in The Handbook of Economic Sociology, 1994, pp.255-282

The Complexity of the Market Phenomenon.

• To look at market as a specific type of social structure (some kind of recurrent and patterned interactions between agents that are maintained through sanctions). 255
• To view markets in terms of exchange. 255
• The term “market” was introduced into the English language in the twelve century (from the Latin mercatus - trade or place to trade). 255
• Many meanings of the term “markets” over time. 255
• It is uncertain when market first appeared – archaeological findings indicate that external trade existed by at least 5000 BC. National markets were created first through the political revolutions of these centuries in England, France and the United States. 256
• Four  types of markets had made appearance (first in the United States and some European countries):
• The financial market
• The mass consumer market
• The labor market
• The industrial market. 256
• The market economy was first mainly national in character, but as the twentieth century it has become international. 257

The Market in Economic Theory.

• In the economics literature a surprisingly small amount of attention to the market. 257
• The market in classical political economy (from Adam Smith to Marx):
  • Classical economists saw the market as synonymous with either a market place or a geographical area. In their eyes the market was something concrete as opposed to the abstract market of latter-day economists. Second, the main emphasis in classical political economy had been on production rather than on exchange. Third, it was argued that incidental factors would typically result in a market price that was different from the natural price. 257
  • Adam Smith – saw as central to any analysis of market the relationship between the market and the division of labor and how the market influences price. 258
  • David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill – political economics became more abstract (Mill talks about “the laws of Production”). 258
  • Karl Marx – production was more important than the market when it came to deciding the price of a commodity. Market consists of social relationships (the merchandise fetishism is an example). Markets have a distinct history. There is a legal and ideological dimension to the market. 258
  • The marginalist revolution and the creation of the modern concept of the market.
  • The market became an abstract concept. The emergence of the concept “perfect market”, characterized by perfect competition and perfect information. The economy was centered increasingly around markets. All markets in an economy were interconnected. 259
  • Alfred Marshall – five factors were important in the understanding of markets: time, space, formal regulation, informal regulation, and familiarity between buyer and seller. 260
  • The Austrian School (Mises and Hayek). The most important contribution of neo-Austrian economics – the theory of the market as a process, “actuated by the interplay of the actions of the various individuals cooperating under the division of labor” (Mises). The market emerges spontaneously being the result of human action rather than human design. 260
  • Keynes’s Critique of the Law of Markets – his solution for matching demand and supply was the intervention of the state. Keynes did not believe that markets by themselves can ensure a high level of productivity. 261
  • Industrial Organization and the concept of market structure (Edward Chamberlin) – conceived of the market as being an industry.  Chamberlin criticized the theory of perfect competition because it did not take into account product differentiation. Reputation of the seller and personal links between buyers and sellers also could make difference. The structure-conduct-performance paradigm. 261-262
  • Postwar developments – general equilibrium theory, game theory (introduced the idea of intersubjectivity), the Chicago School (a more central place for the market), the economics of information, market clearing (Dennis Carlton), New Institutional Economics (transaction costs, property rights, search costs, enforcement costs, measurement costs). 263-264

The market in Sociological Theory.

• The market in classical sociological theory
• Max Weber – emphasis on conflict/struggle in the market, social action in the market begins as competition and ends as exchange, exchange in the market represents the most instrumental and calculating type of social action that was possible between two human beings, competition as a peaceful conflict, monetary prices are always the result of a power struggle between the parties on the market. 265
• Parsons and Smelser – the market as a distinct social system in its own right.
• Polanyi – markets were created by the state, commodification of land, misery of the common people, the idea of counter-movement. 266-267
• Granovetter (networks approach), Wallerstein (the world system approach), a social structural approach, a social constructionist approach, a historical-comparative approach etc. 267
• Harrison White – markets consists of structures that are reproduced through signaling or communication between the participants. 268
• Howard Baker – markets as networks. 268
• Zelizer – the cultural dimension of markets. She analyzes how things become commodities (life insurance or the reverse process of removing commodities from the market – child labor, for example).
• The role of the state. 270

Integrating the economic and sociological approaches to the market.

• I suggest that the core of the market phenomenon does not consist of one element – exchange, but of two elements – exchange in combination with competition. The social structure of the market is characterized by a special type of interaction that begins as competition between a number of actors (buyers and/or sellers) and that ends up with an exchange for a few of the actors. 271
• Competition in production and competition in exchange. Incorporating the element of competition in the exchange. “When the competition for opportunities of exchange starts to penetrate most of society outside the market the market progresses from being a nondynamic force in society to becoming a dynamic one”. 272
• Simmel – competition as a form of “indirect conflict”. 272

Much of early modern European statecraft seemed similarly devoted to rationalizing and standardizing what was a social hieroglyph into a legible and administratively more convenient format.” (p.3)

Bad state engineering originates in a combination of four elements:

1. The administrative ordering of nature and society

2. A high-modernist ideology – a version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws…It was, accordingly, uncritical, un skeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production.

3.  An authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being.

4. A prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist. (pp. 4-5)

Legibility

“In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.” (p.5)

The book is a case against the imperialism of high-modernist, planned social order.

“Schematic, authoritarian solutions to production and social order inevitably fail when they exclude the fund of valuable knowledge embodied in local practices.” (p.6)

Motives for legibility – simplification, legibility, control, appropriation and manipulation.

The radical simplification of the forest to a single commodity – “an exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora-which were, and still are, not entirely understood-was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences.” (pp.19-20)

“No administrative system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification.” (p.22)

Local measurements are interested, contextual, and historically specific. (p.27)

According to Witold Kula (Measures and men) three factors made the “metrical revolution” in France possible:

- The growth of market exchange encouraged uniformity in measures.

- Both popular sentiment and Enlightenment philosophy favored a single standard throughout France.

-  The Revolution and especially Napoleonic state building actually enforced the metric system in France and the empire. (p.30)

“At one stroke the equality of all French people before the law was guaranteed by the state; they were no longer mere subjects of their lords and sovereign but bearers of inalienable rights as citizens.” (p.32)

From collective taxation (of communities) to individual taxation. (pp.37-38)

The construction of cadastral maps.

Redesigning cities ( at the center of Haussmann plans for Paris lay the military security of the state – to made the city safe against popular insurrections.) pp. 60-61

The creation of surnames – to create legible people.

The creation of a standard, official language.

The centralization of traffic patterns.

Simplifications have at least 5 features:

- State simplifications are observations of only those aspects of social life that are of official interest. They are interested, utilitarian facts.

- They are also nearly always written (verbal or numerical) documentary facts.

- They are typically static facts.

- Most stylized state facts are also aggregate facts. Aggregate facts may be impersonal (the density of transportation networks) or simply a collection of facts about individuals (employment rates, literacy rates, residence patterns).

- For most purposes, state officials need to group citizens in ways that permit them to make a collective assessment. Facts that can be aggregated and presented as averages or distributions must therefore be standardized facts. (p.80)

The process by which standardized facts susceptible to aggregation are manufactured:

- The creation of common units of measurement or coding

- Each item or instance falling within a category is counted and classified according to the new unit of assessment.

- One arrives this way at synoptic facts that are useful to officials. (p.80)

“The modern state, through its officials, attempts with varying success to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, assess, and manage.” (pp.81-82)

“Until recently, the ability of the state to impose its schemes on society was limited by the state’s modest ambitions and its limited capacity.” (p.88)

“Many of the great state-sponsored calamities of the twentieth century have been the work of rulers with grandiose and utopian plans for their society.” (p.89)

“The discovery of society as a reified object that was separate from the state and that could be scientifically described.” (p.91)

High-modernism implies:

- a truly radical break with history and tradition.

- tends to devalue or banish politics.

- authoritarianism.

- the temporal emphasis is on the future.

- progress is objectified by a series of preconceived goals.

- it appeals greatly to the classes and strata who have the most to gain – in status, power, and wealth – from its worldview (bureaucratic intelligentsia, technicians, planners, and engineers). (pp.93-97)

Obstacles to high-modernist planning:

- the existence and belief in a private sphere of activity in which the state and its agencies may not legitimately interfere.

- the private sector in liberal political economy.

- the existence of working, representative institutions through which a resistant society could make its influence felt. (pp.101-102)

“The most rigidly planned economies tend to be accompanied by large “underground, ‘gray,’ informal,” economies that supply, in a thousand ways, what the formal economy fails to supply.” (p.261)

High-modernims vs metis.

Metis – cunning intellingence, indigenous technical knowledge, practical skills, a wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human environment. The practice and experience reflected in metis is almost always local (p.313)

“What proved to be dangerous to us and to our environment is the combination of the universalist pretensions of epistemic knowledge and authoritarian engineering.” (p.340)

The case for institutions that are multifunctional, plastic, diverse, and adaptable. (p.353)

]]> http://lib.spranceana.com/james-scott-seeing-like-a-state-how-certain-schemes-to-improve-the-human-condition-have-failed-140.html/feed 0 http://lib.spranceana.com/lynn-hunt-politics-culture-and-class-in-the-french-revolution-138.html http://lib.spranceana.com/lynn-hunt-politics-culture-and-class-in-the-french-revolution-138.html#comments Tue, 13 Sep 2011 22:03:52 +0000 Vitalie Sprinceana http://lib.spranceana.com/?p=138

Lynn Hunt

Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution

University of California Press, 1984

The re-invention of the notions of political and ideology.

The very notion of “the political” expanded and changed shape. The structure of the polity changed under the impact of increasing political participation and popular mobilization; political language, political ritual, and political organization all took on new forms and meanings. P. 2

By the end of the decade of revolution, French people had learned a new political repertoire: ideology appeared as a concept, and competing ideologies challenged the traditional European cosmology of order and harmony; propaganda became associated with political purposes; the Jacobin clubs demonstrated the potential of mass political parties; and Napoleon established the first secular police state with his claim to stand above parties. (p.2)

Paradoxically, while multiplying the forms and meanings of politics, the most revolutionary of the French acted out of a profound distrust of any thing explicitly political. Leading political figures never called themselves politicians; they served “the public good” (la chose publique), not a narrow “partisan spirit” (esprit de parti). Politics and politicking were consistently identified with narrowness, meanness, divisiveness, factionalism, opportunism, egotism, and selfishness. (p.3)

Three major interpretive positions of the French Revolution:

- the Marxist interpretation – revolution served as a touchstone; it fostered the development of capitalism by breaking the feudal stranglehold on production, and it brought the bourgeoisie as a class to power.

- the revisionist interpretation – there was no conscious class conflict between bourgeoisie and aristocracy; a crisis of social mobility and status anxiety within an amalgamated elite made up of nobles and bourgeois (Furet).

- the modernization account (Tocqueville) – the Revolution represented the aggrandizement of state power and centralization rather that the triumph of capitalism: revolutionaries ended up creating an even more powerful state modeled on that same absolute monarchy. (pp.3-7)

The aim of the book is the politics of revolution, the political culture of the Revolution. (p.10) revolutionary political culture cannot be deduced from social structures, social conflicts, or the social identity of revolutionaries…Revolutionaries worked to reconstitute society and social relations. (p.12)

As disagreement over the nature of the rearrangement (between society and politics) became apparent, different ideologies were invented in order to explain this development. Rather than expressing an ideology, therefore, revolutionary politics brought ideology into being. (p. 13)

In order to reconstruct the logic of revolutionary action and innovation, it is thus essential to examine both the politics of revolution and the people who practiced them. My contention is that there was a fit or affinity between them, not that one can be deduced from the other. (p. 13)

The chief accomplishment of the French Revolution was the institution of a dramatically new political culture. (p. 15)

Political clubs as political schools.

Political clubs proliferated at every level, and electoral assemblies seemed to meet almost continuously during the revolution’s first years. (p.20)

Certain key words served as revolutionary incantations. Nation was perhaps the most universally sacred, but there were also patrie, constitution, law, and, more specific to the radicals, regeneration, virtue, and vigilance. (p. 21)

The revolutionary oath of loyalty created sovereignty from within the community. (p.21)

The reading of revolutionary language commonly follows from some prior assumption: that language is an instrument of social conflict (the Marxist position), that language is a vehicle of political self-deception (the Tocquevillian position), that language is a carrier of cultural integration (the Durkheimian position)… I propose to look at language more horizontally, in term of its internal patterns and its connections to other aspects of political culture…Revolutionary language did not simply reflect the realities of revolutionary changes and conflicts, but rather was itself transformed into an instrument of political and social change…revolutionary political discourse was rhetorical; it was a means of persuasion, a way of reconstituting the social and political world. (p. 24)

To treat revolutionary rhetoric as a text in the manner of literary criticism. (p.25)

As a consequence of the constant displacement of political authority, charisma came to be most concretely located in words, that is, in the ability to speak for the Nation. (p.26)

The Nation and the Revolution were constantly cited as points of reference, but they came with no history. (p. 26)

The French harkened to a “mythic present” (p.27)

The obsession with conspiracy became the central organizing principle of French revolutionary rhetoric (Furet). (p.39)

Conspiracy became a systematic obsession when the revolutionaries confronted the novelties of mass politics…everyone seemed to fear back-room politicking, secret machinations, and factionalism. (pp.42-43)

Distrust of factions.

French political orators were speaking in two registers at once: one political and the other sacred…factional politics was synonymous with conspiracy, and “interests” was a code for betrayal of a nation united. (p.44)

French revolutionary rhetoric broke through the confines of past politics by positing the existence of a new community (rather than the revival of a purer, former one) and by insisting that it could be realized through politics (rather than through the true religion, a return to past tradition, or an adherence to some previously made social contract). (p. 49)

Politicization of everyday life – costumes, standardization, holidays.

Different costumes indicated different politics, and a color, the wearing of a certain length of trousers, certain shoe styles, or the wrong hat might touch off a quarrel, a fistfight, or a general street brawl. During the Revolution, even the most ordinary objects and customs became political emblems and potential sources of political and social conflict. (p.53

The politicization of the everyday life (p.56)

Symbols of the Revolution:

- the cockade

- the liberty cap

- the patriotic altar

- the liberty tree (p.59)

The officials of the revolutionary regime tried to discipline popular political festivity. Officials incorporated popular symbols into organized festivals and ceremonies, and they devised their own symbols for popular consumption. (p.61)

Revolutionaries could only hope to win their “symbolic” battles if they succeeded in educating their public. An intense course in political education was necessary to teach the people to distinguish between the Liberty of their republican present and the Black Virgin of their royalist past. (p.68)

National education, propagandizing in the army, and the enforcement of bureaucratic routine were strategies for the extension of power. They contributed to the “perfectioning of the political machine” by incorporating officials and ordinary citizens alike into the republican state… But now even the measures of space, time, and weight came into question. Everyone should speak the same language, use the same weights and measures, and turn in the old coinage. (p.70)

The standardization of costumes (made by David) – On the one hand, the deputies or representatives of the people were supposed to be simply a transparent reflection of the people, that is, just like them, because part of them. For this reason, everyone was supposed to wear a new national uniform that would efface differences. On the other hand, the representatives were obviously other, different, not like the people exactly because they were the teachers, the governors, the guides of the people. Accordingly, the uniforms of officials were to be just distinct enough to permit recognition. (p.77)

The masculinization of the Revolutionary imagery (the symbolical battle between Hercules and Marianne) – In the eyes of the Jacobin leadership, women were threatening to take Marianne as a metaphor for their own active participation; in this situation, no female figure, however fierce and radical, could possibly appeal to them. Hercules put the women back into perspective, in their place and relationship of dependency. The monumental male was now the only active figure. (p.104)

The persistence of the left-right division (p. 133)

The rhetoric of revolution appealed to the peripheries of the nation, to people who lived in the economic, social, and cultural backwaters. (p.148)

The professionalization of bureaucracy – p. 152

City professionals seized the opportunity to develop political careers. P. 155

In the villages – continuity of leadership between old regime and new, the continuing hegemony of the same local notables. (p.166)

Layers dominated national and regional politics; merchants, artisans, and shopkeepers were prominent in the cities; and a mixture of peasants, artisans, and small merchants ran the villages. (p.167)

The Revolution opened political access to groups that previously had been excluded for social reasons – modest merchants, artisans and  shopkeepers, and minor professionals. (p.170)

General cultural patterns that shaped the workings of revolutionary politics:

- mobility

- migration

- opportunities to religious minorities (pp.181-183)

The Revolution was, in essence, the multiplication and diffusion of culture and power. (p.188)

The most obvious centers for local officials were the Jacobin clubs. (p.201)

In terms of social origins, the new political class was heavily urban. (p.205)

The French Revolution did promote the rationalizing of authority, the development of new political institutions, and the increased participation of the people through an expanded electoral process. (p. 209)

The creation of a new political rhetoric and the development of new symbolic forms of political practice transformed contemporary notions about politics. Politics became an instrument for refashioning society. (p. 213)

The new men and the new political culture came into being together. (p. 216)

Three strands in French political culture that were in formation during the Revolution: democratic republicanism, socialism, and authoritarianism. (p. 224)

[Revolution] was the moment in which politics was discovered as an agent for conscious change, as the mold for character, culture, and social relations. (p.236)

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

Oxford University Press, 2005

Neoliberalism – a theory of political economic practices proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.

The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defence, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture. (p.2)

Neoliberalism values market exchange as ‘an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs’. (p.3)

‘Time-space compression’ (p.4)

‘Embedded liberalism’ – market processes and entrepreneurial and corporate activities were surrounded by a web of social and political constraints and a regulatory environment that sometimes restrained but in other instances led the way in economic and industrial strategy. (…) Redistributive politics (including some degree of political integration of working-class trade union power and support for collective bargaining), controls over the free mobility of capital (some degree of financial repression through capital controls in particular), expanded public expenditures and welfare state-building, active state interventions in the economy, and some degree of planning of development. (p.11)

The rise of neoliberal theory – A small and exclusive group of passionate advocates––mainly academic economists, historians, and philosophers––had gathered together around the renowned Austrian political philosopher Friedrich von Hayek to create the Mont Pelerin Society (named after the Swiss spa where they first met) in 1947 (the notables included Ludvig von Mises, the economist Milton Friedman, and even, for a time, the noted philosopher Karl Popper)… This movement remained on the margins of both policy and academic influence until the troubled years of the 1970s. At that point it began to move centre-stage, particularly in the US and Britain, nurtured in various well-financed think-tanks (offshoots of the Mont Pelerin Society, such as the Institute of Economic Affairs in London and the Heritage Foundation in Washington), as well as through its growing influence within the academy, particularly at the University of Chicago, where Milton Friedman dominated… The dramatic consolidation of neoliberalism as a new economic orthodoxy regulating public policy at the state level in the advanced capitalist world occurred in the United States and Britain in 1979 (Reagan and Thatcher).  Pp.19-23

Neoliberalization as a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites. (p.19)

Neoliberalization has meant, in short, the financialization of everything (p.33).

While neoliberalization may have been about the restoration of class power, it has not necessarily meant the restoration of economic power to the same people. (p. 31)

Nevertheless, there are some general trends that can be identified.

The first is for the privileges of ownership and management of capitalist enterprises––traditionally separated––to fuse by paying CEOs (managers) in stock options (ownership titles).

The second trend has been to dramatically reduce the historical gap between money capital earning dividends and interest, on the one hand, and production, manufacturing, or merchant capital looking to gain profits on the other.

A power shift away from production to the world of finance (pp. 31-33).

How was neoliberalization accomplished, and by whom?

