Our carceral society

In Discipline and Punish (his genealogy of modern penal practices) Michel Foucault makes the following observation:

“Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”

I was reminded of this while reading some of the comments on my previous posting regarding the failure of OBE in South Africa, given the confirmation, by some teachers who commented, that they are buried under mountains of administration of various kinds, which impact on their ability to teach effectively. At a certain level, the above quotation speaks for itself, but it is nevertheless illuminating to elaborate on the broader context of Foucault’s interpretive analysis, of which it is a rather condensed metonymy.

In particular, because it is futile to attempt a summary of everything that the French thinker covers in this book, I would like to lift out some of the mutually reinforcing practices he identifies, the overall effect of which is one of imposing on contemporary society the character of an extended prison. The logic that Foucault lays bare in Discipline and Punish is, in short, that prisons exist to hide the fact that we live in a carceral society. Talking about the “delinquent”, he says:

‘The carceral network does not cast the unassimilable into a confused hell; there is no outside … The prison is merely the natural consequence, no more than a higher degree, of that hierarchy laid down step by step … We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social worker’-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behaviour, his aptitudes, his achievements. The carceral network, in its compact or disseminated forms, with its systems of insertion, distribution, surveillance, observation, has been the greatest support, in modern society, of the normalizing power … ”

As an aside it is interesting to note that, in an analogous manner, Brett Easton Ellis, in his novel, American Psycho (1991), describes a yuppie consumerist society where sheer ennui in the face of the monodimensional materialistic desert of designer clothes, designer cosmetics, designer drugs and “designer murders” — apparently committed to relieve the boredom on the part of the protagonist, Patrick Bateman (an anti-Batman?) — comprises a similar carceral domain from which there is no escape. Significantly, Ellis ends the novel with the words: “This is not an exit”.

In other words, whether we like it or not, we cannot escape to an “outside” — unless we try and “change the system from within”, as Leonard Cohen sings, we shall remain imprisoned in this kind of society. This is why I write what I write about OBE, for instance — like Foucault, I hate all forms of oppression, and today, we live within interlinked and reciprocally reinforcing networks and practices of what may be called “oppression”, of which OBE (and similar ones at universities) is just one. Not the kind of oppression or social control that can be traced back to a person, or a group of people, but an impersonal system of suffocating “normalisation”, to use Foucault’s term. As he says, most people have still not learned to “cut off the head of the king” — that is, people always look for conspiracy theories, trying to match a face or faces to whatever they perceive as being the source of what is “wrong” with society.

What Foucault sets out to characterise in Discipline and Punish is the peculiarly modern form of social control, which does not — like the premodern form — set out to make a public spectacle of the punishment of criminals (such as the bloody affair of drawing and quartering), designed to frighten citizens into submission. Instead, it consists of many, varied micro-mechanisms of disciplining citizens, from teaching children a kind of uniform “penmanship”, to organising available space in hospitals in an increasingly “efficient” manner, and the “panoptical” surveillance of prisoners in prisons designed (according to Bentham’s paradigmatic model) to yield maximum visibility of inmates in their cells. To Foucault’s many examples we could add practices such as using gatsometers and radar devices (even speed bumps) for traffic control, all of these bringing about a subtle but effective imposition of uniform behaviour on individuals, so that Foucault speaks of them being turned into “docile bodies”. And make no mistake — Foucault’s genealogy of the prison is carried out with critical intent.

This, I would argue, is ultimately the effect, if not the intention, of systems such as OBE and all the “audits” regularly enforced regarding all kinds of institutions. It constitutes people as “docile bodies”. There are especially three distinctive modern ways of producing “docile bodies”, according to Foucault (and for those who would contest his claims, he has provided meticulously gathered historical evidence — if you doubt me, read Discipline and Punish). The first is what he calls “hierarchical observation”, of which the panoptical prison is probably the best concrete instance, where merely being observable (not in fact, but in principle) by warders, exercises control over prisoners (or rather, causes them to monitor their own behaviour). But there are many other varieties of such hierarchical observation, with its concomitant effect of control, of turning people into docile bodies. The architectural design of schools, lecture halls, factory floors and hospital wards ensure maximum visibility of those who are overseen by those doing the overseeing, whatever the functional reason, and has the effect, by and large, of docile behaviour.

The second way of producing docile bodies is termed “normalising judgment” by Foucault. In a previous age individuals may have been judged according to the intrinsic moral value or reprehensibility of their actions, but today the tendency is to place them, through judgment, on a differentiating scale or continuum which ranks them in relation to everyone else. It is not difficult to understand how widespread this practice is, not merely where one might expect to find it, namely in schools and universities, but across the board. Just as a student may be expected to be ranked in the top 20% of their class, and not merely to pass, so, too, car rental companies, hotels, restaurants, airlines and educational institutions are subjected to ranking, in this way establishing a “norm” by which they are judged. And it should be noted that, importantly, such social practices do not tolerate difference — everyone should conform to the same standards. Small wonder that there is such an obsession with statistics.

Yet, paradoxically, individuals are encouraged to think “outside of the box”, but when they really do, they soon find themselves in trouble. The reason for this is obvious: the kind of lateral thinking that is encouraged is supposed to serve the optimisation of the system, in the end, but radically lateral thinking, which questions the system, is rejected.

The third practice of reducing bodies to docility is well-known to everyone who has been to school: examination. It is actually the most invidious and effective form of domestication (“docilification”), in that it combines the previous two, hierarchical observation and normalising judgment, and is a privileged locus of the modern nexus of power and knowledge. At one and the same time, the examination provides “truth” about individuals examined, and lays the basis for their control through the norms that are established in this way. In other words, examination as a social practice is a subtle way of exercising power.

Because I read Foucault, it is important to me to find other ways to “evaluate” students — ones that are more conducive than examinations to giving them a sense of their unique ability and insight. These include essays or research papers where they are free to choose any topic, as long as they can relate it to the theme of the course (for instance one on Foucault) class discussions and presentations. In fact, by the time they submit their term papers, I usually already know, from their contributions in class, whether they understand the material dealt with or not. In the end I cannot avoid “normalising” altogether, of course, because I have to assign them a mark of some kind, otherwise they would not progress towards getting their degree. But I can individualise the evaluation as far as possible, and I do. In this time of stifling “normalisation” and pervasively carceral practices, it is the least I can do.

In this respect every teacher is in the position of the psychiatrist, Doctor Dysart, in Peter Shaffer’s “Equus”, who knows that he has to practise “normalising” therapy on his patient, Alan Strang, to enable him to live in extant society, but does so with a certain amount of guilt, if not “regret”, knowing that he is unavoidably robbing Alan of what made him gloriously singular in the first place. We have to find ways to bring out what is singular in ourselves and (in my case) our students, cultivating autonomy on their part, while not jeopardising their ability to function in this carceral society of ours, even as we attempt to change it bit by bit into a “better”, more human society.