By Partha Chatterjee
On the question of “the war of all against all”, Didier, Nadia and Bernard made important interventions to situate Foucault’s 1972-73 lectures in the political context of the time. But it seems to me that there is a textual dimension that is possibly more significant in understanding Foucault’s comments on the “civil war” aspect of power.
Although Foucault’s principal theme in The Punitive Society is power, the analytical distinction between sovereign power and disciplinary power which is introduced and developed from the very first chapter of Discipline and Punish is not clearly established in the lectures. Foucault seems not to have grasped it yet as a crucial change in the rationality of power from the ancient regime to the modern regime. Instead, the central point that Foucault establishes in the lectures is that, contra Hobbes, the establishment of sovereign power does not bring the civil war to an end. The civil war continues in the persistence of illegalities and frequent peasant revolts and the ruling groups struggle to bring under control the dispossessed and marginal populations. Interestingly, all of Foucault’s historical evidence comes from the 18th and early 19th century which is a period of transition to a production regime dominated by capital. Very similar material, such as the laws against vagabondage, poor houses, etc., is cited by Marx in his chapters on “the so-called primitive accumulation” in Capital, volume 1, where Marx argues that the dispossession of peasants and artisans and their transformation into property-less wage labourers require the active intervention of the power of the law.
Since Foucault, in the lectures, looks closely at the criticisms that are made by the rebellious groups against the depredations of advancing commercial and industrial power, he takes seriously the “moral” aspect of the resistance, since much of the polemics of the time, including those launched by the reformers of the penal system, was carried out in the language of morality. But by the time he is writing Discipline and Punish, the most significant element for Foucault is the reformer’s critique of the penal system as a “bad economy of power”: the old judicial and penal regime, the reformers said, was excessive, wasteful, inefficient and frequently counter-productive. The principal frame within which power is analyzed in the book is “the economy of punishment” – that is what grounds the analytical distinction between sovereign power and disciplinary power.
In Discipline and Punish, the modern regime of disciplinary power is analyzed in terms of strategy, tactics, deployment, dispersal, etc. These are metaphors of war. Modern power too occupies the terrain of war. But “civil war” or “war of all against all” is not a good analogy. I suspect that is why the civil war theme entirely drops out of the book.
Foucault would, of course, take up the theme of war as a paradigm for the modern practices of power in his 1975-76 lectures “Society must be Defended”. It is quite a different treatment that keeps in view the distinction between sovereign power and disciplinary power.
Didier also made an important point about the specificity of the prison as an institution and the lack of fit between Foucault’s discussion of the reformed modern prison and actual prisons in France or the United States today. However, I have always wondered about the consequences of the move in Foucault’s thinking, documented in the text of the lectures, from genuine concern with the actual conditions of prisons to a consideration of modern power itself as a new regime of punishment as discipline. Certainly in Discipline and Punish, the central chapters in Parts Two and Three have nothing to do with prisons per se. It seems to me that Foucault largely sets aside the specific discussion of prisons in order to focus on generalized punishment, the production of docile bodies, correct training, surveillance etc. Interestingly, the criticism of actual prison practices even today largely points to the failure of those practices to conform to the normative humane principles of modern power analyzed by Foucault.