The ‘long march’ of neoliberal ideas through these institutions that Hayek had envisaged back in 1947, the organization of think-tanks (with corporate backing and funding), the capture of certain segments of the media, and the conversion of many intellectuals to neoliberal ways of thinking, created a climate of opinion in support of neoliberalism as the exclusive guarantor of freedom. (p.40)

The constructing (manufacturing of the consent):

- Powerful ideological influences that circulate through the corporations, the media, and the numerous institutions that constitute civil society––such as the universities, schools, churches, and professional associations.

- Appeals to traditions and cultural values under the pretext of an attempt to advance the cause of individual freedoms.

- Once the state apparatus made the neoliberal turn it could use its powers of persuasion, co-optation, bribery, and threat to maintain the climate of consent necessary to perpetuate its power.

- The penetration of universities

- The alliance with the Christian Right and the moral majority (pp.40-49).

But we must look beyond these infinitely varied ideological and cultural mechanisms––no matter how important they are––to the qualities of everyday experience in order to better identify the material grounding for the construction of consent.

And it is at that level––through the experience of daily life under capitalism in the 1970s––that we begin to see how neoliberalism penetrated ‘common-sense’ understandings. The effect in many parts of the world has increasingly been to see it as a necessary, even wholly ‘natural’, way for the social order to be regulated. (pp.40-41)

Neoliberalization required both politically and economically the construction of a neoliberal market-based populist culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism. (p.42)

Corporate welfare substituted for people welfare. (p.47)

In the US – the unholy alliance between big business and conservative Christians backed by the neoconservatives (p.50)

The commonality between the US and the UK cases most obviously lies in the fields of labour relations and the fight against inflation. (pp.58-59)

The neoliberal state in theory:

According to theory, the neoliberal state should favour strong individual private property rights, the rule of law, and the institutions of freely functioning markets and free trade.

While personal and individual freedom in the marketplace is guaranteed, each individual is held responsible and accountable for his or her own actions and well-being.

The free mobility of capital between sectors, regions, and countries is regarded as crucial.

Neoliberal theorists are, however, profoundly suspicious of democracy. Governance by majority rule is seen as a potential threat to individual rights and constitutional liberties…Neoliberals therefore tend to favour governance by experts and elites. (pp.64-66)

Contradictions of neoliberalism:

There is the problem of how to interpret monopoly power.

The second major arena of controversy concerns market failure.

Asymmetries of power or of information that interfere with the capacity of individuals to make rational economic decisions in their own interests.

A contradiction arises between a seductive but alienating possessive individualism on the one hand and the desire for a meaningful collective life on the other. (pp.66-69)

The neoliberal state in practice.

There are two arenas in particular where the drive to restore class power twists and in some respects even reverses neoliberal theory in its practice.

The first of these arises out of the need to create a ‘good business or investment climate’ for capitalistic endeavours.

The second arena of bias arises because, in the event of a conflict, neoliberal states typically favour the integrity of the financial system and the solvency of financial institutions over the well-being of the population or environmental quality. (pp.70-71)

Internally, the neoliberal state is necessarily hostile to all forms of social solidarity that put restraints on capital accumulation. (p.75)

Neoliberalism does not make the state or particular institutions of the state (such as the courts and police functions) irrelevant, as some commentators on both the right and the left have argued. There has, however, been a radical reconfiguration of state institutions and practices (particularly with respect to the balance between coercion and consent, between the powers of capital and of popular movements, and between executive and judicial power, on the one hand, and powers of representative democracy on the other). p.78

Contradictions of the neoliberal state:

1. On the one hand the neoliberal state is expected to take a back seat and simply set the stage for market functions, but on the other it is supposed to be activist in creating a good business climate and to behave as a competitive entity in global politics.

2. Authoritarianism in market enforcement sits uneasily with ideals of individual freedoms.

3. While it may be crucial to preserve the integrity of the financial system, the irresponsible and self-aggrandizing individualism of operators within it produces speculative volatility, financial scandals, and chronic instability.

4. While the virtues of competition are placed up front, the reality is the increasing consolidation of oligopolistic, monopoly, and transnational power within a few centralized multinational corporations.

5. At the popular level, the drive towards market freedoms and the commodification of everything can all too easily run amok and produce social incoherence. (pp.79-80)

Neoconservatism = some neoliberalism (elite governance, mistrust of democracy, and the maintenance of market freedoms) + a concern for order + a concern for an overweening morality as the necessary social glue to keep the body politic secure (p.82)

The general progress of neoliberalization has therefore been increasingly impelled through mechanisms of uneven geographical developments. Successful states or regions put pressure on everyone else to follow their lead. Leapfrogging innovations put this or that state (Japan, Germany, Taiwan, the US, or China), region (Silicon Valley, Bavaria, Third Italy, Bangalore, the Pearl River delta, or Botswana), or even city (Boston, San Francisco, Shanghai, or Munich) in the vanguard of capital accumulation. But the competitive advantages all too often prove ephemeral, introducing an extraordinary volatility into global capitalism (pp.87-88).

Forces and fluxes at work.

- Power of neoliberal ideas (held to be particularly strong in the cases of Britain and Chile).

- The need to respond to financial crises of various sorts (as in Mexico and South Korea).

- A more pragmatic approach to reform of the state apparatus (as in France and China) to improve competitive position in the global market.

- An interplay of internal dynamics and external forces.

- Contingent geopolitical considerations (pp.115).

Neoliberalism on trial.

Neoliberal achievements:

- Capital accumulation – Its actual record turns out to be nothing short of dismal.

- The reduction and control of inflation is the only systematic success neoliberalization can claim.

- A number of spectacular shifts of emphasis under neoliberalization – the rise of finance and of financial services, paralleled by a remarkable shift in the remuneration of financial corporations as well as a tendency for the larger corporations (such as General Motors) to fuse the two functions.

- An extraordinary burst in information technologies.

- The main substantive achievement of neoliberalization, however, has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income.

- The commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations.

- Conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China).

- Suppression of rights to the commons.

- Commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption.

- Colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources).

- Monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land.

- The slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry).

- The use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession (pp.154 – 159).

Accumulation by dispossession comprises four main features:

1. Privatization and commodification.

2. Financialization.

3. The management and manipulation of crises.

4. State redistributions. (pp.160- 164)

The Commodification of Everything.

Commodification presumes the existence of property rights over processes, things, and social relations, that a price can be put on them, and that they can be traded subject to legal contract (p.165).

Environmental degradations.

Attacks on rights.

Freedom’s Prospect.

The emergence of diverse oppositional cultures that from both within and without the market system either explicitly or tacitly reject the market ethic and the practices that neoliberalization imposes:

- environmental movements

- anarchist movements among the young

- religious communities

- discontent within ruling policy circles as to the wisdom of neoliberal propositions and prescriptions.

- A revival of academic and institutional interest in the cosmopolitan ethic (‘an injury to one is an injury to all’) as a basis for global governance (pp.186-188)

Alternatives.

But we first need to initiate a political process that can lead us to a point where feasible alternatives, real possibilities, become identifiable.

There are two main paths to take. We can engage with the plethora of oppositional movements actually existing and seek to distil from and through their activism the essence of a broad-based oppositional programme. Or we can resort to theoretical and practical enquiries into our existing condition (of the sort I have engaged in here) and seek to derive alternatives through critical analysis (pp.198-199).

The idea is to work through the whole of civil society in a more open and fluid search for alternatives that would look to the specific needs of the different social groups and allow them to improve their lot (p.199).

The first lesson we must learn, therefore, is that if it looks like class struggle and acts like class war then we have to name it unashamedly for what it is (p.202).

]]> http://lib.spranceana.com/a-brief-history-of-neoliberalism-by-david-harvey-133.html/feed 0 http://lib.spranceana.com/pierre-bourdieu-the-forms-of-capital-129.html http://lib.spranceana.com/pierre-bourdieu-the-forms-of-capital-129.html#comments Sat, 05 Mar 2011 15:54:42 +0000 Vitalie Sprinceana http://lib.spranceana.com/?p=129 Pierre Bourdieu 1986. The forms of capital.

Capital is accumulated labor.

- a vis insita, a force inscribed in objective or subjective structures.

- a lex insita, the principle underlying the immanent regularities of the social world.

Capital is a force inscribed in the objectivity of things so that everything is not equally possible or impossible.

The structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social world, i.e., the set of constraints, inscribed in the very reality of that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of success for practices.

CAPITAL can present itself in three fundamental guises:

- as economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the forms of property rights;

- as cultural capital, which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of educational qualifications;

- and as social capital, made up of social obligations (‘connections’), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of a title of nobility.

Cultural capital exists in three forms:

- in the embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body; it is linked to the body and presupposes embodiment. Its aquisition is called Bildung, cultivation – presupposes a process of embodiment, incorporation, which, insofar as it implies a labor of inculcation and assimilation, costs time, time which must be invested personally by the investor.

a) it cannot be transmitted instantaneously (unlike money, property rights, or even titles of nobility) by gift or bequest, purchase or exchange.

b)it cannot be accumulated beyond the appropriating capacities of an individual agent.

c) it declines and dies with its bearer (with his biological capacity, his memory, etc.).

d) it is predisposed to function as symbolic capital (ecause the social conditions of its transmission and acquisition are more disguised than those of economic capital).

- in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc.), which are the trace or realization of theories or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.;

a) is transmissible in its materiality (but what is transmissible is legal ownership and not (or not necessarily) what constitutes the precondition for specific appropriation, namely, the possession of the means of ‘consuming’ a painting or using a machine, which, being nothing other than embodied capital, are subject to the same laws of transmission).

b) remains irreducible to that which each agent, or even the aggregate of the agents, can appropriate (i.e., to the cultural capital embodied in each agent or even in the aggregate of the agents).

c)  it exists as symbolically and materially active, effective capital only insofar as it is appropriated by agents and implemented and invested as a weapon and a stake.

- and in the institutionalized state - in the form of academic qualifications.

Social capital:

It is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition – or in other words, to membership in a group – which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital, a ‘credential’ .

a) The volume of the social capital possessed by a given agent thus depends on the size of the network of connections he can effectively mobilize and on the volume of the capital (economic, cultural or symbolic) possessed in his own right by each of those to whom he is connected.

b) the profits which accrue from membership in a group are the basis of the solidarity which makes them possible.

c) The existence of a network of connections is the product of an endless effort, at institution, of which institution rites – often wrongly described as rites of passage – mark the essential moments and which is necessary in order to produce and reproduce lasting, useful relationships that can secure material or symbolic profits.

d) the reproduction of social capital presupposes an unceasing effort of sociability, a continuous series of exchanges in which recognition is endlessly affirmed and reaffirmed.

e) every group has its more or less institutionalized forms of delegation which enable it to concentrate the totality of the social capital, which is the basis of the existence of the group (a family or a nation, of course, but also an association or a party), in the hands of a single agent or a small group of agents and to mandate this plenipotentiary, charged with plena potestas agendi et loquendi, to represent the group, to speak and act in its name.

Conversions of capital:

The different types of capital can be derived from economic capital, but only at the cost of a more or less great effort of transformation, which is needed to produce the type of power effective in the field in question.

Economic capital is at the root of all the other types of capital.

In accordance with a principle which is the equivalent of the principle of the conservation of energy, profits in one area are necessarily paid for by costs in another (so that a concept like wastage has no meaning in a general science of the economy of practices). The universal equivalent, the measure of all equivalences, is nothing other than labor-time (in the widest sense).

Every reproduction strategy is at the same time a legitimation strategy aimed at consecrating both an exclusive appropriation and its reproduction.

Giorgio Agamben „Homo Sacer”

* The two meanings of Life in ancient Greek philosophy

zoe – the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods);

bios – indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group. (p.1)

* The oikos excluded from the polis.

In the classical world simple natural life is excluded from the polis in the strict sense, and remains confined, as merely reproductive life – to the sphere of the oikos, “home”. (p.2)

* The entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis as the decisive event of modernity.

“In any case, however, the entry of zoē into the sphere of the polis –
the politicization of bare life as such — constitutes the decisive event of modernity and
signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical
thought. p. 4

* Foucault: the modern Western state has integrated techniques of subjective individualization with procedures of objective totalization – a real “political” double bind, constituted by individualization and the simultaneous totalization of structures of modern power. (Dits et Ecrits, 4: 229-32).

* The aim of Agamben is to identify the hidden point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power (the double-bind).

* Sovereign power as producer of the biopolitical body.

Agamben: “It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.” (p.6)

* Modern politics.

- The realm of bare life gradually coincides with the political realm.

- Bare life becomes both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order.

- Bare life becomes both the site for the organization of State power and emancipation from it (p.9).

- knows no value (and nonvalue) other than life.

* Modern democracy.

“Modern democracy’s puzzle: it wants to put the freedom and happiness of men into play in the very place – ‘bare life” – that marked their subjection.” (pp. 9-10)

Modern democracy does not abolish sacred life but disseminates it into every individual body. (p.125)

* Sovereign and sovereignty.

The paradox of sovereignty: the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order. (p.15) or the law is outside itself.

The status of exception – The exception is what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it is always already included. p.25

In the status of exception it is impossible to distinguish transgression of the law from execution of the law. p.57

The sovereign decides the originary inclusion of the living in the sphere of law, not the licit and the illicit.

Sovereignty – the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it. p. 28

Nomos – the daemon, spirit of the law.

The sovereign nomos – the sovereign nomos is the principle that, joining law and violence, threatens them with indistinction. (p.31)

The relationship between the constituted and the constituting power.

* Concentration camps as an absolute space of exception, the most absolute biopolitical space ever created.

- In the classical European medieval and modern age this zone corresponded to the New World, which was identified with the state of nature in which everything is possible. p.36

- the refugees – the appearance or rights outside the fiction of the citizen that always cover over them.

Two weaknesses of the “birth-nation‘ link: refugees (bodies without civil rights) and the denationalization and denaturalization by many European states of large portions of their own population. p.132

The separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are experiencing today
is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the citizen. p.133

- VPs (human guinea pigs) – persons for medical experiments, excluded from the political community – homines sacres. p.159

- camps are born not out of ordinary laws, but out of a state of exception and martial law (p.167). The camps are independent from any judicial control.

“The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule.” (pp.168-169) Insofar as the state of exception is “willed,” it inaugurates a new juridico-political paradigm in which the norm becomes indistinguishable from the exception (p.170). “Whoever entered the camp moved in a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exception and rule, licit and illicit, in which the very concepts of subjective right and juridical protection no longer made any sense.” (p.170)

Camps appear together with new laws on citizenship and denationalization promulgated by almost all European countries, including France, between 1915 and 1933.

Schmitt – the old nomos is constituted from localization and order.

Agamben – the new nomos is produced at the point marking the inscription of bare life within the old nomos. “To an order without localization (the state of exception, in which law is suspended) there now corresponds a localization without order (the camp as permanent space of exception). (p.175)

* Homo Sacer.

The ambivalence of the sacred – pure and impure simultaneously. The sacred includes both elements of pure and elements of impure – evil, causes of sickness (Durkheim).

Sacratio – arises from the conjunction of two traits: the impunishability of killing and the exclusion from sacrifice. p.81

“The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life — that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed — is the life that has been captured in this sphere.” p.83

The formal structure of exception – what is captured in the sovereign ban is a human victim who may be killed but not sacrificed – homo sacer.

The relationship between the sovereign and homo sacer is one of symmetry:

- the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns. p.84

- “What unites the surviving devotee, homo sacer, and the sovereign in one single paradigm is that in each case we find ourselves confronted with a bare life that has been separated from its context and that, so to speak surviving its death, is for this very reason incompatible with the human world.’ (p.100)

- in the same way the killing of homo sacer is not a crime, the killing of the sovereign constitutes a special crime. p.102

* Biopolitics – the growing inclusion of man’s natural life in the mechanisms and calculations of power.

The first time we encounter “right over life and death” in the history of law is the unconditional authority of the pater over his sons.

Not simple natural life, but life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life) is the originary political element. p.89

The first recording of bare life as the new political subject – the 1679 writ of habeas corpus. At it center is neither the old subject of feudal relations and liberties, nor the future citoyen, but rather a pure et simple corpus. (p.123) “It is not the free man and his statutes and prerogatives, nor even simply homo, but rather corpus that is the new subject of politics.” (p.124)

The advancement of biopolitcs, i.e. the politicization of bare life – “the sovereign is entering into an ever more intimate symbiosis not only with the jurist, but also with the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the priest.” (p.122)

“Every society sets this limit; every society — even the most modern — decides who its “sacred men” will be. It is even possible that this limit, on which the politicization and the exceptio of natural life in the juridical order of the state depends, has done nothing but extend itself in the history of the West and has now -in the new biopolitical horizon of states with national sovereignty – moved inside every human life and every citizen. Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being.” (pp. 139-140)

“Declarations of rights represent the originary figure of the inscription of natural life in the juridico-political order of the nation-state.” (p.127).

Declarations of rights must be regarded as the accomplishment of the passage from divinely authorized royal sovereignty to national sovereignty. p.128

Corpus (the body) carries both subjection to sovereign power and individual liberties. p.125

It is up to the sovereign to decide at which point life ceases to be politically relevant and the value or non-value of life as such. p.142

A logical synthesis of biology and economy. (quoting a Nazi propaganda publication). p.145

‘The novelty of modern biopolitics lies in the fact that the biological given is as such
immediately political, and the political is as such immediately the biological given…The life that, with the declarations of rights, became the ground of sovereignty now becomes the subject-object of state politics (which therefore appears more and more in the form of “police”).” (p.148)

The twentieth century totalitarianism has its ground in the dynamic identity of life and politics.

The question of eutanasia – life and death acquire a political meaning precisely only through a decision. “Life and death are not properly scientific concepts but rather political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning precisely only through a decision.” (p.164)

Three conclusions:

1. The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception as zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion).
2. The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary political element and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoē and bios.
3. Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West. (p.181)

Resistances?

- to re-affirm and re-instate the difference between zoe and bios (a bare life that is only bare life and a political life that is only political).

Every attempt to rethink the political space of the West must
begin with the clear awareness that we no longer know anything of the classical distinction
between zoē and bios, between private life and political existence, between man as a
simple living being at home in the house and man’s political existence in the city. p.187

Questions for discussion:

1. Both Foucault and Agamben are concerned with bio-power – the exercise of power on and through bodies. What types of bodies does Agamben use to develop his theory of power? What is the difference between Foucault’s and Agamben’s conceptions of the body as a site of operation of power? Does Agamben’s theory of bio-power differ from Foucault’s? If so, how?

2. In both Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Foucault traces the transition of power from a negative “politics of blood” exercised by a sovereign to a productive power in which norms and regulations are disseminated and reinforced throughout society.  Where does Agamben locate power?  How does his conception borrow from Foucault’s theory of power?  How does it depart from Foucault’s theory?

3. Who is Homo Sacer? What does it mean that someone can kill him “without committing homicide” (183)? Who would we characterize today as homo sacer?

4. What is the role of the state of exception in Agamben’s theory of power? Would you agree with Agamben that places such as Guantanamo, the temporary refugee camps, the zones d’attentes in French international airports in which foreigners asking for refugee status are detained – all they are states of exception and in a sense, equivalent to the Nazi’s concentration camps, from a legal point of view? Do you agree with Agamben that they have evolved from an exception to the rules to a banal normality?

5. Foucault argues that “power is everywhere…and comes from everywhere” (History of Sexuality, p.93). Agamben also states that “the bare life realm gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction” (p.9). Both thinkers emphasize the fact that power has already permeated all spheres of life. In this case, is it possible to conceive of an apolitical existence? Is the retreat or escape from politics imaginable?

