Tag: Biopolitics

Darwinian Conservatism and the Liberal Welfare State

§1. Introduction.

In his book Darwinian Conservatism the political scientist Larry Arnhart makes the case that traditional conservatism is the right political philosophy for humanity to follow because “it rests on a view of human nature that is supported by Darwinian biology” (Arnhart, 10). Arnhart developed his case by way of defending five propositions, each dealing with how Darwinism would support a specific conservative proposition.

This essay will concentrate on the following question: Has Arnhart made a persuasive argument for Darwinian conservatism? My answer to the question is negative, because I think Arnhart makes certain jumps, or takes shortcuts, which are undermining the strength of the connection between his Darwinian premises and conservative conclusions. I will support my view with three arguments in which I will try to show that Darwinism does not necessarily lead to conservatism and can, for equally valid reasons, be interpreted to support liberalism.

The three arguments I like to develop are: 1) Arnhart does not consider reasonable liberal alternatives. Instead he sets up Liberalism as a straw man and then easily knocks it down; 2) Arnhart does not put his hypothesis to the test by looking at comparative research about how different countries with different socio-economic systems satisfy the twenty basic desires he identifies; 3) Arnhart thinks there is no manner to rank and prioritize our desires and therefore concludes society should have a libertarian, hands-off attitude in this regard. Based on psychological research and common sense one can reason in favor of some kind of ranking, which supports a more liberal direction of the policy making process.

I will also develop two lines of argument to challenge my own reasoning. 1) I will play with the idea that people in social democracies, though they might report at the subjective level a high sense of well-being and are by objective measures well off, they are deep down miserable, but do not know that, because they suppress such realization by their hedonistic life-style. 2) Secondly, arguing against the idea that the European social democracies evolved naturally, I will for the sake of argument side with conspiricist conservatives and make the case that the welfare state came into being as the result of devious conniving behind the scenes by an international network of individuals, families, and semi-secret groups.

§2.1. Liberal Alternatives

Arnhart seems to be too eager to make his case for Darwinian Conservatism and drive towards its conclusion without carefully considering possible alternatives. First of all, though he does address criticisms of his five main propositions, they are all challenges posed by other conservatives, especially transcendentalist conservatives (Arnhart, 10-13). Secondly, criticisms coming from more moderate liberal positions were not included among the commentaries solicited by the editor Kenneth Blanchard of the expanded edition of Darwinian Conservatism. The challenges came from transcendentalist conservatives and secular libertarians, not liberals or Marxists.

The liberals depicted and refuted by Arnhart are mostly Utopian liberals, whose abstract concept of liberty, rationalist ethics and Utopian programs based on the presumed perfectibility of man, are all shown to be dangerous ideas, because they do not take into account the more biological, realistic view of man with his natural desires and long established habits. Some of my liberal friends could not recognize themselves in the Utopian liberal depiction as presented by Arnhart and thought the argument reeked of a straw-man fallacy. This might be true from the perspective of more moderate, pragmatic liberals, but I think it certainly is applicable to the more classical Utopian and Marxist variations of liberalism.

It is easy to show with the historical record that Utopian left wing and authoritarian right wing regimes do a poor job in enabling their population to flourish, but as little as anti-fascism leads to liberalism does anti-communism lead to conservatism. And it is the latter move which Arnhart seems to make in his justification of Darwinian conservatism. If you do not want to end up with the unsatisfactory and unnatural results of liberal Utopianism, you will have to embrace a form of naturalistic conservatism as its only alternative. This is the fallacy of a false dichotomy. There is a continuum between the extremes of anarchy and totalitarianism, and pragmatic liberalism, as it evolved in Europe, is one of many socio-political systems on that continuum.

Arnhart does engage in his book the work of Peter Singer, because of the latter’s plea for a Darwinian liberalism based on biological science and not primarily on abstract moral principles or Marxist ideology, though those seem still operative in Singer’s thinking. Arnhart’s deconstruction of Singer follows two lines of counter-attack. First, he thinks that Singer’s principle of ethical impartiality, which is confessedly a rational principle, has no basis in human nature and therefore can not really be considered Darwinian, and secondly, that much of Singer’s “‘deflated’ leftism” is acceptable to conservatives, as long as it is based on the idea that “conformity to human nature is a fundamental standard for good social policy” (Arnhart, 128).

But the tables can be turned here and an argument can be made that liberal ends still might be attained in conformity with human nature. For example, one could argue that it was in conformity with the given natural desires, changing emotions and habits and evolving, prudential reasoning of its citizens that the European welfare state evolved. And it evolved naturally and gradually by incrementally changing its collective habits, deliberations and laws. If conservatives would recognize the gradual evolving quality of this process and see that it harmonized with man’s evolved nature, they would not have any reason to oppose the quite liberal outcome. Only by deducing arguments from purely ideological or religious sources could they make a case against a naturally evolved welfare state, but not on Darwinian conservative principles only.

§2.2. Comparative Research

Another line of critique involves empirical data. Arnhart does not provide enough supportive research in which countries with a different socio-political system are compared in which way they accomplish the satisfaction of the basic, genetically driven desires of humans. Arnhart stated that specifically the USA and the UK fulfill those desires, but, instead of making the case, he merely refers to Paul Rubin’s Darwinian Politics (Arnhart, 84). I find several problems with that. First of all, it looks contradictory to lump the USA with the UK. To me the UK is, even after Thatcher’s reforms, a fully developed welfare state comparable to other western European states. Maybe Canada might have been a better choice to put in the same category as the USA. Secondly, as I somewhat developed elsewhere, Rubin recognizes other natural desires which lead to a welfare state.1 This implies that, if these desires are considered natural and the welfare state provides a legitimate satisfaction of those desires, then the existence of the welfare state is justified on Darwinian principles.

