this 'leniency' simply reflects the government's new priorities – namely, the preservation of bodies for the use in the economy. Foucault says the development of leniency was part of "a double movement by which, during this period, crimes seemed to lose their violence, while punishments, reciprocally, lost some of their intensity, but at the cost of greater intervention" (75). So is the prison system really less violent? or does it still constitute a war?
Foucault agrees. He claims that there is still "a trace of 'torture' in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice – a trace that has not been entirely overcome, but which is enveloped, increasingly, by the non-corporal nature of the penal system." Because the body itself is no longer physically destroyed by judicial punishment people believe that it no longer involves the use of violence. The war, however, is being waged on an even deeper level, because it has become"a punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations" (16). The prison system is above all meant to produce a body of abstract knowledge that transforms violence and coercion into a set of institutions meant to transform individuals.
Society's war against its own population, therefore, has been abstracted by the modern prison systems. We still have violent means of coercion all around us, we just aren't tapped into it. Prisons disguise this implicit war by naturalizing it, abstracting it, making us believe that is accomplishing a certain goal, rehabilitating a certain set of people with certain 'problems' or 'illnesses'. I'll have a whole section on power/knowledge, so for now in this section I just need to establish that prisons have managed to make the social war more abstract, and have therefore disassociated prisons from violence. It is still a form of war, however. It is still a means of battling certain parts of the population.
Next I'm going to discuss the notion of the social contract and how it has functioned as a way of conceptualizing, masking, abstracting, the constant war that society is engaged in. After that I'll summarize the whole chapter and wrap up the major argument about the warlike nature of peace and order. After that I'll specify the ways that the war is waged (open-strategies, modifying forms of simulation), and my practical suggestions.
The Idea of the Social Contract and Disguising the Implicit War
In the previous section I wanted to establish that prison systems effectively disguise the violence that society uses. It seems, however, that the force wielded by the government is more often legitimized with the idea of the social contract. In this section I want to draw on some of Focault's reflections on the social contract. Ultimately, I want to refute the notion of the social contract because I think it is a way of explaining away the violence that constitutes social order. Who signed this contract with the government? Since when did we agree to give up our power to revolt? Weren't people coerced into not revolting? Weren't people killed for revolting? Perhaps this notion of the social contract was only conceptualized after people were already coerced into these 'democratic' situations? Since when does the government concede things to us? Since when does the government act in everyone's best interest? Never, because that isn't how government got its start. It started as a group of people waging violent war against other people living near them. Their explicit war was eventually transformed into an implicit war, and the social contract was a nice way of explaining it.
The social contract supposedly offered a way for the government and the people to have a healthy relationship with power and violence. Often people associate the social contract with the rise of something like 'humanism' or a concern for the welfare of people. This might be true, but Foucault believes that humanism and the social contract are inadequate for describing modern power relations. Humanism, as we like to think of it, is only a matter of repositioning the economy of power: "If the law must now treat in a 'humane' way an individual who is 'outside nature' (whereas the old justice treated the 'outlaw' inhumanely), it is not on account of some profound humanity that the criminal conceals within him, but because of a necessary regulation of the effects of power. It is this 'economic' rationality that must calculate the penalty and prescribe the appropriate techniques. 'Humanity' is the respectable name given to this economy and to its meticulous calculations" (92). Government had to abandon violent penal methods because the threat of revolution was too great. Humanism merely is a rationalization of this modification of penal methods, which was 'economic' in its logic.
Further, Foucault believes that we need to give up on the notion of the social contract. He writes that in order to understand modern power relations we have to abandon "the violence-ideology opposition, the metaphor of property, the model of the contract or of conquest;...." (28). This is because modern penal practices depend more on the coercion of individuals. We are not rehabilitating individuals to fit in with our social model, we are coercing individuals into thinking of themselves and others in certain ways:"And, ultimately, what one is trying to restore in this technique of correction is not so much the juridical subject, who is caught up in the fundamental interests of the social pact, but the obedient subject, the individual subjected to habits, rules, orders, an authority that is exercised continually around him and upon him, and which he must allow to function automatically in him" (128-9).
The body is still the ultimate place where power is exercised. The social contract is a nice idea, it sounds warm and cozy and makes society sound like a good old time where we all agree to be certain ways and give up certain rights to gain certain rights. But whatever, I don't buy it. Neither does Foucault: "The real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical libraries. The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power; panopticism constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion" (222). In other words, the body still must be disciplined, people must still be controlled. But violence doesn't get it done anymore. And the 'social contract' sure as hell doesn't get it done. But the panopticon – the perfect tool of constant surveillance – makes it possible to coerce and discipline bodies without violently destroying them.
So I've told you the social contract doesn't adequately describe power relations. And I have told you that violence is still the fundamental thing in the modern judicial system. Now I'll summarize this section, cap this chapter off with a redoubled explanation of how society is waging an implicit war.