6. Agamben is more pessimistic than Foucault about the possibility of resisting bio-power (see pp. 187-188). Why? Do you agree?

7. Toward the end of the book Agamben tries to construct a solution: “the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoē” (p.188). What do you think about the possible separation between the biological body and the political body? Is it possible to re-construct a duality that would return life to life and politics to politics? What would a new bare life and a new political life look like?

* The “Repression Hypothesis”.

Features:

- Sexuality was confined into the home through the institution of conjugal family and the parents’ bedroom.

- Sexuality was conceived in terms of generation and reproduction.

- Repression tended to mute and dismiss sexuality.

- Repression tended to reintegrate a part of illegitimate sexualities in the circuits of profit in insularized and clandestine forms – the brothel, the mental hospital.

- Repression is connected and coincides with the development of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production.

- Repression provides an incentive to talk about sexuality – the speaker’s benefit.

Three doubts about the “repressive hypothesis”:

- its historicity (is sexual repression truly an established historical fact?)

- its theoretical value (does it describe what it pretends to?)

- its political engagement (it is part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces)

Foucault’s intention is to put the “repressive hypothesis” back within a general economy of discourses on sex in modern societies since the seventeenth century and to “define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world. to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said.” (p.11) – sexuality as a “discursive fact”.

Things to look at:

- forms of power

- channels of power

- discourses

- instances of discursive production

- instances of the production of power

- instances of the propagation of knowledge. (pp.11-12)

Instead of repression, one sees a veritable discursive explosion around and apropos of sex. p.17

It tells the history of sexuality as being marked by two ruptures:

- the advent of prohibitions (the seventeenth century).

- relative tolerance toward prenuptial and extramarital relations (the twentieth century) p. 115

Techniques of repression originate in the penitential practices of medieval Christianity.

* The “Discursive Explosion Hypothesis”.

Features:

- an institutional incitement to speak about it.

- a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about.

- based on the model of confession – detailization, examination.

- the transformation of sex into discourse has been borrowed from the ascetic and monastic settings.

- optimization and valorization of discourses on sex.

- the building of an enormous apparatus for producing discourse about sex.

- political, economic, and technical incentives to talk about sex in the form of analysis, stocktaking, classification, and specification, of quantitative or causal studies.

- sex become a feature to be administered, a “police matter”

- policing sex: the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses.

- the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation.

- the future of a society becomes connected to the manner in which each individual made use of his sex.

- the emergence of the sexuality of children and adolescents.

- the proliferation and dispersion of discursive centers.

- the construction of a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative.

- the solidification of the sexual mosaic.

- the construction of devices to provoke sex.

- the establishment of a system of legitimate knowledge and of an economy of manifold pleasures.

Centers that produced discourses on sex:

- medicine

- psychiatry

- criminal justice

- social controls

- demography

- biology

- psychology

- ethics

- pedagogy

- political criticism.

General lines of evolution:

Up to the end of the 18-th century, sexual practices were governed by three major explicit codes:

- canonical law

- the Christian pastoral

- civil law.

“They determined, each in its own way, the division between licit and illicit. They were all centered on matrimonial relations: the marital obligation, the ability to fulfill it, the manner in which one complied with it, the requirements and violences that accompanied it, the useless or unwarranted caresses for which it was a pretext, its fecundity or the way one went about making it sterile, the moments when one demanded it (dangerous periods of pregnancy or breast-feeding, forbidden times of Lent or abstinence), its frequency or infrequency, and so on.” (p. 37) – the legitimate alliance.

This system underwent two main modifications:

- a centrifugal movement with respect to heterosexual monogamy…It tended to function as a norm, one that was stricter, perhaps, but quieter.

- into the light came the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals; the sensuality of those who did not like the opposite sex; reveries, obsessions, petty manias, or great transports of rage. (p.38) – peripheral sexualities. The rise of sexual normality and abnormality.

Two great systems conceived by the West for governing sex: the law of marriage and the order of desires. (pp.39-40).

Incorporation of sex into the Power field involved four operations:

1. penetration, expansion and proliferation of power into sex.

2. incorporation of perversions and a new specification of individuals.

3. perpetual spirals of power and pleasure.

4. the construction of devices of sexual saturation, networks of pleasures and power linked together (the classroom, the dormitory, the visit, and the consultation).

The science of sex was a science “subordinated in the main to the imperatives of a morality whose divisions it reiterated under the guise of the medical norm.” (p.53)

Throughout the nineteenth century sex seems to have been incorporated into two very distinct orders of knowledge: a biology of reproduction, which developed continuously according to a general scientific normativity, and a medicine of sex conforming to quite different rules of formation. p.54

Two historical procedures for producing the truth of sex:

- ars erotica

-scientia sexualis.

The confession becomes one of the principal techniques for producing truth. “It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to one’s parents, one’s educators, one’s doctor, to those one loves; one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone else, the things people write books about. One confesses–or is forced to confess.” (p.59)

The confession is transformed into science through:

1. a clinical codification of the inducement to speak.

2. the postulate of a general and diffuse causality.

3. the principle of a latency intrinsic to sexuality.

4. the method of interpretation.

5. the medicalization of the effects of confession. (pp.65-67)

Sexuality is the correlative of the discursive practice which constitutes the scientia sexualis. The history of sexuality must be written from the viewpoint of a history of discourses. (p.69)

The objective of the inquiry is to move toward an analytics of power – toward a definition of the specific domain formed by relations of power, and toward a determination of the instruments that will make possible its analysis. (p.82)

* The “juridico-discursive” representation of power and sex.

Features:

- The negative relation. It never establishes any connection between power and sex that is not negative: rejection, exclusion, refusal, blockage, concealment, or mask.

- The insistence of the rule. Power is essentially what dictates its law to sex.

- The cycle of prohibition: thou shall not go near, thou shall not touch, thou shalt not consume, thou shalt not experience pleasure, thou shalt not speak, thou shalt not show thyself; ultimately thou shalt not exist, except in darkness and secrecy.

- The logic of censorship. This interdiction is thought to take three forms: affirming that such a thing is not permitted, preventing it from being said, denying that it exists.

- The uniformity of the apparatus. Power over sex is exercised in the same way at all levels. (pp.83-84)

Mechanics of juridico-discursive power:

- poor in resources,

- sparing of its methods,

- monotonous in the tactics it utilizes,

- incapable of invention, and

- seemingly doomed always to repeat itself.

- it is a power that only has the force of the negative on its side, a power to say no;

- in no condition to produce, capable only of posting limits, it is basically anti-energy.

- finally, it is a power whose model is essentially juridical, centered on nothing more than the statement of the law and the operation of taboos.

- all the modes of domination, submission, and subjugation are ultimately reduced to an effect of obedience. (p.85)

It imposed itself as agency of regulation, arbitration, and demarcation by establishing a principle that would temper all other powers and distributing them according to boundaries and fixed hierarchy.

Its main belief is that law has to be the very form of power and that power always had to be exercised in the form of law.

Foucault: “In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king…We shall try to rid ourselves of a juridical and negative representation of power, and cease to conceive of it in terms of law, prohibition, liberty, and sovereignty…We must at the same time conceive of sex without the law, and power without the king. ” (pp.88-91)

* Foucault’s conception of power.

Features:

- the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization;

- as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them;

- as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another;

- and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies;

- the omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another;

- power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere;

- power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. (pp.92-93)

- politics and war as two different strategies for integrating these unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable, and tense force relations. (p.93)

- power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is exercised from innumerable points, in the inter-play of nonegalitarian and mobile relations;

- relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter; they are the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal conditions of these differentiations; relations of power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play;

- power comes from below; that is, there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix;

- power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective. the rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level where they are inscribed;

- where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by definition, they can only exist in the strategic field of power relations;

- resistances are distributed in irregular fashion: the points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behavior. (pp.94-96)

Four cautionary prescriptions when studying production of discourses on sex:

1. Rule of immanence. One must not suppose that there exists a certain sphere of sexuality that would be the legitimate concern of a free and disinterested scientific inquiry were it not the object of mechanisms of prohibition brought to bear by the economic or ideological requirements of power. If sexuality was constituted as an area of investigation, this was only because relations of power had established it as a possible object; and conversely, if power was able to take it as a target, this was because techniques of knowledge and procedures of discourse were capable of investing it.

2. Rules of continual variations. We must seek rather the pattern of the modifications which the relationships of force imply by the very nature of their process. Relations of power-knowledge are not static forms of distribution, they are “matrices of transformations.

3. Rule of double conditioning. (family and society) Thus the father in the family is not the “representative” of the sovereign or the state; and the latter are not projections of the father on a different scale. The family does not duplicate society, just as society does not imitate the family. But the family organization, precisely to the extent that it was insular and heteromorphous with respect to the other power mechanisms, was used to support the great “maneuvers” employed for the Malthusian control of the birthrate, for the populationist incitements, for the medicalization of sex and the psychiatrization of its nongenital forms.

4. Rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses. We must not imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but as a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies. (pp.98-101)

Domains of power, mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex.

Four strategic unities:

1. A hysterization of women’s bodies.

2. A pedagogization of children’s sex.

3. A socialization of procreative behavior.

4. A psychiatrization of perverse pleasure.

Bio-politics facilitated the penetration of power at every level of the social body.

“The rudiments of anatomo- and bio-politics, created in the eighteenth century as techniques of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions (the family and the army, schools and the police, individual medicine and the administration of collective bodies), operated in the sphere of economic processes, their development, and the forces working to sustain them.” (p.141)

Four figures emerged from this preoccupation with sex, four privileged objects of knowledge: the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult. (p.105) - forms of deployment of sexuality.

Two different and contrary systems of deployments and their differencies:

Deployment of alliance;

- built around a system of rules defining the permitted and the forbidden, the licit and the illicit;

- has as one of its chief objectives to reproduce the interplay of relations and maintain the law that governs them;

- what is pertinent is the link between partners and definite statutes;

- is firmly tied to the economy due to the role it can play in the transmission or circulation of wealth;

- the deployment of alliance is attuned to a homeostasis of the social body, which it has the function of maintaining; whence its privileged link with the law; whence too the fact that the important phase for it is “reproduction.”

Deployment of sexuality:

- operates according to mobile, polymorphous, and contingent techniques of power;

- engenders a continual extension of areas and forms of control;

- concerned with the sensations of the body, the quality of pleasures, and the nature of impressions, however tenuous or imperceptible these may be;

- is linked to the economy through numerous and subtle relays, the main one of which, however, is the body–the body that produces and consumes;

- has its reason for being, not in reproducing itself, but in proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way.” (pp.106-107)

Deployment of sexuality developed along two primary dimensions: the husband-wife axis and the parents-children axis. (p. 108)

Family:

- its role is to anchor sexuality and provide it with a permanent support;

- it is the interchange of sexuality and alliance: it conveys the law and the juridical dimension in the deployment of sexuality; and it conveys the economy of pleasure and the intensity of sensations in the regime of alliance. (p.108)

- since the seventeenth century family absorbs sexuality and its alien, and even perilous effects for the deployment of alliance. (p.110)

Sexuality as a historical construct. (p.105) Sexuality was taking shape, born of a technology of power that was originally focused on alliance. (p. 108) Sexuality gave rise to the notion of sex, as a speculative element necessary to its operation. Sex as an imaginary element. (pp.155-156)

Historical Periodization:

- in the nineteenth century the technology of sex was ordered in relation to the medical institution, the exigency of normality and the problem of life and ilness;

- the medicine of sex was isolated from the medicine of the body, it isolated a sexual “instinct” capable of presenting constitutive anomalies, acquired derivations, infirmities, or pathological processes. (p.117)

- an inverse class relationship – the most rigorous techniques were formed and applied with the greatest intensity, “in the economically privileged and politically dominant classes”. (p.120) They first tried it on themselves. (p.122) The Bourgeoisie employed biological, medical and eugenic percepts in order to maximize life; it converted the blue blood of the nobles into a sound organism and a healthy sexuality. (pp. 123-124)

- lower classes were penetrated by mechanism of sexualization in three successive stages: a) the problem of birth control, b) the organization of the “conventional family” and c) the development of the juridical and medical control of perversion. (pp.121-122)

There is a bourgeois sexuality, and there are class sexualities. (p.127)

* Right of Death and Power over Life

Power now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. (p.137) Power operates now by administrating bodies and calculating management of life. (p.140)

Capital punishment is still maintained by invoking the monstrosity of the criminal and the danger he poses on the health of the living social organism.

Power has assigned itself the task of administering life into two basic forms:

- centered on the body as a machine, “its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls”;

- centered on the species body, “the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population.” (p. 139)

Biopower as a fundamental element in the development of capitalism: the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes.

Biological existence as political problem.

In the eighteenth century life of the human species “entered into the order of knowledge and power” (p.141-142). Modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question. (p.143)

The rise of the normalizing society – centered on norms (a continuum of apparatuses: medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory rather than on law. (p.144) We, on the other hand, are in a society of “sex,” or rather a society “with a sexuality”: the mechanisms of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to what reinforces the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used. (p.147)

“at the juncture of the “body” and the “population,” sex became a crucial target of a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death.” (p. 147)

The new principle of politics is the substitution of blood with sex/sexuality. (“from a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality” – p.148).

We have, then, a public execution and a time-table. They do not punish the same crimes or the same type of delinquent. But they each define a certain penal style. Less than a century separates them. p.7

Among so many changes, I shall consider one: the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle. p.7

The body as the major target of penal repression disappeared. p.8

the gloomy festival of punishment was dying out… two processes were at work… The first was the disappearance of punishment as a spectacle.

Punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process…It is ugly to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing…

The disappearance of public executions marks therefore the decline of the spectacle; but it also marks a slackening of the hold on the body.

generally speaking, punitive practices had become more reticent. One no longer touched the body, or at least as little as possible, and then only to reach something other than the body itself. pp.8-11

the punishment–body relation is not the same as it was in the torture during public executions. The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property. The body, according to this penality, is caught up in a system of constraints and privations, obligations and prohibitions. Physical pain, the pain of the body itself, is no longer the constituent element of the penalty. p.11

From being an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of suspended rights. p.11

As a result of this new restraint, a whole army of technicians took over from the executioner, the immediate anatomist of pain: warders, doctors, chaplains, psychiatrists, psychologists, educationalists. p.11

The reduction of these `thousand deaths’ to strict capital punishment defines a whole new morality concerning the act of punishing. p.12

The celebrated article 3 of the French Code of 1791 — `Every man condemned to death will have his head cut off’ — bears this triple signification: an equal death for all (`Crimes of the same kind will be punished by the same kind of punishment, whatever the rank and state of the guilty man may be,’ in the words of the motion proposed by Guillotin and passed on 1 December 1789); one death per condemned man, obtained by a single blow, without recourse to those `long and consequently cruel’ methods of execution, such as the gallows, denounced by Le Peletier; lastly, punishment for the condemned man alone, since decapitation, the capital punishment of the nobility, was the least shaming for the criminal’s family (Le Peletier, 720). The guillotine, first used in March 1792, was the perfect vehicle for these principles. Death was reduced to a visible, but instantaneous event. Contact between the law, or those who carry it out, and the body of the criminal, is reduced to a split second. There is no physical confrontation; the executioner need be no more than a meticulous watchmaker. pp.12-13

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, then, the great spectacle of physical punishment disappeared; the tortured body was avoided; the theatrical representation of pain was excluded from punishment. The age of sobriety in punishment had begun. By 1830-48, public executions, preceded by torture, had almost entirely disappeared. p. 14

In France, the guillotine, that machine for the production of rapid and discreet deaths, represented a new ethic of legal death. p. 15

Punishment had no doubt ceased to be centred on torture as a technique of pain; it assumed as its principal object loss of wealth or rights. But a punishment like forced labour or even imprisonment — mere loss of liberty — has never functioned without a certain additional element of punishment that certainly concerns the body itself: rationing of food, sexual deprivation, corporal punishment, solitary confinement. pp. 15-16

The reduction in penal severity in the last 200 years is a phenomenon with which legal historians are well acquainted. p. 16

If the penality in its most severe forms no longer addresses itself to the body, on what does it lay hold? The answer of the theoreticians — those who, about 1760, opened up a new period that is not yet at an end — is simple, almost obvious. It seems to be contained in the question itself: since it is no longer the body, it must be the soul. p. 16

No doubt the definition of offences, the hierarchy of their seriousness, the margins of indulgence, what was tolerated in fact and what was legally permitted — all this has considerably changed over the last 200 years; many crimes have ceased to be so because they were bound up with a certain exercise of religious authority or a particular type of economic activity; blasphemy has lost its status as a crime; smuggling and domestic larceny some of their seriousness. But these displacements are perhaps not the most important fact: the division between the permitted and the forbidden has preserved a certain constancy from one century to another. p. 17

they [the judges] have begun to do something other than pass judgement. Knowledge of the offence, knowledge of the offender, knowledge of the law: these three conditions made it possible to ground a judgement in truth. p. 19

To sum up, ever since the new penal system — that defined by the great codes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — has been in operation, a general process has led judges to judge something other than crimes; they have been led in their sentences to do something other than judge; and the power of judging has been transferred, in part, to other authorities than the judges of the offence. The whole penal operation has taken on extra-juridical elements and personnel. It will be said that there is nothing extraordinary in this, that it is part of the destiny of the law to absorb little by little elements that are alien to it. But what is odd about modern criminal justice is that, although it has taken on so many extra-juridical elements, it has done so not in order to be able to define them juridically and gradually to integrate them into the actual power to punish: on the contrary, it has done so in order to make them function within the penal operation as non-juridical elements; in order to stop this operation being simply a legal punishment; in order to exculpate the judge from being purely and simply he who punishes. p. 22

a whole field of recent objects, a whole new system of truth and a mass of roles hitherto unknown in the exercise of criminal justice. A corpus of knowledge, techniques, `scientific’ discourses is formed and becomes entangled with the practice of the power to punish. p. 23

a history of the modern soul on trial:

1. Do not concentrate the study of the punitive mechanisms on their `repressive’ effects 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.

2. Analyse punitive methods not simply as consequences of legislation or as indicators of social structures, but as techniques possessing their own specificity in the more general field of other ways of exercising power. Regard punishment as a political tactic.

3. Instead of treating the history of penal aw and the history of the human sciences as two separate series whose overlapping appears to have had on one or the other, or perhaps on both, a disturbing or useful effect, according to one’s point of view, see whether there is not some common matrix or whether they do not both derive from a single process of `epistemologico-juridical’ formation; in short, make the technology of power the very principle both of the humanization of the penal system and of the knowledge of man.

