{"id":903,"date":"2015-10-06T18:05:29","date_gmt":"2015-10-06T18:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/testing.elotroalex.com\/foucault\/?p=88"},"modified":"2016-02-07T23:02:19","modified_gmt":"2016-02-08T04:02:19","slug":"foucault-313-axel-honneth-on-foucaults-lectures-on-the-punitive-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/2015\/10\/06\/foucault-313-axel-honneth-on-foucaults-lectures-on-the-punitive-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Axel Honneth on The Punitive Society"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

By Axel Honneth<\/strong><\/p>\n

By contrast\u00a0to Nadia Urbinati<\/a>, whose comments I read with great interest and from which I learned a lot, I will concentrate in my remarks on some theoretical premises within Foucault\u2019s fascinating lectures on The Punitive Society<\/em><\/a>. There are a few astonishing and revealing differences to the book he later published as result of these\u00a0lectures (M. Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison<\/em>), which I take as a starting point for outlining some tensions I see in the theoretical apparatus of Foucault\u2019s approach. To mention these fractures and breaks in his attempt to analyze what he calls the birth of the prison does not mean to criticize his approach; instead I attempt to draw our attention to some difficulties we are confronted with when trying to follow his enormously fruitful inspirations:<\/span><\/p>\n

1. \u00a0In these lectures even more than in the book based on them, Foucault is emphasizing that all power is somewhat rooted in what he calls civil wars<\/em>; he understands this civil war in difference to Hobbes as a \u201cpermanent state\u201d (p. 13) of all social life, so that it cannot be ended by the establishment of a sovereign, but instead continues even after such an enthronement. As constitutive properties of that kind of civil war Foucault sees a) that they are pursued by collectivities or groups, which b) are not existing before, but constituted by the struggles (p. 28) and c) which therefore must be the bearers or containers of capacities for exercising power. Power itself is then, if\u00a0I understand Foucault\u2019s proposal correctly, the unstable, fluid element for the appropriation of which the struggles\u2014the civil wars\u2014are pursued; or, we can also say, that power is a relational factor insofar as its exact form, quality and size depends on how and by whom it is appropriated and reactivated at a specific time within the civil war. Only in brackets I would like to mention here that such a concept of power would require to be understood in some way or the other as entailing the capacity of one side to direct the course of action of the other side against its will\u2014a relative traditional definition of \u201cpower\u201d which Foucault would like to avoid.<\/p>\n

What is more striking, however, is that beside this understanding of power as something permanently fluid within adversarial, war-like relationships, Foucault also speaks at the same time of power as something fully \u201cestablished\u201d (p.31), not qualified to be quickly appropriated or circulated. The problem with this second notion as it informs e.g. the concept of a \u201cdisciplinary power\u201d is not that it is inconceivable; to the contrary, it makes good sense to think of certain forms of power as being so highly aggregated and deeply institutionalized that opposition to them\u00a0or appropriation of them\u00a0is hard to imagine. The problem is rather that it is difficult to conceive of how the two notions can be internally connected such that the one helps to explain the other and vice versa: either power is the permanently fluid, unstable result of an ongoing civil war, in which it always easily can be re-appropriated by one or the other involved collectivities, or power is the institutionalized system of apparatuses by which an oppressed group is somehow subjected to certain forms of conduct and behavioral norms. One possible way out of this difficult problem could be to say that what Foucault attempts in his lectures is exactly to investigate the historical transition from one to the other, from the fluid, struggle-based power to the institutionalized, established power of the disciplinary regime. But then one would have to conclude that the second, aggregated form of power must by\u00a0definition succeed in ending the civil war\u2014the idea of a possibility, which not only contradicts Foucault\u2019s hypothesis that civil war is a \u201cpermanent state\u201d of all social life, but which also would make him sound a little bit like Hobbes when saying that the sovereign in virtue of his constituted power is able overcome the war of all against all.<\/p>\n

2. \u00a0A second element that is much more highlighted in these lectures than in the later book is the role Protestant Ethics is playing in the formation of what is called the \u201cprison-form\u201d (esp. Lecture 6). The rough idea here is that one central factor in paving the way to establish imprisonment as the central, dominating form of punishment in the beginning of the nineteenth century was the belief of certain protestant groups that only enforced confinement to rethink one\u2019s vices and moral failures can bring the sinner back to an ethically correct form of life; it was this concept of the moral function of imprisonment which in Foucault\u2019s view spread at the end of the eighteenth century and started to produce\u00a0the fast institutionalization of the prison as the state-based form of punishment\u2014a process by which the state became \u201cthe agent of morality\u201d (p.112\/113). Let me only mention in brackets the close, methodological as well as substantial affinity between this analysis of Foucault and Max Weber\u2019s explanatory strategy in his study on the Protestant Ethics: in both cases it is claimed that Protestantism in one form or the other served in bringing about the moral conditions under which the capitalist system could then establish itself. The convergence between the two authors goes even deeper than that since both believed that it was the \u201celective affinity\u201d (Foucault: \u201ctwin form\u201d, p.72) of certain practices (Weber: protestant practices of searching for inner-worldly signs of salvation and capitalist orientation towards accomplishment; Foucault: \u201cprotestant\u201d prison form and wage-form), the (contingent) combination of which allowed the institutionalization of capitalism.<\/p>\n

