Discipline and deterrence: Rethinking Foucault on the question of power in contemporary society

Discipline and Deterrence: Rethinking Foucault on the Question of Power in Contemporary Society

WILLIAM

BOGARD*

Whitman

College

This article considers how Michel Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power might be reformulated and extended to account for significant transformations in the mechanisms of social control in contemporary, postmodem societies. Despite several interesting efforts to apply Foucault’s conception of discipline to social control issues in the sociological and criminological literature, such efforts have for the most part misinterpreted his position. This article suggests a more adequate reading of Foucault’s conception of discipline as a multipricity of minor coercive techniques which taken together constitute one of multiple schemes for exercising power under given historical social conditions. With regard to the multiple dimensions of power, I shall argue, noting recent criticisms of Foucault’s work by Jean Baudrillard, that the exercise of power in contemporary or postmodem societies involves not only mechanisms of discipline, but of deterrence as well. To what extent is discipline the characteristic mode of social control in late modern or postmodem societies, i.e., societies of the present? I raise this question in reaction to an interesting theoretical debate, now entering its second decade, provoked by Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault’s influential study of camera1 technologies at the beginning of the modem age.’ Among the diverse topics of that debate have been the role of imprisonment in the 20th century, the history of its development, its uses and representations, successes and failures, and the changing calls for its reform. These might be called the debate’s penal, or better, institutional concerns. But at another level, its topic is power, a topic which in the last several years has been revitalized by postmodem theory, specifically with regard to how to conceptualize what may be significant transformations in the mechanisms through which power is exercised today. At issue here is Foucault’s thesis that contemporary Western societies can be characterized as “disciplinarian,” and that discipline, as a strategy for normalizing individual conduct or administering the affairs of social collectivities, has become the general formula for domination in these societies.2 *Direct all correspondence to: William Bogxd, WA 99362. Telephone: (509) 527-5122.

Department

of Sociology,

The Social Science Journal, Volume 28, Number 3, pages 325-346. Copyright 0 1991 by JAI Press Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 0362-3319.

Whitman

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A number of divergent positions have emerged from this debate: that the disciplinary tactics of the modem prison have dispersed into the wider non-camera1 environmentinto, for example, the system of public welfare, community-based corrections, treatment centers, and private business3; that discipline is losing or has lost its usefulness today as a strategy of penality or, more broadly, social contro14; or finally, that the very conditions of possibility for the exercise of disciplinary power, as Foucault conceives it, have collapsed or no longer exist in technically advanced, informationbased societies.5 One purpose of this essay is to suggest that some of the contributors to this debate, particularly those attracted to Foucault’s work from sociology and criminology, have either misrepresented his claims or have failed to appreciate the flexibility of his analysis of discipline. Instead, they have tended to force Foucault’s work into alignment with relatively narrow institutional or ideological concerns, things which in fact interested him only indirectly. On the other hand, those who have criticized Foucault from a position more his own have done better in drawing attention to some important theoretical distinctions regarding contemporary power relationships. Among the latter group, I believe Jean Baudrillard has presented the most interesting and useful argumentroughly, that “deterrence” has supplanted disciplinary strategies oriented to the problem of exercising power in contemporary, postmodem societies-even though it too, as we shall see, is based on an interpretation of Foucault that attributes to him a position on power which is not in fact his own. A second and more positive aim is to suggest how, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault was moving toward a far more open conception of discipline as a “multiplicity within a multiplicity:” i.e., both a multiplicity of minor coercive techniques, and a social field which together with other social fields in history comprise multiple forms, or “diagrams ,” of power. Here I shall rely heavily on an interpretation of Foucault developed elsewhere.6 But I shall use it to argue that the exercise of power in contemporary societies, and in the institutions of those societies, is a matter of both discipline and deterrence, or conversely, that power as it tends to be exercised today is a matter of neither one of these methods exclusively. I do not mean that both together exhaust the present possibilities of exercising power, only that an analysis of power relations which could account for contemporary forms of domination and subjugation must at a minimum allow for both. But before we can reach this point, it will be necessary to reexamine what Foucault means by “discipline.” THE

DIAGRAM

OF DISCIPLINE

Foucault does not begin his analysis by providing us with a universal formula for discipline. Rather, he describes a profusion of minor techniques (the disciplines), of the most diverse origin and application, and asks how, over a period extending from the 17th to the early 19th century, they come to produce something like the “blueprint of a general method” of domination.’ In Discipline and Punish, Foucault traces three converging historical developments: the birth of a detailed “political anatomy” of the body, the diffusion of a mechanics of normalization and individualization, and panoptic surveillance. Beginning in the 17th century and throughout the 18th century, a number of forces coalesce around the body to increase its power and capacity for work. A

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whole micro-physics of distributing spaces, serializing movements, combining and ranking behaviors is organized on an unprecedented scale to transform bodies and their relations to one another into a generalized productive machinery-obedient, economical, and efficient. Supplementing these are a whole set of techniques for training the individual to conform to a norm, utilizing “corrective” mechanisms that coerce by means of continuous examination and hierarchical observation. Behind everything looms the figure of the Panopticon, Bentham’s ideal prison or “inspection house,” whose concrete operation depends on an art and mechanics of discreet surveillance, but whose formal principle-and here perhaps Foucault comes closest to an abstract formula for discipline-is to impose a particular form of conduct on a human multiplicity.8

To multiply the powers of bodies by transforming them into a passive machinery, to measure their conduct against a norm, to subject them to continuous supervision: taken together, these projects come to constitute responses to the general “problematic” of how power can be exercised at the beginning of the modern age. They become, over time, the object of specialized knowledge and interests-in criminology, psychiatry, pedagogy, administration-and the locus of social struggles for the reform of disciplinary institutions. It might be said, as Deleuze has noted, that in the abstract sense, discipline for Foucault is like a “diagram” or schema of the forces that create individuals, differentiating and separating them from a confused mass of bodies, composing and realigning their relations and turning them into a productive order.9 Foucault first invokes the notion of a diagram in reference to Bentham’s plan for the Panopticon, but it is clear from passages like the following that it has a significance beyond its application to the prison: . . the Panopticon . . 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.10

The Panoptic diagram thus becomes something like a general diagram of the disciplines, the map of what Foucault will come to call a “disciplinary society.” A diagram should not be confused with an ideological formation or a representation which masks the truth of social relations and stands apart from them, nor does it precisely define the structure of those relations. It is neither a utopian configuration nor a Weberian ideal type.” For Foucault, a diagram is embedded in the very social relations it constitutes, as an immanent cause. Deleuze notes that Foucault thinks of a diagram as something like an “abstract machine” that sets processes in motion, giving a form to unformed matter and finalizing various functions (e.g., education, care, enforced

