To begin with, a quote.
“… the real political task in a society such as ours it to criticize the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize them in such a manner that the politics of violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them.”
I begin the criticism of government with the problem of the discourses and the subject. It is to begin with “discover[ing] the point at which these practices, [those which are dealing with the subject knowledge, and power], became coherent reflective techniques with definite goals, the point at which a particular discourse emerged from these techniques and came to be seen as true, the point at which they are linked with the obligation of searching for the truth and telling the truth.”
In other words, when do certain “truths” be considered a truth to be understood and obligated to be told and searched within by the subject. When knowledge does not slowly detach from it’s empirical roots, that which the initial from where it arose, to become pure speculation subject to the demands of reason. To call upon the subject where religions once did and demanded the sacrifice of bodies, to call for an experimentation upon the self for the subject of knowledge.
Let us first begin with the problem of the subject.
Foucault’s goal of his work for over the span of two decades has “not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to [CREATE A HISTORY OF THE DIFFERENT MODES BY WHICH, IN OUR CULTURE, HUMAN BEINGS ARE MADE SUBJECTS.]” He gives three modes of objectification to explain this.
The first to go over is what is called “dividing practices”. This first mode of classification, control, and containment in the process of objectification takes from an undifferentiated mass and uses these modes, these practices, to move to a tradition of humanitarian rhetoric on reform and progress. We see the increasingly strategically planned out elaboration of the social sciences. These increasingly efficient methods of combined procedures of power and knowledge in most cases but not all is to dominated groups or to groups formed and given an identity through these dividing practices. In the words of Foucault, “the subject is objectified by a process of division with either himself or from others”. The sane from the insane. The mad from the normal citizen. One of the largest parts to remember is that in this process, humans are given both a social and personal identities with the combination of pseudo-sciences which mediate the practice of exclusion in a special sense usually but always in a social one. Some examples are that of the, “constituted subject [being] seen as a victim caught in the processes of objectification and constraint — most obviously the case for prisoners and mental patients.”
The second mode of objectification is, “related to, but not independent from, the first.” Scientific classification. This mode comes from, “the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences;…” An example is given with, “the objectivizing of the speaking subject in graimmaire générale, philology, and linguistics… [or] the objectivizing of the productive subject, the subject who labors, in the analysis of wealth and of economics. Or … the objectivizing of the sheer fact of being alive in natural history or biology.” It is within the process of scientific classification that discourses are turned into disciplines, especially ones which deal with universals of human social life, make these discourses/disciplines self-reaffirming and autonomous to the point where they are used as a lens of epistemically means to find truth within their respective area of truth to be found which therefore re-ify themselves through the course of history. The natural sciences is also an example. Consider as well the parallel developments associated with the dividing practices, the relation to domination is more oblique. Take for example as Foucault demonstrates in the, “birth of the clinic how the body was increasingly treated as a thing during the nineteenth century and how this objectification paralleled and complemented by the dividing practices instituted in the clinic’s spatial, temporal, and social compartmentalizations.” Keep in mind that these two modes of objectification are not the same nor orchestrated together by an unseen actor.
The third mode of objectification is that of subjectification. In the process of subjectification; one initiates an active self-formation which characteristically entails a process of self-understanding where one is mediated by an external figure whether it be a confessor or psychoanalyst. Things like sex and race are two examples of the byproduct of subjectification as the health of the individual and the race, the growth of medical discourses about sexuality and so forth take the individual and the race and join them together to thereby make it so the individual and the race were joined now in a common set of concerns. This calls for the mediation of one’s own body, soul, thoughts, conduct, etc. Put short, subjectification concerns itself with the “way a human being turns [themself] into a subject.” This differs to the past two modes significantly as the dividing practices, speaking broadly, are “techniques of domination and have been applied mainly to vagabond populations, the working classes, those defined as marginal, etc… the person who is put into a cell or whose dossier is being compiled is basically in a passive, constrained position.” But it’s important to not draw “too sharp a line” between the dividing practices and subjectification as shown in the history of sexuality and discipline and punish, the two can be effectively combined though distinguishable.
So now we have these three modes of objectification of the subject. That which categorize, distribute, and manipulate; “those through which we have come to understand ourselves scientifically; those that we have used to form ourselves into meaning-giving selves…” Clustered tightly around the problem of the subject are the terms of knowledge and power.
“Perhaps, too, we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests. Perhaps we should abandon the belief that power makes mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. These ‘power-knowledge relations’ are to be analysed, therefore, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not free in relation to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject who knows, the objects to be known and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and their historical transformations. In short, it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge.”