My own exploratory research, comparing the liberal Netherlands with the more conservative USA, indicated that Holland is better off as far as the satisfaction of natural desires are concerned. In a preliminary conclusion in one of my entries I stated that the Dutch have “better health care, longer life span, a supportive parental leave system, less poverty, less hunger, less corruption, better protected fundamental and property rights, a better civil and criminal justice system, and greater press freedom”.2

One of the statistics I did not use in my entry was the index for human development and overall well-being. Here the numbers become interesting because in the Human Development Index (HDI), which is based on life expectancy, education and income, the US and Holland both score very high and very close. Actually, in 2011 the US and Holland tied at the third place after Norway and Australia and in 2012 the US went slightly ahead. But when the numbers are adjusted by taking into account income inequality–a procedure now widely accepted–the ranking changes quite dramatically. When one looks at the Inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI) the US dropped a whopping 19 places in 2011 and 13 places in 2012, while the European countries on the list kept their high ranking because of their much lower inequality.3 The adjustment is justified by the idea that, when there is a large income inequality in a country and, because of that, most of the benefits are concentrated at the top, the average citizen will have a lower HDI then if the benefits would have been more equally spread over the population. The Inequality-adjusted HDI is thereby seen as the actual index and the unadjusted HDI as an index for a country’s potential. From this idea can be deduced that, though the US has a very high potential for human development, the country does not actualize this potential fully because of its income inequality. And of all the developed countries it is the USA which has the largest difference between its potential and actual development.

§2.3. Maslow and the Ranking of our Desires

It might not be true that there is no way to rank our desires and that, in light of such lack, one cannot assign policy priorities to help people attain some of the basic ones. A more careful, and even scientifically based model to create some overall ranking of our natural desires might lead to a more liberal and less conservative socio-political order.

Arnhart states that to “combine and rank the goods of life, each individual must exercise prudential judgment in deciding how to arrange and integrate these goods in a way that is fitting for the contingent and particular circumstances of the individual and for that individual’s propensities, abilities and history” (Arnhart, 239). This more open-ended, flexible and tolerant conception of human goods, which he named the “inclusive end conception,” seemed to have been developed in opposition to the more rigid “dominant end conception,” which comes with most transcendentalist conservative and, for that matter, Utopian liberal world views.

The question whether evolutionary theory can provide something of a ranking of our natural desires in such a way that we do not have to appeal to a transcendental source outside life itself to indicate which of our natural desires are good or bad. Question is if there is something of a natural ranking already taking place without humans necessarily noticing it. We might already act according to a certain naturally evolved and reasonably coherent value system, but are not yet aware of such. Or maybe some psychologists, though not explicitly working within the evolutionary paradigm, have found a hierarchy in our desires. If so, we’ll have to see if it harmonizes with evolutionary psychology.

The system I have in mind is the hierarchy of needs as developed by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow and presented in his paper “A Theory of Human Motivation.” In this now more or less accepted theory humans have a hierarchy of needs ranging from very basic physiological needs to the highest, which is self-actualization. And we move from first satisfying the basic set of needs to the next, higher set. Without getting into details, it is obvious that there is quite an overlap between the basic needs Maslow’ identified and the natural desires Arnhart enumerated. The first question is if Maslow’s hierarchy can be used to organize and evaluate our needs and thereby overcome the alleged problem of the probable absence of a transcendental source to provide a similar service. The second question is if this hierarchy can help settle questions in political philosophy.

Reflecting on the logic of its organization in the form of a pyramid, I can agree that the basic physiological needs come first to be satisfied. No life without air, water, food or sleep. And our sense of evolved sympathy would find it very hard to see or contemplate anybody in our proximity deprived of them. Slightly less vital for our survival, but still quite important, are our security needs for shelter, health and a safe environment. Then, one step further up in the hierarchy, are our social needs for friendship, romance, familial bonding and communal belonging. Next is our need for a sense of self-worth, which finds satisfaction in personal accomplishment and social recognition. Maslow’s highest rung is the need for the conscious actualization of one’s potential, a level where one can find peak experiences of flow, mastery and self-transcendence.

Given this hierarchy I would venture that a community should be organized such that a) the basic biological needs (food, health and shelter) are one way or another guaranteed to all members and that b) long-term policies are such that they give the best infrastructure for the optimal fulfillment of the other needs. A right to work and a minimum living wage would take care of the basic needs including housing, and a non-corrupt government can provide safety, health insurance and affordable education. At the same time there should be a maximum of freedom for people to pursue their social, romantic, vocational, economic, creative and spiritual needs. Apparently the social democracies of north-western Europe have accomplished a lot in this direction. They only still have to get their Muslim population to buy into the program, because the Muslim appeal to their own transcendental source of morality is posing somewhat of a danger to this more enlightened, secular, semi-self-regulating set-up.

In summary, what seems to be overlooked in the dichotomy between the libertarian “inclusive end conception” and the religionist or secular Utopian “dominant end conception” is a ‘two-tiered end conception’, which differentiates between basic and elective goods based on Maslow’s hierarchy of natural needs. The basic needs are food, health and shelter, which all should be more or less guaranteed by a polity if these could not be met within the context of a free market economy. The elective needs are social, vocational, cultural and spiritual, for which fulfillment a polity only has to provide the infrastructure, but not its actual fulfillment. To me it looks like that the social democracies of Europe have organized their societies around such a two-tiered conception of human needs and have done so quite successfully.

