{"id":913,"date":"2015-10-25T10:37:59","date_gmt":"2015-10-25T14:37:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/testing.elotroalex.com\/foucault\/?p=136"},"modified":"2018-08-11T16:10:41","modified_gmt":"2018-08-11T20:10:41","slug":"epilogue-civil-war-protestant-ethics-and-the-specificity-of-the-prison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/2015\/10\/25\/epilogue-civil-war-protestant-ethics-and-the-specificity-of-the-prison\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernard E. Harcourt | Epilogue: Civil War, Protestant Ethics, and the Specificity of the Prison"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt<\/strong><\/p>\n

The third seminar (video here<\/a>) on\u00a0The Punitive Society<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0with Didier Fassin<\/a>, Axel Honneth<\/a>, and Nadia Urbinati<\/a>, centered on three topics: (1) the model of civil war as a vehicle to analyze \u00a0relations of power throughout society; (2) the relationship between\u00a0a genealogy of morals (or what Honneth referred to as Protestant Ethics) and a political economic analysis of punishment practices and power relations, with a foray into the body-soul dualism; and (3) the specificity of the prison and of mass incarceration in the United States today. Those three topics mirrored the three axes that\u00a0Foucault used to situate his 1973 lectures: Hobbes, Marx, and\u00a0Clausewitz [see T<\/em>PS<\/em>\u00a0p. 271-279].\u00a0I will try to suggest here some closures and some openings toward future seminars in the\u00a0Foucault 13\/13 series<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I. \u00a0The Model of\u00a0<\/em>Civil War<\/em><\/p>\n

Regarding the first theme, the suggestion [at 90:25<\/a>] to place Foucault\u2019s turn to civil war in conversation with Carl Schmitt\u2019s concept of the political and of the friend-foe distinction, following \u00c9tienne Balibar\u2019s parenthetical note<\/a>\u00a0at Foucault 2\/13<\/a>, prompted perhaps the most productive pushback. Adam Tooze\u2019s objection [at\u00a0126:05<\/a>] proposed instead to put\u00a0the model of civil war in relation to Alexandre Koj\u00e8ve\u2019s reading\u00a0of Hegel\u2019s master-slave dialectic\u2014a far more productive rather than repressive hypothesis. <\/span>Tooze\u2019s suggestion built on Kendall Thomas\u2019 earlier remark about slavery [118:12] and intersected Rosalind Morris\u2019s comments on debt bondage [129:30], as well as Neni\u00a0Panourgi\u00e0\u2019s remarks on the reality of the prison archipelago in the rehabilitation camps of\u00a0the Aegean, Kenya, and Malaysia after WWII [141:15].<\/p>\n

The proposal was that the master-slave struggle in the Koj\u00e8ve-Hegelian tradition may fit better with the\u00a0early 19th<\/sup> century struggles over industrialization and the accumulation of capital\u2014over battles that are about property and wealth more than life or death. Axel Honneth returned to the question fruitfully at 151:15, though strenuously resisting the idea of a \u201cFrench Hegel\u201d [155:15]. In any event, rather than a \u201cstruggle to the death,\u201d the idea here would be to understand civil strife as a productive moment, at a particular historical time when the privileged were establishing industrial wealth as against the popular working classes.\u00a0Nadia Urbinati agreed and added, in subsequent conversation, that \u201cthe way Foucault\u00a0thinks of \u2018civil war\u2019 is truly innovative and not reducible to Schmitt, who\u00a0thinks that conflict must have an end in a unity (and unitary) solution, which is the state.\u201d<\/p>\n

There still remains, of course, the question of the violence of the discourse and practices of industrialization\u2014recall the \u201cmonstrous delinquent of 19th century penalty\u201d and the \u201cdegenerate race\u201d [T<\/em>PS<\/em>\u00a0p. 163-65], the production of the \u201ccriminal as social enemy,\u201d as well as the violent repression of the Nu-pieds<\/em> in 1639 discussed in\u00a0Penal\u00a0Theories and Institutions<\/a><\/em>\u2014as well as what Didier Fassin<\/a> reminded us about the uniquely oppressive character of American mass incarceration. Perhaps, it is most important here to be precise about the historical period: Foucault was focusing specifically, as he indicated at the beginning on the second lecture of 10 January 1973, on the period 1825 to 1848. If we move to the contemporary American criminal justice system, especially in the Death Belt today, it may be different and we may in fact be facing a struggle to the death<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On all accounts, this rich discussion surrounding civil war laid a remarkable foundation for our\u00a0forthcoming seminar on\u00a0\u201cSociety must be defended\u201d<\/em> (1975\u20131976), which be held on\u00a023 November 2015 and\u00a0lead by\u00a0Ann Stoler<\/a>,\u00a0Partha Chatterjee<\/a>\u00a0and Bob\u00a0Gooding-Williams<\/a>. The theme of civil war is at the heart of those 1976 lectures and so we will be able to return to that discussion in a few weeks.<\/p>\n