Politics as the Continuation of War by Other Means: Disciplinary Society as Waging an Implicit War
Now, I have just sketched out generally Foucault's depiction of the transition from torture to prison. The monarch waged an explicit war against his own people, and displayed his personal revenge against offenders in public spectacles of torture. In the modern age, after monarchs, the war against segments of the own population is able to go implicit. The monarch's violence became unpredictable in its tendency to cause a revolution, and it was no longer economically sound with the rise of capitalist economies. New methods of control had to be found, new ways of waging war against the home population had to be conceptualized. The military itself provided a ready made model of discipline that could be applied to many other social institutions (like hospitals, schools, police forces, prisons, etc.). The prison gave rise to an abstract body of knowledge that was able to disassociate the use of penal justice from the violence that it relied on. As a result, judicial practices are no longer thought of as explicitly violent, the war is now implicit. Further, the notion of the social contract functioned to further hide the violent and coercive nature of modern institutions. Now, lastly, I want to cap this first chapter by clarifying this notion of implicit war, and offering some evidence that Foucault, and others, regard society as waging a war against its own population, albeit in a new form.
The prison systems wage their war against society with the support of a whole series of other institutions that are medical, educational, and legal in nature. More or less, all of these institutions fall under the locus of the state. They are political institutions in the broadest sense – they regulate relations of power between individuals. While originally the monarch's war was explicit, this series of institutions also wages an implicit war of sorts. Foucault writes that the transition from the explicit to the implicit war was a gradual process, but one that always includes violence and war. He writes that "from fiscal illegality to customs illegality, to smuggling, to looting, to the armed struggle against the government's taxation agents, then against the soldiers themselves and, finally, to rebellion, there was a continuity, in which it was difficult to mark the frontiers;...." (83). In other words, both the monarch's violence and the governments institutional apparatuses are a way of waging war.
Indeed, even this transition from an explicit war to an implied war waged by a network of institutions took force to implement. Foucault writes that "although the new criminal legislation appears to be characterized by less severe penalties, a clearer codification, a marked diminution of the arbitrary, a more generally accepted consensus concerning the power to punish..., it is sustained in reality by an upheaval in the traditional economy of illegalities and a rigorous application of force to maintain their new adjustment" (89). This transition to a 'less violent' judicial system is driven primarily by violence itself.
Furthermore, some Frenchmen of the eighteenth century thought of criminals as enemy troops, and as their struggle against them as a form of war. One Frenchmen, for example, wrote, "'Every malefactor, by attacking the social rights, becomes, by his crimes, a rebel and a traitor to his country; by violating its laws he ceases to be a member of it; he even makes war upon it. In such the case the preservation of the state is inconsistent with his own, and one or the other must perish; in putting the guilty to death we slay not so much the citizen as the enemy'" (90). This new war against crime, however, differs from the monarch's war in its justifications.
Foucault discusses how the monarch's war was always an individual declaration of war that pitted the sovereigns body against the body of the condemned. Modern penal practice, however, involves a set of institutions that collectively declare war against an individual without saying so explicitly: the modern war of institutions is implicit. Foucault concludes, "The right to punish has been shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defence of society. But it now finds itself recombined with elements so strong that it becomes almost more to be feared. The malefactor has been saved from a threat that is by its very nature excessive, but he is exposed to penalty that seems to be without bounds. It is a return to a terrible 'super power'. It brings with it the need to establish a principle of moderation for the power of punishment" (90).
Foucault again describes this transition from monarchy to republic, and explains how these systems of punishment functioned in different ways. "We have, then, the sovereign and his force, the social body and the administrative apparatus; mark, sign, trace; ceremony, representation, exercise; the vanquished enemy, the juridical subject in the process of requalification, the individual subjected to immediate coercion; the tortured body, the soul with its manipulated representations, the body subjected to training. We have here the three series of elements that characterize the three mechanisms that face one another in the second half of the eighteenth century. They cannot be reduced to theories of law (though they overlap with such theories), nor can they be identified with apparatuses or institutions (through they are based on them), nor can they be derived from moral choices (through they find their justification in morality). They are modalities according to which the power to punish is exercised: three technologies of power" (131). Interestingly, Foucault notes that there are three major forces that interact to produce disciplinary society. Theories of law provide a body of knowledge, while institutional apparatuses implement them, and while moral systems enact them on an individual level.
This new system of punishment, however, operates much more generally in the social body. So many institutions contain traces of this new disciplinary style. Our society has effectively become a carceral society, a society centered on prisons and incarceration. Foucault writes that "a whole set of regulations and by empirical and calculated methods relating to the army, the school and the hospital, for controlling or correcting the operations of the body" (136). These methods of controlling the body, which reach their apex in prison systems, are spread throughout all of society. All of society functions based on a series of institutions that control behavior through the production of knowledge."The human body," Foucault claims, "was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it" (138).
The generality of these disciplinary mechanisms, and their realtioship to war in general, could be seen in educational institutions too. Many institutions adopt the model of war and armies, and they therefore behave like war. In Jesuit Colleges, for example, classes competed among themselves, 300 in a whole class split into groups of 10. "The general form was that of war and rivalry; work, apprenticeship and classification were carried out in the form of the joust, through the confrontation of two armies; the contribution of each pupil was inscribed in this general duel; it contributed to the victory or defeat of a whole camp; and the pupils were assigned a place that corresponded to the function of each individual and to his value as a combatant in the unity group of his 'decury'" (146). This example makes it clear that the model of war permeated society in many different ways – our most prominent institutions use war and the military as a model for conduct.