§3.1. Are the Dutch Really Better off?

Recently I discussed with a very wealthy, conservative father of one of my friends how mellow and happy the Dutch seem to be. He thought that the Dutch might not know they are actually unhappy. Maybe they “smoke” too much. They think they are happy, but their hedonistic lifestyle suppresses the fact that they are miserable escapists living in a life-sapping, oppressive welfare state. Given the idea that people tend to be self-deluded and self-justifying and that people might not be honest when asked to report about personal feelings, the idea of the Dutch not being really happy has some plausibility. The problem is then, of course, how to tease out the truth. Methodologically speaking this is tricky, because it is quite complex to differentiate between what people report about their well-being and how they deep down really think and feel. Probably the Harvard-based Project Implicit could help in this regard as they investigate “thoughts and feelings outside of conscious awareness and control.”5

Maybe by looking at statistics about suicide in the US and the Netherlands it might become clear if it is reasonable to think that there is a discrepancy between a nation’s self-image and reality. According to statistics from the European Commission the average suicide rate in the Netherlands in 2009 was 8.5 per 100.000 inhabitants (males 12.0 and females 5.0).6 According to the US Department of Health and Human Services the average suicide rate in the US in the same year was 12 per 100.000 inhabitants (males 19.5 and females 5.5).7 Wikipedia took these numbers and ranked 107 countries by average suicide rate, from high to low. The US came in 33rd place, just ahead of the traditionally suicide-prone populations of Sweden (11.9) and Norway (11.9) and just below Communist Cuba (12.3). The Netherlands came in at 51st place, leaving only Spain (7.6), Italy (6.3) and Greece (3.5) with lower rates of suicide in Europe.8 It looks like that females in both countries are equally inclined towards suicide and that US males are 50% more likely to commit suicide than their Dutch counterparts. If human nature is in general similar in both countries it seems reasonable to conclude that American men are one and a half times more unhappy then Dutch men. But, what if the psychological profile of both populations is quite different as my friend’s father suggests? Is it plausible to assume that the oppressiveness of the welfare state makes people more unhappy, but at the same time its tolerance of escapist habits would assuage this side effect and keeps people from committing suicide? Rationally speaking I can see the logic, but intuitively I find it quite absurd. It is an interesting question though and I have to admit that I am at a loss of arguments to be convinced one way or the other. I can only reiterate that Project Implicit might bring some clarity here.

§3.2. The Deviously Engineered Nature of the Welfare State

The argument that the welfare state is somehow the natural outcome of a social evolution in conformity with man’s natural desires might not be true and merely a rationalization. The truth is more ominous and relatively hidden. In broad lines it is as follows. For a few centuries a network of groups and individuals have conspired to introduce socialist policies into the fabric of society. Their ends justified their means and through Communist revolution, Fabian gradualism or the surreptitious infiltration of governments and civic institutions they steered the west into the adoption of unnatural, collectivist policies and the creation of institutions like the European Union and the United Nations. Libertarians and conservatives in the USA are the last bulwark against this encroachment and will have to engage in a battle of epic proportions to keep the USA free by rolling back the welfare state domestically and promote free markets and limited government in the international arena. A Darwinian conservative could use this conspiricist argument against the welfare state with great effect, because the deceitful origin of the welfare state shows how counter-natural it actual is.

§4. Conclusion

Though I heartily agree with the premise that a sound political philosophy has to take into account the evolved nature of man, I cannot agree with the idea that such a philosophy is necessarily conservative. Ironically, by the standards of Darwinian conservatism itself, European countries enabled the natural evolution of their welfare state (§2.1) and do a better job in fulfilling man’s natural desires than the more conservative USA (§2.2.). The difference between Arnhart’s more libertarian-leaning Darwinism and the Darwinism which leads naturally to the European style welfare state is that the latter incorporates 1) some natural needs which justify a welfare state identified by Rubin, but overlooked by Arnhart (§2.2.), and 2) it incorporates a two-tiered conception of natural needs instead of Arnhart’s proposed inclusive end conception (§2.3.). Two arguments can be made to totally undermine the above idea of Darwinian liberalism. The first is to argue that people in a welfare state are worse off because they are actually unhappy, but smother that feeling by unnatural and immoral activities (§3.1) and secondly by arguing that the welfare state is nothing more than the unnatural and immoral product of a long-term deception perpetrated by a devilish, Machiavellian cabal (§3.2.).

This paper was written for the class “Biopolitics and Human Nature” (Political Science
320) conducted by Prof. Larry Arnhart in the spring of 2013 at Northern Illinois University

[Response to paper: Arnhart, Larry. 2020. “Darwinian Conservatism, Darwinian Liberalism, and the Welfare State: A Reply to Govert Schuller“. Darwinian Conservatism by Larry Arnhart. Blog. 30 July 2020.]

Sources Cited

Arnhart, Larry, et al. 2009. Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question. K.C. Blanchard, (Ed.). Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic.

1.  “More on Politics and Natural Desires”. Response to Michael Penicnak Entry #6. March 5, 2013. Political Science 320, NIU, Dekalb, IL, Spring 2013.

2.  “The Fulfillment of Basic Desires in the USA and the Netherlands”. Entry #6. February 26, 2013. Political Science 320, NIU, Dekalb, IL, Spring 2013.

3.  “Statistical Annex“. Human Development Report 2011 & 2013. United Nations Development Programme. Web. 29 April 2013. “Human Development Index“. Wikipedia. 

4. “The Political Implications of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Natural Needs” Entry#7. March 5, 2013. Political Science 320, NIU, DeKalb, IL, Spring 2013.