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work).12 It is an unstable historical formation, neither universal nor the totality of social relations, but rather the form of a changing amalgam of localized events and processes. When Foucault invokes the diagram of a “disciplinary society,” he is referring to the generalization of a multiplicity of techniques that have separate and relatively independent developments throughout the 17th and 18th centuries-in schools, military hospitals, armies, workshops-but which at the turn of the 19th century begin to freely circulate, traversing the social body in the form of standardized procedures for making power relationships function in the most diverse social settings. One could say that discipline for Foucault is a form of power, but more precisely, it is a generalized response to the question of how power can be exercised to address the manifold problems of production and control which arise in the modern age. All this gives Foucault’s method in Discipline and Punish a maximum of flexibility. It would be the worst mistake to interpret his work as an effort to assign some absolute status to discipline as a form of power. In the first place, discipline always creates gaps, spaces of free play which embody new possibilities for struggle and resistance. This follows from Foucault’s belief that power is always relational, and that resistance is a necessary feature of any power relationship.13 Second, the diagram of discipline refers to only ooze possible mode of the exercise of power, although for Foucault it is a dominant mode of modernity, one which has the potential to invest, if never the entire social field, at least a significant part of it. But the fact remains that just as diagrams are multiplicities, so are there multiple diagrams-we might say that discipline for Foucault is a “multiplicity within a multiplicity.” Other diagrams can mix with or coexist alongside the disciplinary diagram, supplement it, or replace it as the dominant form. Conversely, the diagram of discipline can substitute for older, formerly dominant, forms of power. Foucault claims that if disciplinary power has a model, it is the plague, which quarantines the infected individual behind closed doors and regulates, in multiple ways, the smallest details of his life.14 Sovereign societies of the past, on the other hand, possessed an entirely different diagram of power, organized around entirely different mechanisms-not disciplinary power, which quietly combines and multiplies forces through instituting a strict regimen of conduct, but the power of exile, which acts by the division and exclusion of forces and takes the segregation or isolation of the leper as its model. I5 Such models are, in fact, fictions, and we should not expect to find any social circumstances which embody them in their pure form. The important point is that Foucault’s method allows for as many diagrams as there are social fields in history, each one an unstable and evolving multiplicity, and each producing its own regimes of truth and power.lh Foucault never claims that discipline is an exclusively modem phenomenon, an interpretation which derives from the mistaken view that his intention is to focus on significant gaps or discontinuities in the history of power and knowledge.” Discipline didn’t suddenly emerge in the late 18th century; Foucault is quite clear in noting that earlier ages were familiar enough with its uses-in monasteries, armies, workshops. Rather it expanded its scope and refined its tactics, took on new objects and formed general strategies, responding to the massive demographic, economic, and politicojudicial changes that swept over Europe during this time and which posed new problems for the productive control of social relations.

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On the other hand, Discipline and Punish is sometimes read as an attempt by Foucault to say something about the nature of contemporary power relationships, and then immediately criticized for failing in this aim because most of the book is limited to a description of disciplinary strategies in the 18th and 19th centuries. But this is not a fair criticism either. Foucault never intended in Discipline and Punish to write about the current situation, only to isolate certain historical themes and problems that might be useful for understanding-and possibly transforming-power relations as they exist today .I8 Misinterpretations of this sort probably account for why some analyses of modern disciplinary strategies in the so-called “social control” literature in sociology and criminology appear strained whenever they attempt to mark their distance from Foucault. One recent case in point is the influential “dispersion of discipline” thesis developed by Stanley Cohen. I9 Cohen argues that we are now living in what appears to be a reversal of the first great transformation in social control which Foucault described in Discipline and Punish. This reversal is characterized by a breakdown of the old ideological consensus about the desirability of centralized control and the confinement of deviants in early 19th century penality. But Cohen notes that rather than signalling an end to discipline as a mechanism of control, this breakdown coincides with its liberation from the narrow confines of the penal system-hence his phrase “dispersion of discipline.” To support his case, Cohen notes how prison reform ideologies of the 1960’s_the various calls during that period for decentralization, decarceration, delegalization or deprofessionalization-merely fostered or served as alibis for an extension of the disciplinary regime imposed by 19th century penal institutions into the wider society in the form of community corrections programs, treatment centers, neighborhood watch organizations, etc.-a process of “widening the net and thinning the mesh’ in which ever more persons are subjected to disciplinary forms of coercion.20 In the first place, it should be pointed out that in Discipline and Punish Foucault had already described the tendency of penal reform discourse to perpetuate, refine, and extend the very system of controls which it seeks to reform.21 This is not at all anything new, but is in fact contemporaneous with the institution of camera1 practices in the late 18th century. For Foucault, even radical changes in penal ideology for the most part only mean business as usual. It is difficult to distinguish any real difference between Foucault and Cohen on this point (as I think Cohen himself would readily admit). The “reversal” Cohen refers to, if it is to have any significance at all, must concern not just an ideological reorientation to the problem of discipline, but the actual decentralization of disciplinary techniques and their subsequent dispersal into the wider society. But again, Foucault provides a number of illustrations of this very process at work early in the 19th century. Cohen’s analysis for the most part ignores Foucault’s extended discussion of the “swarming of the disciplines” and his remarks about how the camera1 systemfrom the very beginning effected a transport of penitentiary techniques from the penal institution to the wider society.** Cohen may be right to point out that disciplinary tactics and the institutions that employ them have changed in the latter part of the 20th century, but the “dispersion” of discipline is a strategic phenomenon that has its origins in an earlier age and not in the 1960’s. Cohen’s

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“great reversal” is, I think, at best a misleading concept. At worst, it based upon a highly selective reading of Foucault. In a contrasting argument, Anthony Bottoms claims that correctional practice in the late 20th century is characterized by strategies which rely more on preventative or juridical rather than disciplinary controls. He argues that recent evidence compiled from court statistics indicates that the trend in modem penality has been away from strategies that focus on the normalization of individual thought and conduct-here Bottoms uses the term “soul-training” to summarize what Foucault meant by discipline -toward those which function to divert whole categories of offenders away from the system of incarceration.23 In the limited context of an analysis of penal institutions, this argument is persuasive enough and has some value in drawing our attention to an important goal of contemporary correctional practice. But to challenge Foucault on his own ground, Bottoms would need to inquire into the possibility that prevention has become a general formula of domination over and beyond its specific application in penal contexts. More troubling is Bottoms’s effort to categorically restrict Foucault’s analysis of discipline to the practice of “soul-training.” We shall see below in our discussion of “bio-power” that Foucault did not intend the concept of discipline to be exhausted in a notion of individual training-whether of the body or the soul-and that the kinds of preventative strategies which Bottoms views as necessary to the control of whole categories of persons is in fact accounted for by Foucault. To be fair, Bottoms is ready to admit that disciplinary methods still play a very important role in contemporary social control strategies. But he fails to appreciate the flexibility of Foucault’s diagrammatic analysis and succumbs to the general temptation to reduce the multiplicity of disciplinary strategies which Foucault describes to a single category. I shall return to these arguments again below as examples of contemporary sociological approaches to social control or penality that have reworked Foucault’s analysis of discipline to fit better into their own ideological and institutional concerns. To date, they have either misunderstood or have had little to add to the general analysis of power Foucault develops in the early pages of Discipline and Punish. On the other hand, researches of this kind owe much to Foucault for opening up to the social sciences a number of possibilities for describing modem conditions and effects of power. THE PRISON Discipline, for Foucault, cannot be identified with any particular institution. This may seem surprising in a book which spends so much time talking about the prison and its strategies of control. But if Foucault refers to the prison, it is always in relation to prior concerns: how imprisonment came to be taken in the 19th century as the ideal means for punishing infractions in society; how strategic forms of knowledge developed around and rationalized this procedure; how the arbitrary power to punish invested in the sovereign ruler prior to the 18th century was gradually transformed into a penitentiary system with its own unique forms of coercion.24 Before Discipline and Punish is about the prison, it is about the question of how power can be exercised, of how discipline comes to be accepted as a mechanics of control that can cut transversally across all institutions, linking them together and making them function in new ways.*5 For Foucault, the prison is not singled out as the only possible model for