The question going to be posed to the systems of disciplines that the government works to produce and uphold is as follows, what are and how are the effective operation of these disciplines — how and around what concepts they formed, how were they formed, how they were used, where they developed. Put well by Colin Gordon, “How are the human sciences historically possible, and what are the historical conditions of their existence?” So what does this mean for philosophy? Well, there is a small issue. Foucault expands that,
“The central issue of philosophy and critical thought since the eighteenth century has always been . . . What is this Reason that we use? What are its historical effects? What are its limits, and what are its dangers? . . . [If] philosophy has a function within critical thought, it is precisely to accept this sort of spiral, this sort of revolving door of rationality that refers us to its necessity, to its indispensability, and at the same time to its intrinsic dangers.”
So now we begin with the issue of government. But we must first look at the history of these governments and where else to go than the view of the state? Something Foucault has quite the strong view on stating, “Since the sixteenth century, a new political form of power has been continuously developing. This new political structure, as everyone knows, is the state. But most of the time, the state is envisioned as a kind of political power which ignores individuals, looking only at the interests of the totality, or, I should say, of a class or a group among the citizens. That’s quite true. But I’d like to underline the fact that the state’s power (and that’s one of the reasons for its strength) is both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power. Never, I think, in the history of human societies — even in the old Chinese society-has there been such a tricky combination in the same political structures of individualization techniques, and of totalization procedures.”
We know already a brief idea of the individualization techniques in relation to the objectification of the subject so let us now turn to the totalization procedures. For this we will look at the KEY historical changes between the state and its relation to the subject. In the middle of the 16th century, the state extended their concern no longer with the nature of the state rather extending their grasp to mediate and control almost every aspect of social life and the subject and used the economy to manage this to a great extent.
Foucault adds nuance to this by saying, “From the middle of the sixteenth century, a series of treatises on the “art of government” began to appear. They were not concerned with the traditional questions of the nature of the state, nor even with problems of how the prince could best guard his power (although these topics were not.entirely absent) . Their scope was much wider. In fact, they covered almost everything. These treatises spoke directly of the “governing of a household, souls, children, a province, a convent, a religious order, or a family.” Political reflection was thereby tacitly broadened to include almost all forms of human activity, from the smallest stirrings of the soul to the largest military maneuvers of the army. Each activity in its own specific way demanded reflection on how it could best be accomplished. “Best,” Foucault tells us, meant “most economical.” “The art of government . . . is concerned with . . . how to introduce economy, that is the correct manner of managing individuals, goods and wealth within the family, . . . how to introduce this meticulous attention of the father towards his family, into the management of the state.”
So this first major shirt is moving from a concern with the nature of the state, and then the prince and his concerns, to now everything else on introducing the economy but more specifically, order. Society was in the process of becoming a political target.
A reason for this shift can be shown when Foucault quotes a philosopher, Guillaume de la Perriere, in his treatise Miroir de la politique (1567): “government is the right disposition of things arranged so as to lead to a convenient end.” With this Foucault notices the fundamental link between the sovereign and a territory. Now of course the feudal lord already ruled all of those who lived in his territory and controlled the resources as well but the fundamental tie of the sovereign’s legitimacy was his connection to a realm.
The Foucault Reader explains this by saying, “In Guillaume de la Perriere’s definition, there is no mention of territory. Rather, a complex relationship of men and things is given priority. “Consequently,” Foucault concludes, “the things which the government is to be concerned about are men, but men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those other things which are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, etc.; men in their relation to other kinds of things which are customs, habits, ways of doing and thinking, etc.; lastly, men in their relation to that other kind of things which are accidents and misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death, etc.” 19 The concerns of a well-governed polity (or, as it would be called in the eighteenth century, a well-policed state) now extend from the prince and his conduct down through the customs of the people to the environment itself.”
Sovereignty has a link with the traditional roots of these traditional theories of sovereignty.
These treaties made on government can be linked for example, in France from the middle of the sixteenth century on, to the rise and growth of centralized state administrative apparatuses. “In fact, it was only slightly later, in the seventeenth century, that detailed knowledge of the disposability of the things available-the different “elements, dimensions and factors of the state’s power”-was christened “statistics” : the science of the state. The art of government and empirical knowledge of the state’s resources and condition-its statistics — together formed the major components of a new political rationality.”
It’s funny how MMT’s theory of state formation along with one Foucault’s thoughts regarding the evolvement of the state parallel as explained, “The attention to population, family, and economy during the classical age is related to’ well-studied historical events which the Annales school has made famous: “the demographic expansion of the eighteenth century, connected with historical monetary abundance, which in turn was linked to the expansion of agricultural production through a series of circular processes.””
As we see the state’s grasp widen and began to foster life and the growth and care for the size of populations become its concern as put in the art of government we see a new regime of power begin to take hold.
Bio-Power.