5.  Project Implicit. Home Page. Web. 29 April 2013. .

6 . “Death Due To Suicide“. Eurostat. European Commission. 2009. Web. 29 April 2013. 

7.  National Vital Statistics Reports. Vol. 60, No. 3 (December 29, 2011). Web. 29 April 2013. 

8.  “List of countries by suicide rate”. Wikipedia. Web. 29 April 2013. 

 

Foucault’s Concept Discipline: A Systematic Analysis

Introduction.

In this essay I will primarily focus on the pivotal Foucauldian concept of discipline as developed in his influential 1975 study Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (hereafter DP). The plan of the paper is to first connect the concept with its immediate neighboring terms, especially punishment and surveillance. Then I will address how Foucault sets the practice within a four-fold categorization of space, time, movement and tactics, to be followed by his thoughts on the practice of examination, which term will be framed as a manifestation of the Foucauldian concept of power/knowledge. After this I will set penal discipline in its historical context in which it was the punishment mode which won over the more rational mode of punishment which Enlightenment reformers proposed to replace the ever more politically dangerous monarchical mode of spectacular, cruel punishment. I will also shortly address the history and reason for the first penal institute in Europe and the origin of certain disciplinary practices. Lastly I will bring in a framework to understand discipline as a system of punishment in correlation with the then rising system of production of mercantilism and how this can also be understood at the micro-level of the body. As a finale, Foucault’s original leading question regarding the constitution of individuality and how that played out in disciplinary practices will be addressed.

Discipline and its Components

First, I like to position the concept of discipline within the field of other crucial terms in Foucault’s study, starting with a critical reflection on the inaccurate title of the English translation Discipline and Punish, which does not convey the same logic as the original French title Surveiller et Punir.1 As Stuart Elden points out, discipline and punishment are not two discrete terms. The first comprises the second, because discipline is made up of two mutually dependent elements, i.e. surveillance and punishment (Elden). A more accurate title might have been something along the lines of The Genesis and Praxis of the Modern Prison: Penal Discipline through Surveillance and Punishment.

Surveillance in the context of the penal system refers to a group of spatial arrangements and evaluational procedures by which the behavior of prisoners is observed, recorded, classified and ranked in order to constitute a body of knowledge about them. Prisoners are distributed and ‘fixed in space’ according to the nature of their crime and their behavior, and prison architecture enables maximum visibility by putting them in cells which are directly observable by guards. The maximum efficacy in such penal architecture is attained in Jeremy Bentham’s 1843 idea of the Panopticon, a circular prison with all cells facing an inside space with in the middle a tower from which guards can observe all prisoners without themselves being seen.

Punishment in this context does not refer to the sentence imposed upon the defendant by the judicial system, but it is rather a quite independent, extra-juridical “small penal mechanism” at the heart of the penal disciplinary system comprised of a proliferating amount of micro-penalties and rewards (DP: 177). Its aim is to normalize the inmates in conformity to certain rules and standards. Its method is, first by surveillance, to compare, differentiate, quantitatively measure and hierarchize the behavior of the inmates, with which knowledge the system then can coerce and incentivize them by corrections towards an established norm. One could say that the system differentiates individuals in order to create a homogenized population. Foucault captures this disciplinary mechanism of evaluation succinctly in the concept of Normalizing Judgment, in which the verb to normalize means coercive conditioning towards a norm and the noun judgment means a rebuking assessment of how far one is deviant from the norm.

Discipline and its Categories

Foucault has a few other differentiations and central concepts by which to understand not only penal discipline, but also the origin and spread of disciplinary practices circulating between other institutions like monasteries, military barracks, schools, hospitals, psychiatric wards, bureaucracies and workplaces. It looks to me that the large field Foucault tries to cover together with his methodology of staying close to primary sources forces him to apply different schemata and organizing concepts to bring order to the many historically changing practices and discourses he investigates. One way he gets a grip on what he perceives as “a whole set of techniques, a whole corpus of methods and knowledge, descriptions, plans and data” is a fourfold differentiation according to the categories of space, time, movement and their integration in the concept of composition of forces (DP:141). Each category has its own disciplinary techniques and also shapes an aspect of the identity of the person involved.

The spatial component of discipline was referred to already above and comprises elements like the enclosure of protected spaces, i.e. the cell; the partitioning of these spaces to seclude inmates from each other; and the creation of functional sites for different activities to enable efficiency of surveillance and production. Foucault names this aspect the cellular distribution of space which also constitutes a cellular individuality.

The temporal aspect of discipline is about the breaking down of time in serialized divisions to regulate the different enforced behaviors to which the inmates are subjected to. Washing, eating, work and exercise all have specific points of start and finish according to a time-table, which increases power over the inmates by “the possibility of a detailed control and a regular intervention” (DP:160).

Closely connected with disciplinary space and time are of course the movements and activities controlled within the rigid spatio-temporal grid of penal architectonics and temporal segmentation. Control over activities are enabled by the enforcement of a time-table to “establish rhythms, impose particular occupations, regulate the cycles of repetition” (DP:149); by the temporal elaboration of the act by which the development and stages of an activity are analyzed and controlled in terms of a succession of punctuated gestures; the correlation of the body and the gesture to ensure the correct use of the body and its time by “imposing the best relation between a gesture and the overall position of the body, which is its condition of efficiency and speed” (DP:152); by the analysis of the seemingly most elementary components of activity, i.e. the “breakdown of the total gesture into two parallel series: that of the parts of the body used … and that of the object manipulated” thereby constituting something like a “body-machine complex” (DP: 153); and lastly by the exhaustive use of the body to extract ever more productive moments by pushing its operations to optimum speed and efficiency.