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discipline. Rather, it is the concrete assemblage that, because of its extreme concentration of disciplinary methods, comes closest to embodying the ideals expressed in this model. If we understand this, it is not so difficult to comprehend why Foucault ends his analysis in Discipline and Punish with a commentary on the Mettray prison colony, an exemplar of the 19th century penality which represents the completion (and not the origin) of the disciplinary diagram in the form of a system of incarceration: 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 behavior.z6 For Foucault, the institution of the prison “fixes” multiple relations of disciplinary power (the same can also be said of educational, military, religious, or economic institutions). Better, it is the visible effect of a certain integration of power relations, an effect which simultaneously serves to differentiate the prison from other institutions and to make a continuous circulation of disciplinary techniques among them possible. It is true that Foucault says that in the 19th century prisons come to resemble schools, factories, hospitals, etc., which in turn all resemble the prison.27 But this does not prevent the prison and other institutions from being relatively autonomous formations with their own objects and modes of functioning. Further, the prison itself is an unstable, fluid form. Throughout most of the 18th century it was a rather marginal institution for punishing crimes, and may become so once again. There is nothing to suggest that discipline necessitates incarceration when other techniques would be better adapted to the control of infractions in society.28 When seen from Foucault’s perspective, the prison institution emerges as a microcosm of minor processes whose operations are situated on a different level than ideology, or in this case the formal prescriptions of penal law. Whereas penal law forms a system of representations geared to the classification of crimes, the prison sets into motion an entire technology or machinery of production.29 It is a machine designed to make the offender and his conduct visible, and therefore “calculable.” While it is true that penal law might be said to evolve alongside the prison, they have two distinct histories. Their developments are uneven and at times contradictory, and it is the job of analysis to unravel the problematic of their multiple points of intersection over time. In view of the fact that neither penal institutions nor penal law constitute privileged points of departure for Foucault’s analysis of discipline, it is unfortunate that all too often it is precisely from these points that his critics in the social control literature launch their attacks. The result, I think, has been a restriction of the debate to topics that only tangentially concerned Foucault and a redirection of attention away from important questions about diagrammatic features of power relations in contemporary society. We’ve seen that to support his claim that preventative rather than disciplinary technologies constitute the major form of social control in modem society, Bottoms compiles statistics from the outcomes of court cases which show a proportional decline in the use of imprisonment as a method of punishment in relation to the increasing use of other, noncarceral, methods-fines, deferred sentences, victim compensation,

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etc.30 Cohen, on the other hand, also begins his analysis with a reference to the system of incarceration, working outward from this point to the quasi- or extra-penal environment into which he claims its methods have diffused-the system of halfway and quarterway houses, parole offices, juvenile detention facilities, welfare agencies, treatment centers, and so forth.3’ There is nothing wrong with such approaches per se, but it is not how Foucault poses the problem. If we situate the analysis of discipline at the level of penal law, we fail to thematize the multiplicity of disciplinary techniques. If we situate the analysis of discipline at the level of the institution, we are prone to confuse cause and effect. In the latter case, we must say that disciplinary technologies do not so much diffuse outward from the prison as the prison itself is the effect of process of diffusion, or more accurately, the concrete form of a diffusive process which passes through it and which both anticipates and antedates it. Such analyses also tend to substitute a function of the institution for that which makes it possible to function. For Foucault, it is not that the function of prisons, in the sense of a purpose or end, is discipline (or training, rehabilitation, correction, etc.). If that that were the case, it could easily be argued that the prison does not “function” at all, and that judged by these standards it is a hopeless failure (and indeed, many criminologists have noted just this fact). Foucault, on the other hand, is not so much concerned with admonishments about the failure of the prison or the recurring calls for its reform, which have dogged the prison since its beginning (such might be part of the ideological discourse of criminology for which Foucault has little patience).32 Rather when he speaks, as he occasionally does in his discussion of the Panoptic diagram, about the function of the prison, it is not in terms of its purpose, but rather of the prison as a function-of power relations-and as a mechanism through which power relations themselves become finalized functions (e.g., of correction, rehabilitation, punishment, therapy, etc.): The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations functions in a function, and of making a function through these power relations.33

Abstractly considered, the institution of the prison has no special or exemplary status. Except for the fact that here one can find disciplinary methods concentrated in their most extreme form, the prison, like other institutions, is an effect of multiple power relations which themselves are in turn functions of broader historical forces (I shall return to this point below). What is of primary concern for Foucault is not the institution, but the diagram of power, the abstract panoptic or disciplinary machine itself as it traverses those institutions and sets them in motion. BIO-POWER

AND THE

CONTROL

OF THE

POPULATION

It is only when Foucault’s critics turn aside from their institutional concerns to focus on the whole micro-economy of discipline that truly interesting arguments begin to emerge. Some commentators have noted a shift from 19th century tactics which had as their object the production of individual capacities-a political anatomy of the

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body-to the use of measures designed for the control of whole categories of persons. Mass surveillance, the decentralization of social control, the development of computerized matching and profiling systems, and the widespread use of probabilistic or insurial models in the public and private spheres are variously cited as as evidence of a move away from a disciplinary diagram of power toward a diagram whose object is diffuse and situated on a macro-level.34 But in fact, Foucault has argued much the same thing in other places.35 In Discipline and Punish, we recall, the abstract formula of discipline (or more accurately, the disciplines) was to impose a form of conduct on a multiplicity of particular individuals. There Foucault had concentrated on minute and detailed exercises of power over a limited number of bodies confined to a relatively small spacethe classroom, the barracks, prison cells. But in later work, he turned to consider controls of a more administrative nature, whose objects were large multiplicities (or entire populations) distributed over wide areas-controls directed, in political and economic domains, to “problems of birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration.“36 In the first volume of The History of SexuaEity, Foucault invokes the sphere of “bio-power” or “bio-politics,” the form of power exercised not just over the individual’s life but over Eife in general, and with its own attendant forms of knowledge-demographic, probabilistic, distributional-oriented to the evaluation of the relation between resources and inhabitants, the accumulation of capital, and the general expansion of the productive forces.37 If, in The History of Sexuality, bio-power becomes for Foucault another general formula for domination, it is not because he thinks a new diagram of power has succeeded a disciplinary one. He notes that techniques for the control of entire populations were both contemporaneous with and geared into those whose object was the political investment of the body. Considered abstractly they form not a totality, but a dualism, or better, a bipolar continuum of a multiplicity of material relations whose principle is the “power over life:” disciplinary power- control over the living body--and administrative power-control over the living population:

