African Sun Media
SUN PReSS
Chapter Title: On Discipline and punish
Book Title: Following Foucault
Book Subtitle: The Trail of the Fox
Book Author(s): Evelin Lindner, Howard Richards and Catherine Odora Hoppers
Book Editor(s): Howard Richards
Published by: African Sun Media, SUN PReSS. (2018)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1nzg0kf.19
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives
4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To view a copy of this license,
visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
African Sun Media, SUN PReSS are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Following Foucault
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:42:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
205
LECTURE THIRTEEN
On Discipline and punish
“Normalisation” is probably Foucault’s most influential concept. Discipline and
Punish (Foucault, 1975) is the book where he constructed it. (The importance of the
concept of normalisation for the book is emphasised in its very last words, page
360, where Foucault writes, “Here I interrupt my writing of this book which should
serve as historical background for further studies of the power of normalization and
the formation of knowledge in modern society”.) It is probably his most influential
book. Stanley Cohen (Cohen, 1985) wrote “to write today about punishment and
classification without Foucault, is like talking about the unconscious without Freud”.
In Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics and Normalised Bodies, Cressida Heyes
bravely attempts to summarise what “normalisation” means for Foucault, in a few
words. It is “a set of mechanisms for sorting, taxonomising, measuring, managing,
and controlling populations, which both fosters conformity and generates modes of
individuality” (Heyes, 2007: 16). I think we can taste the flavour, not only of Foucault,
but of the Foucauldian diaspora – the worldwide outpouring of studies influenced
by Foucault – by noticing three kinds of normalising that Heyes analyses. They are
sexual reassignment surgery, weight loss dieting, and cosmetic surgery.
At one level, Discipline and Punish – the book from which the concept of normalising
comes – is not about any of Heyes’s three examples. It is subtitled, “The birth of the
prison”. It is about how western society, especially France, has dealt with criminals
from the late 18th
century until the present – that is to say, until 1975, the year when
Discipline and punish was published. At another level, Discipline and Punish is about
these three examples and more. One of its remarkable conclusions is that we now live
in a jail-like society (this conclusion is expressed in the last chapter, “Le carcéral”:
342–360). Our world has become, in important ways, one big jail; therefore, if you
want to understand our world in general, study prisons in particular. What Foucault
sees when he sees prisons and prison-like institutions everywhere, is suggested in the
final remark concluding Part Three of the book – the part where he most explicitly
develops his twin concepts of “discipline” and “normalisation”. Foucault writes:
That the prison with its cells, with its schedules, with its obligatory labour, with its
techniques of surveillance and record-keeping, with its masters of normality who
transmit and expand the functions of the judge; has become the main instrument
of the modern criminal justice system should come as no surprise. It should come
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:42:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Following Foucault - The Trail of the Fox206
as no surprise either that the prison resembles the factory, the school, the military
barracks, and the hospital; or that all these resemble prisons. (Foucault, 1975: 264)
Discipline and Punish has four parts:
-	 Part One: Torture. Pages 1–86 (the French name of Part One, Supplice, is sometimes
kept in French when Foucault is translated into English because it has connotations
not captured by “torture”).
-	 Part Two: Punishment. Pages 87–158
-	 Part Three: Discipline. Pages 159–266
-	 Part Four: Prison. Pages 267–360
Notice that Part Three, the part whose last lines I just quoted, is the longest.
Part One presents a startling contrast between two very different ways of dealing
with criminals. The first is a spectacle: the torture and killing of a man who had tried
to kill the king, conducted before a crowd of spectators in a public square in Paris
in 1757. It is an extended ritual of atrocities, in which the body of the condemned
man is subjected to maximum pain and utterly destroyed. The second is a timetable
–it is a minutely detailed regime regulating the daily lives of the inmates of a Paris
reformatory some 80 years later. Remember that it is just this time period – the
end of the 18th
century, the beginning of the 19th
, the time of the French Revolution
and its aftermath – that Foucault associates with the end of what he calls the
“classical” period (the period from about the middle of the 16th
century to a little after
the middle of the 18th
century). The end of the “age classique” is the beginning of
“notre modernité”. What Foucault will trace in Discipline and Punish, is the transition
between the first way of dealing with criminals he dramatically depicts in Part One,
the public display of authorised violence, and the second. The second – introduced
in Part One as a flash-forward giving the reader a glimpse of what is to come –
is systematic discipline behind closed walls. Discipline and Punish is a story about
power. It is about the evolutionary origins of power in what Foucault takes to be its
productive modern form, the form of discipline. What modern productive discipline
produces is normalisation.
