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Rethinking Confinement: Captive Bodies in and Beyond Foucauldian Theory

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Rethinking Confinement: Captive Bodies in and Beyond Foucauldian Theory 99 MARCUS HARTNER AND CORNELIA WÄCHTER Rethinking Confinement: Captive Bodies in and Beyond Foucauldian Theory Foucault famously traces the replacement of the direct targeting of the body in punishment to subtler, more insidious penalties, operating strongly through the gaze of surveillance. The perceived omnipresence of this gaze causes the captive subjects to render their own bodies docile. According to Foucault, imprisonment is merely one of many manifestations of the dialectic of normalcy, and disciplinary structures extend far beyond the prison walls in what he calls a "carceral archipelago" (1995, 298) or "carceral continuum" (303). In this continuum, bodies are not only imprisoned by walls but, much more pervasively, by the powers of discipline and biopolitics. 'Docile,' 'captive' bodies are thus to be found in virtually every social realm. It is this pervasiveness which gave rise to a plethora of utilisations of Foucauldian conceptions of especially non-carceral forms of captivity in literary and cultural studies. Foucault, for instance, bore crucial impact on Victorian studies, notably with the publication of D.A. Miller's The Novel and the Police (1988), which reads the novel as a form of Foucauldian discipline. In general, the depiction and critical assessment of different forms of surveillance became extremely widespread in the humanities.1 Furthermore, as far as the study of actual carceral spaces is concerned, the continued relevance of Foucault's work becomes readily apparent in the fact that the young and burgeoning field of carceral geography developed largely in "dialogue with the work of Foucault" (Moran 2015, 1) – an engagement that, according to Dominique Moran, one of the leading figures of the new field, has originated from other disciplines' interest in Discipline and Punish (19). While researchers in carceral geography have aimed to "'[test]' Foucauldian assertions of the production of disciplined or docile bodies in carceral settings," they have "found them wanting" in many cases (Moran 2015, 19). The twofold move of adopting and, at the same time, adapting Foucauldian theory has not only been equally characteristic of literary and cultural studies, but a renewed interest in the work of Foucault in this field may provide an important impetus for current work in carceral geography. To name but a few examples: When Moran observes that "most recently," researchers within carceral geography had begun to supplement Foucault's (and Agamben's) work with "other theoretical approaches to confinement which emphasise the significance and complexity of agency within carceral space" (25), she refers to an aspect that has received sustained attention in literary and cultural studies and which Foucault himself sought to redress in his later work. Relatedly, when carceral 1 For an overview of Foucault's impact on different disciplines, see Kammler (2008). For recent examples in both literary and cultural studies, see Falkenhayner (2019), Flynn and Mackay (2018), and Wise (2016). Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 30.2 (Summer 2019): 99-105. Anglistik, Jahrgang 30 (2019), Ausgabe 2 © 2019 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 100 MARCUS HARTNER AND CORNELIA WÄCHTER geographers like Ben Crewe et al. advocate the conception of spaces and places as "determinants of social practice and personal experience, rather than as empty theatres or neutral backcloths within and against which they occur" (2014, 60), this insight occurs with a considerable time lag compared to the influence of, for instance, Michel de Certeau's work on literary and cultural studies. Rather than intending to criticise research in carceral geography, we mean to take this renewed interest in Foucault's work on captivity as a cue to reconsider it from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. We aim to contribute to an exploration of the extent to which the Foucauldian notions of discipline and literally/metaphorically imprisoned bodies remain useful tools and to what extent and in what ways we are challenged to conceptually move beyond Foucault or to at least expand upon Foucault. Such revision, as Georgia Christinidis' contribution illustrates, may also lie in reading Foucault back upon Foucault. In this context, we believe that there are several issues in need of further study. Firstly, according to Foucault, the 'new prison' that emerged in the mid-19th century no longer sought the body as its direct target but instead tackled the soul. Work based on this premise problematically de-emphasises the very materiality of spaces of confinement and the ways in which they impact very immediately on