In concrete terms, starting in the seventeenth century, [the] power over life evolved in two basic forms; these forms were not antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of these poles. . . centered on the body as a machine [and] its disciplining . . The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body [whose] supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population. . . . these two techniques of power. . were to be joined. . in the form of concrete arrangements that would go to make up the great technology of power in the nineteenth century.38

Does the bipolar nature of the “power over life” create a problem for Foucault’s concept of “disciplinary societies. 7” Can the diagram of discipline which Foucault first invoked in Discipline and Punish now refer to both sides of the dualism, the techniques of the body and those of the population? That is, is “bio-power” a form

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of discipline? Deleuze, who perhaps knew Foucault’s thought on these matters best among all his commentators, writes: “When the diagram of power abandons the model of sovereignty in favor of a disciplinary model, when it becomes the ‘bio-power’ or ‘bio-politics’ of population, controlling and administering life, it is indeed life that emerges as the new object of power” (italics mine).39

This would suggest, against Foucault’s critics, that the diagram of discipline cannot be uniquely identified with a micro-physics of the body, with techniques of training or normalization, or hierarchical observation, but refers also to a mechanics of administration. And certainly, the body does not disappear as the locus of an investment of power when Foucault refers to bio-power. The scale of control is expanded and decentralized, and a different problematic of the relation between power and knowledge is posed insofar as discipline no longer entails confinement of bodies to limited spaces. Foucault had in fact already begun to develop these ideas in DiscipEine and Punish, and The History of Sexuality merely carries it to a higher level. The notion of bio-power, the control over whole categories of persons-what Foucault will call the “species body”-is not incompatible with the concept of a disciplinary society.40 Rather, in supplementing Foucault’s analysis of the political anatomy of the body-of the disciplines-it imparts to the concept of a disciplinary society its fullest expression.

THE PANOPTICON The meaning of “discipline, ” in short, is for Foucault neither coextensive with “the disciplines ,” nor is it identical with power relations in general, which are always socially and historically embedded, multiple, localized, and diffuse. But what about the figure-the diagram-of the Panopticon Foucault invokes in Discipline and Punish? If Foucault claims that power itself does not reduce to this figure, in it he at least appears to provide us with a metaphor for a very important kind of power-the power of supervision and surveillance, of making human conduct calculable and its motivations “transparent.” Is panoticism, as a technology of power perfected in the 19th century, a viable historical image for understandinging power relationships as they exist in late modern societies? For Foucault, panopticism is both a mechanism of supervision and a strategy of truth. As a mechanism of supervision, it operates by means of discreet surveillance within a fixed space, recording the slightest movements and changes in attitude. As a strategy of truth, it probes the surface of the body and “brands” it, marking it off from other bodies according to a binary logic (separating healthy from diseased, sane from insane, delinquent from normal, young from old, etc.)?’ In the late 18th and early 19th century, panopticism emerges as a response to the problems of control posed by criminal activity, insanity, ignorance and disease in modem urban societies. And since panopticism is valuable as a generulizuble strategy of control, its effect is to blur the boundaries that once served to distinguish older mechanisms of control. The prison, the asylum, the school, the hospital: all become, to a greater or lesser

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degree, surveilling institutions under the image of the plague, all loci of the individualizing (subjugating) effects of power. Foucault notes that as a disciplinary apparatus, the Panopticon reverses all the principles of confinement which applied to the dungeon (deprivation of light and the hiding of the “prisoner”) except enclosure .42It is a system of light, a systematic play of visibilities and invisibilities facilited by the architectural arrangement of its parts and whose ideal is transparency. Its major effect is to induce within those confined there a reflective consciousness of their permanent, or more accurately, potential visibility. A single observer stationed in the central guardtower of Bentham’s Panopticon can efficiently monitor the entire group of prisoners confined along its periphery. The tower functions to mask the observer’s presence (or absence), since it is designed to allow seeing out but not seeing in. Although it is continually visible to the inmates from their cells, they are unable to verify the fact of their observation. Thus, in terms of actual effects, the exercise of power within the Panopticon is rendered invisible and non-corporeal; ideally, inmates enclosed within would not need to be continually supervised by a human observer-the watchtower alone, signalling the ever present possibility of observation, would be sufficient to insure their passivity. Foucault notes that the Panopticon is therefore “light” in another sense. Because inmates virtually police themselves in panoptic contexts, power can “throw off its weight.” As Bentham envisaged it, the perfection of panoptic power should tend to render all overt use of power unnecessary. Panopticism would assure the automatic and subtle functioning of power insofar as the observed are “caught up in a power situation of which they themselves are made to be the bearers.“43 THE

END OF PANOPTIC

SPACE?

As a mechanism of discipline, panoptic power functions by means of detailed inspection and examination. The image it invokes of continuous surveillance seems apropos of the kinds of disciplinary possibilities opened up by modern electronic media, particularly television, whose use in discreetly monitoring social transactions is now commonplace in a variety of settings, both public and private. In an interesting argument, however, Baudrillard has claimed that panoptic-and by extension, disciplinary -principles do not apply to televisual media, which cannot be thought of precisely as an apparatus of inspection:

The eye of TV is no longer the source of an absolute gaze, and the ideal of control is no longer that of transparency. The latter still presupposes an objective space (that of the Renaissance) and the omnipotence of a despotic gaze. This is still, if not a system of confinement, at least a system of scrutiny. No longer subtle, but always in a position of exterior&y, playing on the opposition between seeing and being seen, even if the focal point of the panopticon may be blind.M

Despite the great temptation to invoke an analogy between panoptic and televisual systems, Baudrillard insists that the development of television signals the end of panoptic space. As a system of detailed inspection and examination, the panoptic