Punishment, the topic that lends Part Two its title, is to be understood, according to
Foucault, as a political tactic within the general field of the study of power relations.
Power relations, in turn, are to be understood in the light of two other key foci of
attention: knowledge and the body. With respect to knowledge, the genealogy of
power assuming its modern forms as disciplines must be understood as inseparable
from the genealogy of psychology, sociology, criminology and other human sciences.
The more they know about people, the more people become controllable. Foucault’s
hyphenated expression, power-knowledge, expresses the mutually reinforcing
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:42:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Lecture Thirteen 207
and overlapping dependence of power on knowledge and knowledge on power. In
deference to Foucault, I am saying “genealogy of sciences” where others would say
“history of sciences” because Foucault insists that he is not a historian; he was (before
his Nietzschean turn) an “archaeologist”; now (after his Nietzschean turn) he is a
“genealogist”. With regard to the body, the genealogy (others would say the history)
of modern discipline is ultimately about bodies. The human body is the ultimate
material that is seized and shaped by all political, economic and penal institutions. All
systems of domination fundamentally depend on the subjugation of bodies. Bodies
must be rendered docile, obedient, useful.
Chronologically and conceptually, the focus of Part Two is mostly on the new-
in-the-18th
-century ideas of systematic legal thinkers, of whom Cesare Beccaria
(1738–1794) was the most famous and most seminal. They advocated rational
punishment. The old way was expensive, irrationally and unnecessarily violent, and
ineffective. Modern commerce required a carefully graduated system of punishmentsfitting-the-crime
that would teach whole populations to respect property and
persons, especially property. Besides, under the old system, sometimes the crowds,
who were supposed to be cowed into obedience by torture-unto-death staged as a
public spectacle, sympathised with the condemned criminal and became rebellious.
In part three, the heart of the book, power goes further conceptually while shifting
backwards a bit chronologically. Throughout the 18th
century (with some glimpses
before and after), power establishes systematic discipline, not just in the treatment of
criminals but generally in the army, in schools, in churches and convents, in hospitals,
in orphanages, and in factories and other workplaces. It does this by confining people
in limited spaces, where they can be more closely observed and more efficiently
controlled (Foucault, 1975: 166–175). (In Foucault’s terms, power becomes cellular.)
It does it by precisely scheduling people’s time, first in the monasteries with their
around-the-clock routines of ora et labora and eventually in all institutions (Foucault,
1975: 175–183). It does it by prescribing precisely what they are to do (Foucault,
1975: 183–199). It does it by examinations, in schools in clinics and everywhere.
Examinations turn individuals into cases and establish files that turn individuals into
documentary records (Foucault, 1975: 217–227). In a sense – here we need to tread
lightly because Foucault’s meaning is neither simple nor clear – discipline creates
individuals, because individuals in the form they assume in disciplinary society did
not exist at all before discipline. Put differently, discipline creates souls. The brutal
torture of the body with which Part One opened becomes the infinitely more effective,
infinitely more insidious and infinitely more pervasive discipline of a soul, and of a
body via a soul. The soul becomes the prison of the body. Part Three concludes with
a long discussion of Jeremy Bentham’s design for an ideal prison, the Panopticon. The
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:42:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Following Foucault - The Trail of the Fox208
Panopticon principle (which can be applied in factories and elsewhere as well as in
prisons) permits a warder in a central location to gaze simultaneously into the cells of
all the prisoners. Knowledge becomes power and power becomes knowledge because
everything the prisoner does at every moment of the day and night is subject to total
scrutiny and therefore to total control.
In part of Section Two of Part Three Foucault writes about “normalisation” and
“normalising” (Foucault, 1975: 209–216). He says that in every disciplinary institution
there functions a system of punishment that he calls “infra-penal”. Discipline fills
with light punishments, spaces that the law with its heavy punishments leaves empty
(Foucault, 1975: 209). In school, at work, and in the army there are, for example, little
sanctions that can be called light punishment for being late or for being impolite.