the bodies they confine. To quote Sara Ahmed, "spaces are not exterior to bodies; instead, spaces are Winter Journals like a second skin that unfolds in the folds of the body" (2006, 9). Moreover, since Foucault's interest is in outlining disciplinary structures that not only characterise but 'transcend' the prison and pervade society at large, the particularity of prison Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) environments and the particularity of embodied, affective prison experience inevitably fade into the background. Foucault himself reminds us that captivity comes in different guises: for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution The way in which certain categories of the population were confined in the seventeenth century, to take this example, is very different from the hospitalization practiced in the nineteenth century, and still more so from the machinery of security we have at the present time. (1988, 164) Rashad Shabazz, for instance, explores new forms of carcerality beyond the prison in parts of Chicago's South Side, or "Black Chicago," where "techniques and technologies of prison punishment – policing, containment, surveillance and the establishment of territory, the creation of frontiers" served to "effectively [prisonize] the landscape" (2015, 2; original emphasis). While drawing upon Foucault, Shabazz departs from the French critic's "European race-neutral focus" and joins others in criticising his "lack of attention to the way race informs and structures incarceration and carceral punishment" (5). Feminist critics have similarly criticised Foucault's apparent blindness to the relevance of gender. Sandra Lee bartky, for example, asks: "Where is the account of the disciplinary practices that engender the 'docile bodies' of women, bodies more docile than the bodies of men?" (1988, 63). What is more, even in the same period and the same type of institution, custodial spaces differ from each other more significantly than has sufficiently been acknowledged in most existent research – a shortcoming that is only gradually being redressed. Thus, for instance, David Sibley and Bettina van Hoven aver that the "distinctive geographies of the institution need to be recognised in attempts to Anglistik, Jahrgang 30 (2019), Ausgabe 2 © 2019 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) CAPTIVE BODIES IN AND BEYOND FOUCAULDIAN THEORY 101 understand socio-spatial relations" (2009, 200). The same pertains to other spaces of confinement – both literal and metaphorical. Another shortcoming of prevalent readings of Foucauldian 'discipline' is the inordinate focus on Panopticism. Discipline was at least 'supposed to' turn the subject into a self-disciplining agent, rendering the soul the notorious "prison of the body" (Foucault 1995, 30). Whereas the model may have served well to describe dominant processes in the 'carceral continuum' of the post-classical age, the panopticism so strongly associated with it was always much less prevalent in prison than the popular imagination would have it (Fludernik 2017, 4-5). Prior to CCTV, officers by no means had eyes that saw without being seen; and those who were in fact almost perpetually visible from the centre of the famous radial design that dominated Victorian prison architecture were the prison officers, not the prisoners. This continues to be the case in modern CCTV systems of surveillance in prison, where residential cells usually do not have CCTV but communal areas do. Moreover, as Dickens vividly illustrated shortly after the inception of the 'new prison,' all that solitary confinement and surveillance bred was hypocrisy and suffering (Wächter 2015, 48-49). Bodies may have been forced into docility while under scrutiny, but no internalisation of the respective norms took place. Accordingly, in order to adequately map processes of surveillance in prison, we need to move beyond Foucault. Instead of taking Panopticism literally, Monika Fludernik suggests investigating the function of the Panopticon as a "master trope" (2017, 5), i.e. as a rhetorical tool in picturing or mapping discipline as it came to dominate society at large. And indeed we can find numerous examples of internalised surveillance and corresponding docility – notably with regard to gender and sexuality and not least in the entangled attempts of 'normalising' criminal deviants and of 'normalising' those who 'deviate' in terms of sex and gender. In fact, gender and sexuality constitute another important aspect which generally remains under-researched in contemporary prison studies. both women and LGbTQ prisoners have long been prison's 'others' or the "forgotten offenders" (Thomas 2003, 5), usually relegated to an afterthought in prison policy tacitly assuming 'the prisoner' to be heterosexual and male. Moreover, as Jim Thomas points out, "heterosexual norms
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