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apparatus is perfectly suited to the functions of normalization and individualization, to recording small deviations from an established model of conduct (Bentham, for example, had noted that the Panopticon makes an ideal laboratory for conducting experiments). For Baudrillard, on the other hand, television effectively dispenses with the model, and with it the oppositions between activity and passivity, subjectivity and objectivity, center and periphery, on which panoptic space is grounded. More accurately, television does not transform individuals into passive objects (docile bodies), but, by virtue of its capacity to reproduce images, into their own models, both reversing and cancelling panoptic power and creating a “hyperspace” where it is no longer possible to distinguish between the model and its object. The result, for Baudrillard, is no longer a system of surveillance, but one of deterrence (which, ultimately, signals a dissipation of disciplinary power): apparatus of surveillance (of Disciwhere the distinction between active and passive is abolished. No longer is there any imperative to submit to the model, or to the gaze. “YOU are the model”. Such is the slope of hyperrealist sociality where the real is confused with the model . A turnabout of affairs by which it becomes impossible to locate an instance of the model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, since you are always already on the other side. No more subject, focal point, center or periphery, but pure flexion or circular inflection the dissolution of TV into life. the dissolution of life into TV.45 [With TV one switches]

over from a panoptic

pline and Punish) to a system of deterrence,

The notion of a system of deterrence is important in the general context of the question posed at the beginning of this article, and I shall return to it below. For now, I only wish to draw attention to the fact that Baudrillard is alternately sympathetic and unfair to Foucault in the two passages quoted above. Unlike some of Foucault’s critics, he realizes that panopticism cannot be reduced to or identified with a system of confinement or particular institution.46 That is, he recognizes that it is important to distinguish in Discipline and Punish between the Panopticon as an apparatus of incarceration and the diagram of panopticism, which need not entail confinement. But the point of Foucault’s analysis escapes him when he identifies the panoptic diagram with a system of “scrutiny” or the “objective gaze” (or more generally with a systematic play between seeing and being seen which functions even when the panopticon is “blind’). We might recall here that Bentham believed that panoptic arrangements, to the extent that they were capable of effecting the internalization of the power relationship, do not require the constancy, or even necessarily the presence, of a gaze. For Bentham, the internalization of power relations which becomes possible with panoptic systems, at least ideaEly, transforms subjects into “models” of their own conduct; that is, they become, ultimately of their own accord, “model’ prisoners. Now it is true that Foucault does not approach the problem of panoptic supervision in the same way Bentham did, i.e., he is not concerned with the psychological question of how power relations are internalized. And it is also true that a consideration of the multiple techniques for making something visible or opening it to inspection constitutes a major part of Foucault’s discussion of panopticism. But if Foucault emphasized the importance of the gaze in describing panopticism, it was always with a view to other problems: first, of the standardization of multiple techniques-the concrete operations

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-for partitioning space and ordering temporal relations (i.e., imposing form on the multiplicity of human conduct), and second, of linking these operations to the forms of discursive knowledge which direct that gaze and give it its object.47 However essential the gaze-whether seeing, blind, or the systematic play of visibilities-may appear as a condition of panoptic power, it is never placed at the center of Foucault’s concerns, but is itself one of the effects of power, or rather one of multiple focal points where power is diffracted and functionalized. What is at issue here is not so much the role of the gaze in effecting control as a question about Foucault’s method: of rigorously describing relations of power, as it were, from the inside, and proceeding by way of this description to an “exterior” through which these relations are dispersed and deployed in concrete institutional assemblages.48 For Baudrillard, however, it is no longer possible to speak of an “exterior.” Television (and ultimately all electronic media) collapses the polar opposition between interior and exterior, an opposition, he claims, lies at the heart of the disciplinary diagram and of power itself. This, he claims, is a no longer a technology aimed at the control of the body or even the population, but a technology of reproducible images and information, i.e., of simulation; not a condition of generalized surveillance, but a “simulacra of spaces” in which it is no longer possible to distinguish what is interior from what is exterior and whose principle is holographic, not exclusionary or combinatory. Thus, it would not be right to say, as we might for a surveillant apparatus, that TV “watches” or “controls” you, since you are the TV, you are the image. v49In such a situation, discipline gives way to a generalized deterrence: a situation of permanent stalemate and meaningless provocation in which the difference between superior and inferior forces necessary to constitute the power relationship itself disappears. Although I think this is a provocative argument and contains some genuine insights into the key role played by the mass media in (post)modem societies, I also think Baudrillard misunderstands Foucault on at least two points. First, Baudrillard comes very near to identifying the disciplinary or panoptic diagram with power per se, something which Foucault, with his notion of multiple diagrams, clearly never intended. Even worse, he chastises Foucault for failing to realize that power is not everything, for (inadvertantly) invoking power as a principle of reality or truth, forever the last term of analysis, despite the many historical guises it can don: . something happened at the level of power which Foucault cannot grasp once again from deep within his genealogy: for him the political has no end, but only metamorphosis from the ‘despotic’ to the ‘disciplinary’. . . This may constitute enormous progress over the imaginary order of power which dominates us-but nothing has changed concerning the axiom of power. . . Power, then is still turned toward a reality principle and a very strong principle of truth. . . Foucault can thus describe to us the successive spirals of power, that last of which enables him to mark its most minute terminations, although power never ceases being the term, and the question of its extermination can never arise.5o

But in fact Foucault never believed that power was a homogeneous all-embracing principle of reality, a position which, if it were true, would indeed make everything power. Rather, power is heterogeneous, multiple, and always born of something else,

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viz., of social and historical transformations which continuously transpose the problem of how power is to be exercised.51 Foucault does not argue that power is everything, only that in the modern age power seems to come from everywhere. This hardly commits one to the position that power cannot be exterminated. On the other hand, it gives another sense to what Foucault means by the “exterior” of power. The “exterior” is what exceeds power; it is the multiplicity of forces from which power relations are born. On this point, Baudrillard, despite his assertions to the contrary, and Foucault are not so far apart. Baudrillard also speaks, in another place, of an “exterior’‘-an “outside” of power-when he refers to the force of seduction overcoming power. 52In any case, Baudrillard’s claim that power for Foucault never ceases “being the term,” in the sense of a reality or truth principle-an ontological affirmation -is a misunderstanding. For Foucault, to conceive of power in such a way would merely return and confine us to an analysis of the Law, a methodological orientation he spent a great deal of time in Discipline and Punish trying to distance himself from. Taking the example of the prison, Foucault notes: To make an analysis of power in terms of an ontological affirmation would have meant to question oneself as to what penal law is and to deduce the prison from the essence itself of the law which condemns the crime. Instead, I was attempting [in Discipline and Punish] to reinsert the prison within a technology which is the technology of power, but which has its birth in the 17th and 18th centuries, that is, when an entire series of economic and demographic problems poses once again the problem of what I have called the economy of power relationships. Could the feudal type systems or the systems of the great administrative monarchies still be considered valid when it is a question of irrigating the power relationships in a social body whose demographic dimensions. . . are those which they have become? All of this is born out of something else: and there is no Power, but power relationships which are born incessantly, as both effect and condition of other processes. .. It is precisely the heterogeneity of power which I wanted to demonstrate, how it is always born of something other than itse1f.j’