4. Try to discover whether this entry of the soul on to the scene of penal justice, and with it the insertion in legal practice of a whole corpus of `scientific’ knowledge, is not the effect of a transformation of the way in which the body itself is invested by power relations. pp. 23-24

But we can surely accept the general proposition that, in our societies, the systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain `political economy’ of the body: even if they do not make use of violent or bloody punishment, even when they use `lenient’ methods involving confinement or correction, it is always the body that is at issue — the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission. It is certainly legitimate to write a history of punishment against the background of moral ideas or legal structures. But can one write such a history against the background of a history of bodies, when such systems of punishment claim to have only the secret souls of criminals as their objective? p. 25

But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. This political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which need is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated and used); the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body. p. 25

there may be a `knowledge’ of the body that is not exactly the science of its functioning, and a mastery of its forces that is more than the ability to conquer them: this knowledge and this mastery constitute what might be called the political technology of the body. p. 26

What the apparatuses and institutions operate is, in a sense, a micro-physics of power, whose field of validity is situated in a sense between these great functionings and the bodies themselves with their materiality and their forces. p. 26

Now, the study of this micro-physics presupposes that the power exercised on the body is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy, that its effects of domination are attributed not to `appropriation’, but to dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings; that one should decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess; that one should take as its model a perpetual battle rather than a contract regulating a transaction or the conquest of a territory. In short this power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the `privilege’, acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions — an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated. Furthermore, this power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who `do not have it’; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them; it exerts pressure upon them, just as they themselves, in their struggle against it, resist the grip it has on them. This means that these relations go right down into the depths of society, that they are not localized in the relations between the state and its citizens or on the frontier between classes and that they do not merely reproduce, at the level of individuals, bodies, gestures and behaviour, the general form of the law or government; that, although there is continuity (they are indeed articulated on this form through a whole series of complex mechanisms), there is neither analogy nor homology, but a specificity of mechanism and modality. Lastly, they are not univocal; they define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion of the power relations. pp. 26-27

Perhaps, too, we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests. Perhaps we should abandon the belief that power makes mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. p. 27

One would be concerned with the `body politic’, as a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communication routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge. p. 28

The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A `soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body. p. 30

I would like to write the history of this prison, with all the political investments of the body that it gathers together in its closed architecture. Why? Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing the history of the presents. pp.30-31

The spectacle of the scaffold.

Torture is a technique; it is not an extreme expression of lawless rage. To be torture, punishment must obey three principal criteria: first, it must produce a certain degree of pain, which may be measured exactly, or at least calculated, compared and hierarchized; death is a torture in so far as it is not simply a withdrawal of the right to live, but is the occasion and the culmination of a calculated gradation of pain: from decapitation (which reduces all pain to a single gesture, performed in a single moment — the zero degree of torture), through hanging, the stake and the wheel (all of which prolong the agony), to quartering, which carries pain almost to infinity; death-torture is the art of maintaining life in pain, by subdividing it into a `thousand deaths’, by achieving before life ceases `the most exquisite agonies’. Torture rests on a whole quantitative art of pain. pp. 33-34

The term `penal torture’ does not cover any corporal punishment: it is a differentiated production of pain, an organized ritual for the marking of victims and the expression of the power that punishes; not the expression of a legal system driven to exasperation and, forgetting its principles, losing all restraint. In the `excesses’ of torture, a whole economy of power is invested. pp. 34-35

The secret and written form of the procedure reflects the principle that in criminal matters the establishment of truth was the absolute right and the exclusive power of the sovereign and his judges. p. 35

Written, secret, subjected, in order to construct its proofs, to rigorous rules, the penal investigation was a machine that might produce the truth in the absence of the accused. p. 35

confession: Through the confession, the accused himself took part in the ritual of producing penal truth…This double ambiguity of the confession (an element of proof and the counterpart of preliminary investigation; the effect of constraint and a semi-voluntary transaction) explains the two great means used by classical criminal law to obtain it: the oath that the accused was asked to make before his interrogatory (and therefore under threat of perjury before both human and divine justice; and, at the same time, a ritual act of commitment); judicial torture (physical violence to obtain truth, which, in any case, had then to be repeated before the judges, as a `spontaneous’ confession, if it were to constitute proof). pp. 38-39

Beneath an apparently determined, impatient search for truth, one finds in classical torture the regulated mechanism of an ordeal: a physical challenge that must define the truth; if the patient is guilty, the pains that it imposes are not unjust; but it is also a mark of exculpation if he is innocent. In the practice of torture, pain, confrontation and truth were bound together: they worked together on the patient’s body. The search for truth through judicial torture was certainly a way of obtaining evidence, the most serious of all — the confession of the guilty person; but it was also the battle, and this victory of one adversary over the other, that `produced’ truth according to a ritual. In torture employed to extract a confession, there was an element of the investigation; there also was an element of the duel…It is as if investigation and punishment had become mixed. p. 41

We have come full circle: from the judicial torture to the execution, the body has produced and reproduced the truth of the crime — or rather it constitutes the element which, through a whole set of rituals and trials, confesses that the crime took place, admits that the accused did indeed commit it, shows that he bore it inscribed in himself and on himself, supports the operation of punishment and manifests its effects in the most striking way. The body, several times tortured, provides the synthesis of the reality of the deeds and the truth of the investigation, of the documents of the case and the statements of the criminal, of the crime and the punishment. It is an essential element, therefore, in a penal liturgy, in which it must serve as the partner of a procedure ordered around the formidable rights of the sovereign, the prosecution and secrecy. p. 47

The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested. p. 47

The right to punish, therefore, is an aspect of the sovereign’s right to make war on his enemies: to punish belongs to `that absolute power of life and death which Roman law calls merum imperium, a right by virtue of which the prince sees that his law is respected by ordering the punishment of crime’…The public execution, then, has a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular. The public execution, however hasty and everyday, belongs to a whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored (coronation, entry of the king into a conquered city, the submission of rebellious subjects); over and above the crime that has placed the sovereign in contempt, it deploys before all eyes an invincible force. Its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength.Although redress of the private injury occasioned by the offence must be proportionate, although the sentence must be equitable, the punishment is carried out in such a way as to give a spectacle not of measure, but of imbalance and excess; in this liturgy of punishment, there must be an emphatic affirmation of power and of its intrinsic superiority.pp. 48-49

The justice of the king was shown to be an armed justice. The sword that punished the guilty was also the sword that destroyed enemies. p. 50

every crime constituted as it were a rebellion against the law and that the criminal was an enemy of the prince. p.50

We must regard the public execution, as it was still ritualized in the eighteenth century, as a political operation. It was logically inscribed in a system of punishment, in which the sovereign, directly or indirectly, demanded, decided and carried out punishments, in so far as it was he who, through the law, had been injured by the crime. In every offence there was a crimen majestatis and in the least criminal a potential regicide. And the regicide, in turn, was neither more nor less, than the total, absolute criminal since, instead of attacking, like any offender, a particular decision or wish of the sovereign power, he attacked the very principle and physical person of the prince. The ideal punishment of the regicide had to constitute the summum of all possible tortures. pp. 53-54

The atrocity that haunted the public execution played, therefore, a double role: it was the principle of the communication between the crime and the punishment, it was also the exacerbation of the punishment in relation to the crime. It provided the spectacle with both truth and power; it was the culmination of the ritual of the investigation and the ceremony in which the sovereign triumphed. And it joined both together in the tortured body. p. 56

Of all the reasons why punishment that was not in the least ashamed of being `atrocious’ was replaced by punishment that was to claim the honour of being `humane’ there is one that must be analysed at once, for it is internal to the public execution itself: at once an element of its functioning and the principle of its perpetual disorder…In the ceremonies of the public execution, the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance. p. 57

Preventing an execution that was regarded as unjust, snatching a condemned man from the hands of the executioner, obtaining his pardon by force, possibly pursuing and assaulting the executioners, in any case abusing the judges and causing an uproar against the sentence — all this formed part of the popular practices that invested, traversed and often overturned the ritual of the public execution. pp. 59-60

If the crowd gathered round the scaffold, it was not simply to witness the sufferings of the condemned man or to excite the anger of the executioner: it was also to hear an individual who had nothing more to lose curse the judges, the laws, the government and religion. The public execution allowed the luxury of these momentary saturnalia, when nothing remained to prohibit or to punish. p. 60

Generalized punishment.

This need for punishment without torture was first formulated as a cry from the heart or from an outraged nature. In the worst of murderers, there is one thing, at least, to be respected when one punishes: his `humanity’. p. 74

Yet this reform must be situated in a process that historians have recently uncovered through the study of legal archives: the relaxation of penality in the eighteenth century or, to be more precise, the double movement by which, during this period, crimes seemed to lose their violence, while punishments, reciprocally, lost some of their intensity, but at the cost of greater intervention. From the end of the seventeenth century, in fact, one observes a considerable diminution in murders and, generally speaking, in physical acts of aggression; offences against property seem to take over from crimes of violence; theft and swindling, from murder and assault; the diffuse, occasional, but frequent delinquency of the poorest classes was superseded by a limited, but `skilled’ delinquency; the criminals of the seventeenth century were `harassed men, ill-fed, quick to act, quick to anger, seasonal criminals’; those of the eighteenth, `crafty, cunning, sly, calculating’ criminals on the fringes of society. p. 75

A general movement shifted criminality from the attack of bodies to the more or less direct seizure of goods; and from a `mass criminality’ to a `marginal criminality’, partly the preserve of professionals. It was as if there had been a gradual lowering of level — `a defusion of the tensions that dominate human relations, … a better control of violent impulses’. p. 76

In fact, the shift from a criminality of blood to a criminality of fraud forms part of a whole complex mechanism, embracing the development of production, the increase of wealth, a higher juridical and moral value placed on property relations, stricter methods of surveillance, a tighter partitioning of the population, more efficient techniques of locating and obtaining information: the shift in illegal practices is correlative with an extension and a refinement of punitive practices. p. 77

The conjuncture that saw the birth of reform is not, therefore, that of a new sensibility, but that of another policy with regard to illegalities.

Roughly speaking, one might say that, under the Ancien Régime each of the different social strata had its margin of tolerated illegality: the non-application of the rule, the non-observance of the innumerable edicts or ordinances were a condition of the political and economic functioning of society. p. 82

In short, penal reform was born at the point of junction between the struggle against the super-power of the sovereign and that against the infra-power of acquired and tolerated illegalities. p.87

That is to say, although the new criminal legislation appears to be characterized by less severe penalties, a clearer codification, a marked diminution of the arbitrary, a more generally accepted consensus concerning the power to punish (in the absence of a more real division in its exercise), it is sustained in reality by an upheaval in the traditional economy of illegalities and a rigorous application of force to maintain their new adjustment. A penal system must be conceived as a mechanism intended to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them all. p.89

The semio-technique with which one tried to arm the power to punish rested on five or six major rules.

The rule of minimum quantity. A crime is committed because it procures certain advantages. If one linked, to the idea of crime, the idea of a slightly greater disadvantage, it would cease to be desirable.

The rule of sufficient ideality. If the motive of a crime is the advantage expected of it, the effectiveness of the penalty is the disadvantage expected of it. This means that the `pain’ at the heart of punishment is not the actual sensation of pain, but the idea of pain, displeasure, inconvenience — the `pain’ of the idea of `pain’. Punishment has to make use not of the body, but of representation.

The rule of lateral effects. The penalty must have its most intense effects on those who have not committed the crime; to carry the argument to its limit, if one could be sure that the criminal could not repeat the crime, it would be enough to make others believe that he had been punished. There is a centrifugal intensification of effects, which leads to the paradox that in the calculation of penalties the least important element is still the criminal (unless he is likely to repeat the offence).

The rule of perfect certainty. With the idea of each crime and the advantages to be expected of it must be associated the idea of a particular punishment with the precise inconveniences that result from it; the link from one to the other must be regarded as necessary and unbreakable. This general element of certainty that must give the system of punishment its effectiveness involves a number of precise measures.

The rule of common truth. Beneath this ordinary-seeming principle is hidden an important transformation… To establish the offence, in all evidence, and according to the means valid for all, becomes a task of first importance. The verification of the crime must obey the general criteria for all truth. In the arguments it employs, in the proofs it provides, legal judgement must be homogeneous with judgement in general. There is, therefore, an abandonment of legal proof, a rejection of torture, the need for a complete demonstration of the truth, an effacement of all correlation between degrees of suspicion and degrees of punishment. Like a mathematical truth, the truth of the crime will be accepted only when it is completely proven.

The rule of optimal specification. For penal semiotics to cover the whole field of illegalities that one wishes to eliminate, all offences must be defined; they must be classified and collected into species from which none of them can escape. A code is therefore necessary and this code must be sufficiently precise for each type of offence to be clearly present in it. The silence of the law must not harbour the hope of impunity. An exhaustive, explicit code is required, defining crimes and fixing penalties…the need for an individualization of sentences, in accordance with the particular characteristics of each criminal. pp.94-99

Beneath the humanization of the penalties, what one finds are all those rules that authorize, or rather demand, `leniency’, as a calculated economy of the power to punish. But they also provoke a shift in the point of application of this power: it is no longer the body, with the ritual play of excessive pains, spectacular brandings in the ritual of the public execution; it is the mind or rather a play of representations and signs circulating discreetly but necessarily and evidently in the minds of all. p. 101

It is this semio-technique of punishments, this `ideological power’ which, partly at least, will remain in suspense and will be superseded by a new political anatomy, in which the body, once again, but in a new form, will be the principal character. And this new political anatomy will permit the intersection of the two divergent lines of objectification that are to be seen emerging in the eighteenth century: that which rejects the criminal `from the other side’ — from the side of a nature against nature; and that which seeks to control delinquency by a calculated economy of punishments. p. 103

The gentle way in punishment.

To find the suitable punishment for a crime is to find the disadvantage whose idea is such that it robs for ever the idea of a crime of any attraction. It is an art of conflicting energies, an art of images linked by association, the forging of stable connections that defy time: it is a matter of establishing the representation of pairs of opposing values, of establishing quantitative differences between the opposing forces, of setting up a complex of obstacle-signs that may subject the movement of the forces to a power relation.

1. They must be as unarbitrary as possible.

2. This complex of signs must engage with the mechanics of forces: reduce the desire that makes the crime attractive; increase the interest that makes the penalty be feared; reverse the relation of intensities, so that the representation of the penalty and its disadvantages is more lively than that of the crime and its pleasures.

3. Consequently, one must use a temporal modulation. The penalty transforms, modifies, establishes signs, arranges obstacles…Duration certainly intervened in the old system of penalties; days at the pillory, years of banishment, hours spent dying on the wheel. But it was a time of ordeal, not of concerted transformation.

4. For the convict, the penalty is a mechanics of signs, interests and duration. But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.

5. Hence a whole learned economy of publicity. In physical torture, the example was based on terror: physical fear, collective horror, images that must be engraved on the memories of the spectators, like the brand on the cheek or shoulder of the condemned man. The example is now based on the lesson, the discourse, the decipherable sign, the representation of public morality.

6. This will make possible in society an inversion of the traditional discourse of crime. How can one extinguish the dubious glory of the criminal?…each punishment should be a fable. pp. 104-113

the idea of penal imprisonment is explicitly criticized by many reformers. Because it is incapable of corresponding to the specificity of crimes. Because it has no effect on the public. Because it is useless, even harmful, to society: it is costly, it maintains convicts in idleness, it multiplies their vices p. 114

In any case, it can be said that, in the late eighteenth century, one is confronted by three ways of organizing the power to punish. The first is the one that was still functioning and which was based on the old monarchical law. The other two both refer to a preventive, utilitarian, corrective conception of a right to punish that belongs to society as a whole; but they are very different from one another at the level of the mechanisms they envisage. Broadly speaking, one might say that, in monarchical law, punishment is a ceremonial of sovereignty; it uses the ritual marks of the vengeance that it applies to the body of the condemned man; and it deploys before the eyes of the spectators an effect of terror as intense as it is discontinuous, irregular and always above its own laws, the physical presence of the sovereign and of his power. The reforming jurists, on the other hand, saw punishment as a procedure for requalifying individuals as subjects, as juridical subjects; it uses not marks, but signs, coded sets of representations, which would be given the most rapid circulation and the most general acceptance possible by citizens witnessing the scene of punishment. Lastly, in the project for a prison institution that was then developing, punishment was seen as a technique for the coercion of individuals; it operated methods of training the body — not signs — by the traces it leaves, in the form of habits, in behaviour; and it presupposed the setting up of a specific power for the administration of the penalty. We have, then, the sovereign and his force, the social body and the administrative apparatus; mark, sign, trace; ceremony, representation, exercise; the vanquished enemy, the juridical subject in the process of requalification, the individual subjected to immediate coercion; the tortured body, the soul with its manipulated representations, the body subjected to training. We have here the three series of elements that characterize the three mechanisms that face one another in the second half of the eighteenth century. They cannot be reduced to theories of law (though they overlap with such theories), nor can they be identified with apparatuses or institutions (though they are based on them), nor can they be derived from moral choices (though they find their justification in morality). They are modalities according to which the power to punish is exercised: three technologies of power.

The problem, then, is the following: how is it that, in the end, it was the third that was adopted? How did the coercive, corporal, solitary, secret model of the power to punish replace the representative, scenic, signifying, public, collective model? Why did the physical exercise of punishment (which is not torture) replace, with the prison that is its institutional support, the social play of the signs of punishment and the prolix festival that circulated them? pp. 130-131

Discipline-Docile Bodies.

The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power. It is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body — to the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skilful and increases its forces. The great book of Man-the-Machine was written simultaneously on two registers: the anatomico-metaphysical register, of which Descartes wrote the first pages and which the physicians and philosophers continued, and the technico-political register, which was constituted by a whole set of regulations and by empirical and calculated methods relating to the army, the school and the hospital, for controlling or correcting the operations of the body. p. 136

The `invention’ of this new political anatomy must not be seen as a sudden discovery. It is rather a multiplicity of often minor processes, of different origin and scattered location, which overlap, repeat, or imitate one another, support one another, distinguish themselves from one another according to their domain of application, converge and gradually produce the blueprint of a general method. They were at work in secondary education at a very early date, later in primary schools; they slowly invested the space of the hospital; and, in a few decades, they restructured the military organization. p.138

the art of distributions.

In the first instance, discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space. To achieve this end, it employs several techniques.

1. Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony. There was the great `confinement’ of vagabonds and paupers; there were other more discreet, but insidious and effective ones. There were the collèges, or secondary schools: the monastic model was gradually imposed; boarding appeared as the most perfect, if not the most frequent, educational régime.

2. the principle of elementary location or partitioning…Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual. Avoid distributions in groups; break up collective dispositions; analyse confused, massive or transient pluralities. Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed. One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation; it was a tactic of anti-desertion, anti-vagabondage, anti-concentration. Its aim was to establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits.

3. The rulè of functional sites would gradually, in the disciplinary institutions, code a space that architecture generally left at the disposal of several different uses. Particular places were defined to correspond not only to the need to supervise, to break dangerous communications, but also to create a useful space. The process appeared clearly in the hospitals, especially in the military and naval hospitals.

4. In discipline, the elements are interchangeable, since each is defined by the place it occupies in a series, and by the gap that separates it from the others. The unit is, therefore, neither the territory (unit of domination), nor the place (unit of residence), but the rank: the place one occupies in a classification, the point at which a line and a column intersect, the interval in a series of intervals that one may traverse one after the other. Discipline is an art of rank, a technique for the transformation of arrangements. It individualizes bodies by a location that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations. pp. 141-145

One should not forget that, generally speaking, the Roman model, at the Enlightenment, played a dual role: in its republican aspect, it was the very embodiment of liberty; in its military aspect, it was the ideal schema of discipline. The Rome of the eighteenth century and of the Revolution was the Rome of the Senate, but it was also that of the legion; it was the Rome of the Forum, but it was also that of the camps. Up to the empire, the Roman reference transmitted, somewhat ambiguously, the juridical ideal of citizenship and the technique of disciplinary methods. p. 146

the table – it makes possible the measurement of quantities and the analysis of movements. In the form of taxonomy, it has the function of characterizing (and consequently reducing individual singularities) and constituting classes (and therefore of excluding considerations of number). But in the form of the disciplinary distribution, on the other hand, the table has the function of treating multiplicity itself, distributing it and deriving from it as many effects as possible. p. 149

the control of activity

1. The time-table is an old inheritance. The strict model was no doubt suggested by the monastic communities. It soon spread. Its three great methods — establish rhythms, impose particular occupations, regulate the cycles of repetition — were soon to be found in schools, workshops and hospitals.