I will put a two paragraph long quote here explaining bio-power because I am too lazy to summarize. “”[Bio-power] brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge: “power an agent of the transformation of human life . . . . Modem man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.” Biopower coalesces around two distinct poles at the beginning of the classical age. One pole is the human species. For the first time in history, scientific categories (species, population, fertility, and so forth), rather than juridical ones, become the object of systematic, sustained political attention and intervention.
The other pole of bio-power is the human body: the body approached not directly in its biological dimension, but as an object to be manipulated and controlled. A new set of operations, of procedures-those joinings of knowledge and power that Foucault calls “technologies”-come together around the objectification of the body. They form the “disciplinary technology” that Foucault analyzes in detail in Discipline and Punish.” A technology is the combination of power and knowledge used to serve a utility in practice.
What is the aim of this disciplinary technology exactly? It’s aim is in whatever its institutional form it arises in is to forge a “docile body that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved.” This is done in several related ways but three listed within the reader are, “through drills and training of the body, through standardization of actions over time, and through the control of space.”
Discipline itself proceeds from an organization of individuals in space and requires a specific enclosure of space. Once this space is established we see the now enabled ability to have the sure distribution of individuals who are to be disciplined and supervised. Some examples are “In a factory, the procedure facilitates productivity; in a school, it assures orderly behavior; in a town, it reduces the risk of dangerous crowds, wandering vagabonds, or epidemic diseases.”
Foucault believes this disciplinary control is unquestionably linked to the rise of capitalism. However, the relationship between the economic changes that came in the accumulation of capital and the political changes that resulted in the accumulation of power remains unspecified. Foucault argues that the two are mutually dependent: “Each makes the other possible and necessary; each provides a model for the other.”
The reader summarizes this by saying, “Disciplinary technologies, in other words, preceded modern capitalism. In Foucault’s argument, they are among its preconditions. Without the availability of techniques for subjecting individuals to discipline, including the spatial arrangements necessary and appropriate to the task, the new demands of capitalism would have been stymied. In a parallel manner, without the fixation, control, and rational distribution of populations built on a statistical knowledge of them, capitalism would have been impossible. The growth and spread of disciplinary mechanisms of knowledge and power preceded the growth of capitalism in both the logical and temporal sense. Although these technologies did not cause the rise of capitalism, they were the prerequisites for its success.”
But the growth of capitalism is not Foucault’s focus. It is once again rather the subject and power as well as the political rationality which has bound them together.
So to use the example of what is a manifestation of disciplinary technology we turn to the panopticon.
The panopticon is “a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men . . . . [I]t is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form . . . it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.”
What a superb example to use Foucault! As the panopticon carries a particular organization of space and human beings, “a visual order that clarifies the mechanisms of power which are being deployed.”
A description of the panopticon is simple. “The panopticon consists of a large courtyard, with a tower in the center, surrounded by a series of buildings divided into levels and cells. In each cell there are two windows: one brings in light and the other faces the tower, where large observatory windows allow for the surveillance of the cells. The cells become “small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”
Perfectly individualized, even from the guard. As the inmate is not simply just visible to the supervisor but rather he is visible to ONLY the supervisor and is cut-off from any other form of contact. “This new power is continuous and anonymous.” Anyone could operate this mechanism as long as they were in the correct position just as easily as they can be subjected to it. As “[the] surveillant could as easily be observing a criminal, a schoolboy, or a wife.”
Regardless if there is a guard or not surveilling the inmate, the power apparatus still operates effectively. As the “inmate cannot see whether or not the guardian is in the tower, so he must behave as if surveillance were perpetual and total. If the prisoner is never sure when he is being observed, he becomes his own guardian.” He must mediate himself. Become his own guard. What about the other surveiller perhaps? Well, the system of panopticon which it employs provides a system for the controlling of the controllers. “Those who occupy the central position in the panopticon are themselves thoroughly enmeshed in a localization and ordering of their own behavior.”
So with regards to power and the panopticon we see that “power is not totally entrusted to someone who would exercise it alone, over others, in an absolute fashion; rather, this machine is one in which everyone is caught, those who exercise this power as well as those who are subjected to it.”
So through the ordering of space, the panopticon brigs together and organized a power apparatus structure, control of the body, control of groups and knowledge (knowing if one is being watched or not and who is around them). “It locates individuals in space, in a hierarchical and efficiently visible organization.”
For Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarian and maker of the panopticon made it’s teleology of utility. “A particular rationality accompanies the panoptic technology: one that is self-contained and nontheoreticaI, geared to efficiency and productivity. For Bentham, the panopticon had the advantage of being utilitarian, capable of service in a multitude of settings for a multitude of purposes. It seemed to pose no standard of judgment or to follow any particular program. It aimed to be a tool for distributing individuals in space, for ordering them in a visible way. Hence its potential for generalization.”