One other point deserves brief mention. In his critique of Foucault, Baudrillard often

appears to be describing the features of a discontinuous process, one in which the diagram of discipline disappears and is replaced completely by a generalized system of deterrence. This way of thinking is foreign to Foucault (despite his followers’ repeated references to him as a philosopher of discontinuity). If the abstract notion of historical discontinuity ever interested Foucault, it was only as a site on which the problem of continuity itself was posed. Foucault, as we have seen, did indeed maintain that no diagram was absolute and that it could be replaced or succeeded by another. But he also recognized that a history of diagrams would not reveal any neat breaks, but rather a complex deployment of forces which continually pass into one another and of which some, in any given historical period or for any given society, would emerge to define dominant relationships of power while others might recede to the margins. For Foucault, sovereign forms of power did not simply disappear in the late 18th century with the perfection of the disciplines, even if they did slip below a certain threshold where they could no longer function as the primary mode of exercising

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power. Even if we could modify Baudrillard’s argument somewhat (as I shall attempt to do below) and assert that deterrence has become a general strategy for domination in (post)modem societies, it would not be because discipline has disappeared.54 Alternately, we cannot say that deterrence was something unknown in earlier times. David Garland has noted how deterrence (along with retribution) was a cornerstone of 19th century Victorian penal representations ,55 and Foucault has shown its significance with regard to 18th century “semiotic techniques” whose goal was to impress the certainty of swift punishment on all potential offenders.56 There is no necessary antithesis or historical discontinuity between deterrent and disciplinary diagrams. Rather, they have two different histories with multiple points of connection, contiguity, and friction which are revealed only by an examination of the concrete forms and particular relations in which they are embodied. Discipline

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Too much in our experience of contemporary society speaks against Baudrillard’s thesis that deterrence marks an end in any sense of the disciplinary diagram. In fact, what is most disturbing about contemporary societies is that we can find almost too many examples of what Foucault called the disciplinary technologies of bio-powerrandom drug testing, disease monitoring in the population, life support systems, genetic engineering, in vitro fertilization-in short, the whole administrative apparatus for regulating health and sexuality in the population. Moreover, the description of the disciplines Foucault offers us in Discipline and Punish-i.e., the training of the body, meticulous orderings of space and time, the attention to the infinitesimal details of conduct-seems also widely to conform to our present experience. On the other hand, we might argue, with Baudrillard but without having to abandon Foucault, that since the middle of the 20th century (to fix a somewhat arbitrary date) a number of important events have intervened which have made it necessary to pose once again the problem of the economy of power relationships, and in such a way that the old disciplinary strategies are either redeployed to serve a new deterrent function or increasingly marginalized. It is becoming more evident, to take just a few examples, that the development of nuclear arsenals, the changeover to an information-based consumer economy, growing uncertainties about the global environment, political terrorism, etc.-that all these events have given rise today to new questions about how power can be exercised: questions whose resolution depends on the development of new institutional mechanisms and new forms of discursive knowledge that embody deterrent, and not just disciplinary, aims. The import of these developments, I think, is that we must supplement genealogical research of the type Foucault was engaged in (i.e., on the prison, the clinic, and the asylum) with similar kinds of research on data banks, think tanks, undercover operations, marketing organizations, securities and insurance firm~.~~And part of this task would be to extend Foucault’s critique of criminological, psychiatric, and medical knowledge by tracing their complex relations to the fields of statistical inference, profiling, information theory, risk analysis, game theory, technical forecasting, futures research, and the whole array of simulation strategies. Foucault, to be sure, was not unaware of either the contemporary significance or the historical roots of these developments. He draws our attention in The History of

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Sexuality to the emergence of probabilistic methods in the 19th century as a means of forecasting trends in the population. 58 And it would be difficult to find a more appropriate description of forty years of living under the shadow of nuclear war than when he notes that “what might be called a society’s ‘threshold of modernity’ has been reached when the life of a species is wagered on its own political strategies.“59 Although there are many places in the History ofSexuality that might indicate what Foucault had in mind was indeed what we commonly mean by “deterrence,” the general context remains one of discipline, expanded to encompass the issues of bio-power and the control over life. But there are a number of reasons to believe that such developments raise problems for the economy of power relations that, while related to those of discipline, are nonetheless conceptually distinct. The following appear to me to be the most relevant of those distinctions. With discipline, the problem of power is that of producing and finalizing functions within a human multiplicity, to maximize utility through the strategic ordering of spatial and temporal relations, ultimately to foster or disallow life itself. With deterrence, on the other hand, we might say that the problem is one of reintroducing an asymmetry between opposing forces which have evolved too close to a point of equivalence or parity, or to a saturation point where it is no longer possible to increase their respective utilities. We need to be clear on this point, for it is easy here to confuse the ideology of deterrence with its practice, and it is the latter in which we are most interested.60 As an ideology, deterrence claims as its goal the strategic balance of power relations, which translates into a form of mutual restraint. Here deterrence represents itself as a logic of equivalence, and as a means of insuring peace and stability by the threat of mutual retaliation. But the actual practice of deterrence is something entirely different and follows not a logic of equivalence, but one of expansion and contraction-the expansion of opposing forces asymtotically to a point where each threatens to disappear, followed by an indefinitely prolonged “laying down of arms.” The equivalence of forces is not a goal, not even a practical goal, but a problem of the economy of power relations for which deterrence becomes a general solution. What must be deterred (prevented, delayed) is not, as the ideology of deterrence would suggest, the exercise of power but, somewhat paradoxically, the inability to exercise power. (For deterrence never really aims for a balance of power. The reproduction of deterrent practices is only possible given an asymmetry of power relations, no matter how small.) The paradigm case, of course, is 40 years of the arms race which has culminated in the current policy of the Superpowers with regard to nuclear weapons. In one way, the issue here does concern the “end” of power, at least in the sense of asking the question how power can be exercised in a situation where its actual exercise would lead to mutual annihilation. Since reaching a point of parity in the 1960’s, the problem of Superpower relations has increasingly become one of finding ways to recapture the utility of these weapons. (Paul Virilio has called deterrence the “last ideology” since the threat of nuclear retaliation in kind as a means of insuring general peace and security is no longer perceived as credible or realistic.Yl Hence, it should come as no surprise that today the question of how power can be exercised is articulated today, at least in the sphere of international relations, in terms