2. The temporal elaboration of the act…A sort of anatomo-chronological schema of behaviour is defined. The act is broken down into its elements; the position of the body, limbs, articulations is defined; to each movement are assigned a direction, an aptitude, a duration; their order of succession is prescribed. Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power.

3. Hence the correlation of the body and the gesture. Disciplinary control does not consist simply in teaching or imposing a series of particular gestures; it imposes the best relation between a gesture and the overall position of the body, which is its condition of efficiency and speed. In the correct use of the body, which makes possible a correct use of time, nothing must remain idle or useless: everything must be called upon to form the support of the act required. A well-disciplined body forms the operational context of the slightest gesture. Good handwriting, for example, presupposes a gymnastics — a whole routine whose rigorous code invests the body in its entirety, from the points of the feet to the tip of the index finger.

4. The body-object articulation. Discipline defines each of the relations that the body must have with the object that it manipulates. Between them, it outlines a meticulous meshing (the example with weapons)…This is an example of what might be called the instrumental coding of the body. It consists of a breakdown of the total gesture into two parallel series: that of the parts of the body to be used (right hand, left hand, different fingers of the hand, knee, eye, elbow, etc.) and that of the parts of the object manipulated (barrel, notch, hammer, screw, etc.); then the two sets of parts are correlated together according to a number of simple gestures (rest, bend); lastly, it fixes the canonical succession in which each of these correlations occupies a particular place. This obligatory syntax is what the military theoreticians of the eighteenth century called `manoeuvre’.

5. Exhaustive use. The principle that underlay the time-table in its traditional form was essentially negative; it was the principle of non-idleness: it was forbidden to waste time, which was counted by God and paid for by men; the time-table was to eliminate the danger of wasting it — a moral offence and economic dishonesty. Discipline, on the other hand, arranges a positive economy; it poses the principle of a theoretically ever-growing use of time: exhaustion rather than use; it is a question of extracting, from time, ever more available moments and, from each moment, ever more useful forces. This means that one must seek to intensify the use of the slightest moment, as if time, in its very fragmentation, were inexhaustible or as if, at least by an ever more detailed internal arrangement, one could tend towards an ideal point at which one maintained maximum speed and maximum efficiency…Through this technique of subjection a new object was being formed; slowly, it superseded the mechanical body — the body composed of solids and assigned movements, the image of which had for so long haunted those who dreamt of disciplinary perfection. This new object is the natural body, the bearer of forces and the seat of duration; it is the body susceptible to specified operations, which have their order, their stages, their internal conditions, their constituent elements. In becoming the target for new mechanisms of power, the body is offered up to new forms of knowledge. It is the body of exercise, rather than of speculative physics; a body manipulated by authority, rather than imbued with animal spirits; a body of useful training and not of rational mechanics, but one in which, by virtue of that very fact, a number of natural requirements and functional constraints are beginning to emerge. pp. 149- 155

The Gobelins school is only one example of an important phenomenon: the development, in the classical period, of a new technique for taking charge of the time of individual existences; for regulating the relations of time, bodies and forces; for assuring an accumulation of duration; and for turning to ever-increased profit or use the movement of passing time. How can one capitalize the time of individuals, accumulate it in each of them, in their bodies, in their forces or in their abilities, in a way that is susceptible of use and control? How can one organize profitable durations? The disciplines, which analyse space, break up and rearrange activities, must also be understood as machinery for adding up and capitalizing time. This was done in four ways, which emerge most clearly in military organization.

1. Divide duration into successive or parallel segments, each of which must end at a specific time…Each stage in the combinatory of elements must be inscribed within a great temporal series, which is both a natural progress of the mind and a code for educative procedures. The `seriation’ of successive activities makes possible a whole investment of duration by power: the possibility of a detailed control and a regular intervention (of differentiation, correction, punishment, elimination) in each moment of time; the possibility of characterizing, and therefore of using individuals according to the level in the series that they are moving through; the possibility of accumulating time and activity, of rediscovering them, totalized and usable in a final result, which is the ultimate capacity of an individual…The disciplinary methods reveal a linear time whose moments are integrated, one upon another, and which is orientated towards a terminal, stable point; in short, an `evolutive’ time. But it must be recalled that, at the same moment, the administrative and economic techniques of control reveal a social time of a serial, orientated, cumulative type: the discovery of an evolution in terms of `progress’. The disciplinary techniques reveal individual series: the discovery of an evolution in terms of `genesis’. These two great `discoveries’ of the eighteenth century — the progress of societies and the geneses of individuals — were perhaps correlative with the new techniques of power, and more specifically, with a new way of administering time and making it useful, by segmentation, seriation, synthesis and totalization. p.160

In any case, the small temporal continuum of individuality-genesis certainly seems to be, like the individuality-cell or the individuality-organism, an effect and an object of discipline. And, at the centre of this seriation of time, one finds a procedure that is, for it, what the drawing up of `tables’ was for the distribution of individuals and cellular segmentation, or, again, what `manoeuvre’ was for the economy of activities and organic control. This procedure is `exercise’. Exercise is that technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but always graduated. p. 161

the composition of forces.

In the course of the classical period, one passed over to a whole set of delicate articulations. The unit — regiment, battalion, section and, later, `division’- became a sort of machine with many parts, moving in relation to one another, in order to arrive at a configuration and to obtain a specific result. What were the reasons for this mutation? Some were economic: to make each individual useful and the training, maintenance, and arming of troops profitable; to give to each soldier, a precious unit, maximum efficiency. But these economic reasons could become determinant only with a technical transformation: the invention of the rifle, more accurate, more rapid than the musket, it gave greater value to the soldier’s skill; more capable of reaching a particular target, it made it possible to exploit fire-power at an individual level; and, conversely, it turned every soldier into a possible target, requiring by the same token greater mobility; it involved therefore the disappearance of a technique of masses in favour of an art that distributed units and men along extended, relatively flexible, mobile lines. pp. 162-163

Discipline is no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, of extracting time from them and accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine. This demand is expressed in several ways.

1. The individual body becomes an element that may be placed, moved, articulated on others. Its bravery or its strength are no longer the principal variables that define it; but the place it occupies, the interval it covers, the regularity, the good order according to which it operates its movements. The soldier is above all a fragment of mobile space, before he is courage or honour.

2. The various chronological series that discipline must combine to form a composite time are also pieces of machinery. The time of each must be adjusted to the time of the others in such a way that the maximum quantity of forces may be extracted from each and combined with the optimum result.

3. This carefully measured combination of forces requires a precise system of command. All the activity of the disciplined individual must be punctuated and sustained by injunctions whose efficacity rests on brevity and clarity; the order does not need to be explained or formulated; it must trigger off the required behaviour and that is enough…Place the bodies in a little world of signals to each of which is attached a single, obligatory response: it is a technique of training, of dressage.

To sum up, it might be said that discipline creates out of the bodies it controls four types of individuality, or rather an individuality that is endowed with four characteristics: it is cellular (by the play of spatial distribution), it is organic (by the coding of activities), it is genetic (by the accumulation of time), it is combinatory (by the composition of forces). And, in doing so, it operates four great techniques: it draws up tables; it prescribes movements; it imposes exercises; lastly, in order to obtain the combination of forces, it arranges `tactics’. p. 167

It may be that war as strategy is a continuation of politics. But it must not be forgotten that `politics’ has been conceived as a continuation, if not exactly and directly of war, at least of the military model as a fundamental means of preventing civil disorder. p. 168

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Walhausen spoke of `strict discipline’ as an art of correct training. The chief function of the disciplinary power is to `train’, rather than to select and to levy; or, no doubt, to train in order to levy and select all the more. p. 170

Hierarchical observation

The exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power, and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible. pp. 170-171

what was now needed was an intense, continuous supervision; it ran right through the labour process; it did not bear — or not only — on production (the nature and quantity of raw materials, the type of instruments used, the dimensions and quality of the products); it also took into account the activity of the men, their skill, the way they set about their tasks, their promptness, their zeal, their behaviour. p. 174

Hierarchized, continuous and functional surveillance may not be one of the great technical `inventions’ of the eighteenth century, but its insidious extension owed its importance to the mechanisms of power that it brought with it. By means of such surveillance, disciplinary power became an `integrated’ system, linked from the inside to the economy and to the aims of the mechanism in which it was practised. It was also organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top and laterally; this network `holds’ the whole together and traverses it in its entirety with effects of power that derive from one another: supervisors, perpetually supervised. The power in the hierarchized surveillance of the disciplines is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery. p. 176

Normalizing judgment.

The disciplines established an `infra-penality’; they partitioned an area that the laws had left empty; they defined and repressed a mass of behaviour that the relative indifference of the great systems of punishment had allowed to escape…The workshop, the school, the army were subject to a whole micro-penality of time (latenesses, absences, interruptions of tasks), of activity (inattention, negligence, lack of zeal), of behaviour (impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle chatter, insolence), of the body (`incorrect’ attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness), of sexuality (impurity, indecency). At the same time, by way of punishment, a whole series of subtle procedures was used, from light physical punishment to minor deprivations and petty humiliations. It was a question both of making the slightest departures from correct behaviour subject to punishment, and of giving a punitive function to the apparently indifferent elements of the disciplinary apparatus: so that, if necessary, everything might serve to punish the slightest thing; each subject find himself caught in a punishable, punishing universality. p. 178

The order that the disciplinary punishments must enforce is of a mixed nature: it is an `artificial’ order, explicitly laid down by a law, a programme, a set of regulations. But it is also an order defined by natural and observable processes: the duration of an apprenticeship, the time taken to perform an exercise, the level of aptitude refer to a regularity that is also a rule. p. 179

Disciplinary punishment has the function of reducing gaps. It must therefore be essentially corrective. In addition to punishments borrowed directly from the judicial model (fines, flogging, solitary confinement), the disciplinary systems favour punishments that are exercise — intensified, multiplied forms of training, several times repeated. p. 179

In discipline, punishment is only one element of a double system: gratification-punishment. p. 180

The distribution according to ranks or grade has a double role: it marks the gaps, hierarchizes qualities, skills and aptitudes; but it also punishes and rewards. It is the penal functioning of setting in order and the ordinal character of judging. p. 181

In short, the art of punishing, in the régime of disciplinary power, is aimed neither at expiation, nor even precisely at repression. It brings five quite distinct operations into play: it refers individual actions to a whole that is at once a field of comparison, a space of differentiation and the principle of a rule to be followed. It differentiates individuals from one another, in terms of the following overall rule: that the rule be made to function as a minimal threshold, as an average to be respected or as an optimum towards which one must move. It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes in terms of value the abilities, the level, the `nature’ of individuals. It introduces, through this `value-giving’ measure, the constraint of a conformity that must be achieved. Lastly, it traces the limit that will define difference in relation to all other differences, the external frontier of the abnormal. pp. 182-183

For in this slender technique are to be found a whole domain of knowledge, a whole type of power. One often speaks of the ideology that the human `sciences’ bring with them, in either discreet or prolix manner. But does their very technology, this tiny operational schema that has become so widespread (from psychiatry to pedagogy, from the diagnosis of diseases to the hiring of labour), this familiar method of the examination, implement, within a single mechanism, power relations that make it possible to extract and constitute knowledge? It is not simply at the level of consciousness, of representations and in what one thinks one knows, but at the level of what makes possible the knowledge that is transformed into political investment. p. 185

One of the essential conditions for the epistemological `thaw’ of medicine at the end of the eighteenth century was the organization of the hospital as an `examining’ apparatus. The ritual of the visit was its most obvious form. p. 185

examination – Similarly, the school became a sort of apparatus of uninterrupted examination that duplicated along its entire length the operation of teaching. p. 186

The examination introduced a whole mechanism that linked to a certain type of the formation of knowledge a certain form of the exercise of power.

1. The examination transformed the economy of visibility into the exercise of power. Traditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown and what was manifested and, paradoxically, found the principle of its force in the movement by which it deployed that force. Those on whom it was exercised could remain in the shade; they received light only from that portion of power that was conceded to them, or from the reflection of it that for a moment they carried. Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection…Discipline, however, had its own type of ceremony. It was not the triumph, but the review, the `parade’, an ostentatious form of the examination. In it the `subjects’ were presented as `objects’ to the observation of a power that was manifested only by its gaze.

2. The examination also introduces individuality into the field of documentation. The examination leaves behind it a whole meticulous archive constituted in terms of bodies and days. The examination that places individuals in a field of surveillance also situates them in a network of writing; it engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them. The procedures of examination were accompanied at the same time by a system of intense registration and of documentary accumulation. A `power of writing’ was constituted as an essential part in the mechanisms of discipline…Thanks to the whole apparatus of writing that accompanied it, the examination opened up two correlative possibilities: firstly, the constitution of the individual as a describable, analysable object, not in order to reduce him to `specific’ features, as did the naturalists in relation to living beings, but in order to maintain him in his individual features, in his particular evolution, in his own aptitudes or abilities, under the gaze of a permanent corpus of knowledge; and, secondly, the constitution of a comparative system that made possible the measurement of overall phenomena, the description of groups, the characterization of collective facts, the calculation of the gaps between individuals, their distribution in a given `population’…A great problem needs great solutions perhaps. But there is the small historical problem of the emergence, towards the end of the eighteenth century, of what might generally be termed the `clinical’ sciences; the problem of the entry of the individual (and no longer the species) into the field of knowledge; the problem of the entry of the individual description, of the cross-examination, of anamnesis, of the `file’ into the general functioning of scientific discourse.

3. The examination, surrounded by all its documentary techniques, makes each individual a `case’: a case which at one and the same time constitutes an object for a branch of knowledge and a hold for a branch of power. The case is no longer, as in casuistry or jurisprudence, a set of circumstances defining an act and capable of modifying the application of a rule; it is the individual as he may be described, judged, measured, compared with others, in his very individuality; and it is also the individual who has to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc. pp. 187-191

The disciplines mark the moment when the reversal of the political axis of individualization — as one might call it — takes place. In certain societies, of which the feudal régime is only one example, it may be said that individualization is greatest where sovereignty is exercised and in the higher echelons of power. The more one possesses power or privilege, the more one is marked as an individual, by rituals, written accounts or visual reproductions…In a disciplinary régime, on the other hand, individualization is `descending’: as power becomes more anonymous and more functional, those on whom it is exercised tend to be more strongly individualized; it is exercised by surveillance rather than ceremonies, by observation rather than commemorative accounts, by comparative measures that have the `norm’ as reference rather than genealogies giving ancestors as points of reference; by `gaps’ rather than by deeds. In a system of discipline, the child is more individualized than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the normal and the non-delinquent. pp. 192-193

ndeed, the political theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often seems to follow this schema. But it should not be forgotten that there existed at the same period a technique for constituting individuals as correlative elements of power and knowledge. The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an `ideological’ representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called `discipline’. We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it `excludes’, it `represses’, it `censors’, it `abstracts’, it `masks’, it `conceals’. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production. p. 194

This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead — all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism. p. 197

A whole literary fiction of the festival grew up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different truth to appear. But there was also a political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary functioning of power; not masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual of his `true’ name, his `true’ place, his `true’ body, his `true’ disease. The plague as a form, at once real and imaginary, of disorder had as its medical and political correlative discipline. Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of `contagions’, of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder. pp. 197-198

The exile of the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society. Two ways of exercising power over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous mixtures. The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies — this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city. The plague (envisaged as a possibility at least) is the trial in the course of which one may define ideally the exercise of disciplinary power. In order to make rights and laws function according to pure theory, the jurists place themselves in imagination in the state of nature; in order to see perfect disciplines functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of plague. pp. 198-199

Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in an individual way, etc.). p. 199

The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions — to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide — it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap. p. 200

Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. p. 200

The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. p. 201

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers…Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. p. 201

Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. The ceremonies, the rituals, the marks by which the sovereign’s surplus power was manifested are useless. There is a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants.Similarly, it does not matter what motive animates him: the curiosity of the indiscreet, the malice of a child, the thirst for knowledge of a philosopher who wishes to visit this museum of human nature, or the perversity of those who take pleasure in spying and punishing. p. 202

A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. p. 202

The Panopticon, on the other hand, must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men…But the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use. It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behaviour must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used. It is — necessary modifications apart — applicable `to all establishments whatsoever. p. 205

In each of its applications, it makes it possible to perfect the exercise of power. It does this in several ways: because it can reduce the number of those who exercise it, while increasing the number of those on whom it is exercised. Because it is possible to intervene at any moment and because the constant pressure acts even before the offences, mistakes or crimes have been committed. Because, in these conditions, its strength is that it never intervenes, it is exercised spontaneously and without noise, it constitutes a mechanism whose effects follow from one another. Because, without any physical instrument other than architecture and geometry, it acts directly on individuals; it gives `power of mind over mind’. The panoptic schema makes any apparatus of power more intense: it assures its economy (in material, in personnel, in time); it assures its efficacity by its preventative character, its continuous functioning and its automatic mechanisms. It is a way of obtaining from power `in hitherto unexampled quantity’, `a great and new instrument of government…; its great excellence consists in the great strength it is capable of giving to any institution it may be thought proper to apply it to’ (Bentham, 66). p. 206

here is no risk, therefore, that the increase of power created by the panoptic machine may degenerate into tyranny; the disciplinary mechanism will be democratically controlled, since it will be constantly accessible `to the great tribunal committee of the world’ p. 207

How will power, by increasing its forces, be able to increase those of society instead of confiscating them or impeding them? The Panopticon’s solution to this problem is that the productive increase of power can be assured only if, on the one hand, it can be exercised continuously in the very foundations of society, in the subtlest possible way, and if, on the other hand, it functions outside these sudden, violent, discontinuous forms that are bound up with the exercise of sovereignty. p. 208

There are two images, then, of discipline. At one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come. The movement from one project to the other, from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized surveillance, rests on a historical transformation: the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society. p. 209

But this extension of the disciplinary institutions was no doubt only the most visible aspect of various, more profound processes.

1. The functional inversion of the disciplines. At first, they were expected to neutralize dangers, to fix useless or disturbed populations, to avoid the inconveniences of over-large assemblies; now they were being asked to play a positive role, for they were becoming able to do so, to increase the possible utility of individuals.

2. The swarming of disciplinary mechanisms. While, on the one hand, the disciplinary establishments increase, their mechanisms have a certain tendency to become `de-institutionalized’, to emerge from the closed fortresses in which they once functioned and to circulate in a `free’ state; the massive, compact disciplines are broken down into flexible methods of control, which may be transferred and adapted. Sometimes the closed apparatuses add to their internal and specific function a role of external surveillance, developing around themselves a whole margin of lateral controls. Thus the Christian School must not simply train docile children; it must also make it possible to supervise the parents, to gain information as to their way of life, their resources, their piety, their morals.