Foucault explicitly claims that the military served as a model of discipline that was then superimposed on society as a whole. "In the great eighteenth-century states," he argues, "the army guaranteed civil peace no doubt because it was a real force, an ever-threatening sword, but also because it was a technique and a body of knowledge that could project their schema over the social body" (168). In addition to bearing physical violence, the military also provides a model of discipline and control of bodies. This imposition of military standards on the rest of society becomes even clear when Foucault says, "The classical age saw the birth of the great political and military strategy by which nations confronted each other's economic and demographic forces; but it also saw the birth of meticulous military and political tactics by which the control of bodies and individual forces was exercised within states" (168). The rise of modern military forces has great implications for the general structure of society.
Foucault believes that this military society has been overlooked by many philosophers and historians. He criticizes them for relying too readily on the notion of the social contract. "Historians of ideas," he writes, "usually attribute the dream of a perfect society to the philosophers and jurists of the eighteenth century; but there was also a military dream of society; its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal social contract, but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will but to automatic docility" (169). Indeed, legal philosophers attempted to build a model of a just society, but that is only part of the story: "While jurists or philosophers were seeking in the pact a primal model for the construction or reconstruction of the social body, the soldiers and with them the technicians of discipline were elaborating procedures for the individual and collective coercion of bodies" (169). Modern society as we know it is far more warlike than we typically recognize.
Although the new legal systems enforced their punishments with less violent methods, they still implicitly or explicitly made reference to violence, battle, and war. As a result, schools, hospitals, and prisons all adopted the military model of organization. Observation became more important than anything else, and the production of knowledge and discipline began to rule people more than explicit violence. Just because the state's use of violence is now implicit, however, does not mean that it is no longer at war. Just because 'politics' as we know it seems to have established internal 'peace' and thus gotten rid of 'war', doesn't mean that politics is not in itself a form of war. For this is exactly what Foucault claims. "It may be that war as strategy is the continuation of politics (Clausewitz). But it must not be forgotten that 'politics' has been conceived as a continuation, if not exactly and directly of war, at least of the military model as a fundamental means of preventing civil disorder. Politics, as a technique of internal peace and order, sought to implement the mechanism of the perfect army, of the disciplined mass, of the docile, useful troop, of the regiment in camp and in the field, on manoeuvres and on exercises"" (168, I added the bracket that says Clausewitz, cause that what he is referencing). This new system of institutions that governs out political lives successfully hides the physical violence that it requires. All of our social order depends on the government's ability to hurt people, to kill people.
I find it interesting that Foucault hints at Clausewitz. In some essays from Power/Knowledge he discusses Clausewitz's work even more explicitly. I'll perhaps turn to that later. But for now I want to share something about Clausewitz that Foucault never mentions. I am going to use this to answer the question, what does it mean to be at war? If society is waging a permanent war against its own population, how do we know? What does it mean to be at war.
Well, Clausewitz says you are at war if there exists the potential for battle. If battle could possibly happen, then you are at war. Because there have been wars in which there was no battle (but it was still a war) you need a definition that can accommodate this fact. So, this definition leaves room for that. We are at war if there exists the possibility for battle.
Now let me ask you this: at what point in our society is there not the potential for battle? At what point could we kill someone and not expect men with guns to respond? At what point can we break the law and not expect for someone with guns to come for us? Why is it that when two men show up at a bank with assault rifles, dozens of men with guns and bigger guns show up. Why does the SWAT team show up whenever something bad happens. Because in our society there is always the potential for battle, there is always the possibility that someone will come do battle with you if you want to do it. And we, therefore, are always at war with our own government. We have been pacified into peace, a forgetful peace in which we don't remember this violence that is all around us, keeping us all in line.
In conclusion, all political power rests on the ability of a nation to make war, even if it means making war against their own population. In this section I have argued that society is indeed waging a war against its own population. That we, as subjects of legal power, are at war with the state. The only thing is that the state had to find a better way of waging this war against us. Torture was sloppy and unpredictable, revolutions got out of control, bodies became too important in the economy. Fortunately (for those in power), military institutions provided a perfect model of discipline that could be spread to the rest of society. This allows the penal institutions to build up a disciplined and abstract body of knowledge that distanced the prison systems from the violence that is inherent to their maintenance. Further, the notion of the social contract helped stabilize this new implicit war being waged by our disciplinary society. Lastly, I summarized the argument in this section. The model of war and military institutions pervades our society. And this is because our nation-state is inseparable from a state of war. The state is at war with us, and always will be.
From here I have quite a lot of writing left to do. This is chapter 1 of 6. In the next section I am going to explain more precisely how these two different types of war, torture and prisons, are waged. In particular, I am going to discuss how they exercise power, wage their war, through forms of representation and discourse.
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