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of disarmament rather than the endless multiplication of forces which have lost their capacity to be used.62 If the abstract formula of discipline is to impose a form of conduct on a human multiplicity, the formula for deterrence is to dissuade through the use of simulations of impending harm or risk (e.g., the scenario of nuclear holocaust, environmental impact assessments, profiles of the “typical” or potential criminal, disease carrier, etc.).63 Deterrence is a technology of signs and information (though this does not exclude its operation on bodies or species); of the reproduction of models (which does not discount its effect on conduct). There are other differences. Where discipline aims at certainty (Bentham’s “inspection house” was also a house of certainty), deterrent strategies aim at the randomization of potential outcomes, the calculation of probabilities, and the assessment of risks-certainty, even as an ideal, is ruled out from the beginning. If discipline serves as a “corrective” for behavior-i.e., to align conduct more closely to the norm-deterrence serves as a disinclination to depart from a norm already embodied in action: it is not, for example, the criminal who must be deterred, but the law-abiding citizen. Where discipline sets forces in motion, deterrence indefinitely postpones the equivalence of forces. Here again, the case of nuclear deterrence serves as a paradigm, but this is only because it is the most concentrated and extreme form of a whole multiplicity of tactical maneuvers-of postponement, disinclination, destabilization, etc.-that, like the disciplines in the 18th century, have evolved into a general mechanism of domination, and which today pervades the most diverse institutional settings. There is no need to abandon Foucault’s general analysis of power in all this. It might appear, from the above distinctions, that discipline in Foucault’s sense connotes a certain “potency” of power, whereas deterrence, insofar as it invokes the notion of parity in power relations, means that power is thereby rendered impotent. But because power for him is always an effect, or more accurately a multiplicity of effects, and always an attempted answer to a situation in which the exercise of power is problematic, Foucault has always consistently maintained the void at the heart of all power, and particularly the power to discipline: Power is not omnipotent or omniscient-quite the contrary! If power relationships have produced forms of investigation, of analysis, of models of knowledge, etc., it is precisely not because the power was omniscient, but because it was blind. . If it is true that so many power relationships have been developed, so many systems of control, so many forms of surveillance, it is precisely because power was always impotent.”

Here Foucault offers the most profound clue for understanding not only disciplinary societies, but deterrent societies as well. The status afforded to deterrent techniques today-so many methods for the manipulation of signs, of dissuasion, postponement, and disinclination-perhaps arises from a similar impotence of power, an impotence reflected in a contemporary way of life that resists postponing any outcome, and that in seeking immediate results is disinclined toward nothing.

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CONCLUSION Discipline and deterrence do not exhaust the list of diagrammatic possibilities for the exercise of power in contemporary, postmodern societies. We have seen that Foucault, in invoking the concept of a discipline, never intended that it be taken to describe the totality of power relationships possible within given historical social field. Foucault was not a philosopher or historian of totality, but of localized events, of minor techniques for combining forces, creating orders of rank, serializing time and compartmentalizing space. To this we have suggested adding those techniques which serve to deter through postponing the equivalence of forces, through the manipulation of images, simulation and modeling, and the diverse strategies of dissuasion and disinclination. From all the foregoing, it should be clear that the use of the concept of a “disciplinary society,” no less than the concept of a “deterrent society,” can serve only as general approximations or even fictions, and given Foucault’s commitment to the principle of the multiplicity of power relations it is perhaps unfortunate that on occasion he chose to speak in such global terms. I do think that if it is possible at all today to articulate a general (or generalizable) formula for domination, it would refer to both discipline and deterrence as mixed strategies, and that all institutions, considered from the point of view of their development, would exhibit characteristics of both to varying degrees. To impose a form of conduct on a human multiplicity, and to postpone the potential equivalence of forces: such might be a contemporary formula for domination. At best, however, this would only be a minimal and provisional formulation: the former, because nothing in principle prohibits the coexistence of multiple diagrams of power, and the latter, because a micro-level, genealogical description of deterrent practices remains to be written.(j5 In this sense, the foregoing analysis of deterrence has been overly schematic and serves primarily to illustrate that the question of how power can be exercised admits of multiple answers. But this is enough of a gain to justify the effort expended on developing a somewhat provisional formulation of the problem of deterrence. Once we can admit that multiple diagrams of power are possible, and that each diagram itself refers to multiple techniques which have the potential to escape their specific institutional applications and circulate freely across the social body, the analysis of power relations gains immeasurably in terms of scope and flexibility. Here we owe much to Foucault for opening so many new fields of investigation. At the same time, it is impossible to underestimate the difficulty of describing concretely how microrelations of power emerge against the background of changes that are so near to us historically; such a description is always, in some sense, the work of the future. Here we encounter that form of blindness which results from being enmired in the present, from the present always being one step ahead of us, too close to permit us to grasp what might be significant transformations in question of how power can be exercised.

NOTES 1.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979). Hereafter referred to as DP. In this article, I shall be looking at only a small fraction of that debate. The literature on not only Discipline and Punish but all of

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5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

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Foucault’s works has grown tremendously over the last decade, and it is impossible to summarize it here. I draw the reader’s attention, however, to the following writings which have some bearing on the present topic: Nancy Fraser, “Foucault on Modem Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions,” Praxis International 1 (198 1): 272-287; David Hoy (ed.), Foucault: A Critical Reader (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Michael Walzer, “The Politics of Michel Foucault,” Dissent (1983), pp. 481-490; Stephen David Ross, “Foucault’s Radical Politics,” Praxis International 5 (July 1985): 13 1-144; David Garland, Punishment and Welfare: a History of Penal Strategies (Brookfield, Vermont: Gower, 1985); and Michelle Perrot (ed.), L’impossibleprison: Reserches sur le systeme penitentiaire au XIX siecle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980). My interest here is limited primarily to the reception of his remarks regarding discipline in sociological and criminological circles and to an evaluation of his position vis-a-vis recent criticisms raised by the French social philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Throughout this article I shall use the terms “late modem society,” “postmodem society,” “contemporary society,” “present-day society,” etc., somewhat interchangeably as glosses for major social, political, technological, and cultural transformations that have occurred in the West since roughly the middle of the 20th century. I do not intend to take part here in what I perceive to be an increasingly sterile debate over whether or not we have entered a “postmodem” era. While not without a certain critical value, such terms all too quickly become conceptual blinders which restrict theoretical flexibility and divert our attention from the real task of describing concrete social relations. Cf. Stanley Cohen, “The Punitive City: Notes on the Dispersion of Social Control,” Contemporary Crisis 3 (1979): 339-363; Stanley Cohen, Visions of Social Control (Cambridge: Policy Press, 1985); C. Shearing and P. Stenning, “From the Panopticon to Disneyworld: The Development of Discipline,” Pp. 335-349 in Perspectives in Criminal Law, edidted by Anthony N. Doob and Edward L. Greenspan (Aurora, Ontario: Canada Law Book, Inc.). Cf. Anthony Bottoms, “Neglected Features of Contemporary Penal Systems,” Pp. 166202 in The Power to Punish: Contemporary Penal&y and Social Analysis, edited by David Garland and Peter Young (New Jersey: Humanities Press). Also in the same volume the essay by Thomas Mathiesen, “The Future of Control Systems: The Case of Norway,” Pp. 130-145. Cf. Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulations (New York: Semiotexte, 1983). Specifically, in Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Much of what follows owes considerably to Deleuze’s excellent explication of Foucault’s analysis of power in Discipline and Punish and related works. DP, 138. And thus we might speak of a third sense of “multiplicity” we can locate in Foucault, viz., the multiplicity of the object of discipline. Cf. DP, p. 205; and Deleuze, p. 34. Ibid. DP, p. 205. Cf. Foucault’s remarks regarding the Panoptic figure in “Questions of Method: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” Pp. 108-l 10 in After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, edited by Kenneth Baynes, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987). Deleuze, Pp. 36ff. See his article “The Subject and Power” Pp. 219-226 in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). It is also instructive to note that in this same essay Foucault denies that the aim of his later works was to develop the general foundations of a theory of power.

