Rethinking Confinement: Captive Bodies in and Beyond Foucauldian Theory

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.

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

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 and gender roles can be a means of oppressive control in prisons" (2003, 1). Gender (and particularly the toxic masculinities which are not only prevalent in men's prisons but, as Donald Sabo et al. aver, are reproduced by the contemporary correction system [2001, 4]) is one of the ways in which material and immaterial, literal and metaphorical forms of imprisonment intersect. Besides such intersections, another gap in Foucauldian theory and its discussion relates to forms of and texts about actual physical, corporeal confinement that differ in important ways from prisons and literary representations of the prison. Perhaps the most famous and influential example is the captivity narrative – a heterogeneous literary genre that dates back to the 15th century (Snader 2000, 18) and generally (although there are important historical variations) depicts the abduction, treatment, and eventual return of a traveller, prisoner-of-war, or settler from captivity among a foreign people.2

2 For an introduction to the influential 'Indian Captivity Narrative' in American literature, see Derounian-Stodola and James Levernier (1993) and Carroll (2008). On North African

While such captives may have been held in actual prisons or prison-like institutions during their ordeal (Davis 2009, 193-194), the genre is a form of travel writing in which captivity tends to serve an ideological function in the fashioning of national identity and the construction of cultural, religious, and ethnic otherness. Instead of focussing on the intersection of convict, institution, and society, captivity narratives tend to engage with relationships of 'us' and 'them' in ways diametrically opposed to the othering of prisoners within our own society. Even though individual accounts can fulfil diverse functions (Carroll 2008, 144), their main concerns tend to be religious, nationalist and/or ethnographic in nature. Like travel literature in general, captivity accounts thus require "us to negotiate a complex and sometimes unsettling interplay between alterity and identity, difference and similarity" (Thompson 2011, 9; original emphasis). However, "[a]ll captivity texts," as Carroll points out, "derive their narrative power from the image of the suffering captive" (2008, 145). Due to the genre's inherent structural opposition of captive and captor, which generally translates into a relationship of victim and aggressor, captivity narratives structurally facilitate the construction of antagonistic cultural/ethnic binaries. As not only those binaries but also notions of innocent suffering are subject to culturally constructed norms, former captives frequently find their experiences and behaviour subject to public debate and moral censure after their return. Having shed the physical fetters of captivity abroad, the captive author needs to subject their autobiographical voice to discursive restraints in the form of normative master narratives regarding capture, suffering, escape, and resistance. Moreover, as such narratives generally devote substantial attention to the corporeal dimension of subjugation and suffering, representations of the physical materiality of the experience of captivity frequently acquire a symbolical dimension that, once more, reminds us of the necessity to investigate the intersection of the material and the metaphorical. Captivity narratives, in other words, constitute another example why (re)presentations of the materially and metaphorically incarcerated body need to take centre-stage in all analyses and theoretical reflections of incarceration and bondage. Due to its limited number of contributions, our section of this special issue does not aim to engage exhaustively with the entire scope of issues sketched above. Instead, the following articles will present four individual case studies demonstrating the necessity to go beyond Foucault in different ways. To return to Foucault's assertion that it is vital to recognise that historical forms of captivity differ significantly from contemporary ones, one of the respects in which it is necessary to move beyond Foucault even in engaging with Foucault is in his conception of the neoliberal subject. While Foucault, for instance, explicitly does not endorse "that savage liberalism that would lead to individual coverage for those who have the means to pay for it, and to a lack of coverage for the others" (2002, 379), he has been widely criticized for what Michael Behrent goes so far as claiming "should be read as a strategic endorsement of economic liberalism" (2009, 567). Both Georgia Christinidis and Christoph Singer in their

captivity accounts, see Matar (2001), MacLean and Matar (2011), and Colley (2002). See also Colley (2002) on the lesser-known British captivity narratives from colonial India and Allen (2009) on accounts from the early Spanish colonial period.