All the above techniques of analysis and control can be combined in the concept of the composition of forces. When the behaviors of individual bodies are rationally combined and mutually integrated in a larger machine-like construct like a well-disciplined army or an efficient assembly line, the composite mechanism will be more productive than the sum of the composed parts ever could be. For this to happen the individual as a body-segment will be assigned its spatial niche and it will have to execute its “chronological series” of gestures in temporal and spatial co-ordination with other body-segments “in such a way that the maximum quantity of forces may be extracted from each and combined with the maximum result” (DP: 164-5). This co-ordination also “requires a precise system of command” with communicative signals to be directly obeyed by the ensembled body-segments which have been carefully conditioned to respond automatically. Furthermore, to ensure its best results, the command has to apply “the highest form of disciplinary practice”, tactics, which Foucault defines as “the art of constructing, with located bodies, coded activities and trained aptitudes, mechanisms in which the product of the various forces is increased by their calculated combination … “ (DP: 167). Granted that tactics has its origin and best example in military theory and practices, it also easily applies to the workplace, educational institutes, hospitals, politics and the prison.

Foucault’s tentative summation of the above is

… that discipline creates out of the bodies it controls four types of individuality, or rather an individuality that is endowed with four characteristics: it is cellular (by the play of spatial distribution), it is organic (by the coding of activities), it is genetic (by the accumulation of time), it is combinatory (by the composition of forces). And, in doing so, it operates four great techniques: it draws up tables; it prescribes movements; it imposes exercises; lastly, in order to obtain the combination of forces, it arranges ‘tactics’ (DP: 167).

Discipline and Examination as Manifestations of Co-original Power/Knowledge

At the level of epistemology the cardinal hypothesis Foucault develops is the mutual implication of knowledge and power, which in the case of the penal system manifests as the mutual constituting elements of a) the power of calibrated punishment based on knowledge and b) the detailed knowledge obtained through surveillance enabled by having power over the inmates. Discipline, as the overarching concept containing both surveillance and punishment, is therefore a more complex and dynamic concept in which its power and knowledge elements are not just sitting side by side with a contingent relationship of profitable give-and-take, but are inextricably entwined and depend on each other for their existence. Power and knowledge are co-original and have to be thought together in their constitutive circularity, and, as Foucault does, they can be combined in one concept: power/knowledge.2

According to Foucault one of the key techniques in which this co-original circularity can be recognized is the phenomenon of the examination. Though the familiar method of examination can be considered a “tiny operational schema”, Foucault questions whether this widespread and overlooked practice actually utilizes “within a single mechanism, power relations that make it possible to extract and constitute knowledge?” (DP: 185). To quote Foucault further:

The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgement. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them. . . . In it are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth. At the heart of the procedures of discipline, it manifests the subjection of those who are perceived as objects and the objectification of those who are subjected. The superimposition of the power relations and knowledge relations assumes in the examination all its visible brilliance (DP: 184-5; italics added).

I think the italicized phrases catch the phenomenon very closely and paraphrasing it one could say that, as a manner of establishing both a knowledge and power relationship, inmates are not only perceived as observable entities to be subjugated and subjugated entities to be observed, but, and more deeply so, subjugation is dependent on observation as is observation made possible by subjugation.

One could say that examinations are not neutral and examinators are not interest-free. They threaten and induce, if not actually punish and reward, based on the knowledge extracted through the exam to differentiate and rank the examinee. And the examinee feels this pressure coming from the observers and their normalizing judgment to conform to the established norm by coughing up the desired data or behavior as best as possible, mostly fearing disqualification and punishment and desiring recognition and rewards. In and through the examination, power and knowledge go hand in hand in order to create a docile and usable population.

There are three or four specific mechanisms at work in the exam by which the formation of knowledge and the exercise of power are linked. Traditionally, Foucault observes, power was ostentatiously visible on the side of those who exercised it—mostly monarchs–while those on whom it was exercised could stay in its shadows. This relationship became reversed during modernity. The exercising, now disciplinary power became fragmented, anonymous, bureaucratic and invisible while its subjects became necessarily visible through surveillance and examination in order to maintain the now disciplined, objectified individuals in subjection.

Second, examination created a whole system of documentation, a “whole apparatus of writing”, which enabled the two correlative possibilities of a) constituting “the individual as a describable, analyzable object” and also of b) creating a comparative, statistical system of measurement, description and distribution of collective characteristics. In this way one can develop categories, calculate averages and establish standards and norms and also create a unique, individualized subject with a possibly in-depth description of how the individual conforms or deviates from the norm in the welter of categories developed. Thirdly, and extending the second mechanism of documentation, examination creates out of each individual a case, i.e. an individual who is measured, described and judged in terms of knowledge, but also is subject to possible correction, training or exclusion in terms of disciplinary power. Fourth, examination is at the heart of the procedure by which the individual is paradoxically both a creation and object of knowledge and is also both the creation and object of power. If we label an individual as a delinquent we are not merely describing an already formed individual and his criminal act, but actually create by the power of classification a certain identity for that individual behind the criminal act, which then also becomes a hook into which power can insert itself to correct and dominate him.

It is the examination which, by combining hierarchical surveillance and normalizing judgement, assures the great disciplinary functions of distribution and classification, maximum extraction of forces and time, continuous genetic accumulation, optimum combination of aptitudes and, thereby, the fabrication of cellular, organic, genetic and combinatory individuality. With it are ritualized those disciplines that may be characterized in a word by saying that they are a modality of power for which individual difference is relevant (DP: 192).