3. The state-control of the mechanisms of discipline. In England, it was private religious groups that carried out, for a long time, the functions of social discipline; in France, although a part of this role remained in the hands of parish guilds or charity associations, another — and no doubt the most important part — was very soon taken over by the police apparatus. pp. 210-213

In appearance, it (the Panopticon) is merely the solution of a technical problem; but, through it, a whole type of society emerges. Antiquity had been a civilization of spectacle. `To render accessible to a multitude of men the inspection of a small number of objects’: this was the problem to which the architecture of temples, theatres and circuses responded. With spectacle, there was a predominance of public life, the intensity of festivals, sensual proximity. In these rituals in which blood flowed, society found new vigour and formed for a moment a single great body. The modern age poses the opposite problem: `To procure for a small number, or even for a single individual, the instantaneous view of a great multitude.’ In a society in which the principal elements are no longer the community and public life, but, on the one hand, private individuals and, on the other, the state, relations can be regulated only in a form that is the exact reverse of the spectacle… Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies. We are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism. pp. 216-217

The formation of the disciplinary society is connected with a number of broad historical processes — economic, juridico-political and, lastly, scientific — of which it forms part.

1. Generally speaking, it might be said that the disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities…But the peculiarity of the disciplines is that they try to define in relation to the multiplicities a tactics of power that fulfils three criteria: firstly, to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost (economically, by the low expenditure it involves; politically, by its discretion, its low exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses); secondly, to bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible, without either failure or interval; thirdly, to link this `economic’ growth of power with the output of the apparatuses (educational, military, industrial or medical) within which it is exercised; in short, to increase both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system. This triple objective of the disciplines corresponds to a well-known historical conjuncture. One aspect of this conjuncture was the large demographic thrust of the eighteenth century; an increase in the floating population and the growth in the apparatus of production, which was becoming more and more extended and complex; it was also becoming more costly and its profitability had to be increased… Hence, in order to extract from bodies the maximum time and force, the use of those overall methods known as time-tables, collective training, exercises, total and detailed surveillance…Lastly, the disciplines have to bring into play the power relations, not above but inside the very texture of the multiplicity, as discreetly as possible, as well articulated on the other functions of these multiplicities and also in the least expensive way possible.

If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection. In fact, the two processes — the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital — cannot be separated…Let us say that discipline is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a `political’ force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force.

2. The panoptic modality of power — at the elementary, technical, merely physical level at which it is situated — is not under the immediate dependence or a direct extension of the great juridico-political structures of a society; it is nonetheless not absolutely independent. Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century the politically dominant class was masked by the establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative régime. But the development and generalization of disciplinary mechanisms constituted the other, dark side of these processes. The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines…The `Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines…What generalizes the power to punish, then, is not the universal consciousness of the law in each juridical subject; it is the regular extension, the infinitely minute web of panoptic techniques.

3. Taken one by one, most of these techniques have a long history behind them. But what was new, in the eighteenth century, was that, by being combined and generalized, they attained a level at which the formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process…What is now imposed on penal justice as its point of application, its `useful’ object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual…The extreme point of penal justice under the Ancien Régime was the infinite segmentation of the body of the regicide: a manifestation of the strongest power over the body of the greatest criminal, whose total destruction made the crime explode into its truth. The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation. Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? pp. 218 – 229

The prison, an essential element in the punitive panopoly, certainly marks an important moment in the history of penal justice: its access to `humanity’. p. 231

At the turn of the century, a new legislation defined the power to punish as a general function of society that was exercised in the same manner over all its members, and in which each individual was equally represented: but in making detention the penalty par excellence, it introduced procedures of domination characteristic of a particular type of power. p. 231

How could prison not be the penalty par excellence in a society in which liberty is a good that belongs to all in the same way and to which each individual is attached, as Duport put it, by a `universal and constant’ feeling? Its loss has therefore the same value for all; unlike the fine, it is an `egalitarian’ punishment. The prison is the clearest, simplest, most equitable of penalties. More-over, it makes it possible to quantify the penalty exactly according to the variable of time. There is a wages-form of imprisonment that constitutes, in industrial societies, its economic `self-evidence’ — and enables it to appear as a reparation. p. 232

How could the prison not be immediately accepted when, by locking up, retraining and rendering docile, it merely reproduces, with a little more emphasis, all the mechanisms that are to be found in the social body? The prison is like a rather disciplined barracks, a strict school, a dark workshop, but not qualitatively different. This double foundation — juridico-economic on the one hand, technico-disciplinary on the other — made the prison seem the most immediate and civilized form of all penalties…In short, penal imprisonment, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, covered both the deprivation of liberty and the technical transformation of individuals. p. 233

The prison should not be seen as an inert institution, shaken at intervals by reform movements. The `theory of the prison’ was its constant set of operational instructions rather than its incidental criticism — one of its conditions of functioning. The prison has always formed part of an active field in which projects, improvements, experiments, theoretical statements, personal evidence and investigations have proliferated. The prison institution has always been a focus of concern and debate. p. 235

In several respects, the prison must be an exhaustive disciplinary apparatus: it must assume responsibility for all aspects of the individual, his physical training, his aptitude to work, his everyday conduct, his moral attitude, his state of mind; the prison, much more than the school, the workshop or the army, which always involved a certain specialization, is `omni-disciplinary’. Moreover, the prison has neither exterior nor gap; it cannot be interrupted, except when its task is totally completed; its action on the individual must be uninterrupted: an unceasing discipline. Lastly, it gives almost total power over the prisoners; it has its internal mechanisms of repression and punishment: a despotic discipline. It carries to their greatest intensity all the procedures to be found in the other disciplinary mechanisms. It must be the most powerful machinery for imposing a new form on the perverted individual; its mode of action is the constraint of a total education. pp. 235-236

This complete `reformatory’ lays down a recoding of existence very different from the mere juridical deprivation of liberty and very different, too, from the simple mechanism of exempla imagined by the reformers at the time of the idéologues.

1. The first principle was isolation. The isolation of the convict from the external world, from everything that motivated the offence, from the complicities that facilitated it. The isolation of the prisoners from one another. Not only must the penalty be individual, but it must also be individualizing — in two ways. First, the prison must be designed in such a way as to efface of itself the harmful consequences to which it gives rise in gathering together very different convicts in the same place: to stifle plots and revolts, to prevent the formation of future complicities that may give rise to blackmail (when the convicts are once again at liberty), to form an obstacle to the immorality of so many `mysterious associations’. In short, the prison should form from the malefactors that it gathers together a homogeneous and interdependent population…But, at the heart of the debate, and making it possible, was this primary objective of carceral action: coercive individualization, by the termination of any relation that is not supervised by authority or arranged according to hierarchy.

2. `Work alternating with meals accompanies the convict to evening prayer; then a new sleep gives him an agreeable rest that is not disturbed by the phantoms of an unregulated imagination. Thus the six weekdays pass by. They are followed by a day devoted exclusively to prayer, instruction and salutary meditations. Thus the weeks, the months, the years follow one another; thus the prisoner who, on entering the establishment, was an inconstant man, or one who was single-minded only in his irregularity, seeking to destroy his existence by the variety of his vices, gradually becomes by dint of a habit that is at first purely external, but is soon transformed into a second nature, so familiar with work and the pleasures that derive from it, that, provided wise instruction has opened up his soul to repentance, he may be exposed with more confidence to temptations, when he finally recovers his liberty’… Penal labour cannot be criticized for any unemployment it may give rise to: with its limited extent, and its low output, it cannot have a general effect on the economy. It is intrinsically useful, not as an activity of production, but by virtue of the effect it has on the human mechanism. It is a principle of order and regularity; through the demands that it imposes, it conveys, imperceptibly, the forms of a rigorous power; it bends bodies to regular movements, it excludes agitation and distraction, it imposes a hierarchy and a surveillance that are all the more accepted, and which will be inscribed all the more deeply in the behaviour of the convicts, in that they form part of its logic

3. But prison goes beyond the mere privation of liberty in a more important way. It becomes increasingly an instrument for the modulation of the penalty…it makes it possible to quantify the penalties exactly, to graduate them according to circumstances and to give to legal punishment the more or less explicit form of wages; but it also runs the risk of having no corrective value, if it is fixed once and for all in the sentence. The length of the penalty must not be a measurement of the `exchange value’ of the offence; it must be adjusted to the `useful’ transformation of the inmate during his term of imprisonment. It is not a time-measure, but a time finalized. The form of the operation, rather than the form of the wages…Hence the idea that punitive rigour must not be in direct proportion to the penal importance of the offence — nor determined once and for all.

the carceral apparatus has recourse to three great schemata: the politico-moral schema of individual isolation and hierarchy; the economic model of force applied to compulsory work; the technico-medical model of cure and normalization. The cell, the workshop, the hospital. The margin by which the prison exceeds detention is filled in fact by techniques of a disciplinary type. And this disciplinary addition to the juridical is what, in short, is called the `penitentiary’. pp. 237-248

The legal punishment bears upon an act; the punitive technique on a life; it falls to this punitive technique, therefore, to reconstitute all the sordid detail of a life in the form of knowledge, to fill in the gaps of that knowledge and to act upon it by a practice of compulsion. It is a biographical knowledge and a technique for correcting individual lives…The penitentiary technique bears not on the relation between author and crime, but on the criminal’s affinity with his crime. pp. 252-253

But one thing may be noted at the outset: the penal justice denned in the eighteenth century by the reformers traced two possible but divergent lines of objectification of the criminal: the first was the series of `monsters’, moral or political, who had fallen outside the social pact; the second was that of the juridical subject rehabilitated by punishment. Now the `delinquent’ makes it possible to join the two lines and to constitute under the authority of medicine, psychology or criminology, an individual in whom the offender of the law and the object of a scientific technique are superimposed — or almost — one upon the other. p. 256

From the point of view of the law, detention may be a mere deprivation of liberty. But the imprisonment that performs this function has always involved a technical project. The transition from the public execution, with its spectacular rituals, its art mingled with the ceremony of pain, to the penalties of prisons buried in architectural masses and guarded by the secrecy of administrations, is not a transition to an undifferentiated, abstract, confused penality; it is the transition from one art of punishing to another, no less skilful one. It is a technical mutation. p. 257

But what, in June 1837, was adopted to replace the chain-gang was not the simple covered cart, which had been suggested at one time, but a machine that had been very meticulously designed: a carriage conceived as a moving prison, a mobile equivalent of the Panopticon. p. 263

the critique of the prison and its methods:

– Prisons do not diminish the crime rate: they can be extended, multiplied or transformed, the quantity of crime and criminals remains stable or, worse, increases.

- Detention causes recidivism; those leaving prison have more chance than before of going back to it; convicts are, in a very high proportion, former inmates.

– The prison cannot fail to produce delinquents. It does so by the very type of existence that it imposes on its inmates: whether they are isolated in cells or whether they are given useless work, for which they will find no employment, it is, in any case, not `to think of man in society; it is to create an unnatural, useless and dangerous existence’; the prison should educate its inmates, but can a system of education addressed to man reasonably have as its object to act against the wishes of nature?

– The prison makes possible, even encourages, the organization of a milieu of delinquents, loyal to one another, hierarchized, ready to aid and abet any future criminal act.

– The conditions to which the free inmates are subjected necessarily condemn them to recidivism: they are under the surveillance of the police; they are assigned to a particular residence, or forbidden others; `they leave prison with a passport that they must show every-where they go and which mentions the sentence that they have served’ (stigma)

– Lastly, the prison indirectly produces delinquents by throwing the inmate’s family into destitution: `The same order that sends the head of the family to prison reduces each day the mother to destitution, the children to abandonment, the whole family to vagabondage and begging. It is in this way that crime can take root’ (Lucas, II, 64). pp. 265 – 268

the seven universal maxims of the good `penitential condition’.

1. Penal detention must have as its essential function the transformation of the individual’s behaviour.

2. Convicts must be isolated or at least distributed according to the penal gravity of their act, but above all according to age, mental attitude, the technique of correction to be used, the stages of their transformation.

3. It must be possible to alter the penalties according to the individuality of the convicts, the results that have been obtained, progress or relapses.

4. Work must be one of the essential elements in the transformation and progressive socialization of convicts. Penal labour `must not be regarded as the complement and as it were an aggravation of the penalty, but as a mitigation, of which it is no longer possible to deprive the prisoner’. It must enable him to learn or to practise a trade, and to provide the prisoner and his family with a source of income.

5. The education of the prisoner is for the authorities both an indispensable precaution in the interests of society and an obligation to the prisoner.

6. The prison régime must, at least in part, be supervised and administered by a specialized staff possessing the moral qualities and technical abilities required of educators.

7. Imprisonment must be followed by measures of supervision and assistance until the rehabilitation of the former prisoner is complete. pp. 269-270

Or, to be more precise, perhaps the popular illegalities began to develop according to new dimensions: those that were introduced by the movements which, from the 1780s to the Revolutions of 1848, linked together social conflicts, the struggles against the political régimes, the resistance to the movement of industrialization, the effects of the economic crises. Broadly speaking, there were three characteristic processes. First, the development of the political dimension of the popular illegalities. This occurred in two ways: hitherto localized practices, limited in some sense to themselves (like the refusal to pay taxes and rents or to comply with conscription; the violent confiscation of hoarded goods; the looting of shops and the forced selling of products at a `fair price’; confrontations with the representatives of power), were able during the Revolution to lead to directly political struggles, whose aim was not simply to extract concessions from the state or to rescind some intolerable measure, but to change the government and the very structure of power. On the other hand, certain political movements were explicitly based on existing forms of illegality (for example, the royalist agitation of the west and south of France used the peasants’ rejection of the new laws on property, religion and conscription); this political dimension of illegality was to become more complex and more marked in the relations between the workers’ movement and the republican parties in the nineteenth century, in the passage from the workers’ struggles (strikes, prohibited coalitions, illegal associations) to political revolution…On the other hand, through the rejection of the law or other regulations, it is easy enough to recognize the struggles against those who set them up in their own interests: people were no longer fighting against the tax farmers, financiers, the king’s agents, prevaricating magistrates or bad ministers — all the agents of injustice — but against the law itself and the justice whose task it was to apply it; against local landowners who introduced new rights; against employers who worked together, but forbade workers’ coalitions; against entrepreneurs who introduced more machines, lower wages and longer working hours, and made the factory regulations more and more strict. Lastly, although it is true that, during the eighteenth century, criminality tended towards more specialized forms, inclining more and more to the skilful theft, and became, to some extent, the practice of men on the fringes of society, isolated from a population that was hostile to them — one sees, in the last years of the eighteenth century, the reconstitution of certain links or the establishment of new relations; not, as contemporaries said, that the leaders of popular agitation had been criminals, but because the new forms of law, the rigours of the labour regulations, the demands either of the state, or of the landowners, or of the employers, and the most; detailed techniques of surveillance, increased the occasions of offences, and threw to the other side of the law many individuals, who, in other conditions, would not have gone over to specialized criminality; it is against the background of the new laws of property, against the background, too, of unacceptable conscription that a peasant illegality developed in the last years of the Revolution, with a consequent increase in violence, acts of aggression, thefts, looting and even the greater forms of `political brigandage’; it was also against a background of legislation or very heavy regulations (concerning the livret, or service certificate, rents, hours, absences from work) that a workers’ vagabondage developed that often crossed the boundary into actual delinquency. A whole series of illegal practices, which during the previous century had tended to remain isolated from one another, now seemed to come together to form a new threat. pp. 273-275

There was a threefold diffusion of popular illegalities at the turn of the century (quite apart from a quantitative extension that is problematic and still uncalculated): their insertion in a general political outlook; their explicit articulation on social struggles; a communication between different forms and levels of offences. p. 275

If this is the case, the prison, apparently `failing’, does not miss its target; on the contrary, it reaches it, in so far as it gives rise to one particular form of illegality in the midst of others, which it is able to isolate, to place in full light and to organize as a relatively enclosed, but penetrable, milieu. p. 276

For the observation that prison fails to eliminate crime, one should perhaps substitute the hypothesis that prison has succeeded extremely well in producing delinquency, a specific type, a politically or economically less dangerous — and, on occasion, usable — form of illegality; in producing delinquents, in an apparently marginal, but in fact centrally supervised milieu; in producing the delinquent as a pathologized subject. The success of the prison, in the struggles around the law and illegalities, has been to specify a `delinquency’. p. 277

Delinquency, solidified by a penal system centred upon the prison, thus represents a diversion of illegality for the illicit circuits of profit and power of the dominant class. p. 280

Prison and police form a twin mechanism; together they assure in the whole field of illegalities the differentiation, isolation and use of delinquency. In the illegalities, the police-prison system segments a manipulable delinquency. This delinquency, with its specificity, is a result of the system; but it also becomes a part and an instrument of it. So that one should speak of an ensemble whose three terms (police-prison-delinquency) support one another and form a circuit that is never interrupted. Police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send back a certain number of them to prison. p. 282

It was then that the direct, institutional coupling of police and delinquency took place: the disturbing moment when criminality became one of the mechanisms of power. p. 283

The criminal fait divers, by its everyday redundancy, makes acceptable the system of judicial and police supervisions that partition society; it recounts from day to day a sort of internal battle against the faceless enemy; in this war, it constitutes the daily bulletin of alarm or victory…The combination of the fait divers and the detective novel has produced for the last hundred years or more an enormous mass of `crime stories’ in which delinquency appears both as very close and quite alien, a perpetual threat to everyday life, but extremely distant in its origin and motives, both everyday and exotic in the milieu in which it takes place. p. 286

It may be, therefore, that crime constitutes a political instrument that could prove as precious for the liberation of our society as it has been for the emancipation of the Negroes; indeed, will such an emancipation take place without it? p. 289

All the illegalities that the court defined as offences the accused reformulated as the affirmation of a living force: the lack of a home as vagabondage, the lack of a master as independence, the lack of work as freedom, the lack of a time-table as the fullness of days and nights. This confrontation of illegality with the discipline-penality-delinquency system was perceived by contemporaries or rather by the journalist who happened to be there as the comic effect of the criminal law at grips with the petty details of indiscipline. And it was true: the affair itself and the verdict that followed represented the heart of the problem of legal punishment in the nineteenth century. The irony with which the judge tried to envelop indiscipline in the majesty of the law and the insolence with which the accused reinscribed indiscipline among the fundamental rights represent for penality an exemplary scene. p. 290

Were I to fix the date of completion of the carceral system The date I would choose would be 22 January 1840, the date of the official opening of Mettray.

Why Mettray? Because it is the disciplinary form at its most extreme, the model in which are concentrated all the coercive technologies of behaviour. In it were to be found `cloister, prison, school, regiment’. The small, highly hierarchized groups, into which the inmates were divided, followed simultaneously five models: that of the family (each group was a `family’ composed of`brothers’ and two `elder brothers’); that of the army (each family, commanded by a head, was divided into two sections, each of which had a second in command; each inmate had a number and was taught basic military exercises; there was a cleanliness inspection every day, an inspection of clothing every week; a roll-call was taken three times a day); that of the workshop, with supervisors and foremen, who were responsible for the regularity of the work and for the apprenticeship of the younger inmates; that of the school (an hour or an hour and a half of lessons every day; the teaching was given by the instructor and by the deputy-heads); lastly, the judicial model (each day `justice’ was meted out in the parlour: `The least act of disobedience is punished and the best way of avoiding serious offences is to punish the most minor offences very severely. pp. 293-294

ing. It receives from them, and from their lesser, smaller task, a sanction from below; but one that is no less important for that, since it is the sanction of technique and rationality. The carceral `naturalizes’ the legal power to punish, as it `legalizes’ the technical power to discipline. In thus homogenizing them, effacing what may be violent in one and arbitrary in the other, attenuating the effects of revolt that they may both arouse, thus depriving excess in either of any purpose, circulating the same calculated, mechanical and discreet methods from one to the other, the carceral makes it possible to carry out that great `economy’ of power whose formula the eighteenth century had sought, when the problem of the accumulation and useful administration of men first emerged. p. 303

The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the `social worker’-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behaviour, his aptitudes, his achievements. The carceral network, in its compact or disseminated forms, with its systems of insertion, distribution, surveillance, observation, has been the greatest support, in modern society, of the normalizing power. p. 304

At present, the problem lies rather in the steep rise in the use of these mechanisms of normalization and the wide-ranging powers which, through the proliferation of new disciplines, they bring with them. p. 306

The carceral city, with its imaginary `geo-politics’, is governed by quite different principles. The extract from La Phalange reminds us of some of the more important ones: that at the centre of this city, and as if to hold it in place, there is, not the `centre of power’, not a network of forces, but a multiple network of diverse elements — walls, space, institution, rules, discourse; that the model of the carceral city is not, therefore, the body of the king, with the powers that emanate from it, nor the contractual meeting of wills from which a body that was both individual and collective was born, but a strategic distribution of elements of different natures and levels. That the prison is not the daughter of laws, codes or the judicial apparatus; that it is not subordinated to the court and the docile or clumsy instrument of the sentences that it hands out and of the results that it would like to achieve; that it is the court that is external and subordinate to the prison. That in the central position that it occupies, it is not alone, but linked to a whole series of `carceral’ mechanisms which seem distinct enough — since they are intended to alleviate pain, to cure, to comfort — but which all tend, like the prison, to exercise a power of normalization.

