Foucault After Bush

Upgraded from an Exchange in the Moot, a reader asks:

"I feel like kind of a bore in focusing on this rudimentary element of your post, but it was your summary of Discipline and Punish that really grabbed my attention. The overview of Discipline and Punish’s more particular argument made me realize that there is whole, important, component of this text that I’ve totally neglected! I read the book as an undergrad, but I skimmed the last two chapters, since, in the class for which I read it, our discussions focused on Foucault’s more general argument, concerning the ‘disciplinary society,’ which, to my recollection, comes through most clearly in the chapter called “Panopticism.” More importantly, your analysis of Foucault’s points about modern incarceration and his utterly continuous insights regarding ‘normalization’ as revealing the anti-democratic forces within modern liberal democracies was something of a revelation for me. As obvious as the anti-democratic effects of these powers relations may be, I didn’t ever think about them in this way, at least not with any clarity...

"Clearly, you are very interested in practical politics. Clearly, you have found Discipline and Punish and Foucault’s oeuvre, helpful in this arena. Your post suggested to me that I should be getting much more out of Foucault. It also raised some questions. I made the intuitive connection between Foucault’s argument in Discipline and Punish and anti-democratic forces immediately. If someone is talking about strategies for increased control over the social body, they are obviously talking about threats to democracy, which presumes agents with at least some degree of autonomy (can’t believe this wasn’t clear to me when I first read the book). However, I have to admit to myself that this it all still quite vague. How exactly does the modern prison system work to enforce obedience in a way that threatens democracy? How exactly do the different strategies of normalization do the same? I certainly don’t expect you to answer these questions. My question for you is whether you think I’d come to some sort of satisfactory answer to these questions were I just to reread Discipline and Punish (read it about two years ago). Is there some secondary literature or work in a similar vein that I might find it helpful to read? And a final question. When you raise the possibility that debt might be the late modern technology par excellence for controlling subjects, are you implying that perhaps Foucault’s work has lost some of its relevancy?"

My response (forgive its terseness, it would take a long time to do real justice to the questions, so I will just provide some suggestive connections and recommend further explorations):

I think it is useful to think of prisons and parole officers as institutions producing socially useful delinquent populations rather in the way it is useful to think (to keep this very Foucauldian) of clinics and therapists as institutions producing socially useful perverted populations like queers -- especially in the context of racist wars on urban zones and racist Wars on (some) Drugs. When I teach Foucault's D&P I often pair it with Angela Davis on prisons. I have also benefited from The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander.

Nobody who studies Foucault seriously has remained untouched by the publication in the last few years of his newly translated College de France lectures, especially the volumes delineating the genealogy of neoliberal biopolitics, Security, Territory, Population, then The Birth of Biopolitics, and then the two volumes on the Government of Self and Others (volume two called here, The Courage of Truth). A volume called The Government of the Living is not yet out, at least I don't think it is. It is hard to read these volumes without re-thinking D&P and History of Sexuality, vol. 1. I also read them with texts like Harvey's Brief History of Neoliberalism, Mike Davis's Planet of Slums and Victorian Holocausts, and Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine very much in mind.

It is important to grasp that for Foucault autonomy is ambivalent (Judith Butler's writing since 2000 really helps us engage with such an ambivalent understanding of agency) as is obedience -- we are lured into collaboration with the terms of our own exploitation precisely through promises of capacitation, legibility, pleasure. The point is not to deny these promises are worthy or fulfilled but that they precede, exceed, and undermine while they also enable agency.

Also, it is crucial to understand that panoptism is not just a matter of a normalization which provides a rational for and practice of universal intervention in the form of a promise to provide equity (the usual -- correct but incomplete -- point people tend to get from the chapter), but also the organization of a specifically experimental form of human subjecthood in a society figured as a vast laboratory and one to which we consent via open participation. Again, the point is not to propose that our consent is really phony or that participation is just a ruse, but that these are ambivalent, costly and beneficial, disabling and enabling, a field ripe for both resistance and opportunism.

I think it is important to realize that Foucault's exposure of the bloodyminded history and reality of humanism is not in itself enough to recommend its rejection (to do so would actually involve a kind of obliteration of the who that might want to do such a thing in the first place!), but creates a fruitful and frustrating demand that humanism be taken up and redeployed differently, forced to live up to its hitherto (and probably inevitably) false promises. For me, it is Fanon who provides the best formulations for this sort of political imperative (and I regard Foucault, Fanon, and Arendt as the three indispensable figures delineating the field of the biopolitical, though they are only rarely read together, all-together, in this way, as if each provides necessary corrective supplements for one another -- but Paul Gilroy is a good figure to read today who is doing work on race and culture in this vein).

I don't think Foucault has lost his relevance -- but I do think our Foucault in the aftermath of the Bush Administration is a different Foucault from the Reagan era's, if that makes sense.