There is another rationality added into the project of the panopticon. It offered a logic of not only efficiency but normalization. By “normalization,” Foucault is saying a system of “finely gradated and measurable intervals in which individuals can be distributed around a norm-a norm which both organizes and is the result of this controlled distribution. A system of normalization is opposed to a system of law or a system of personal power. There are no fixed pivot points from which to make judgments, to impose will.”
We return back to bio-power for a moment to realize that “order is an essential component of the regime of bio-power, for “a power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms…. Such a power has to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its murderous splendor … it effects distributions around the norm… . [The] juridical institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory.””
This normative order is an essential component to the regime of bio-power, for “a power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms…. Such a power has to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its murderous splendor … it effects distributions around the norm… . [The] juridical institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory.”
Foucault adds with its relation to sovereignty that “[t]his normative rationality has gradually undermined and “invested” (like a parasite invests a body) both the excesses of sovereign power and, more important, the procedures of the law (without eliminating either, again like a parasite).”
So it manifests in law? Precisely. It manifests within the disciplines, practices, and procedures found in the sciences. This normalization occurs within law with the introduction of medicine, psychiatry, and some social sciences into legal deliberations in the 19th century. This lead to what Foucault calls the systematic “normalization” of the law — that being the ever increasing appeal to statistical measures and judgements with regard to what is “normal” and what is not within a population, rather than “adherence to absolute measures of right and wrong.” With this under the regime of bio-power, neither does the sovereign and or the law escape this spread of normative rationality. “”There are two meanings of the word subject,” Foucault writes, “subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge . Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.””
But what about that which is obtuse? Anomalous? Well that’s covered by the technologies of normalization as anomalies are a part of the key role they play in the system creation, classification, and control of these “anomalies” in the social body. The reason they use lies in two claims. “first, that certain technologies serve to isolate anomalies; and second, that one can then normalize anomalies through corrective or therapeutic procedures, determined by other related technologies. In both cases, the technologies of normalization are purportedly impartial techniques for dealing with dangerous social deviations.”
The separation from the mad and the sane is normalized by painting the mad as contra-normality. The reason those who view on the movie screen the criminal or the madman to be so entertaining is because it re-affirms our normality to that which is “the norm”. The structure of normality is affirmed through the affirmation of an artificial contra-normality. Foucault expands on this by saying “the advance of bio-power in the nineteenth century is in fact contemporary with the appearance and proliferation of the modern categories of anomaly-the delinquent, the pervert-which the technologies of discipline and confession are supposedly designed to eliminate, but never do.”
One mediates themself on the level of conduct as well. In Foucault’s reading: “The implantation of per versions in an instrument effect: it is through the isolation, in tensification, and consolidation of peripheral sexualities that the relations of power to sex and pleasure branched out and mul tiplied, measured the body, and penetrated modes of con duct.” The end of good government is the correct disposition of things even when these things have to be invented so as to be well governed.
Now to come to and end we follow through with the relation of knowledge and power with regard to the population subjected to the technologies listed before. Foucault expands in the most beautiful fashion, “With the nineteenth century, the possibility of knowledge about and control over the most minute aspects of behavior in the name of the population’s welfare is at least present in principle, although never fully realized. A vast documentary apparatus becomes an essential part of normalizing technologies. Precise dossiers enable the authorities to fix individuals in a web of objective codification. More precise and more statistically accurate knowledge of individuals leads to finer and more encompassing criteria for normalization. This Accumulation Of Documentation makes possible “the measurement of overall phenomena, the description of groups, the characterization of collective facts, the calculation of the gaps between individuals, their distribution in a given ‘population.’” The power of the state to produce an increasingly totalizing web of control is intertwined with and dependent on its ability to produce an in creasing specification of individuality.”
Foucault doesn’t try to claim that this totalizing and individualizing power has taken hold of everything or that it is ineluctable. At the same time this increasing subjection is a real thing.
So now that we see the issue with government is this totalizing power of individuation and subjectification, technologies to discipline and repress. Thought is rearranged and planned out by the simple fact one speaks with an “I” as this “I” holds to the attributes formed by planned out strategies and disciplines. The control of the economy to control the subject. The control of the subject by subjugated subjects promoting the subjectification of others. An individuation caused by a view of liberation which starts with an “I”. The form of bio-power acts within the structures that surround us, power runs fluid and is exercised rather than possessed and it is all according to the nature of the state. That is a vague summary on the Foucauldian problem with government.
So what do we do? What do we do for liberation? “What is to be done in the face of this spreading web of power?” Well he doesn’t give a straight answer but he does say one thing and that is what I will leave you, the reader, with.
“Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of [a] political ‘double bind,’ which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures. The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.”