And that ultimately what presides over all these mechanisms is not the unitary functioning of an apparatus or an institution, but the necessity of combat and the rules of strategy. That, consequently, the notions of institutions of repression, rejection, exclusion, marginalization, are not adequate to describe, at the very centre of the carceral city, the formation of the insidious leniencies, unavowable petty cruelties, small acts of cunning, calculated methods, techniques, `sciences’ that permit the fabrication of the disciplinary individual. In this central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of `incarceration’, objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle.

At this point I end a book that must serve as a historical background to various studies of the power of normalization and the formation of knowledge in modern society. pp. 308-309

]]> http://lib.spranceana.com/michel-foucault-discipline-and-punish-119.html/feed 1 http://lib.spranceana.com/jontathan-littell-les-bienveillantes-115.html http://lib.spranceana.com/jontathan-littell-les-bienveillantes-115.html#comments Fri, 28 Jan 2011 01:13:03 +0000 Vitalie Sprinceana http://lib.spranceana.com/?p=115

après tout, vos opinions vous regardent. Si je me suis résolu à écrire, après toutes
ces années, c’est pour mettre les choses au point pour moi-même, pas pour vous. p.11

Malgré mes travers, et ils ont été nombreux, je suis resté de ceux qui pensent que les seules
choses indispensables à la vie humaine sont l’air, le manger, le boire et l’excrétion, et la
recherche de la vérité. Le reste est facultatif. p.13

Or si l’on suspend le travail, les activités banales, l’agitation de tous les jours, pour se donner
avec sérieux à une pensée, il en va tout autrement. Bientôt les choses remontent, en vagues
lourdes et noires. La nuit, les rêves se désarticulent, se déploient, prolifèrent, et au réveil
laissent une fine couche acre et humide dans la tête, qui met longtemps à se dissoudre. Pas de
malentendu : ce n’est pas de culpabilité, de remords qu’il s’agit ici. Cela aussi existe, sans
doute, je ne veux pas le nier, mais je pense que les choses sont autrement complexes. Même
un homme qui n’a pas fait la guerre, qui n’a pas eu à tuer, subira ce dont je parle. Reviennent
les petites méchancetés, la lâcheté, la fausseté, les mesquineries dont tout homme est affligé.
Peu étonnant alors que les hommes aient inventé le travail, l’alcool, les bavardages stériles.
Peu étonnant que la télévision ait tant de succès. Bref, je mis vite fin à mon malencontreux
congé, cela valait mieux. J’avais bien assez de temps, à l’heure du déjeuner ou le soir après le
départ des secrétaires, pour griffonner. p.15

Les philosophes politiques ont souvent fait remarquer qu’en
temps de guerre le citoyen, mâle du moins, perd un de ses droits les plus élémentaires, celui de
vivre, et cela depuis la Révolution française et l’invention de la conscription, principe
maintenant universellement admis ou presque. Mais ils ont rarement noté que ce citoyen perd
en même temps un autre droit, tout aussi élémentaire et pour lui peut-être encore plus vital, en
ce qui concerne l’idée qu’il se fait de lui-même en tant qu’homme civilisé : le droit de ne pas
tuer. Personne ne vous demande votre avis. p.24

La distinction tout à fait arbitraire établie après la guerre
entre d’un côté les « opérations militaires », équivalentes à celles de tout autre conflit, et de l’autre les « atrocités », conduites par une minorité de sadiques et de détraqués, est, comme
j’espère le montrer, un fantasme consolateur des vainqueurs – des vainqueurs occidentaux,
devrais-je préciser, les Soviétiques, malgré leur rhétorique, ayant toujours compris de quoi il
retournait : Staline, après mai 1945, et passé les premières gesticulations pour la galerie, se
moquait éperdument d’une illusoire « justice », il voulait du dur, du concret, des esclaves et du
matériel pour relever et reconstruire, pas des remords ni des lamentations, car il savait aussi
bien que nous que les défunts n’entendent pas les pleurs, et que les remords jamais n’ont mis
de haricots dans la soupe. p.24

La guerre totale, c’est cela aussi : le civil, ça n’existe
plus, et entre l’enfant juif gazé ou fusillé et l’enfant allemand mort sous les bombes
incendiaires, il n’y a qu’une différence de moyens; ces deux morts étaient également vaines,
aucune des deux n’a abrégé la guerre même
d’une seconde ; mais dans les deux cas, l’homme ou les hommes qui les ont tués croyaient que
c’était juste et nécessaire ; s’ils se sont trompés, qui faut-il blâmer? pp.24-25

Tout comme, selon Marx, l’ouvrier est aliéné par rapport au
produit de son travail, dans le génocide ou la guerre totale sous sa forme moderne l’exécutant
est aliéné par rapport au produit de son action. Cela vaut même pour le cas où un homme
place un fusil contre la tête d’un autre homme et actionne la détente. Car la victime a été
amenée là par d’autres hommes, sa mort a été décidée par d’autres encore, et le tireur aussi sait
qu’il n’est que le dernier maillon d’une très longue chaîne, et qu’il n’a pas à se poser plus de
questions qu’un membre d’un peloton qui dans la vie civile exécute un homme dûment
condamné par les lois. Le tireur sait que c’est un hasard qui fait que lui tire, que son camarade
tient le cordon, et qu’un troisième conduit le camion. Tout au plus pourra-t-il tenter de changer
de place avec le garde ou le chauffeur. p. 25

Un autre exemple, tiré de l’abondante littérature
historique plutôt que de mon expérience personnelle : celui du programme d’extermination des
handicapés lourds et des malades mentaux allemands, dit programme « Euthanasie » ou « T-4
», mis en place deux ans avant le programme « Solution finale ». Ici, les malades sélectionnés
dans le cadre d’un dispositif légal étaient accueillis dans un bâtiment par des infirmières
professionnelles, qui les enregistraient et les déshabillaient ; des médecins les examinaient et
les conduisaient à une chambre close; un ouvrier administrait le gaz; d’autres nettoyaient; un
policier établissait le certificat de décès. Interrogée après la guerre, chacune de ces personnes
dit : Moi, coupable ? L’infirmière n’a tué personne, elle n’a fait que déshabiller et calmer des
malades, gestes ordinaires de sa profession. Le médecin non plus n’a pas tué, il a simplement
confirmé un diagnostic selon des critères établis par d’autres instances.
Le manoeuvre qui ouvre le robinet du gaz, celui donc qui est le plus proche du meurtre dans le
temps et l’espace, effectue une fonction technique sous le contrôle de ses supérieurs et des
médecins. Les ouvriers qui vident la chambre fournissent un travail nécessaire
d’assainissement, fort répugnant, qui plus est. Le policier suit sa procédure, qui est de
constater un décès et de noter qu’il a eu lieu sans violation des lois en vigueur. Qui donc est
coupable ? Tous ou personne? Pourquoi l’ouvrier affecté au gaz serait-il plus coupable que
l’ouvrier affecté aux chaudières, au jardin, aux véhicules ? Il en va de même pour toutes les
facettes de cette immense entreprise. L’aiguilleur des voies ferrées, par exemple, est-il
coupable de la mort des Juifs aiguillés par lui vers un camp ? Cet ouvrier est un fonctionnaire, il fait le même travail depuis vingt ans, il aiguille des trains selon un plan, il n’a pas à savoir ce
qu’il y a dedans – Ce n’est pas sa faute si ces Juifs sont transportés d’un point A, via son
aiguillage, à un point B, où on les tue. Pourtant, cet aiguilleur joue un rôle crucial dans le
travail d’extermination : sans lui, le train de Juifs ne peut pas arriver au point B. De même
pour le fonctionnaire chargé de réquisitionner des appartements pour les sinistrés des
bombardements, l’imprimeur qui prépare les avis de déportation, le fournisseur qui vend du
béton ou du barbelé à la S S, le sous-officier de l’intendance qui délivre de l’essence à un
Teilkommando de la SP, et Dieu là-haut qui permet tout ça. Bien entendu, on peut établir des
niveaux de responsabilité pénale relativement précis, qui permettent d’en condamner certains
et de laisser tous les autres à leur conscience, pour peu qu’ils en aient une ; c’est d’autant plus
facile qu’on rédige les lois après les faits, comme à Nuremberg. Mais même là on a fait un peu
n’importe quoi. pp.25-26

On se plaît à opposer l’État,
totalitaire ou non, à l’homme ordinaire, punaise ou roseau. Mais on oublie alors que l’État est
composé d’hommes, tous plus ou moins ordinaires, chacun avec sa vie, son histoire, la série de
hasards qui ont fait qu’un jour il s’est retrouvé du bon côté du fusil ou de la feuille de papier
alors que d’autres se retrouvaient du mauvais. Ce parcours fait très rarement l’objet d’un choix,
voire d’une prédisposition. Les victimes, dans la vaste majorité des cas, n’ont pas plus été
torturées ou tuées parce qu’elles étaient bonnes que leurs bourreaux ne les ont tourmentées
parce qu’ils étaient méchants. Il serait un peu naïf de le croire, et il suffit de fréquenter
n’importe quelle bureaucratie, même celle de la Croix-Rouge, pour s’en convaincre. Staline,
d’ailleurs, a procédé à une démonstration éloquente de ce que j’avance, en transformant chaque
génération de bourreaux en victimes de la génération suivante, sans pour autant que les
bourreaux viennent à lui manquer. p.27

Ceux qui tuent sont des hommes, comme ceux qui sont tués,
c’est cela qui est terrible. Vous ne pouvez jamais dire: Je ne tuerai point, c’est impossible, tout
au plus pouvez-vous dire : J’espère ne point tuer. p.30

Si nous commettions une injustice, il fallait y réfléchir, et
décider si elle était nécessaire et inévitable, ou si elle n’était que le résultat de la facilité, de la
paresse, du manque de pensée. C’était là une question de rigueur. Je savais que ces décisions
étaient prises à un niveau bien supérieur au nôtre ; néanmoins, nous n’étions pas des
automates, il importait non seulement d’obéir aux ordres, mais d’y adhérer ; or j’avais des
doutes, et cela me troublait. p.47

Von Radetzky nous avait expliqué qu’il fallait raisonner en termes de menace objective : démasquer chaque coupable individuel étant une
impossibilité matérielle, il fallait identifier les catégories socio-politiques les plus susceptibles
de nous nuire et agir en fonction. p.79

« C’est nécessaire, vous comprenez ? Dans tout ça, la souffrance humaine ne doit compter
pour rien. » – « Oui, mais tout de même elle compte pour quelque chose. » C’était cela que je
ne parvenais pas à saisir : la béance, l’inadéquation absolue entre la facilité avec laquelle on
peut tuer et la grande difficulté qu’il doit y avoir à mourir. Pour nous, c’était une autre sale
journée de travail ; pour eux, la fin de tout. p.83

Dans un État
comme le nôtre, les rôles étaient assignés à tous : Toi, la victime, et Toi, le bourreau, et
personne n’avait le choix, on ne demandait le consentement de personne, car tous étaient
interchangeables, les victimes comme les bourreaux. Hier nous avions tué des hommes juifs,
demain ce serait des femmes et des enfants, après-demain d’autres encore; et nous, lorsque
nous aurions rempli notre rôle, nous serions remplacés. p.101

Mais il y avait toujours quelque chose que je ne
saisissais pas. Je commençais enfin à entrevoir que, quel que soit le nombre de morts que je
verrais, ou bien de gens à l’instant de leur mort, je ne parviendrais jamais à saisir la mort, ce
moment-là, précisément en lui-même. C’était de deux choses l’une : ou l’on est mort, et alors il
n’y a de toute façon plus rien à comprendre, ou l’on ne l’est pas encore, et dans ce cas, même le
fusil sur la nuque ou la corde au cou, cela reste incompréhensible, une pure abstraction, cette
idée absurde que moi, seul vivant au monde, je puisse disparaître. Mourants, nous sommes
peut-être déjà morts, mais nous ne
mourons jamais, ce moment-là n’arrive jamais, ou plutôt il n’en finit jamais d’arriver, le voilà,
il arrive, et puis il arrive encore, et puis il est déjà passé, sans être jamais arrivé. pp. 162-163

« Que les ordres restent toujours vagues, c’est normal, c’est même délibéré, et
cela découle de la logique même du Führerprinzip. C’est au destinataire de reconnaître les
intentions du distributeur et d’agir en conséquence. Ceux qui insistent pour avoir des ordres
clairs ou qui veulent des mesures législatives n’ont pas compris que c’est la volonté du chef et
non ses ordres qui comptent, et que c’est au receveur d’ordres de savoir déchiffrer et même
anticiper cette volonté. Celui qui sait agir ainsi est un excellent national-socialiste, et on ne
viendra jamais lui reprocher son excès de zèle, même s’il commet des erreurs; les autres, ce
sont ceux qui, comme dit le Führer, ont peur de sauter par-dessus leur propre ombre. » p.505

Mais un de mes amis, qui lui aussi s’intéresse à ce genre de questions, affirme qu’en temps de
guerre, en vertu si vous voulez de l’état d’exception causé par le danger, l’Impératif kantien est
suspendu, car bien entendu, ce que l’on souhaite faire à l’ennemi, on ne souhaite pas que
l’ennemi nous le fasse, et donc ce que l’on fait ne peut pas devenir la base d’une loi générale.
C’est son avis, vous voyez bien. Or moi, je sens qu’il a tort, et qu’en fait par notre fidélité au
devoir, en quelque sorte, par obéissance aux ordres supérieurs… que justement il faut mettre
notre volonté à mieux remplir les ordres. À les vivre de manière positive. Mais je n’ai pas
encore trouvé l’argument imparable pour lui prouver qu’il a tort. » – « Pourtant, c’est assez
simple, je pense. Nous sommes tous d’accord que dans un État national-socialiste le
fondement ultime de la loi positive est la volonté du Führer. C’est le principe bien connu Führerworte haben Gesetzeskraft. Bien entendu, nous reconnaissons qu’en pratique le Führer
ne peut pas s’occuper de tout et que donc d’autres doivent aussi agir et légiférer en son nom.
En principe, cette idée devrait être étendue au Volk entier. C’est ainsi que le Dr. Frank, dans
son traité sur le droit constitutionnel, a étendu la définition du Führerprinzip de la manière
suivante : Agissez de manière que le Führer, s’il connaissait votre action, l’approuverait. Il n’y
a aucune contradiction entre ce principe et l’Impératif de Kant. » – « Je vois, je vois. Frei sein
ist Knecht, Être libre, c’est être un vassal, comme dit le vieux proverbe allemand. » – «
Précisément. Ce principe est applicable à tout membre de la Volksgemeinschaft. Il faut vivre
son national-socialisme en vivant sa propre volonté comme celle du Führer et donc, pour
reprendre les termes de Kant, comme fondement de la Volksrecht. Celui qui ne fait qu’obéir
aux ordres comme une mécanique, sans les examiner de manière critique pour en pénétrer la
nécessité intime, ne travaille pas en direction du Führer; la plupart du temps, il s’en éloigne.” pp. 521-522

On a beaucoup parlé, après la guerre, pour essayer d’expliquer ce qui s’était passé, de
l’inhumain. Mais l’inhumain, excusez-moi, cela n’existe pas. Il n’y a que de l’humain et encore
de l’humain : et ce Döll en est un bon exemple. Qu’est-ce que c’est d’autre, Döll, qu’un bon
père de famille qui voulait nourrir ses enfants, et qui obéissait à son gouvernement, même si
en son for intérieur il n’était pas tout à fait d’accord ? S’il était né en France ou en Amérique,
on l’aurait appelé un pilier de sa communauté et un patriote ; mais il est né en Allemagne, c’est
donc un criminel. La nécessité, les Grecs le savaient déjà, est une déesse non seulement
aveugle, mais cruelle. Ce n’était pas que les criminels manquaient, à cette époque. pp. 542-543

Wirths était d’accord avec moi pour dire que même les hommes qui, au
début, frappaient uniquement par obligation, finissaient par y prendre goût. « Loin de corriger
des criminels endurcis, affirmait-il avec passion, nous les confirmons dans leur perversité en
leur donnant tous les droits sur les autres prisonniers. Et nous en créons même de nouveaux
parmi nos SS. Ces camps, avec les méthodes actuelles, sont une pépinière de maladies
mentales et de déviations sadiques ; après la guerre, quand ces hommes rejoindront la vie
civile, nous nous retrouverons avec un problème considérable sur les bras. »…

« Et comment croyez-vous que ce sadisme se développe ? demandai-je. Je
veux dire chez des hommes normaux, sans aucune prédisposition qui ne ferait que se révéler
dans ces conditions ? » Wirths regardait par la fenêtre, pensif. Il mit un long moment avant de
répondre : « C’est une question à laquelle j’ai beaucoup réfléchi, et il est malaisé d’y répondre.
Une solution facile serait de blâmer notre propagande, telle par exemple qu’elle est enseignée
ici aux troupes par l’Oberscharführer Knittel, qui dirige la Kulturabteilung : le Häftling est un
sous-homme, il n’est même pas humain, il est donc tout à fait légitime de le frapper. Mais ce
n’est pas tout à fait ça : après tout, les animaux ne sont pas humains non plus, mais aucun de
nos gardes ne traiterait un animal comme il traite les Häftlinge. La propagande joue en effet
un rôle, mais d’une manière plus complexe. J’en suis arrivé à la conclusion que le garde S S ne
devient pas violent ou sadique parce qu’il pense que le détenu n’est pas un être humain ; au
contraire, sa rage croît et tourne au sadisme lorsqu’il s’aperçoit que le détenu, loin d’être un
sous-homme comme on le lui a appris, est justement, après tout, un homme, comme lui au
fond, et c’est cette résistance, vous voyez, que le garde trouve insupportable, cette persistance
muette de l’autre, et donc le garde le frappe pour essayer de faire disparaître leur humanité
commune. Bien entendu, cela ne marche pas : plus le garde frappe, plus il est obligé de
constater que le détenu refuse de se reconnaître comme un *non-humain. À la fin, il ne lui
reste plus comme solution qu’à le tuer, ce qui est un constat d’échec définitif.» pp.573-574

Eichmann: « On ne fait pas la guerre pour que chaque
Allemand ait un frigidaire et une radio. On fait la guerre pour purifier l’Allemagne, pour créer
une Allemagne dans laquelle on voudrait vivre. Vous croyez que mon frère Helmut a été tué
pour un frigidaire? Vous, vous vous êtes battu à Stalingrad pour un frigidaire ? » Je haussai
les épaules en souriant : dans cet état, ce n’était plus la peine de discuter avec lui. Müller lui
mit la main sur l’épaule : « Eichmann, mon ami, vous avez raison. » pp. 705-706

Je bandais, l’idée me venait de me mettre nu, d’aller explorer nu cette grande
maison sombre et froide et silencieuse, un espace vaste et libre mais aussi privé et plein de
secrets, tout comme la maison de Moreau, lorsque nous étions enfants. Et cette pensée en
amenait derrière elle une autre, son double obscur, celle de l’espace quadrillé et surveillé des
camps : la promiscuité des baraquements, le grouillement des latrines collectives, aucun
endroit possible pour avoir, seul ou à deux, un moment humain. J’en avais discuté une fois
avec Höss, qui m’avait affirmé qu’en dépit de toutes les interdictions et les précautions les
détenus continuaient à avoir une activité sexuelle, pas seulement les kapos avec leurs Pipel ou
des lesbiennes entre elles, mais des hommes et des femmes, les hommes soudoyaient les
gardes pour qu’ils leur amènent leur maîtresse, ou se glissaient dans le Frauenlager avec un
Kommando de travail, et risquaient la mort pour une rapide secousse, un frottement de deux
bassins décharnés, un bref contact de corps rasés et pouilleux. J’avais été fortement
impressionné par cet érotisme impossible, voué à finir écrasé sous les bottes ferrées des
gardes, le contraire même dans sa désespérance de l’érotisme libre, solaire, transgressif des
riches, mais peut-être aussi sa vérité cachée indiquant sournoisement et obstinément que tout
amour vrai est inéluctablement tourné vers la mort, et ne tient pas compte, dans son désir, de
la misère des corps. Car l’homme a pris les faits bruts et sans prolongements donnés à toute créature sexuée et en a
bâti un imaginaire sans limites, trouble et profond, l’érotisme qui, plus que toute autre chose,
le distingue des bêtes, et il en a fait de même avec l’idée de la mort, mais cet imaginaire-là n’a
pas de nom, curieusement (on pourrait l’appeler thanatisme, peut-être) : et ce sont ces
imaginaires, ces jeux de hantises ressassés, et non pas la chose en elle-même, qui sont les
moteurs effrénés de notre soif de vie, de savoir, d’écartèlement de soi. Je tenais toujours entre
mes mains L’éducation sentimentale, posée sur mes jambes presque au contact de mon sexe,
oubliée, je laissais ces pensées d’idiot affolé me labourer la tête, l’oreille emplie du battement
angoissé de mon coeur. pp.809-810

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Polity.