But discipline is not just small-scale punishment. It has its own characteristic ways
of making people conform (Foucault, 1975: 210). It is corrective. If a student or a
soldier or a novice in a monastery fails an examination, a frequent consequence
is not being promoted, having to study more and practise more, and taking the
examination again later. “Châtier, c´est exercer”, writes Foucault (Foucault, 1975:
211), which can be interpreted as saying, freely translated, “The kind of punishment
imposed in disciplinary institutions often consists of giving people exercises to do”.
Carefully graded punishments are typically only one side of a disciplinary system,
which is typically complemented by another side, consisting of equally carefully
graded rewards. The carrots often outweigh the sticks. Foucault gives the example
of an 18th
century military school in France, where the cadets were periodically
promoted and demoted according to their performance. Those in the higher ranks
enjoyed more privileges. Those in the lower ranks suffered more shame (Foucault,
1975: 213–215). He concludes, “The perpetual punishing [he seems to mean mainly
systematic small-scale punishing combined with systematic small-scale rewarding]
that penetrates everywhere in disciplinary institutions and controls at all times,
compares, differentiates, establishes hierarchies, homogenizes, and excludes. In one
word, it normalizes” (Foucault, 1975: 215).
Before going into more detail about normalisation, let us step back for a moment and
look at the big picture. What is Foucault doing? Why is he doing it?
I have been suggesting, sometimes with more subtlety and sometimes with less
subtlety, that throughout his life, Foucault was loyal to his mother. He was loyal
to her class interests as a member of a rentier class threatened by the herd, by
democracy, and by socialism. Although it is true that, as Alasdair MacIntyre has
written, “Foucault in each major transition changed direction” (MacIntyre, 1993: 57),
it is also true that his motivation was consistent. He changed directions, but he did
not change loyalties. His loyalty to his mother fused with loyalty to himself as a
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:42:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Lecture Thirteen 209
highly eccentric sexual dissident; also threatened by the herd with its well-known
proclivities for homophobia, xenophobia, and general phobia towards anybody
creative and/or different; and also engaged in what I imagine to be a rather standoffish
relationship with the medical establishment, as represented by her husband
and his father, who was both a practising physician and a professor at a medical
school (these points were discussed in Chapter One and are derived mainly from
Didier Eribon’s biography of Foucault cited there). So my general answer to the
general question, “What is Foucault doing?” would be that he is doing, in his own
words, “critique”, where critique is understood as “an instrument for those who
fight, those who resist and refuse what is” (Foucault, 1981: 13). Friedrich Nietzsche’s
Genealogie der Moral, a seminal book for Foucault, is subtitled eine Streitschrift, that
is, a fighting-writing. I am suggesting that, for Foucault, what needs to be criticised
and fought is modernity’s drift into ever more conformist and ever more technocratic
mediocrity. My general answer to the general question, “Why is he doing it?”, is that
he is motivated by love for his mother and by love for himself.
Discipline and Punish fits into the large picture, thus, lightly sketched in three ways:
-	 As a polemic against the humanist ideals of the welfare state;
-	 As an apology for individualism; and
-	 As a displacement of the intellectual centre of gravity from Marx to Nietzsche;
and at a more sophisticated level, striking a pre-emptive blow against any attempt
to change the rules of the capitalist game. Rules-talk is out. Power-talk is in.
Let me comment briefly on the first two, and, at length, on the third:
Soon after Discipline and Punish came out in English, Clifford Geertz called it the
“Whig history in reverse”. While the Whig history that most of us were brought up
on reads the story of the past few centuries as a story of the gradual progress and
triumph of freedom, Foucault traces the Rise of Unfreedom and the inexorable regress
of liberty (Geertz, 1978). Most of us think of the abolition of judicial torture and its
replacement by what we now call “correctional institutions” as moral progress; it
is a big step toward social democracy, as are public education and health care for
all. Foucault tells a different story, and one which discredits and undermines what
common sense usually regards as the slow and painful but steady implementation of
human rights and human values. (Although Foucault does not repeat in Discipline
and Punish his earlier attacks on humanism, he refers pejoratively on page 166
to “l´homme of modern humanism”, confirming that he still counts himself as an
anti-humanist.)