For now let it stand as a formula that punishment and surveillance are co-originally related in the same manner as power and knowledge and that the practices of discipline and examination are to be understood with this co-originality in mind.3

The Genesis of Discipline

Within the centuries he focuses upon, Foucault differentiates between three modes of dealing with crimes which all have their own distinguishable practices and discourses and are respectively dealt with in the first three parts of his study under the headings Torture, Punishment and Discipline.

Torture refers to the monarchical, Ancien Régime mode of dealing with criminality through the cruel, ceremonial, public display of torture and executions on scaffolds by which the monarch displayed his vengeful, sovereign power over those who dared to break his laws. The criminal was treated as a vanquished enemy who had lost most if not all of his rights and had his body marked by torture or obliterated by execution. It was a kind of state terror to keep the masses in fear and subdued, though sometimes the tables were turned and the masses took the gathering as an opportunity to liberate the criminal for whom they might have felt sympathy or create a small-scale uprising against the authorities to express their frustrations. For several reasons this kind of public spectacle became outdated. Reformist thinkers thought the practices inhumane; the population lowered its tolerance of cruel spectacles; the nature of overall crimes shifted from acts of violence to skillful thievery; and the spectacle became too often a political liability for the authorities.

Punishment refers to the mode of dealing with criminality which was developed in opposition to the monarchical mode and was driven by 18th century macro–reformist Enlightenment ideologues and micro-reformist lawyers and magistrates in order to make punishments less cruel, more ‘humane’, more proportionate to the offense, more functional to prevent crime and more concerned with the reform of the offender, while also trying to make the juridical apparatus more rational and efficient. They criticized the cruelty and arbitrariness of the old system and its disorganized nature because of the proliferation of sold offices with each their own often overlapping and therefore conflicting authorities to arrest, sentence and punish. Reformists developed new theories of law and criminality, more rational justifications for new punishments and the abolition of old ones, and proposals to reform the judiciary. Numerous reform schemes were proposed and new penal codes formulated. Many of these made it through the legislative process throughout Europe with the net effect that by the mid-1900s the “gloomy festival of punishment” had mostly vanished (DP: 8). They took the philosophy of an-eye-for-an-eye serious and devised many ways to punish in proportion to the crime. If you murder you get executed; if you steal you get fined; if you take away someone’s freedom you will get imprisoned, etc. The criminal became a juridical subject with rights because imputed with a moral conscience, and would be sentenced by the social body comprised of his fellow citizens according to the law at a public trial in a court with the aim to restore him eventually to the “social pact” (DP: 129). It could be argued that the idealist spirit of the reformers is still with us and that it informs the folk conception of justice, even while and under the radar of public perception a different power relationship to the offender came into being, i.e. discipline.

Foucault dug up in the historical record that indeed something quite different developed, incrementally, unintentionally and outside of the official juridical system as a new manner of treatment of sentenced offenders. This was the mode of discipline as described above. Increasingly the prison had become the preferred manner of punishment for crimes and within the prison a whole new quite hidden administrative apparatus was set up, not so much to reform the juridical subject and make him fit again as a responsible partner of the social contract, but to condition and coerce the newly constituted individuality of the delinquent, i.e. the sick, deviant ‘criminal’ behind the crime whose whole life and psyche now becomes the object of possible knowledge and a “point of application for punitive mechanisms” (DP: 251). Correction is not pursued through an appeal to the offender’s conscience but through a relentless surveillance and punishment of the delinquent’s behavior to train and condition him into an obedient, manipulable entity. At trial there is still the notion of a juridical subject with a certain amount of privacy and who is only judged for the criminal act, but Foucault makes it clear that once an individual is delivered to the penal system that identity is exchanged for that of the subjugated and objectified delinquent, who has no privacy because he became an object of thorough investigation, permanent surveillance, ongoing evaluation, normalizing conditioning, coercive correction and punitive measures.4

One of the earliest models of a disciplinary prison Foucault finds is the Rasphuis in 16th century Amsterdam. This institute had the function of locking up young male idlers, beggars and other malefactors; use them as industrious workers, who even received wages; and turn them into good people by means of a “strict time-table, a system of prohibitions and obligations, continual supervision, exhortations, religious readings” and other hopefully transformative methods (DP: 121). This very first Dutch ‘punish-house’ came into being in 1596 because the Amsterdam city council was in a quandary what to do with a confessed thief of good parentage. Under the influence of two prominent citizens the idea came up, not to publicly flog the young man as was usual, but to try to rehabilitate him through forced labor and lodge him in a secure house with a strict code of conduct.

The historical origin of the many techniques comprising penal discipline are to be found in a few disparate places and institutions like the monastery, the workshop and the military. From the monastery with its ascetic disciplines came the architectonic practice of cellular enclosures within an inward-directed fortress; rigid time-tables for repetitive activities; continuous exercises aimed at transformation; and even something as simple as common meals in silence. Tucked away in a footnote Foucault observes that, in their turn, many of the monastic practices of Christian religious orders were adopted from the Roman army (DP: 315fn8). From the military came the structure of pyramidal supervision; the roll call to account for all inmates; the numbering of prisoners; regular inspections of cleanliness; and the division into groups and sub-groups with heads and second in command.