contributions consider ways in which it is necessary to move beyond Foucault's work in this respect and highlight that the neoliberal, self-reliant subject and correspondent choice architectures also constitute forms of confinement. Within this framework, as Christinidis argues, even agency transforms into a tool of captivity. In her contribution "Reading Confinement against the Grain: Responsibilisation and Readerliness in Contemporary Culture" she therefore problematises "the opposition between freedom and confinement" (107) by way of an exemplary reading of the case of Gary Gilmore's execution for double murder in 1977 and the legal, personal and literary narratives surrounding it. Christinidis maintains that it was Gilmore's interpellation as 'homo economicus' that facilitated not only the justification of his execution but, at least at times, even served as the framework for his own self-presentation. Singer draws attention to the implications of the notion of the agentic subject for the current welfare system in Britain, in which "deservingness" (121) has replaced unconditionality in the allocation of benefits. In this context, Singer reads administrative temporalities – i.e. when people are subjected to instances of deferral, delay, and waiting – as a form of confinement that "creates subordination […] by producing uncertainty and arbitrariness" (Auyero 2012, 19). He examines representations of conditionality as a tool of control in Beyond Caring (1986, 2010), a series of photographs by Paul Graham, in the TV show Benefits Street (2014), and in Ken Loach's anti-austerity film I, Daniel Blake (2016). Singer highlights that, rather than concerning only those dependent on state support, the now pervasive logic of conditionality actually concerns all of us in that we all become unconditionally responsible for our own welfare. With the articles by Dominik Wallerius and Annika Wirth we return to the argument made above that gender and sexuality constitute an important area of research in contemporary prison studies – an area that still remains understudied. In this context, the contribution by Wallerius serves as a reminder that masculinity and the notion of intersectionality retain their relevance when we turn to more 'metaphorical' meanings of the term 'captivity.' In this context, his article "Beyond the Panopticon: Reading Masculinity through Foucault, Bourdieu, and Joyce" engages with the topic of male identity construction by questioning the metaphor of the natural and social body as a prison confining the (docile) subject. If, as traditional approaches hold, masculinity is restrictive and confined through external forces, he asks, then why do the thus dominated play along and accept their domination? He suggests that Pierre Bourdieu's thoughts on a gendered habitus can usefully complement Foucault's concept of the Panopticon in order to think about masculinity in a more flexible way. Wallerius bases his theoretical observations on a reading of James Joyce's "The Dead" and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which he investigates the notion of masculinity as confinement with regard to the texts' protagonists Gabriel Conroy and Stephen Dedalus. By engaging with the figurative use of confinement as a tool to analyse masculinity and the homosocial space in those texts, he suggests seeing the subject not simply as a docile body or victim of the nets of discourses, but conceiving of it as actively engaged in processes of domination; thus, it is both being subjected to and helping to perpetuate structures of gender confinement.

While the contributions by Wallerius and Singer thus engage with metaphorical instances of captivity by extending the notion of incarceration into waiting rooms and literary constructions of masculinity, we must not forget that there are (textual) discourses about forms of physical, corporeal confinement, such as the aforementioned captivity narrative, that differ from prisons and their literary representations. In her contribution "Retracing the Untold: Sexual Violence in the American Gulf War Captivity Narratives and Their Counter-Narratives," Annika Wirth turns to a recent manifestation of this long-standing narrative genre. Her article, among other things, investigates the silences and omissions in contemporary Gulf war captivity narratives that enable these texts to serve as effective pro-American propaganda material. At the same time, she illustrates the accounts' focus on the corporal dimension of captivity, as well as the intense public attention such captive (auto)biographies are subjected to when deviating from conventional expectations and narrative patterns. Her article presents close readings of Gulf War captivity texts with regard to the (re)presentation of (sexually) violated bodies in the context of American public discourses on the war in Iraq. Emphasising the aforementioned relevance of gender in research on captivity, Wirth's article engages with the profound differences in the portrayal of male and female captives’ bodies and thus shows that normative patterns of narrating captivity are highly gender-specific.

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