In calling Discipline and Punish an apology for individualism, I mean to say that it
chimes in with Nietzsche’s condemnation of herd morality, but I need to distinguish
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:42:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Following Foucault - The Trail of the Fox210
two senses of the word “individual”. Foucault is emphatically not a eulogist of “the
individual” created by modern disciplinary institutions. He is in favour of “the
individual” as the body. It is in the end the human body that normalising seeks to
render docile and obedient. It is, in the end, the human body that can be counted on
to “to fight, to resist, to refuse what is”. In the words of David Garland in Discipline
and Punish, “it is ‘the body’ that somehow represents the individual’s instinctive
source of freedom” (Garland, 1986: 879). Interpreting “individualism” in this second
sense, and reading Discipline and Punish as posing the alternatives starkly in terms of
this binary polarity (normalising power/the body’s resistance to it), I read it as a text
motivated by Foucault’s continuing loyalties.
What I mainly have in mind in reading Discipline and Punish as rejection of Marx
and advocacy of Nietzsche, is not Marxism, as a cluster of schools of thought that
dominated French universities until the mid-1970s – although that is important. What
I mainly have in mind is Foucault’s rejection of the structural analysis of capitalism,
whether it is done by Weberians, Durkheimians, Keynesians, Annales historians, or
anyone else Marxist, non-Marxist or anti-Marxist. It would take a long time to recite
here, today, all my reasons for believing that, to do a proper structural analysis of
capitalism, we need to think mainly in terms of rules (also known as norms). It would
take a long time to explain why I believe that if we think only or mainly of power, we
will not understand where we (humanity) are, how we got here, or, most importantly,
how to get out of the structural traps we are in.3
We will be handicapped in changing
the rules of the modern world-system if we fall into the habit of disregarding rules
as mere fictions.
Fortunately, today I can take a shortcut because Foucault himself seems to have
thought about the same issues, and to have arrived at a conclusion that is the mirror
image of mine. Foucault appears to agree with me that “rules vs. power” expresses
a key, perhaps the key, methodological question, even while he disagrees with my
answer to it. Because he emphatically disagrees with a rule-based approach, from my
point of view, Foucault could not – even if he wanted to – do a structural analysis of
capitalism or of any other institution.
3
	 See my (1995) Letters from Québec. San Francisco and London, International Scholars Press; (2000)
Understanding the global economy. Delhi, Madhya Books, revised edition (2004) Santa Barbara, Peace
Education Books; my and Joanna Swanger´s (2006) Dilemmas of social democracies. Lanham MD,
Rowman and Littlefield; (2012) Gandhi and the future of economics. Lake Oswego OR, World Dignity
University Press; my and Catherine Odora-Hoppers (2010) Rethinking thinking: Modernity’s other
and the transformation of the university. Pretoria, University of South Africa; John Searle (1995), The
construction of social reality. New York, Free Press; Rom Harre and Paul Secord (1972), The explanation
of social behaviour. Oxford, Blackwell; Charles Taylor (1971), “Interpretation and the sciences of man”
in Review of Metaphysics. Volume 25: 3–51; Alasdair MacIntyre and D.R. Bell (1967), “Symposium: The
idea of a social science” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Volume 41: 95–132.
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:42:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Lecture Thirteen 211
Just before beginning his long discussion of Bentham’s Panopticon, Foucault writes:
One often says that the model of a society that would have individuals
for its constitutive elements is borrowed from the abstract juridical forms
of contract and exchange. Mercantile society would be represented as a
contractual association of isolated juridical subjects. Maybe. The political
theory of the 17th
and 18th
centuries often seems to obey this schema. But
one should not forget that there existed during the same epoch a technique
for effectively constituting individuals as the correlative elements of a power
and a knowledge. The individual is, no doubt, the fictitious atom of an
‘ideological’ representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by
that specific technology of power that one calls ‘discipline’ (Foucault, 1975:
227). [For comment on the phrase “isolated juridical subject”, see Hoppers
and Richards 2012: Chapter four.]