What should be noted here is that the three modes of punishment Foucault identified co-existed for a long while and were in tension, sometimes open conflict, with each other at different levels of intensity and at different points of contention. Especially in the 1750-1850 period there were many shifts, discontinuities and reversals of the many laws, regulations, habits, techniques and justifications comprising the juridic-penal system in western Europe. The standard Whiggish narrative is that Europe progressed from an arbitrary, cruel, might is right system to a rational, humane, enlightened law-based system, with the whole historical process driven by an impelling, rationalist teleology. Foucault makes it quite clear that, though the Enlightenment has many valuable ideas, many if not most elements of the Whig narrative are nevertheless fictitious. The discipline regime created many points of power where cruelty and arbitrariness resurfaced including modern forms of hidden torture and ‘accidental’ deaths. Such excesses are generally not perceived by the public and possibly willfully ignored by the judiciary. His analysis goes even so far that the logic and demands of the disciplinary penal system are actually overriding the ones of the juridical system. As a possible coup de grâce to our naivety regarding the rehabilitative function of the prison Foucault states on the last pages that,

… the prison is not the daughter of laws, codes or the judicial apparatus; that it is not subordinated to the court and the docile or clumsy instrument of the sentences that it hands out and of the results that it would like to achieve; that it is the court that is external and subordinate to the prison (DP: 307-8).

This bleak assessment makes only sense if an even larger historical context is taken into account than the three modes of punishment so far. The leading idea of this context is the correlation between systems of punishment and systems of production.

Correlations between Punishment and Production

At the end of the first chapter, “The Body of the Condemned”, Foucault gives praise to the 1939 criminological study Punishment and Social Structure by Marxist sociologists Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, who were connected to the Frankfurter Schule. Foucault refers to this study as a “great work”, which provided him with “a number of essential reference points” (DP: 24). What Foucault borrows from this study is the idea that the penal system is not merely there to reduce crime with a series of negative mechanisms to prevent, deter and exclude criminals and their behavior, nor that it is just the effect and appendage of the juridical system as its executive branch, but that it has primarily a positive, formative social function within the context of the political-economic structure. In short, modes of punishment are subordinated and made serviceable to the means of production. Concretely, in a slave economy punishment takes the form of enslavement to provide extra labor; in a mercantile economy there is forced labor and prison factories to get the idle to work and provide cheap labor; and an industrial economy needs corrected, docile, trainable, flexible bodies to be added to the pool of the free and ever changing market in labor.

Foucault develops this idea further by switching from this Marxist macro-level of analysis to the micro-level of the body and its “forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission” (DP: 25).5 So far the body has been seen through many scientific lenses, except a political-economic one; and political science and economics have been looking at a lot of power relations between institutions, classes, groups, etc., but never at its concrete impingement on the body. Foucault stepped into this lacunae and found a whole world of bodily power points and bodily techniques of domination diffused throughout the body politic. As Foucault stated it:

But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. This political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection … ; the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body (DP: 25-6).

He named this micro-sociological analysis of the disciplined body “a micro-physics of power”, which is the field where the power of the macro-size social “apparatuses and institutions” meets the comparatively small body to shape and condition it to make it serviceable for the even larger, historically contingent political-economic forces which subordinate penal systems to their shifting demands (DP: 26). In short, the police-juridical-penal complex is an instrument of the prevailing economic system to create docile workers and extract maximum profits for a small upper level of owners and managers.

Towards the end of DP Foucault executes an analysis which shows a similar logic of class domination and class justice. Here he feels forced to assume again that penalties are not to punish and diminish illegalities in general and equitably, but are applied in such a manner that a differentiation is established between illegalities which lead to prosecution and incarceration and those which are tolerated and benefit its offenders without legal consequences. Concretely, and here in the USA, one can think of, on one side, police officers getting away with murder and big bankers getting away with massive fraud, while on the other side petty crimes by young black males can lead to cycles of incarceration, recidivism and the establishment of a semi-permanent under-class of delinquents, the depressing dynamics of which Foucault also analyses.

Discipline and its Context of Discovery

To round out and finish the many facets of Foucauldian discipline I should also address what seems to be Foucault’s initial and leading question, the one about the constitution of individuality. Throughout DP it is clear that with the exertion of power on the body, a correlative sense of identity is established. Within the modern disciplinary institutes persons become cases and are identified by the specifics of their case. And the more one is subjected to disciplinary measures, like the delinquent, mentally ill, the sick, the deviant, etc., the larger is one’s dossier and the more one is individualized. As discussed earlier, this dynamic flows forth from the intricate manner that knowledge about people is entwined with the possibility of having power over them. It is not just true that through better knowledge one attains more power, but also that knowledge can only be extracted through power. In order to dominate a body to make it docile and usable you have to give it an identity, a ‘soul’, by which you can control it, but this identity is dependent on having constructed a certain amount of knowledge about it. Constructed might be the right word, because the predicates applicable to the identity are not referring to essential, intrinsic aspects of that person, but are valuations in reference to certain norms, statistical comparisons and other contextual frameworks of measurement and valuation. Once one is measured within these statistical valuations one can start to coerce the body and its gestures towards the desired norm and measure its ‘progress’. This then founds Foucault’s striking inverted expression that “the soul is the prison of the body” (DP: 30). This expression is preceded by a philosophically most pregnant contemplation on the politico-ontological status of this soul.

This real, non-corporal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power. On this reality-reference, various concepts have been constructed and domains of analysis carved out: psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, etc.; on it have been built scientific techniques and discourses, and the moral claims of humanism. But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technical intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of the theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body (DP: 29-30).

Conclusion

Is it possible to gather all these aspects of discipline and combine them in a paragraph? Looking over the headings, they seem to fall into the two familiar categories of systematics and history, i.e. of structure and genesis.

