Historical Drama on Foucault's Theater

2008-12-14T18:08:00.000-08:00

Carlo Ginzburg recalled once a time when he discussed with E.P. Thompson about Michael Foucault’s works, Thompson criticized Foucault as an absolute charlatan and liar. [1]This private talk between two brilliant historians happened in the 1970s, when Foucault was about to be crowned as one of the most influential intellectual figure in 20th century. A rampantly rising fame of Foucault strengthened the already harsh critics because of its potential misleading influence on human sciences. Among the detractors, historians have been the majority.

A threefold reading with three questions of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison helps unveil Foucault’s intellectual agenda and penetrate the tension it brought to scholarship. Respectively, here I suggest reading it as 1) a historical study of 18-19th centuries French punitive reformation that concentrated on the prison system; 2) a theoretical book conceptualizing history as the unfolding of an disputable present by the genealogical approach and a masterpiece inaugurated the advent of post-modernism historiography aiming to use metaphor to criticize modernity since Enlightenment; and 3) a personal methodological decision among others rather than any historical or theoretical discoveries, a starting point paved way to Foucault’s lifetime span philosophical concern, but eventually was criticized by himself as false, enabled him to be driven back to end up with a refreshing and stimulating direction that in turn became big contribution to social science studies.

I. An Empirical History of Western Penal System

Departing from an explicit account of Damien’s torture on one day in 1757, Foucault introduced his subject and compares that account of penalty to Faucher’s timetable for prisoners published in approximately 1837 (p. 6-7). Bridging the two events is a history of prison. Torture as public spectacle disappeared as did “the body as the major target of penal repression” (p.8). Foucault’s juxtaposition of the way the executioners of Damiens declared the royal authority in their very public wretched man's body, and the way Bentham's ideal prison, the Panopticon, was supposed to remodel the prisoner's character by supervising his every thought and gesture, was set in a advent of “new age for penal justice” in Europe and the United States that saw changes in economy of punishment, new theories of law and crime, physician diagnose and medical measurement as new moral and political justifications of the right to declare punish. Situating the massive changes of penal system into the streams of the Enlightenment movement, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the professionalizing and universalizing of human knowledge, Foucault fleshed out the history of prison into a socially and theoretical implicated history. An economy of punishment required disciplines as a means more effective to control people by transforming them into objects of human knowledge that could be predicted, assumed, and judged. It endowed knowledge a huge but intangible power. A prison system was the embodiment, and discipline could be perceived as the technique of exerting power.

Embodied as prison system, discipline with the associated new mechanism of power was able to meet the need of controlling of the largely increased population in 18th century. Perceived as the “punishment in a civilized society,” Foucault’s prison was not only for punishing criminal, but also functioned as an educational and diagnostic institution where prisoners were supervised, observed and regulated. The universalized criminal and medical knowledge that put people under their gaze according to a generalized criminal knowledge, predicts people’s intention, measures people’s past and assumes people’s current thinking, which blurred the boundaries of punishment with social government, and judgment with objective knowledge.

Treating the history of penal law and the history of the human sciences as derived from a single process of ‘epistemologico-juridical’ formation’ makes the technology of power the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system and of the knowledge of man. Coupled with the epistemologico-juridical formation, prison system is described by Foucault as an entry of the soul onto the scene of penal justice, and with it the insertion into legal practice of a whole corpus of ‘scientific’ knowledge.

Foucault conceptualized this single process as the history of prison, a history of knowledge and power weaved into the texture of 18thcentury French social history. He displayed an empirical and concrete depiction of historical course, impressing people with his techniques of connecting historical documents as evidences, which were collected from various dimensions of social relations, logically coherent. Beneath it was a well-mapped and clearly intended project of modernity, however, his drawing paid much attention on evidences, contingency, temporality, and causation, the elements basically carving up the figure of a historical study. His strategy in conceptualizing history discomforted historians in many ways. Philosophical or theoretical work? How should historians respond it when they need to tackle related topics, especially when many of these topics are derived from his inspiration? Is Foucault playing with historical study?

II. “The history of present” and Genealogical Approach

At the end of this work, Foucault claimed that he intended to “write the history of present.” He treated his historical writing as the means to express his critic of Western modernity. His persuasive rhetoric makes it difficult to not identify prison as a metaphor of modern society, the social structure of which was derived from 18^th century, a period when old régime started to be replaced by new government, Enlightenment movement was flagged to upholding discourses of humanitarian and rationalities, prosperity of capitalism, and professionalized knowledge was established as the basic episteme means for people to differentiate truth and false, build up morality. The project of modernity, according to Foucault, started from these transformations, accompanied with the launch of the prison system. Foucault was not reluctant to upset people that modernity unfolded itself as the prison exerted itself by developing a technique of power, universalizing disciplines as controlling method, incarnated into rationality and humanitarian, functioned by capitalism principle. Modern people served as the subjection in this modern social mechanism. The French title of the work, Surveiller et Punir, conveys more neatly than the English the implication that modern society is a vast mechanism of supervision and inspection. Modern society is prison.

Yet, written in 1974, Discipline and Punish was actually far from being the pioneer posing the questions of modern society. As what he said in his lectures at the College de France in 1976, (“Society Must Be Defended:” Lectures at the College de France, “Il faut défendre la société” Cours au Collège de France, 1976) in the latest 15 years there was a large trend in scholarship that aim to criticize the institution, political practice and discourses. Not surprisingly, immersed in this intellectual climate, Foucault was preoccupied with the question of the birth of the modernity, the result of the tremendous transformation since 18^th century. This preoccupation of the birth of modernity, on one hand, staged 18^th century in the center of his study, structured his periodization of Western history, on the other hand, echoed to the tradition of Western historiography, the quest for origins.

