social control

The disciplinary society
by Salvo Vaccaro

Mimesis offers again, after more than three decades, the (new) Italian translation of a book now "classic"by Michel Foucault.
We publish here the introduction by the curator.

 

We republish, after more than thirty years, and in translation revisited and compared with the original in the meantime determined by Daniel Defert and François Ewald in Dits et Écrits volumes, most of the interviews and short writings of Michel Foucault that were collected and published under the title From the torture cells of the types of Lerici in Cosenza, booklet now unobtainable. Over time, some of those texts have been taken and reinterpreted in the body of the Archive Foucault from publisher Feltrinelli or in other newer collections. This is the reason they did not appear in the pages that follow. On the other hand, we have carried out an integration with other short writings that, for temporal and thematic coherence, there appeared to be in line with the common thread that bound them and binds them still.
These are texts whose writing dates back to the seventies of last century and they see, as the pivot around which rotate, Discipline and Punish, 1975. The object is therefore the prison, while the underlying conceptual frame is the device specification which marks, according to Foucault, a precise historical period of European life, but it bounces so much in this, at a particular time-that this threshold, as in a style rule in the Western world that feeds on specific and precise power relations, analyzed by Foucault himself in this extraordinary research. It should also be said that the texts included in this collection become more fully readable through the documentation of a commitment, both activist and intellectual, which marked the existence of Foucault in that decade. The writer has given further evidence on two other publishing occasions, presenting the first Italian player to most of the materials that the GIP - the Information Group on Prisons inspired by Foucault together with other activists and intellectuals in France - produced in the two years of his membership life and the echo of which survives in the texts collected below, the second offering a glimpse of the French philosopher of the engagement on the issues of justice and law in dramatic circumstances for the social conflict or the fate of Europe and the planet, in those years (in hindsight) closing of the Cold War.
The distance of years since the writing of Foucault's writings and interviews allows different lines of interpretation, now linked to the link, always flawed, between thought and life, now linked to the intricate and sometimes disjunctive relationship between books, research, university courses and experiences that all supplies the rest, now linked to the functional analysis diagram to a specific interpretation of this, now linked to the object of analysis focused on which, at that time, the intellectual and passionate interest in Foucault.

Analysis and denunciation of power

Of course, you can not find an overlap between slavish life and thought, but if there is an author who has managed to deny so powerful the Cartesian bifurcation of mind and body, this is Foucault. Results of operations of thinking and body motions, not only through its joint physical, but also with changing states of intensity that, in turn, want to reincarnate and emotional bodies in flexion of the body and brain as a place of thought, fall In fact, in bodily and intellectual positions in unison. This is testified by the many acts through which Foucault reunite analysis and denunciation of power, just to mention a field of fierce conflict chosen according to the contexts in which each time he moved, without renouncing to "appoint" the power (the then Justice Minister René Pleven, for example, or the dictator Franco in Spain), were out of any paralyzing abstraction, but equally out of each trap of its legitimacy, being so careful not to confuse the anonymity system that perpetuated by the pro tempore who carries his name.
It is well established that, about Foucault, it is not possible to find a theme or no overlap in time between the courses at the Collège de France and his books. Obviously there is not a complete estrangement, but it is clear that the courses buy a specific range of research, the typical flow of a wandering in an area known to be moving some assumptions of linear movement at all, which often only partially meets in more solid structure of a volume. This, then, comes at the end to condense normally a long process in which the plot becomes readable brought experience, not merely recounted but filtered by categories genealogical activities for an innovative step in the context of a knowledge that explains also not only the lack of theoretical abstraction and historical detectable already deposited in the archive, but also the political impasses that have occurred and on which so much deep thinking a thought questioner analytical processes, as the practice of impact and transformation.
Equally easy to read, though not of the order of the simple symmetry, is the nexus between political experience in the field and research set out in the courses, which is to promote, as it were, the principle of the strategic direction of thinking that Foucault raises and forth between the two areas, making mercurial actor is the effect of a political activist experience, without flat blindness mediated by theoretical research, and analysis of the cut of a particular theory bounced on the hard floor of the deciphering of a social reality (it's madness, prison, sexuality). So, to stay within the limits of the arc of time of the writings included here, do not require a great effort to record a philological echoes of harmony between the work on the front of the prison, which the foundation of the GIP in 1970 extends to beyond the press of Discipline and Punish, with the contents of the original line of research that institutionally Foucault has entered in the twelve lessons per year of "History of systems of thought" as they called his chair at the Collège de France, on precisely the theories and penal institutions (1971-72), the punitive society (1972-73) and psychiatric power (1973-74), until finally culminate in the organic text of the 1975.
Undoubtedly, not all experiences of discursive practice translate word for word in a discursive practice, and vice versa, although the two faces of the same coin, the outline of the regionality of their center of gravity. Both the practical experiential, theoretical research as they weave a story that reinforces each other, even for those aspects that are not answered either in one or the other, settling into a reservoir of memory, even after the time taken of writing the book that summarizes but reworks, rearranges and reorganizes, sometimes with great waste, the materials gradually accumulated and stratified according to a fullness of the sense now maintained, now abandoned, now right, now revived on other levels, to other excavation lines.

