Discipline and punish

New Internationalist, Dec, 1999

THESE days, the fashion for postmodernism is wearing pretty thin. Too many counter-intuitive claims have been made in its name, too many hostages have been offered up to its political misfortunes. To recap: the intellectual world of the late 1970s, if not exactly ablaze, at least tingled pleasantly thanks to translations of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Come the 1980s and Foucault dies tragically of AIDS while Jacques Derrida's leading exponent (Paul de Man) turns out to have a hidden past as a nazi-sympathizer.

So far we are still in the realms of Greek tragedy -- the farce is yet to come. In 1991 Jean Baudrillard, heir to the postmodern crown, writes a series of articles for Liberation announcing that `the Gulf War is not taking place'. The argument is silly, incredibly silly, but its postmodern credentials are impeccable: human knowledge of a world transcending discourse is a fiction, therefore human knowledge of a war that takes place beyond the bounds of discourse must also be a fiction.

More recently two academics, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, who clearly have too much time on their hands, decide to write a hoax article containing as many humorously outrageous postmodernisms as possible, but dressed up in appropriately serious language, with all the right references. The prominent American journal Social Text accepts it gladly and publishes the piece as another important contribution to the discourse. The editors cringe when the hoax is revealed. Around the world eyebrows are raised, questions are asked.

But while postmodernism has lost a great deal of its lustre as an intellectual fashion, some of the individual works which were central to its emergence retain a freshness and strength. Foucault's Discipline and Punish stands out as one example, but it does so precisely because of the claims that it makes about the world and about broader social significance of the birth of the prison.

Foucault's argument begins with the spectacle of the scaffold and the public execution of the offender. But during the second half of the eighteenth century, humanist abhorrence of the infliction of pain was to triumph and there followed calls for penal reform.

Whereas the medieval dungeon obscured visibility in both directions, the modern prison would control subjects, render them cautious, force them to internalize the discipline and become, in effect, their own jailors. Isolation and surveillance were to create an authoritarian utopia, forming good little individuals ready to take up their places in society.

Humanist schemes such as Jeremy Bentham's `Panopticon' promised to end criminality and provide surefire ways of `grinding rogues good', but they were not acted upon. For example, in the modern prison there is no attempt to instill an automatic association between particular crimes and particular punishments. Incarceration has become the common answer to everything, varying in length but not greatly in character. Prison discipline has been drawn from a collection of diverse tactics rather than a single overarching rationality. It was through the disciplines of the barracks, the workshop, the schoolroom and the hospital, that the modern prison system became possible.

One important consequence of this fragmentary logic is that there is no serious possibility of the prison system reducing overall levels of criminality. Punishment is not geared towards the production of Bentham's new model citizens, it tends instead to function as a school for crime, taking in offenders and grinding out delinquents. Failure was built in from the start.

But here Foucault asks an important question: what is served by this failure? He answers by pointing to the production of a seemingly marginal, but supervised milieu of criminals. Such delinquency allows illegality to be localized and it allows the criminal group to be used by the justice system in order to survey the entire social field. Criminality becomes an instrument of power.

In addition, crime becomes gauged by degrees of anomaly and normality. The disciplinary society -- the school, the court, the asylum and the prison -- is set in a struggle against all forms of anomaly. Prison grinds society uniform.

Foucault's own view of his genealogy of the prison and other disciplinary mechanisms was that they were to be regarded as elaborate fictions. This is not a view that intrudes too much into the text itself; there are no paragraphs ending `this is, of course, a fiction'. What we are left with is an interesting but debatable framework, coupled with a searing criticism of the mechanisms of discipline and punishment. This may well ensure the book's continuing success long after postmodernism has finally gone the way of all fashions.