Get your smart on.
In Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison Michael Foucault traces the transition from a system of public punishment and torture to the privatization of punishment through the creation of institutions such as the prison and the psychiatric hospital at the turn of the century in France. Foucault uncovers how public punishment opened the sovereign power to some unintended consequences: for example, public punishment creates sympathy with the criminal being punished, and at times, this led to protests and revolts in the streets. But public reactions could be forestalled through the privatization and institutionalization of said punishment, and this is where the prison comes in.
The second innovation was the internalization of power through surveillance, exemplified in the new prison's architecture: a pentagonal structure with a guard tower at the center from which all inmates could be watched. The point here is that there need not be any guard posted to the tower; the mere intimation of being watched is internalized by the inmates. When a prisoner believes they are being watched, they will monitor their own behaviors accordingly. Instead of power being applied externally onto a subject, the subject now absorbs and internalizes the power’s authority. No use of force or physical violence is required to keep a large population of prisoners in line. Even the threat of potential surveillance is coercive, which is why privacy is safeguarded in civil societies.
The rise of psychiatry as a pseudo-science and the building of psychiatric hospitals represented a second mechanism for internalizing surveillance. Foucualt details how authority passes from the priest to the psychologist, instilling conformity from the inside out. Those who fail to conform to society’s norms are either criminalized or institutionalized. Norms, therefore, need to be invented and established as a matter for law or the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that creates diagnosable mental illnesses). The history of sexuality is a great case study that Foucault himself undertakes in the three volumes of his ++History of Sexuality++. Sexual “inverts,” later called homosexuals, were often diagnosed as mentally ill and interned in mental hospitals. Likewise, women not conforming to gender roles were pathalogized (often as “hysterics”) and faced similar internment. Refusing a husband sex in the context of marriage was grounds for institutionalization. Prisons and psych hospitals are among the first spaces created as the constitutive “outsides” for the modern state described by ++Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception++ that I wrote about last week. Mass surveillance through technology will predictably lead to the interment of the physically healthy in work camps, and the institutionalization of women who refuse to go back into the domestic realm. In both cases, the outcome is free and frictionless labor in black-box conditions, all in the name of innovation and progress.
The difference between the imprisoned or institutionalized inmate, on the one hand, and the citizen on the other hand, is a matter of degree, not of kind. An individual may not be in prison, but their movements and behaviors are constantly monitored, with increasing technological precision, so as to produce social conformity and homogeneity in a way that is much more efficient and successful that any public shaming or punishment, or even torture, could ever be. Convincing people to obey in advance is the most frictionless way for power to maintain itself, and mass non-conformity will force their hand (as we are seeing in cities across the U.S. right now). That “convincing” is often left to the subjects themselves — e.g., women inculcate girls into subservient roles — creating a self-replicating system. We are rewarded for internalizing misogyny, racism, classism, ageism, ableism, etc., before we are even old enough to scrutinize it. These interlocking ideologies become the water we swim in, almost impossible to perceive until we are flailing on some rocky shore.
As invisible as the work is to maintain “the way things are,” nonetheless it is constant and relentless work. Simply failing to comply is enough to bring out the uglier side of things, to make the violence explicit. As is assigned in many a intro to sociology class, try breaking a gender norm, insist on not complying, and you will see it right away, the invisible hold. An anecdote: I once wrote down, word for word, what a male colleague said to me, then waited for the perfect moment to repeat it back to him. Care to guess how that went? Our compliance is down to the level of the words we use, how we use language.
When I first published this*, I noted how Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance by the United States government is only the latest turn in a long story that goes back to the birth of the modern state. We can now project that pattern forward into AI, which is an umbrella term for marketing surveillance technology. A big picture view reveals what may be an ongoing and irreducible tension between the people and their government, one that will never be completely done away with. Maybe the modern state has got to go. In any case, Foucault’s account lets us see how power works often through rewards as much as through punishments, often in ways that are invisible to us an that feel an awful like us exercising our own personal, individual choice. We much interrogate ourselves, our desires, and our role (and complicity) with the ways power creates social stability thought homogeneity. We must become not only curious, but suspicious of our own motives, to get at the reality of our own disempowerment. And this will feel like shame at first, but it can turn into pride.
*Originally published on a pre-Amazon ++Goodreads++.
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell, U of Chicago P, 2005.
Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories Press, 2003.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995.
---. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley, Pantheon Books, 1978.
Terry, Jennifer. An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society. U of Chicago P, 1999.