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March 27, 2007
I've always been puzzled by Foucault's panopticism thesis in Discipline and Punish seeing it as too overreaching in terms of a new political anatomy that shifts away from sovereignty--the prince or King. I appreciated that it was less about an enclosed institution turned inwards--the Panopticon or prison as a mechanisms of punishment -- and more about an exercise of power that enables a subtle coercion, discipline and generalized surveillance.
Foucault addresses this difference explicitly when he says:
The Panopticon.... must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men. No doubt Bentham presents it as a particular institution, closed in upon itself. Utopias, perfectly closed in upon themselves, are common enough. As opposed to the ruined prisons, littered with mechanisms of torture, to be seen in Piranese's engravings, the Panopticon presents a cruel, ingenious cage. The fact that it should have given rise, even in our own time, to so many variations, projected or realized, is evidence of the imaginary intensity that it has possessed for almost two hundred years. But the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of l power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use. (D+P, p.205).
It is about the technologies of power that work of the docile body of the modern liberal subject and explores the relationship between space and power.
What has caused me to start rethinking this panopticism is the policing of urban space though the use of surveillance cameras. Space is fundamental to the exercise of power. Power relations are in and through space. This is a very different account to the Marxist account of power relations through economic or productive relations and quite different to a political economy of space.
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I didn't find Foucault's conception of "power", as the at once all-pervasive and undifferentiated "other" of reason, entirely adequate and convincing.
But still, there was, I think, a salutary shift in emphasis from dealing with power-relations entirely in terms of the critique of ideologies, in which power is concealed in its operations behind contradictions between factual conditions and normative claims and ostensibly dissolved through the unconcealment of those contradictions, to focusing on techniques of power themselves, which might underlie quite different ideological configurations, (such that, e.g., Milosevic can morph from a socialist to an irredentist nationalist on the basis of his hold on one and the "same" apparatus of power). And, as the quote makes clear enough, it is not simply a matter of a specific configuration or technique, but of a mindset or mentality that pervades the operations of power, an "imaginary".
The move that Foucault makes in "D & P" is to move beyond his prior emphasis on purely discursive analysis to an opposition between the "seen" and the "said", in which the former includes not just perception and embodiment, but specific organizations of spacial configurations and relatively non-thematic, atelic practices, pervading institutions in which discourses, the "said", are generated and operated, such that there develops an ironic dynamic whereby the "seen" and the "said" at once mutually constitute and undermine each other, with the thematic meanings of the order of the "said" being reduced by the practices and configurations in and by which they actually operate, and the practices and configurations of the order of the "seen" being systematically misrepresented by the articulations of the order of the "said" as authoritative knowledge.
The upshot is that there emerges to light a shadow form of police/carcerial power beneath and beyond not just the legitimations of ideologies, but of the consistent and authoritative order of law itself, which ideologies are to legitimate. And, of course, the claim is that embodied "subjects" becomes constituted as surreptitiously responsive to the operations of this shadow power in the very spontaneous exercize of their illusory "freedom".
The upshot of this no-longer-dialectical, ironical dynamic is that both the imposition of and resistence to power-relations take place in one and the same nexus of power-relations, such that any move made within that mutually implicated nexus of power is simply a transformation of that nexus of power-relations rather than its dissolution in the name of "truth".