II. \u00a0Moral Economies<\/i><\/p>\n

The second topic on moralization and\u00a0Protestant Ethics\u2014namely, whether it is possible to marry a political economic account of power (fully developed by Foucault in\u00a0TPS\u00a0<\/em>starting at p. 227, but also in\u00a0his theory of i<\/em>ll\u00e9galismes, s<\/em>ee TPS<\/em>\u00a0p. 281-289) with a genealogical account of the moralization of the popular classes and their\u00a0ill\u00e9galismes\u00a0<\/em>(best articulated\u00a0in\u00a0Foucault\u2019s exclamation \u201cGo, and repent,\u201d\u00a0see TPS<\/em> p. 156 note ** and 289-294)\u2014led to a lively debate about the relationship between acting on the body and acting on the soul, or more generally the relationship between \u201ca biopolitics and\u00a0<\/em>psychopolitics\u201d in Honneth\u2019s terms or \u201cpolitical and moral economies\u201d in Fassin\u2019s words. Honneth argued that \u201cyou can\u2019t have it both ways\u201d [48:50], which prompted a lot of pushback. \u00a0\u201cWe are not Cartesians,\u201d interjected Jeremy Kessler, Ann Stoler, and Nadia Urbinati [104:22], pushing the conversation \u00a0instead towards concepts like \u201cdispositions\u201d or \u201cways of doing\u201d as a way to bridge the dualism. \u00c9tienne Balibar interjected with a citation to Spinoza in support of the effort to bridge these dualities [105:00], while Joel Whitebook brought the conversation back to Foucault\u2019s earlier analysis in The History of Madness<\/i>\u00a0[143:30].<\/p>\n

The discussion of moral economies also triggered a\u00a0productive discussion between Jean Cohen [at 122:45] and Axel Honneth\u00a0[at 152:03] on the question of the functionalism of Foucault\u2019s account, with Honneth adamantly maintaining, at the end of the seminar, that \u201cDefinitely, [Foucault] is not a functionalist.\u201d [at 152:08]<\/p>\n

Underlying\u00a0the discussion was the pregnant question of subjectivity, which had been more on the surface in the first seminar Foucault 1\/13<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0Lectures on the Will to Know,\u00a0<\/em>but which receded somewhat in the texts of Penal Theories and Institutions<\/em> and\u00a0The Punitive Society. <\/em>As we will see in April 2016,\u00a0Foucault complained in 1984 that he had not paid sufficient attention to subjectivity during the early 1970s and in\u00a0Discipline and Punish<\/em> and emphasized that his theory of power-knowledge could not stand without the third element of the subject; the relative \u00a0absence of a discussion of subjectivity here may be a reflection of that.<\/p>\n

However, the topic will emerge at our\u00a0next seminar on 26 October 2015,\u00a0Foucault 4\/13 on the 1974 lectures\u00a0Psychiatric Power<\/em>, which will be led by\u00a0Linda Zerilli<\/a>,\u00a0Alondra Nelson<\/a>, and Anna Lvovsky<\/a>. Already on page 2 of Psychiatric Power, <\/em>Foucault speaks of \u201can order which surrounds, penetrates, and works on bodies [\u2026] but which equally imprints itself on the nerves and what someone called \u2018the soft fibers of the brain.’\u201d\u00a0Foucault 4\/13 should give us an opportunity to explore these questions more deeply. The question of subjectivity will also come to the fore starting with The Government of the Living <\/em>(1980), Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling<\/em>\u00a0(1981), and\u00a0Subjectivity & Truth (<\/em>1981) and of course throughout the following years of lectures.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, Linda Zerilli, of the University of Chicago, is a visiting scholar this year at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought<\/a> and will be giving a seminar on \u201cThe Idea of a Critical Political Theory\u201d<\/a> and two other workshops<\/a>. Please join us!<\/p>\n

III. \u00a0The Specificity of the Prison<\/em><\/p>\n

Didier\u00a0Fassin<\/a>\u00a0urgently called on us to address \u201cthe singularity of imprisonment, the specific violence of confinement and the particular consequences\u2014social, political, ethical\u2014of the generalization of its use.\u201d Nadia Urbinati<\/a>\u00a0equally pressed us for a political reading of the text, as well as to pay attention to the dearth\u00a0of research on mass incarceration in the discipline of political science today [at 72:00]. Jes\u00fas R. Velasco also emphasized [at 1:05] the specificity of Foucault\u2019s encounter with the \u201cmachinery\u201d of the prisons, the riots, the movements (including the Black Panthers), and his other political experiences.<\/p>\n

Kendall Thomas launched the discussion [at 118:12] with an interrogation of the place of slavery in Foucault\u2019s text (TPS\u00a0<\/em>p. 68-70, discussing three models of punishment, infamy, talion, and slavery). Didier Fassin responded [at\u00a0146.48] by suggesting that there is something unique about the American prison experience today, different from France because of the history of slavery in this country, but also different from what was tolerated during the slave-plantation Antebellum period and even thereafter.<\/p>\n

The problem with isolating, in an exclusive manner,\u00a0the specificity of the prison is that it does not do justice, entirely, to Foucault\u2019s project in\u00a0The Punitive Society<\/em>, which was, in large part, to critically explore both<\/em>\u00a0(a) the specificity of the prison\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0(b) the prison form as a model of disciplinary power throughout society:<\/p>\n