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DP, Pp. 195ff. DP, p. 198 Deleuze, pp. 35, 85. In other works, Foucault also speaks of a “pastoral” mode of power in which subjects are compelled, once again in multiple ways which coexist with other technologies of power, to speak the truth of their being. Cf. Foucault’s remarks in PowerlKnowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 111; also in “Questions of Method: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” op. tit, p. 103. Cf. Foucault’s remarks on this point in “The Question of Power,” p. 190 in Focault: Live (New York: Semiotexte, 1989). Cohen, “The Punitive City: Notes on the Dispersion of Social Control,” and Visions of Social Control, op. cit. Cohen, “The Punitive City,” op. cit., p. 346ff. DP, p. 264ff. DP, p. 211ff., 298ff. Bottoms, op. cit. Foucault, “What Calls for Punishment,” p. 280 in Foucaulr Live (New York: Semiotexte, 1989). Deleuze, op. cit., p. 26. DP, p. 293. DP, p. 228. DP, Pp. 305-306. DP, p. 271ff. Bottoms, op. cit., Pp. 161-173. Cohen, Visions of Social Control, op. cit. DP, Pp. 265-268. DP, Pp. 206-207; also in Deleuze, op. cit., p. 36. cf. Bottoms, op. cit., and Mathiesen, op. cit. Also Gary Marx, “I’ll Be Watching You: Reflections on the New Surveillance,” Dissent 22 (1986): 26-34; Gary Marx, “The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove, ” in The Social Fabric: Dimensions and Issues, edited by James F. Short, Jr. (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1986); Gary Marx and N. Reichman, “Routinizing the Discovery of Secrets: Computers as Informants,” American Behavioral Scientist 2 (1984); David Bumham, The Rise of the Computer State (New York: Random House, 1983). Mathiesen suggests that the extension of control to entire categories of persons represents a significant departure from the use of disciplinary measures that Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish. Marx and Bumham, on the other hand, remain closer to Foucault’s analysis but develop their respective theses about the dispersion of social control in relation to specific surveillant technologies rather than the more general problem of discipline. Cf. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (New York: Vintage, 1980). Hereafter referred to as HS. HS, p. 140. HS, Pp. 138-140. Also Deleuze, p. 72. HS, 139, 140. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 92. HS, op. cit., p. 139. DP, p. 199. DP, p. 200. DP, p. 201. Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” op. cit., p. 52.

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Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” Pp. 53-55. Cf. Deleuze’s remarks in Foucault, p. 42. It is relevant in this context to note that Foucault himself denounced the subtitle of his earlier work, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of the Gaze. This was not because Foucault thought the problem of making something visible to the gaze-of supervising and scrutinizing-was unimportant, but rather that in this book it was given too much emphasis at the expense of an analysis of discursive systems and the part they play in social control. Cf. Deleuze on this, op. cit., p. 49f. Cf. Deleuze, op. cit., p. 43. Baudrillard, op. cit., p. 53. We should note that Baudrillard does not confine his discussion of simulation to the electronic media. Television is rather only the most ready example of this process. Throughout his later works, he provides a number of interesting and illuminating examples of the implosion of “real” events or spaces into simulated models-wilderness and game preserves, amusement parks, museum exhibits, archaeological sites, advertisements, even whole cities-examples intended to show modem man’s fascination and seduction by “signs of the real” and by the images and models which have, by their very reproducibility, become more real than the real itself. Baudrillard, “Forget Foucault”, op. cit. Cf. Foucault, “The Question of Power,” op. cit., 185-187. Although a discussion of Baudrillard’s concept of “seduction” is beyond the scope of the present essay, cf. his book Seduction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). esp. Pp. 45-49. Foucault, “The Question of Power,” op. cit. 186, 187. Given his position on the end of power, Baudrillard hesitates to call deterrence a strategy or form of domination. Cf. Simulations, p. 60. David Garland, Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (Brookfield, Vermont: Gower, 1985), Pp. 16-17. DP, 94, 104ff. Some of this work is already being done, although the majority of it to date has been confined to institutional forms of analysis. In particular cf. Gary Marx, Undercover: Police Surveillance in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); and David Bumham, op. cit., The Rise of the Computer State. HS, p. 140. HS, p. 143. Baudrillard would claim that today this distinction is rapidly becoming impossible to make. Certainly the contemporary practice of deterrence has become so infused with the language of game-theoretic dilemmas, simulated decision-making, and scenarios of risk that the differences between the model and the reality of deterrence are increasing difficult to specify. Nevertheless, I feel the distinction is still useful on the material level, not necessarily as a point of critique, but rather to draw attention to the fact that deterrence at least for the present still operates by a method which runs counter to its stated logic. Paul Virilio, Pure War (New York: Semiotexte, 1983) p. 56. Cf. Baudrillard, Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), Pp. 190-191. Traffic police in Florida, over the last few years, have begun to routinely use computer generated profiles of drug dealers to stop, search, and detain travellers using the major Interstate highway in that state. Arrest statistics provide the data for these profiles,

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forming composites of the “typical” drug dealer’s car, race, age, gender, companions, etc. Profiling and matching systems are not only becoming routine investigative tools in the criminal justice system. Their use is common in targeting consumers, tax evaders, welfare cheats, health risks, etc., and with the development desktop computers, it has become a relatively easy matter, despite many attempts at regulation, to share information gathered by formerly separate public and private organizations to create even more comprehensive profiling and matching systems. All these developments “deter” in the general sense suggested above, i.e., they insure against a potential equivalence of forces (of private citizens and police, disease and its treatment, etc.). At present, we lack a comprehensive and detailed historical description of the origins of these deterrent practices. For information on the current situation, however, one should read the works by David Bumham and Gary Marx noted above. Cf. also K. Laudon, Dossier Society: Value Choices in the Design of National Information Systems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); J. Shattuck, “In the Shadow of 1984: National Identification Systems, Computer Matching, and Privacy in the United States,” Hastings Law Journal (July 1984), Pp. 991-1005; Office of Technology Assessment, Federal Government Information Technology: Electronic Surveillance and Civil Liberties (Washington, DC: GPO, 1985); Office of Technology Assessment, The Electronic Supervisor: New Technology, New Tensions (Washington, DC: GPO, 1987). For more philosophical or literary impressions of deterrence and surveillance, cf. Peter Sloterdijk, The Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), esp. p. 329 ff.; Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Assignment: Or, On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers (New York: Random House, 1988); Guy Debord, The Socieo ofthe Spectacle (Detroit: Black and White Press, 1983). Foucault, “The Question of Power,” op. cit., Pp. 183-184. I think this quote illustrates just how close Foucault is to precisely the kinds of positions Baudrillard himself espouses, despite the latter’s attempted criticisms of him. Although Baudrillard’s work contains a number of examples to indicate what such a description might involve.