However, ostensibly converged, Foucault’s intention was indeed diverged from the Western historiography largely. Advocating a genealogical approach inspired from Nietzsche, he disputed traditional Western historiography as nothing but the possession of the myth of origins. In this sense, he identified genealogist as real historians, who were able to discard the illusion of the origins of any taken-for-granted discourse and practice. Genealogy was the only effective historical philosophy in challenging the legitimate of knowledge by discovering its secret implication with power.

History, therefore, must be conceptualized as a generating process, the rediscovery of which required forging connections between the sporadic and the discrete into a pedigree, bringing the peril into center. (“Nietzsche, Genealogy and History,” 1977) Furthermore, in talking of "archaeology," the other identification he attributed to his historical work, he wanted to uncover discrete layers of human thinking and acting, just as the archaeologist uncovers different levels of heritage sites. It is hence not surprising that he grounded his study on principles that might be most contradict to the historian’s. “Do not concentrate the study of the punitive mechanisms on their ‘repressive’ effect alone, on their ‘punishment’ aspects alone, but situate them in a whole series of their possible positive effects, even if these seem marginal at first sight. As a consequence, regard punishment as a complex social function.” The metaphor of panopticonism, could be established as powerful identification of society, abstracted as ubiquitous, and at the same time centered as the prognostic in Foucault’s historical drama of the formation of modern knowledge and power.

However, in order to target modernity as a whole panoptical project to criticize, Foucault’s writing gave birth to a modernity conceptualized as universalized and anti-historical. Due to his powerful metaphor and narrative rhetoric, readers are strongly invited to identify themselves with Foucault’s social model of panopticonism, the discovery from his “archeological” work on the rupture between execution with torture and new penal system, to shed light on their experience today and imagine 18-19th Western society in history. Pervasive his critique was, however, writing history for the present make his historical drama strongly teleological. As what Ginzburg commented, “his followers take his metaphors as explanations, and that is absurd.”

At the end of the book, we “hear the distant roar of battle” and begin our own “studies of the power of normalization and the formation of knowledge in modern society”, for which he has provided a background (p.308). But, is this battle the one everyone must be confronted, or the particular one in Foucault’s philosophical inquiry, which has also changed along with his pursuit?

III. The Back of Agency

Prison and penal system are among other subjects that Foucault investigated as the metaphor for modernity. In Foucault’s stories about power and knowledge, parallel to the birth of prison was the birth of hospital; with the decline of executioner was the rise of physician; along with the measuring of the criminals displayed to us the investigation of madness. (Madness and Civilization, 1961; The Birth of Clinic, 1963) Intellectual archaeology aims to describe systems of ideas with little reference to the role of individuals in their creation. The preoccupation of sporadic discourses and the concentration on unveiling the hidden mechanism missed a fleshed existence of nuanced intentions and desires, namely, the human agency.

However, one should be fully aware that it was not an empirical discovery but a prior methodological decision that Foucault gave no room for individuals in his inquiry. Therefore, when Foucault was accused as a liar by E.P. Thompson, a respectable historian who convincingly argued the positive role human agency had played in the making of the English working class, is easy to understand. Meanwhile, scholars from gender history, history of body and sexuality, the fields originally inspired by Foucault, started to realize that, when claiming to rescue the body from the prison of soul by denouncing the Enlightenment, Foucault actually legitimated the notion of individual in the sense of a individualism given birth by the Enlightenment, which could be traced back to Descartes’ dichotomy of mind and body. Claiming that return back subjectivity to individual is significant not only because it permits conceiving human agency in a historically and culturally constructed context, but also because it reminded historians that Western-centered tradition of epistemology should always be carefully re-considered.

Yet, it is hard to predict if Thompson would still criticize Foucault harshly if that conversation took place a decade later, when Foucault’s third volume of History of Sexuality, Confessions of the Flesh came out. "One could not very well analyze the formation and development of the experience of sexuality from the eighteenth century onward, without doing a historical and critical study dealing with desire and the desiring subject.” He started to ponder how "subjects" handled themselves and controlled over one’s life, based on his self-critic of subject human agency into the panopticon-like prison/society.

This driving back happened right before he died, when historical scholarship was also driven to a more nuanced, subjective experience-oriented, and multiple temporalities-concerned approach that not only methodologically but epistemologically transformed historiography. Furthermore, social science was informed by a more historically inclined sensibility that embraced the notion of contingency and event contributed by this historiography transformation. Identification of historians was changed by their assumption of their potential contributions. New approaches such as post-colonialism history and feminism history strived to bring agencies of non-Western society people and women into the making of history, which stimulated intense theoretical conversations among social sciences.

It is hard to determine whether it was Foucault’s historical drama that stimulated the reflection of historian toward their own enterprise, but it is necessary and instructive to read Foucault associated with the rimficating research pursuits, to read his early work like Discipline and Punish with a concern of his lifetime intellectual inquiry and the counterforce it triggered. This will permit us to shed new light on charting his position in the making of the historical and social science landscape today. Therein lies the legacy of Foucault we should simulate and reevaluate.

[1] Maria Lúcia G. Pallares Burke interviewing Carlo Ginzburg, The New History (Polity Press, 2002), pp. 208-209.

素履前往

2008-11-28T13:03:00.000-08:00

大家還熟悉這個名字吧。今天想起它，像是繞了一個圈子回來。

今後會在這裡做一些新鮮的、有趣的試驗與練習。看看新的道德會不會隨著安頓自我的新的方式而萌生。

大致的目的是，都不揚棄，也不排序，就都擱著。
一個個，都利落地停在枝頭上。

熄燭早禱

Historical Drama on Foucault's Theater

素履前往