Michel Foucault

Political technology of the body

Just the thought of the intersection of life, laid in courses and books, and life experience, especially manifested on the streets and squares, sketches the contours of an analytical grid which govern it. More than a paradigm, a conceptual diagram and discursive whole, capable of making visible the connections that hold the underlying social configuration of a given historical period, their lineage and developmental discontinuity in the main, but also able to make it pliable used to evoke a word power, position, in today's time of reading or listening. The stamp features a particular disciplinary society beyond the institutions that support and raise, each of which has a history and a specific function is not comparable to the other, but they indeed the discipline as a constitutive feature as meeting with success a heterogeneous set of instances of domain whose principle of identity is one and the morphology of the power system, as pointed out by Foucault himself, in different spheres of life associated seeks to restore order went into decay.
The factory, prison, school, military, mental hospitals, the hospice, institutional apparatuses are different, which arose because of the deadly alliance of state and industrial capitalism, strategies and tactics to rational governance of the society, or governmentality in the Foucault portmanteau, in convergent competition in order to secure a hegemony in the pyramid of hierarchy of powers and a prime salience between the junctions of the social fabric to preserve its unity. On the other hand, these devices return and comply with different knowledge at the same time, each of whom will struggle to become self-determining lines secure the border, the homogenized constitutive categories in-house and expelling other forms of knowledge are inconsistent with the purpose of marking what is equally significant is defined as "discipline. "
The disciplinary module also combines the progressive emergence of the individual as a subject carrier of modernity, where there are concerns fall on the one hand, the fate of his soul, now an orphan of the transcendental structure of consciousness but not quite state-of emancipated minority under which bring back a time restored the order of disciplinary subjectivity unitary part, the potential of the body freed slave, to which the owner offers a dimension that cleverly conceals the appropriation as an act of unspeakable violence as a founding act of bourgeois society: back to the catalog of property rights that constitute the individual as an active subject of history, lies a political technology of the body, as Foucault says, that the installation of his capture in sticky texture of the roles and social functions Mediated or not, which makes it subject to the new institutions in which freedom is swallowed up in the internalization of the drives domain.
The discipline thus becomes the name of a topical strategic move outstretched to represent a docile subject, that can be reduced and covered by the order, especially tamed up to suggest the self-appropriation of the move to capture the dominant order: his name is used, right in the Humean sense of the word. The internalization of spiritual discipline is the logical transition to what today are called parent societies, with a break towards the equipments and, but in the saturation of the ideal ordered spaces within which to guide the company under the pastoral model. Undoubtedly, the scale changes, especially changes the look of care, which passes by the individual in his singularity, the whole flock of domesticated, but this nuance of perception can not make us lose the marking of the individual within the mass, the more effective as it is self-assigned after a long time learning and practicing discipline, reinforced by socialization structures.
The diagram specification, however, does not just find a prison in the topos of the cardinal points of application in the modern era. Its plasticity is used to Foucault, not only as a compass to guide their militant activities, but also from policy analysis to capture the twists that history can be read on the floor of the topos is the prison itself, both in terms of society in the 70s of last century. Foucault's concept of a mature discipline in the two courses on the company and punitive psychiatric power, only to find a book in the systematization of the historical genealogy of the prison. But a well-read interview and occasional writings of the first half of this decade, as well as materials produced collectively by the GIP, much attention and emphasis is given to the emerging practice: the society of surveillance and control.
Without a clear break from the disciplinary instance Foucault was ready to seize new emerging post-sixtyeight, through which the wealthy bourgeois society reacts to the world revolution of the ethos that we conventionally call the 1968. Linking prison of the soul and body adaptation of the spiritual body, the prison becomes the threshold for switching and control of the interpenetration between mass society and captures the subject's singular enslaving / subject; prison surveillance stretches the entire body of society, no doubt through other channels of extension and pervasiveness of introducing a different technology policy, from a few years, it also made use of real innovative technologies such as biometrics, the geno, satellite remote controls, circuit cameras deployed on the territory, the identifiability of body mass displacements due to the relevant infrared spectra of heat, the residual traces left by the electromagnetic waves of our phones, and so continuing.