Let me react to this key passage commenting on one sentence at a time. The first
sentence is: “One often says that the model of a society that would have individuals
for its constitutive elements is borrowed from the abstract juridical forms of contract
and exchange.”
Who is the “one” who often says this, or often says something of this sort? I think
and I think Foucault thinks that it is the just about everybody I evoked earlier as
Weberians, Durkheimians, Keynesians, Annales historians and anybody else who
does structural analysis of capitalism. I think there is general agreement that Sir
Henry Maine was onto something significant when he characterised the transition
from traditional to modern society as a transition from a society based on status to
a society based on contract (Maine, 1861). To understand modernity, you have to
understand commerce. You have to understand buying and selling in markets. I would
agree with Charles Taylor and others, that in addition to understanding commerce,
one needs to understand much else. One must understand the sources of the self that
made the modern identity (Taylor, 1989). Here, Foucault alludes to what “one often
says”. Presumably, it is a prelude to Foucault saying something new and different.
But I do not think “one” says exactly what Foucault says “one” says. Foucault wants
to take credit for ground-level insight into everyday life as it is really lived while
“one” traffics merely in “abstract juridical forms”. I think it is the other way around.
Property, contract, sales, commercial exchange, and so on, are the stuff of everyday
life as it is lived on the ground.
In support of my view that the general consensus that Foucault is about to challenge
sees the principles of contract and exchange as not just abstract law, but also as the
common sense of everyday life, I can cite not just Marx (for example, his analysis of
commodity fetishism, Marx, 1867: Chapter 1, Part IV), but also just about anybody
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:42:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Following Foucault - The Trail of the Fox212
else, including distinguished anti-Marxists such as Friedrich von Hayek. Hayek
freely acknowledges that the legal and moral principles that govern contractual
relationships and property ownership and that constitute individuals as independent
juridical subjects who buy and sell are neither universal nor natural. But he says
that, during the last few centuries, the principles of contract and exchange have
become firmly established in the morality and common sense of the people. They are
the going morality, the morality that is, the morality that governs daily life. This is
one of the main reasons for Hayek thinking that it is fatal arrogance on the part of
intellectuals and governments to think they can improve on capitalism in ways that
alter what the masses, in their hearts and minds, know is right (Von Hayek, 1989).
Foucault’s second sentence in this passage is: “Mercantile society would be
represented as a contractual association of isolated juridical subjects.” Here, there is
a shift. It is a shift away from using the juridical framework of exchange as a model
for understanding capitalist society – which is near to, if not exactly at, what “one”
commonly does. It is a shift toward attributing to others the implausible opinion that
society is constituted by a social contract among pre-existing individuals.
The third sentence consists of just one word: “Maybe”. I think Foucault is conceding,
here, that it might, to some considerable extent, make sense to understand capitalism
by understanding its rules. We will see in the next lecture that a year later, in 1976,
he retracted this “maybe”.
The fourth sentence alludes to some thinkers who really did say society began with
a social contract. It reads: “The political theory of the 17th
and 18th
centuries often
seems to obey this schema.” Here, Foucault associates the plausible model of his first
sentence with some implausible (for us today) notions of John Locke, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau and others. His point may be that distantly similar ideas about contract law
have been around for a long time and have had great influence.
In the fifth sentence, Foucault speaks for himself, stating his own views: “But one
should not forget that there existed, during the same epoch, a technique for effectively
constituting individuals as the correlative elements of a power and knowledge.”
Taking his words literally, he is not asking for much. It is as if he is willing to allow
his opponents to define modern individuals as the civil law defines them, as juridical
subjects capable of owning property and entering into contracts, as long as he is able
to add his postscript to mainstream social science. The postscript addressed to social
science by Michel Foucault would be: Especially since the 17th
century, and even
previously, techniques of discipline used in schools, monasteries, armies, workplaces,
orphanages, and reformatories have been creating individuals by normalisation,
filling in spaces left blank on the canvas painted by the law.