Lecture notes.

Solids ↔ Liquids

Features of fluidity – lightness, cannot easily hold their shape, neither fix space nor bind time, time matters.

‘Bonding’, in turn, is a term that signifies the stability of solids – the resistance they put up  against separation of the atoms’. p. 2

Fluidity or liquidity as fitting metaphors when we wish to grasp the nature of the present, in many ways novel, phase in the history of modernity. p.2

Origins of metaphor:

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto: All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind. p. 4 (section Bourgeois and Proletarians)

The first solids to be melted and the first sacreds to be profaned were traditional loyalties, customary rights and obligations which bound hands and feet, hindered moves and cramped the enterprise. p. 3

This process of melting solids “laid the field open to the invasion and domination of instrumental rationality or the determining role of economy”. p.4

However free and volatile the ‘subsystems’ of that order may be singly or severally, the way in which they are intertwined is ‘rigid, fatal, and sealed off from any freedom of choice’. (…) Rigidity of order is the artefact and sediment of the human agents ‘ freedom. p.5

From Estates to  Classes

Estates – no-appeal-allowed allocation-by-ascription.

Classes – the totality of life conditions and life prospects and determined the range of realistic life projects and life strategies. pp. 6-7

Today patterns and configurations are not longer “given”, they are to follow from (be shaped and reshaped) individual’s activity.  pp.6-7

Zombie categories and zombie institutions (Ulrich Beck) – the family, class and neighborhood. p.6

Research question(s):

Are, and if yes, in what measure old sociological concepts appropriate for the investigation of the new, fluid, world?

Five of the basic concepts from the orthodox narratives to be examined:

- emancipation

- individuality

- time/space

- work, and

- community.

Modernity – characterized by a changing relationship between space and time. […] Modern time has become first and foremost, the weapon in the conquest of space. pp.8-9

From Panopticon (Bentham/Foucuault) to post-Panoptical.

Power has become truly exterritorial, no longer bound, not even slowed down, by resistance of space. p.11

Nomadism ↔  Sedentarism

Emancipation.

Modernity put liberation on the top of the agenda of political reform and “freedom” at the top of list of values. p.18

Is liberation a blessing, or a curse?

Two kinds of answers were given:

1) Doubting the readiness of ordinary folks for freedom.

Arguments:

- people being mislead, cheated and deceived

- outrage against the “mass” unwilling to assume the risks and the responsibilities which come together with genuine autonomy and self-assertion

- “embourgeoisement” of the underdog

- mass culture

2) Contesting the benefits of “liberation’.

Arguments:

- a human being released from coercive social constraints is a beast rather than a free individual (Hobbes)

- absence of effective constraints will make life ‘nasty, brutish and short’

- patterns and routines imposed by condensed social pressures makes the social life predictable. pp. 18-20

The agenda of emancipation has been all but exhausted. […] ‘The individual’ has already been granted all the freedom he might have dreamed of and all the freedom he might have reasonably hoped for; social institutions are only too willing to cede the worries of definitions and identities to the individual initiative, while universal principles to rebel against are hard to find. p.22

Society we live in stopped questioning itself (Cornelius Castoriadis). This is a kind of society which no longer recognizes any alternative to itself. p. 22

Accommodation of critique – “Contemporary society has given to the ‘hospitality to critique’ an entirely new sense and has invented a way to accommodate critical thought and action while remaining immune to the consequences of that accommodation, and so emerging unaffected and unscathed – reinforced rather than weakened – from the tests and trials of the open-house policy.” p. 23

Critical theory – it targeted a specific type of modernity.

That heavy/solid/condensed/systemic modernity of the ‘critical theory’ era was endemically pregnant with the tendency towards totalitarianism. The totalitarian society of all-embracing, compulsory and enforced homogeneity loomed constantly and threateningly on the horizon – as its ultimate destination, as a never-fully-defused time-bomb or never-fully-exorcized spectre. That modernity was a sworn enemy of contingency, variety, ambiguity, waywardness and idiosyncrasy, having declared on all such ‘anomalies’ a holy war of attrition; and it was individual freedom and autonomy that were commonly expected to be the prime casualties of the crusade.

Principal icons of that modernity:

- fordist factory

- bureaucracy

- Panopticon

- Big Brother

- the Konzlager.  pp. 25-26

We have been emancipated from belief in the act of creation, revelation and eternal condemnation. With such beliefs out of the way, we humans found ourselves ‘on our own’ – which means that from then on we knew of no limits to improvement and self-improvement other than the shortcomings of our own inherited or acquired gifts, resourcefulness, nerve, will and determination (Lessing). p. 28

Comment V.S.: is this related to Nietzsche’s dead of God? Or with Dostoyevsky’s “If God is dead, everything is possible”?

Two features of our novel form of modernity:

1. The gradual collapse and swift decline of early modern illusion: of the belief that there is […] an attainable telos of historical change, a state of perfection to be reached tomorrow, next year or next millennium.

2. Deregulation and privatization of the modernizing tasks and duties, change from collective action to individual action. The idea of improvement through legislative action of the society gradually changes towards the self-assertion of the individual. p. 29

Individualization and individualization processes: Freud→Elias→Beck.

Modern society exists in its incessant activity of ‘individualizing’ as much as the activities of individuals consist in the daily reshaping and renegotiating of the network of mutual entanglements called ‘society’. […] The meaning of ‘individualization’ keeps changing, taking up ever new shapes. p. 31

Individualization consists of transforming human ‘identity’ from a ‘given’ into a ‘task’. p. 31

Modernity replaces the heteronomic determination of social standing with compulsive and obligatory self-determination. p.32

Now, as before – individualization is a fate, not a choice. p. 34

Ulrich Beck: individualization as a biographical solution to systemic contradictions. p. 34

Individual ↔ Citizen

The citizen is inclined to seek her or his own welfare through the well-being of the city, while the individual tends to reject the “common cause”, “common good”, ‘good society” or “just society”. p. 36

Colonization of public by the private – public interest is reduced to curiosity about the private lives of public figures. p. 37

A wide and growing gap between the condition of individuals de jure and their chances to become individuals de facto – that is, to gain control over their fate and make the choices they truly desire. p. 39

Society is now primarily the condition which individuals strongly need, yet badly miss – in their vain and frustrating struggle to reforge their de jure status into the genuine  autonomy and capacity for self-assertion. pp. 40-41

Toward a new critical theory:

- to question the job with which human beings are charged today – the self-constitution of individual life and the weaving as well as the servicing of the networks of bonds with other self-constituting individuals.

- to question the precariousness of human partnerships

- to criticize the fragility of all common action

- to move beyond the impossibility of generalizing experiences, lived-through as personal and subjective, into problems fit to be inscribed into the public agenda. pp. 49-50

Defense of public sphere: Any true liberation calls today for more, not less, of the ‘public sphere’ and ‘public power’ It is now the public sphere which badly needs defence against the invading private – though, paradoxically, in order to enhance, not cut down, individual liberty. p. 59

individuality.

Joshua discourse ↔ Genesis discourse, or order↔disorder (pp. 54-55)

The world sustaining the Joshua discourse and making it credible was the Fordist world as the highest achievement to date of order-aimed social ingineering. p. 57

Capital↔Labor

Capital and labour were fixed to the ground. Now capital travels light, while labor remains as immobilized as it was in the past. p. 58

Domination of instrumental rationality, but without knowing the ends (goals).

No Big Brother, no Supreme office (multiplication of authorities).

Everything, so to speak, is now down to the individual. It is up to the individual to find out what she or he is capable of doing, to stretch that capacity to the utmost, and to pick the ends to which that capacity could be applied best – that is, to the greatest conceivable satisfaction. It is up to the individual to ‘tame the unexpected to become an entertainment’ p. 62.

Leaders ↔ Counsellors pp. 64-65

Leaders – act as two-way translators between individual good and the ‘good of us all’, or (as Wright C. Mills would have put it) between private worries and public issues.

Counsellors – are wary of ever stepping beyond the closed area of the private. Illnesses are individual, and so is the therapy; worries are private, and so are the means to fight them off. The counsels which the counsellors supply refer to life-politics, not to Politics with a capital P; they refer to what the counselled persons might do by themselves and for themselves, each one for himself or herself – not to what they all together might achieve for each one of them, once they join forces. pp. 64-65

Demise of politics as we know it: the activity charged with the task of translating private problems into public issues (and vice versa) became the discussion of private problems of public figures. p. 70

The new consumerism is driven not by needs but by desire. […] Not founded upon the regulation (stimulation) of desire, but upon the liberation of wishful fantasies. p. 74

Commodification of the body – it has to fit, to be healthy.

Shopping as exorcism

Consumer dependency as a substituent of society: In a consumer society, sharing in consumer dependency – in the universal dependency on shopping – is the condition sine qua non of all individual freedom; above all, of the freedom to be different, to ‘have identity’. pp. 84-85

the mobility and the flexibility of identification which characterize the ‘shopping around’ type of life are not so much vehicles of emancipation as the instruments of the redistribution of freedoms. p. 90

time/space.

community – the last relic of the old-time utopias of the good society. p. 92

civil space – the provision of spaces which people may share as public personae.

models of civil space:

- La Defense is first and foremost the inhospitality of the place: everything within sight inspires awe yet discourages staying (emic place).

- The second category of public yet non-civil space is meant to serve the consumers or, rather, to transubstantiate the city resident into a consumer. In the words of Liisa Uusitalo, ‘Consumers often share physical spaces of consumption such as concert or exhibition halls, tourist resorts, sport activity sites, shopping malls and cafeterias, without having any actual social interaction.’ Such spaces encourage action, not inter-action. (phagic place)

- non-places (Marc Auge) – airports, highways

- empty spaces – spaces empty of meaning, they are seen as empty.  pp. 96-97

conquest and routinization of time

instant living

unstable and transient objects

work.

Self-confidence of moderns: Progress? Do not think of it as ‘the work of history’ It is our work, the work of us, who live in the present. p. 131

Progress= the self-confidence of the present. p. 132

The absence of an agency able to “move the world forward’

It is unclear what the agency should do to improve the shape of the world in the unlikely case that it is powerful enough to do it. pp. 133-134

Fear of Big utopias.

Progress has now been ‘individualized”, deregulated and privatized. p. 135

The transformation of labour toward flexibility.

individualization of labor and stresses associated with it

inadequacy of old form of solidarity, union action.

disengagement and loosening of ties linking capital and labour. p. 149

the reproduction and growth of capital, profits and dividents and the satisfaction of stockholders have all become largely independent from the duration of any particular local engagement with labour. p. 149

capital has become light, exterritorial, unencumbered and disembedded. p. 149

politics has today become a tug-of war between the speed with which capital can move and the ‘slowing down’ capacities of local powers, and it is the local institutions which more often than not feel like waging a battle they cannot win. p. 150

ideas become the main sources of profit, rather than material objects.

4 categories of people presently engaged in economic activity (according to Robert Reich):

- ‘Symbol manipulators’, people who invent the ideas and the ways to make them desirable and marketable

- People engaged in the reproduction of labour (educators or various functionaries of welfare state)

- People employed in ‘personal services’ – the sellers of products and the producers of desire for products

- ‘Routine labourers’, tied to the assembly line or ( in more up-to-date plants) to the computer networks and electronic automated devices like check-out points. pp. 151-152

Procrastination as delay of gratification.

To “put ploughing and sowing above harvesting and ingesting the crops, investment above creaming off the gains, saving above spending, self-denial above self-indulgence, work above consumption.” p. 158

Procrastination led to two different tendencies

- work ethic, or work for the work’s sake

- aesthetic of consumption p. 158

Instrumentalization of the world: Precarious economic and social conditions train men and women (or make them learn the hard way) to perceive the world as a container full of disposable objects, objects for one-off use; the whole world – including other human beings. p. 162

Bonds and partnerships tend to be viewed and treated as things meant to be consumed, not produced; they are subject to the same criteria of evaluation as all other objects of consumption. p. 163

community.

All communities are postulated; projects rather than realities, something that comes after, not before the individual choice. p. 169

Three models of unity

- nationalism

- patriotism

- republicanism

The republican model is the sole variant of unity (the only formula of togetherness) which the conditions of liquid modernity render compatible, plausible and realistic.

This model of an emergent unity which is a joint achievement of the agents engaged in self-identification pursuits, a unity which is an outcome, not an a priori given condition, of shared life, a unity put together through negotiation and reconciliation, not the denial, stifling or smothering out of differences. p. 178

The ‘unholy trinity’ of uncertainty, insecurity and unsafety, each one generating anxiety. p. 181

Body and community are the last defensive outposts on the increasingly deserted battlefield on which the war for certainty, security and safety is waged daily with little, if any, respite. p. 184

The decline of nation-states – eroded by the new global powers armed with the awesome weapons of exterritoriality, speed of movement and evasion/escape ability; retribution for violating the new global brief is swift and merciless. p. 186

Discreditation of nation-states sovereignty

The role of violence in the birth and perseverance of community. (R. Girard) p. 194

the task of sociology – to make intelligible the human condition.

Sociology, one is tempted to say, is a third current, running in parallel with poetry and history. Or at least this is what it should be if it is to stay inside that human condition which it tries to grasp and make intelligible; and this is what it has tried to become since its inception, though it has been repeatedly diverted from trying by mistaking the seemingly impenetrable and not-yet-decomposed walls for the ultimate limits of human potential and going out of its way to reassure the garrison commanders and the troops they command that the lines they have drawn to set aside the off-limits areas will never be transgressed. pp. 203-204

Sociologists, artists and philosophers – have to be at home in many homes, but to be in each inside and outside at the same time, to combine intimacy with the critical look of an

outsider, involvement with detachment – a trick which sedentary people are unlikely to learn. p. 207

Taking distance, taking time – in order to separate destiny and fate, to emancipate destiny from fate, to make destiny free to confront fate and challenge it: this is the calling of sociology. And this is what sociologists may do, if they consciously, deliberately and earnestly strive to reforge the calling they have joined – their fate – into their destiny. p. 210

The need for sociological imagination: sociology is needed today more than ever before. The job in which sociologists are the experts, the job of restoring to view the lost link between objective affliction and subjective experience, has become more vital and indispensable than ever, while less likely than ever to be performed without their professional help, since its performance by the spokesmen and practitioners of other fields of expertise has become utterly improbable. p. 211

Sociology -  enlightenment aimed at human understanding. p. 211

Sociology is the sole field of expertise in which Dilthey’s famed distinction between explanation and understanding has been overcome and cancelled. p. 211-212

The kind of enlightenment which sociology is capable of delivering is addressed to freely choosing individuals and aimed at enhancing and reinforcing their freedom of choice. Its immediate objective is to reopen the allegedly shut case of explanation and so to promote understanding. It is the self-formation and self-assertion of individual men and women, the preliminary condition of their ability to decide whether they want the kind of life that has been presented to them as their fate that as a result of sociological enlightenment may gain in vigour, effectiveness and rationality. The cause of the autonomous society may profit together with the cause of the autonomous individual; they can only win or lose together. p. 212

The absence of guaranteed meanings – of absolute truths, of preordained norms of conduct, of pre-drawn borderlines between right and wrong, no longer needing attention, of guaranteed rules of successful action – is the conditio sine qua non of, simultaneously, a truly autonomous society and truly free individuals; autonomous society and the freedom o f its members condition each other. Whatever safety democracy and individuality may muster depends not on fighting the endemic contingency and uncertainty of human condition, but on recognizing it and facing its consequences point-blank. pp. 212-213

Orthodox sociology ↔ sociology of liquid modernity

Orthodox sociology was preoccupied with the conditions of human obedience and conformity

Sociology of liquid modernity must therefore put individual self-awareness, understanding and responsibility at its focus.

Doing sociology and writing sociology is aimed at disclosing the possibility of living together differently, with less misery or no misery: the possibility daily withheld, overlooked or unbelieved. Not-seeing, not-seeking and thereby suppressing this possibility is itself part of human misery and a major factor in its perpetuation. Its disclosure does not by itself predetermine its use; also, when known, possibilities may not be trusted enough to be put to the test of reality. Disclosure is the beginning, not the end of the war against human misery. pp. 215-216

Impossibility of neutral sociology.

There is no choice between ‘engaged’ and ‘neutral’ ways of doing sociology. A non-committal sociology is an impossibility. Seeking a morally neutral stance among the many brands of sociology practised today, brands stretching all the way from the outspokenly libertarian to the staunchly communitarian, would be a vain effort. Sociologists may deny or forget the ‘world-view’ effects of their work, and the impact of that view on human singular or joint actions, only at the expense of forfeiting that responsibility of choice which every other human being faces daily. The job of sociology is to see to it that the choices are genuinely free, and that they remain so, increasingly so, for the duration of humanity. p. 216