Structure: Penal discipline consists of knowledge-producing surveillance and punitive coercions towards ‘normality’ of subjugated, objectified bodies. This tandem of surveillance and punishment can also be conceptualized as knowledge and power, even as the manifestation of the co-original phenomenon knowledge/power in which both terms constitute each other. Penal discipline can also be clarified by the categories of space (cellular distribution), time (punctuated segments), behavior (conditioning of the body-machine) and tactics (the combination of integrated bodies). Correlative with penal discipline comes the constitution of the delinquent individuality, not as a personality with intrinsic characteristics, but as a product of extrinsic valuations and measurements.

Genesis: The history of penal discipline (and discipline in other institutions) might be best understood by the logic of the demands of early capitalist, mercantile production processes which profited by the ongoing disciplining of idle bodies into docile, usable workers. The prison and its penal disciplines incrementally replaced the more spectacular, but wasteful and politically risky manner of punishment by tortures and executions. Reformers tried to humanize the whole juridical and penal system and succeeded to a certain extent, but also provided unintentionally the ideological cover for the now more hidden cruelties of penal discipline and the creation of an under-class of delinquents. Many of the techniques comprising discipline came from other institutions, especially the monastery and military, and circulated into and through other institutions like hospitals, psych wards, schools and especially the workforce, all optimizing their own efficiency by borrowing and adapting these techniques from each other.

Origin

This paper was written for the class Twentieth Century European Philosophy (CSPH7047) conducted by Dr. David Morgans in the Masters by Research in European Philosophy program at the University of Wales in the spring of 2015.

Sources quoted and consulted

Bouchard, Donald F. 1977. Introduction to Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Michel Foucault. Donald F. Bouchard (Ed.). Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

Brass, Paul R. 2000. “Foucault Steals Political Science”. Annual Review of Political Science, 3:305-330.

Elden, Stuart. “Beyond Discipline and Punish: Is it time for a new translation of Foucault’s Surveiller et punir?” Progressive Geographies: Thinking about place and power (blog). 22 Jan 2014. Accessed 18 May 2014.

Foucault, Michel. 1995 (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Transl. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage.

Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Colin Gordon (Ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, Michel. 1982. “The Subject and Power”. Afterword in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Paul Rabinow & Hubert L. Dreyfus. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Pp. 208-226.

Foucault, Michel. 1984. The Foucault Reader. Paul Rabinow (Ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.

Mark, Philp. 1990. “Foucault”. In: The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences. Quentin Skinner (Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 65-82.

Melossi, Dario. 2003. “A New Edition of Punishment and Social Structure Thirty-Five Years Later: A Timely Event”. Social Justice, Vol. 30, No. 1 (91): 248-263.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1989 (1886). Beyond Good & Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trsl. Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage Books.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1989 (1887). On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic. New York: Vintage Books.

Rabinow, Paul & Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1982. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Rouse, Joseph. 2005. “Power/Knowledge”. In: The Cambridge Companion to Foucault. Second Edition. Gary Gutting (Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 95-122.

Sheridan, Alan. 1990 (1980). Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth. New York: Routledge.

Veyne, Paul. 1997. “Foucault Revolutionizes History”. In: Foucault and His Interlocutors. Arnold Davidson (Ed.). Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 146-182.

Endnotes

1. Because Alan Sheridan, the translator of the book, could not find a good equivalent term for the French verb Surveiller he went with Foucault’s suggestion of Discipline (Sheridan in Foucault, 1995: ix).

2. It is possible that Foucault derived the idea of mutual constitution from his readings of Heidegger, who in Being and Time developed some clarifying formulations of what he named equiprimordiality (gleichursprünglichkeit).

3. On many places Foucault proposes the idea that the establishment of disciplinary institutions might have been a factor in the rise of the social sciences. I did not get a good handle on how this might have played out in the penal context, but I am sure that his excavations in the history of other institutions produced more concrete examples.

4. There is an interesting parallel between Foucault and Nietzsche here. Foucault’s observation of the substitution of a) the delinquent and his psyche with its history and intentions for b) the juridical subject and his action, i.e. the crime, echos Nietzsche’s substitution of c) morally valuing the origin of an action in a purported self and its intentions for d) pre-morally valuing the consequences of an action. It looks as if this “reversal of perspective”, which Nietzsche placed in our pre-history, made its delayed and surreptitious entrance into the penal system (Nietzsche, 1989: §32).

5. According to Italian criminologist Dario Melossi in a review of Punishment and Social Structure there exists not merely a family resemblance between Foucault and Marx, but that even discipline, “the linchpin that ties the place of production with the place of punishment”, is a concept wholly derivative from Marx (Melossi: 253). Be that as it may, Foucault’ Nietzschean sense of history would prevent him from buying into the teleological arc of dialectical materialism.

Entertaining, Type-II Error-prone, Axiomatic Skepticism: An Incomplete Form of Systemic Doubt

Review of “The Perks of Paranoia” (Video; 2013; 3.30 mins) by Christopher Griffin.

Though the creator of the entertaining video, Christopher Griffin, used the fruitful idea of “hyper-active threat detection” derived from evolutionary psychology to explain the tendency of some hyper-active brains to see conspiracies where there are none, he is only giving a part of the evolutionary picture. He overlooks the idea that–as people have evolved faculties to detect the good or bad intentions of other people, and as we try to detect the intentions for beneficial cooperation or nefarious conspiracies in other groups–we do so because deception and deception-detection are structural ingredients of evolution. It is not merely the simple case of evading predators. There is more going on, and more than we might be comfortable with. Continue reading “Entertaining, Type-II Error-prone, Axiomatic Skepticism: An Incomplete Form of Systemic Doubt”