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:42:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Lecture Thirteen 213
The sixth and last sentence reads: “The individual is, no doubt, the fictitious atom of
an ‘ideological’ representation of society, but he is also a reality fabricated by that
specific technology of power that one calls ‘discipline’.” Foucault allies himself, here,
with many others who also find that talk of contracts and rules often disguises reality
more than it reveals it. Most Marxists would say that, at a deep level, that of production
relations, the class of owners of the means of production extracts surplus value from
the proletarian class, while at a superficial level, that of ideology, exploitation is
disguised by contracts signed by separate “atomic” individuals (see Marx, 1867: the
last two paragraphs of Volume One, Chapter 4, part 3).
The conservative sociologist, Vilfredo Pareto, says something similar: what goes on
in people’s conscious minds has little or no significance for the scientific, causal
explanation of social phenomena (Winch, 1958). And of course, for Nietzsche, the
will-to-power loves to wear masks, and liberal democracy under the rule of law is
one of its favourites (Vivian, 2007). Foucault has important allies when he reminds us
that rule-talk is often ideological fiction.
But all of this leaves open the question whether the abstract juridical forms of
contract and exchange, to some considerable extent, really do define the rules of the
capitalist game as it really is played. “One” thinks they do. While Foucault, in this
passage, admits that “one” may have a point, he seems determined to whittle away at
it, claiming more and more for power while conceding less and less to rules.
Hopefully this digression to examine a single passage in some detail will now prove
helpful as I take up the question of the relationship of power to normalisation in
Discipline and Punish.
As David Garland points out in his exposition and critique of Discipline and Punish,
for Foucault the proposition that it is power that generates normalisation is not
a hypothesis. It is an assumption. Foucault approaches the study of disciplinary
institutions on the assumption “that everything that occurs there is fundamentally
oriented to the enhancement of control and the maximization of regulatory power”
(Garland, 1986: 873). Foucault writes from a “power-perspective”. Foucault writes “a
critique of morals in the name of power” (Garland, 1986: 877).
Garland finds Foucault’s power-perspective disconcerting. While most people who
write histories of penal institutions consider several possible explanations of events.
For Foucault there is in principle always only one (Garland, 1986: 876 and passim). That
values other than control, such as compassion or improving health care or helping
children learn their ABCs more effectively, might have played a role in the history
of disciplinary institutions is ruled out not as an empirical finding after study but as
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:42:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Following Foucault - The Trail of the Fox214
a point of departure before study begins (Garland, 1986). Foucault makes assertions
that are supported by little or no evidence, but which are necessitated by the logic
of his own assumptions. For example, Foucault takes what Garland regards as an
unintended consequence of prisons, the formation of a criminal class that learns crime
in prison and practises it upon release, to be an intended consequence of the broader
political strategy of power (Garland, 1986: 875; Foucault, 1975: 299–342.). “Power”
becomes an all-pervasive entity that is everywhere and nowhere: it is never exercised
by anybody with a name and a face, but sometimes by abstractions such as “the
dominant class” or “the state” or more often, by nobody at all. Often, Foucault avoids
the question of who is exercising power by naming “power” itself or a surrogate, like
“strategy”, as the agent exercising power, or by writing sentences without subjects in
the passive voice. Having constructed a blueprint of what totalised discipline would
look like, he goes on to write as if his blueprint and observed reality were identical
(Garland, 1986: 877). All of this is due to what Garland calls Foucault’s “theoretical
preconception” (Garland, 1986: 873). Nevertheless, Foucault became, and remains to
this day, a charismatic celebrity, while the myriad authors who have called attention to
how the “theoretical preconception” of his “power perspective” leads him into logical
and factual errors, have remained obscure (see Garland for references to historical
and other studies calling attention to Foucault’s misrepresentations of facts).
If you have been listening attentively to these lectures, you will see these matters in
a somewhat different light. I have been saying, in agreement with Foucault himself,
that the two great intellectual experiences of his life were reading Heidegger and
reading Nietzsche. I have been saying that Heidegger insisted from the beginning
of his career, even before he wrote Sein und Zeit, that there is such a thing as pretheoretical
knowledge (Lambert, 2002). Foucault never gave up the Heideggerian
claim to be writing at a level somehow prior to and immune to criticism by ordinary
scientific research. Whether writing archaeologies or genealogies, he always insisted
that he was not a historian, not a social scientist, not a scientist of any kind, and
therefore, implicitly, not to be judged by any ordinary criteria for evaluating research.