Language of the complaint

From individual to group, and return the surveillance strategies affect both the institutions, because the knowledge relevant to dismantle the old hierarchical structures in favor of sticky barbed wire and equity to which the variable geometry of spaces of freedom, more and more detached from the pars destruens subtraction of emancipatory education, namely liberation. You saw the transition from law to rule by the supervisory control, the mere repression care assistance, from politics to administrative governance. The prison is not exempt from this reconfiguration, and today it is possible to measure the distance of nearly forty years since Foucault lived in to modern times.
At first glance, spring to view the countless references to a language of complaint, while trying not to flatten the ideology which carrier preferred language of the time, reveals similarities and proximity to sociological formulas, such as the proletariat, the common people, who lit even in real time discussions to no end. However, beyond the effect of surface reading, Foucault leads us towards the transformation visible and less visible not only in prison, compared to that described in the genealogical reconstruction of the book dedicated to it, but of society than inside the provides, encourages and uses it in very different conditions from those of previous centuries. This concept of mediation that the genealogical method applies a straightforward view of this. Even between the lines of Foucault himself, the reader can see the pages that follow the post-panoptic and synoptic perhaps best characterizes this present time, decades away from the 70s of last century.
It's not just the specter of vision to change, but the voluntary auto-inibition power unfolds as a seductive and colliding to legitimize the control and manage the uncertainty of the identification of a constitutive internal control and suppress the enemy. The iceberg is revealed then the prison as the terminal phase of an institution striving to border control today in a public (but dull) dump various segments of humanity is not so dangerous from the point of view simply penal or criminal, but because the bearer of practices and discourses do not conform to the established order, in gangrenous and nauseating for its declining phase.
The liquid society of which Bauman speaks has a lot to do with the disciplinary society of which Foucault spoke, despite the obvious differences: the transition from the notion of a dangerous individual and segment of the population at risk marks a discontinuity of gradient but not quality, although it is triggered and trigger specific social and political effects. Extermination by degradation, an excess of moralism, social expulsion (the American rule of the third offense and throws the key, in spite of each instance of re-education, rehabilitation and recovery to come constitutionalized), the claim does not neutralize the crime but the criminal, the prison as a storehouse of containment on this side and beyond the law to be applied in each case, mark the involutive sections, if you want to think in terms of philosophy of history, much like their ideas, and the eye even to the letter ('garbage bin', for example) that Foucault set out in separate interviews, the statute in his work should not be underestimated or belittled.
If you also change the political technologies and techniques in defense of the existence, proliferation and reproduction of the prison and its undoubted success, despite all the criticism of moral, political and cultural, it is also true that the defense of social inequality is in it is a bastion still alive, rather widespread in the entire body of the society through some electronic devices that achieve the same result as remote monitoring (bracelets, genetic profiling), thus saving the darkest and dirtiest with which soil the goodness of the apparatus function. Segregate and intern converge with the tactics of discrimination along many sectors of separation and distinction, even with the use of vertical hierarchies and moral Nietzsche already stigmatized in the late nineteenth century.
Foucault's approach is radical, literally, considering the reform as an effect of a balance of forces, then as a secondary product of a tactic, the cultural horizon within which to place the prison perspective can be defined purely in the denying sense, or do away with the prison, then mounted as a process of social critique that would lead to put an end to the insane asylum. Without doubt, this radical approach is well integrated into a post-aura sixty-eight still full of power and radical utopian vision. The fact that, after more than thirty years, a fatwa on this side of nostalgia, the problem is to do away with the prison remains intact in its drama and its existential danger man proves that it is necessary to recover, reprocess and rethink the engagement and the radical perspective of which Foucault was a formidable bearer.