In any case, this is not the point I want to make here. Instead I\u2019m interested in a certain tension that could result from Foucault\u2019s emphasis on the protestant roots of the prison-system. In consequence of this religious genealogy, Foucault is somewhat forced to see as the main function of the suddenly established network of prisons the re-socialization, the \u201cinner transformation\u201d (p.91) of those people defined as \u201ccriminal social enemies\u201d (Lecture 4). As long as he is following this line of argumentation in his lectures the central idea therefore is that the prison-form operates on the \u201csoul,\u201d on the psyche of the individual prisoner, attempting to change his or her \u201cinner\u201d attitude towards the requirements of capitalist society\u2014\u201cnormalization\u201d means here a process by which the delinquent is, via mechanisms of influence, manipulation and re-education, made obedient to the existing normative order. And it\u00a0follows from this that \u201cdisciplinary power\u201d mainly, if not exclusively, operates by using instruments able to \u201cnormalize\u201d the psyche<\/em> of the members of the population.<\/p>\n

However, this obvious conclusion contradicts strongly the formulations with which Foucault summarizes the results of his analysis at the end of his lectures; there he claims over and over that it is the \u201cbody\u201d which is the object of the work of the prison-system (p.261\/62). From this observation he concludes that the function and procedures of \u201cdisciplinary power\u201d consist in regulating bodily behavior, \u201ctraining\u201d the body to obey the requirements of the capitalist system; and he adds that the scientific knowledge produced by this kind of power is aimed at \u201ccuring the body\u201d (p.261).<\/p>\n

My worry at this point therefore is, that Foucault is presenting unwillingly two very different understandings of the functioning of the prison-system and, on a larger scale, of what he is naming \u201cdisciplinary power.\u201d And I don\u2019t see how these two descriptions can coexist, because they lead to conclusions contradicting each other: either the modern, disciplinary system of power is working by normalizing the body, making it fit for the demands of the capitalist labor-market, or this system operates via influencing the psyche by stimulating it to be subservient to functional requirements of the capitalist order. My guess is that you can\u2019t have it both ways \u2014biopolitics and<\/em> psychopolitics\u2014the former normalizing bodily behavior, the second normalizing individual affects and psychic reactions.<\/p>\n

3. \u00a0My last remark is also dealing with a point that again is much more emphasized by Foucault in his lectures than in the book later resulting from them. In trying to explain why the two events of the establishment of the modern prison system and the discursive constitution of the criminal as \u201csocial enemy\u201d happen to appear at the same time, Foucault is relying on \u201ctime\u201d as being the bridging variable (p.70\/71): it is in the moment when in consequence of the introduction of the \u201cwage-form\u201d the organization of time<\/em> is becoming the central concern of social integration and the \u201csocial contract,\u201d that the two independent developments can support each other because imprisonment now is understood as a justified subtraction of a certain \u201cquantity of time of liberty,\u201d whereas the \u201ccriminal\u201d is defined as someone undermining and attacking the existing, \u201crepressive\u201d order of time (Lecture 4). This explanation allows Foucault then, in the following passage, much more strongly than in Discipline & Punish<\/em>, to conceive of the establishment of the prison as being an internal element within the broader process of the institutionalization of the \u201ccapitalist system of power\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>\u201cThus, what allows us to analyze the punitive regime of crimes and the disciplinary regime of labor as of a piece is the relationship of the time of life to political power: the repression of time and repression through time, that kind of continuity between workshop clock, production line stopwatch, and prison calendar\u201d (p.72).<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However, as elegant and suggestive as such an explanation may sound, it doesn\u2019t seem to me to be really convincing. Its weakness lies, in my view, where Foucault attempts to show that the criminal is from now on publicly defined as the one who is supposed to undermine or attack the existing order of time. I find that explanation too farfetched, even counterintuitive, since it would have been much more obvious to understand the existing \u201csocial contract\u201d as being based on granting negative freedom and individual property rights, so that correspondingly the \u201ccriminal\u201d is understood as the one who undermines or attacks those \u201cbourgeois\u201d liberties: he or she is the \u201csocial enemy,\u201d since by his or her \u201ccrimes\u201d that bundle of liberties is violated which is the normative basis of the new social contract after the French Revolution. Such an interpretation is heavily supported by literature within political thought of that time period Foucault has in view: from Adam Smith to Hegel there is an overall agreement\u00a0in the conviction that from now on a crime should be understood as a violation of the social bond which is based on the mutual granting of certain liberties, most importantly private property and physical integrity. Such an interpretation then would allow one to give an alternative, but far more obvious explanation for the sudden establishment of the prison as the dominating form of punishment than the one Foucault has offered in these\u00a0lectures: imprisonment is seen as the justified form of punishment for the \u201ccriminal\u201d not because it subtracts a quantity of time, but because it takes in certain degrees that liberty away, which is understood as the normative fundament of the new political order. Following such a line of explanation would mean, however, to see the functional role of the prison not so much in connection with the capitalist organization of time, but with a political regime based in negative liberties alone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Axel Honneth By contrast\u00a0to Nadia Urbinati, whose comments I read with great interest and from which I learned a lot, I will concentrate in my remarks on some theoretical premises within Foucault\u2019s fascinating lectures on The Punitive Society. There… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38956,38969],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lecture-3-13","category-to-do-link-problems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}