I have been tracing where and when the idea of “power” first became central for
Foucault; how it functioned to locate him “to the left of the left” at a place where he
could both condemn the main working class ideologies as conservative and attract
rebellious spirits to apparently more radical causes. Some listeners may remember
that I did not claim to say anything on this point that had not already been said or
implied by Jürgen Habermas. Nietzsche’s will-to-power saved Foucault from the twin
embarrassments of either being guilty as charged in Jean-Paul Sartre’s criticism of Les
Mots et les Choses of writing castles in the air of self-referential discourse referring
only to other discourse, or else falling into a historical materialism incompatible with
his deepest loyalties. Hence, in the light of what I have been suggesting in earlier
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:42:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Lecture Thirteen 215
lectures, when writing Discipline and Punish, Foucault had no intention of writing
the sort of history of disciplinary institutions that any garden-variety historian
might write. He wanted to write a Streitschrift, a fighting document, fighting against
humanism, and for a Nietzschean power perspective.
I conclude that what Garland calls Foucault’s “critique of morals in the name of power”,
and what I have been calling the “rules vs. power” methodological issue, is indeed
the central issue. If Foucault is right to see will-to-power operative everywhere, and
causing everything, if that is, in some sense or other, the valid or preferable or only
legitimate or most realistic or best way to understand this world we live in, then
he can be forgiven for fudging facts. It was for a good cause. Foucault apparently
agreed that such was the central issue, for it is the issue he addressed in his next
book, the first volume of his projected History of Sexuality, published in 1976 and one
year later. In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, he takes back the “maybe”
discussed above, where he conceded – temporarily as it turned out – that there might
be something to be said in favour of “one” taking the abstract juridical forms of
commodity exchange as a model for understanding our capitalist society.
I will examine, in the next lecture, the central issue in Foucault’s most famous book,
Discipline and Punish, and the central issue for normalisation, his most famous
concept, namely the issue of power. I will examine it by looking at another book that
came out a year later and was devoted to that issue. After that, and in the light of
that, I will come back again to Discipline and Punish to consider its concluding Part
Four, the part about prisons.
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:42:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
217
A COMMENT ON LECTURE
THIRTEEN
Evelin Lindner
Garland and other critics seem to be correct when they point out that Foucault
disregarded many facts that did not fit his theoretical perspective. Nevertheless,
Foucault’s account of normalisation rings true for many people. It rings true for me.
It has been a revelation for many of us to put on Foucault’s glasses and to see the
world through them.
I sympathise with Cressida Heyes’s employment of Foucault’s discourse about
how power normalises bodies in studying sexual reassignment surgery, weight loss
dieting, and cosmetic surgery. I think we all know what it feels like to be under
pressure to conform to what a woman is supposed to be, or to conform to what a man
is supposed to be, or to be thin, or to be beautiful. From Foucault, we get new ways
to articulate what many have long felt.
Perhaps Foucault saw some things so clearly that they crowded out other things
from his field of vision. What he did focus on and see clearly seems, to me, to be
especially prevalent in what you, dear Howard, have explained so well, namely the
social democracies that have turned out to be rather disappointing. Especially in
Europe, the working classes fought long and hard to reach goals like free education
for all and comprehensive health care for all. One might add humanitarian reform
of the penal system to the list. But when they got what they had been fighting for,
the outcomes turned out to be not so wonderful. Mass education, universal access to
medical treatment, and trying to rehabilitate lawbreakers in correctional institutions
all seemed to be afflicted by a curse. They seemed to fall inexorably under the sway
of the pseudo-sciences and bureaucratic, petty tyrannies that Foucault brilliantly
exposes. Yet, when the private sector was called on to be the saviour with its superior
“efficiency”, tyranny mostly only changed form and justification.
We are challenged to apply what we know about psychology to humanise and to
personalise what has become an inhuman and impersonal world. But I have to
qualify my words. Psychology itself is too often captured by pseudo-science and even
by bureaucracy. Psychology too often becomes part of the problem. And Foucault
himself did not want to be known as a humanist. Surely those of us who do want to
be known as humanists can draw inspiration from his work to use in our work? Only,
perhaps we should be careful not to presume to identify his name with the spirit of
our own projects.
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:42:08 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms