{"id":904,"date":"2015-10-07T14:34:24","date_gmt":"2015-10-07T14:34:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/testing.elotroalex.com\/foucault\/?p=95"},"modified":"2016-02-07T23:02:45","modified_gmt":"2016-02-08T04:02:45","slug":"didier-fassin-on-the-punitive-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/2015\/10\/07\/didier-fassin-on-the-punitive-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Didier Fassin on The Punitive Society"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Didier Fassin<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Punitive Society<\/em> prepares and announces Discipline and Punish<\/em>, on which Foucault began to work in parallel. Nevertheless, far from being a draft of the latter, the former deserves to be treated as a completely distinct and independent object. It has the liberty and audacity but also sometimes the inconsistency of what the provisional oral presentation permits but is erased in the definitive written version. In that regard, one could argue that the two major conceptual innovations of The Punitive Society <\/em>are the idea of civil war and of the notion of illegalism. The first one has disappeared from Discipline and Punish<\/em>, while the second one becomes central in the book.<\/p>\n

The idea of civil war is probably the most visionary, but it is not the most coherent. <\/span>While it is clear that it differs from both Hobbes\u2019 war of all against all, with its supposed state of nature, and Marx\u2019s class struggle, with its necessary class consciousness, what it is seems much less obvious. The civil war is a \u201csocial war\u201d in the dual meaning of being a war between constituted \u201ccollective elements\u201d and a war \u201cof the rich against the poor\u201d. This war \u201chaunts\u201d the power not in the sense that fear would inhabit it but in the sense that it is ubiquitous in the exercise of it. Yet, at the same time, the civil war manifests itself through the \u201crioting\u201d of eighteenth-century peasants in periods of food shortage and increase in the price of bread. However, what remains obscure is how the two are related \u2013 that of the dominant against the dominated and that of the dominated against the dominant, to use a vocabulary that is foreign to Foucault \u2013 and the suggestion that the latter would be a \u201creactivation\u201d of the former, using its forms and rituals does not resist the empirical test of the archives. More fecund is the link established by Foucault with crime as the criminal becomes the \u201csocial enemy\u201d, that is, the \u201cone who wages war on society\u201d, which then allows society to wage war on him, who can in fact simply be the beggar, the vagrant or, by extension, the poor.<\/p>\n

The notion of illegalism is therefore crucial to understand the criminalization of the poor. Illegalisms correspond to tactical games that agents play with the law at its margins, not abiding by it but doing so within limits generally tolerated by society. They are ubiquitous across social groups and classes. Until the eighteenth century, they all contributed to the good functioning of society as everyone benefited more or less from them. In the nineteenth century, with the development of capitalism and the consolidation of the bourgeoisie, the illegalisms of the lower class became increasingly regarded as dangerous not only for the preservation of property but also for the reproduction of the workforce, and therefore rendered illegal and penalized, whereas the illegalisms of the upper class proliferated with complete impunity. The penal system thus came to be an essential instrument of control of the working class. Prison served to ensure exclusion, surveillance and discipline of the undesirable members of society. In accordance with his usual method, Foucault relies here on analyses of normative discourses from legal texts, institutional rules, criminology treatises, rather than of actual practices described in reports, testimonies or letters. As historians of nineteenth-century prison have shown, such research would have revealed, far from the fantasied projects of surveillance and discipline, the mere routine of neutralization, arbitrary power, physical and psychological abuse.<\/p>\n

The combination of the idea of civil war and the notion of illegalism gives The Punitive Society<\/em> singular relevance \u2013 probably even more than Discipline and Punish<\/em> \u2013 when one wants to examine contemporary situations such as those encountered in countries like Britain and the United States, studied by David Garland, as well as other nations in Europe and elsewhere. Indeed, during the past four decades, politicians and governments have overused the bellicose language of the war on drugs and the war on crime, which has often been translated on the ground into a war on the poor mostly from racial and ethnic minorities. This process has been rendered possible via a differentiation in the processes of criminalization: while the perpetrators of corporate crime and its multiple economic and financial variations were increasingly protected, petty crime and misdemeanor including loitering, driving without a license and possessing marijuana became the object of the attention and severity of the penal system. Today perhaps more than ever, one should take seriously \u00c9mile Durkheim \u2013 to whom Foucault does not entirely do justice in his last lecture \u2013 when he affirms that we do not condemn an act because it is a crime, but it is a crime because we condemn it, and that the range of crimes we condemn is highly differentiated according to social classes. The idea of civil war and the notion of illegalism thus open the way to an exploration of punishment through the lenses of both political economy and moral economy since on the one hand it is used as an instrument in the power relations between social groups and classes and on the other hand it finds its justification in the evaluation of what deserves to be sanctioned and what can be condoned.<\/p>\n

Although it abundantly resorts to the Marxist vocabulary and even thinking, the political economy of punishment, as analyzed by Foucault, accounts for the prison system not in terms of the utilization of a cheap and docile workforce, but in terms of the domestication and subjugation of the workers\u2019 bodies and minds so as to make them functional and productive for the capitalist system, in their relations to time for instance: during the nineteenth century habituation and normalization became the processes through which the power insinuated itself in the life of the subjects and eventually succeeded in controlling their conducts. In parallel, the moral economy of punishment, to reformulate the concept by which E.P. Thompson described traditional modes of exchange and to give it the broader meaning of the production, circulation and appropriation of values and affects, is interpreted by Foucault through the ideal of Jacksonian penitentiaries created by Quakers and lauded by Beaumont and Tocqueville, where silence and labor were supposed to redeem inmates kept in solitary confinement. There are however two issues in Foucault\u2019s thesis.<\/p>\n

First, the political and moral economies of punishment are somewhat disjointed, and how the Christian genealogy, about which he remarkably ignores the illuminating second essay of the Genealogy of Morals<\/em>, is connected to the modes of production is rather unclear: the argument that the \u201ccondition of acceptability of the prison\u201d is the principle of coercion used as a moral force by the capitalist system resembles a little-documented intuition. Adopting very distinct perspectives to account for this conjunction of the political and moral economies, Lo\u00efc Wacquant, in a Neo-Marxist tradition, and especially Bernard Harcourt, in the Foucauldian vein, offer more convincing interpretations. In fact, one problem of Foucault\u2019s analyses is their dualism \u2013 the rich and the poor, the haves and have nots \u2013 when more complexity might be necessary. In particular, the development of the public sphere in that period, as studied by J\u00fcrgen Habermas, implies new mediations: in the case of punishment, the domination of the powerful and the tolerance of their illegalisms supposes to construct the powerless and their illegalisms as a problem vis-\u00e0-vis the growing middle class and even the socially integrated lower class; the \u201cpublic\u201d has to be persuaded that inequality in wealth as well as before the law is not only legitimate but also beneficial to it from the perspective of the social order.<\/p>\n

Second, it seems plausible that both the political economy of punishment oriented toward the increase of capitalist productivity and the moral economy of punishment thought as a way to reform prisoners never really worked, or worked for short periods of time and within specific segments of the system. The dual functionality of the prison \u2013 economic productivity and moral reform \u2013 belongs more to the imagination of those who conceived the system than to the actual reality of how prisons worked. Historians such as Michelle Perrot or Rebecca McLennan propose a much gloomier vision of the meaninglessness and uselessness, brutality and abandonment of both French and United States prisons in the nineteenth century. Even today, the political economy of punishment has more to do with the prison industrial complex (comparable to the military one) than with the use or subjugation of the inmates for cheaper production (with some limited exceptions) and the moral economy of punishment is rarely associated with the rehabilitation of offenders while concern regarding reentry is essentially focused on technologies of control deployed to reduce recidivism under the threat of harsher sanctions.<\/p>\n

A final point should be considered, because it connects The Punitive Society<\/em> and Discipline and Punish<\/em>, and turned out to be one of Foucault\u2019s most influential contributions to the critique of contemporary society. The last lectures develop an argument that will later give birth to the concept of \u201ccarceral archipelago\u201d, namely the percolation of control, surveillance, sanction and discipline throughout the entire society and most of its institutions from education to sexuality \u2013 and one perceives the premises of later lectures and books. This theory contradicts Erving Goffman\u2019s paradigm of the \u201ctotal institution\u201d developed in Asylum<\/em>, according to which closed organizations, be they monasteries, orphanages, psychiatric hospitals or concentration camps, share similar modalities of social relations that are radically distinct from the ordinary functioning of society. However stimulating and heuristic the idea of \u201cprison-form as social form\u201d may be, the risk of thinking of it in terms of dissemination across multiple social worlds is to miss the singularity of imprisonment, the specific violence of confinement and the particular consequences \u2013 social, political, ethical \u2013 of the generalization of its use. Spending four years as an ethnographer in a French prison convinced me that social scientists had to account for both the exceptionality of the carceral condition and the porosity of the correctional system.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Didier Fassin The Punitive Society prepares and announces Discipline and Punish, on which Foucault began to work in parallel. Nevertheless, far from being a draft of the latter, the former deserves to be treated as a completely distinct and… 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],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lecture-3-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904","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=904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}