The Discipline, Bio/Power and Governmentality
The etymology of the word “hospital” shows a close relationship to hospitality ethics. Firstly, in the 11th century, the hospital was “[a] house for the reception and entertainment of pilgrims, travelers, or strangers; any of the establishments of the Knight Hospitallers33” (The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary 1266). Later, it became
“[a] charitable institution for the housing and maintenance of the needy; an asylum for the destitute, infirm, or ages” (The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary 1266) in 1418.
32 I would focus on hospitals in this chapter and continue to investigate the camps in the next.
33 The Knights Hospitaller, also known as the Order of Hospitallers or simply Hospitallers, were a group of men attached to a hospital in Jerusalem that was founded by Blessed Gerard around 1023. The Hospitallers arose around the work of an Amalfitan hospital located in Jerusalem, founded around 1023 to provide care for poor, sick or injured pilgrims to the Holy Land.
Finally, in 1549, it started to be recorded as “[an] institution or establishment providing medical or surgical treatment for the ill or wounded” (The New Shorter
Oxford Dictionary 1266). The hospital is a building deliberately established to
welcome the other and to practice hospitality upon social otherness:[Hospitals were built for] those who could not afford medical treatment, as well as offering shelter for the deserving homeless, the aged poor and travelers […] Special hospitals (to a number over 350 during the high Middle Ages) were set up for the isolation of lepers, and others took
custody of dangerous lunatics; the aim was to detain rather than to cure […]
medical hospitals provided a welcome haven for those “poore, skyye, blinde, aged and impotent persones (Medical England: An Encyclopedia 360-1) However, according to Foucault, a hospital is not only a “field of force relation” but also a “disciplinary institution” where the authority exercises power to make the abnormal self-disciplined. I’d like to clarify the idea of discipline from the aspect of power. Precisely, discipline “consists of a concern with control which is internalised
by each individual: it consists of a concern with time-keeping, self-control over one’s
posture and bodily functions, concentration, sublimation of immediate desires and emotions” (Mills 43). Discipline produces the individual who disciplines himself bythe self. It is a form of power that promotes self-regulation and is operated within
institutions in modern societies. Foucault even claims that “Discipline makes individuals”:[Discipline] trains the moving, confused, useless multitudes of bodies and forces into a multiplicity of individuals elements--small, separate cells, organic autonomies, genetic identities and continuities, combinatory segments. Discipline “makes” individuals; it is the specific technique of a
power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. (Discipline and Punish 170)
As Foucault argues that “discipline makes individuals” and it “regards individuals as objects and instruments,” at the same time the modern regime uses disciplinary power and techniques to control each individual. In this way, authority exercises power within a society “through the use of a range of different mechanisms and techniques”
(Mills 43). It is a delicate way to manipulate a group of people in an “individualizing”
way by assigning each individual with particular positions, such as the
aforementioned “small and separate cells” in various institutions, including prisons and hospitals. To verify the opinion of hospitals as one disciplinary field, Foucault illustrates with one example of a French naval hospital located in the port city of Rochefort34: “The hospital was certainly dedicated to the treatment of its patient population, but to perform its duties it had to be a filter, a mechanism that pins down and partitions; it must provide a hold over this whole mobile, swarming mass, by dissipating the confusion of illegality and evil” (Ramsom 42).
Inside the hospital, with medical supervision, the medical doctor works to dissipate
“the confusion of illegality and evil.” That is, he must impose the idea of self-discipline upon the patients, and the “confusion” would disappear.
More significantly, with the medical discursive knowledge/power, this medical system works to divide the world as “a filter, a mechanism that pins down and partitions.” It functions to arrange, categorize and classify each individual into two parts—the normal and abnormal. With this discursive categorization, the society justifies a rigid arrangement that puts the “normal” in the center and the marginalized aside. In this world of division, the abnormal (the other) are fixed in the position as
34 Rochefort is a commune (the lowest level of administrative division) in the Savoie department (a higher level one) in the Rhône-Alpes region in south-eastern France.
guests because they are deprived of power and have to live at the mercy of the powerful host. To defend the overwhelming majority, the society puts the abnormal under its control in confinement. This “discursive categorization and classification of behaviour” (Falzon 50) aims to “bring forces into conformity with various normative categories or standards of right action” (Falzon 50). This explains the reason hospital becomes a disciplinary field. It trains individuals from different normative categories to obey particular rules and orders. To impose and maintain such control, “these normative categories [are justified] as being universal, necessary and obligatory principles” (Falzon 50), and this categorization presented as truth but indeed it is constructed. In Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Foucault demonstrates in detail how disciplinary regulations bring individuals to act in
accordance with “norms and standards.” The norm “normalizes individuals” and that explains why Foucault would argue that “discipline makes individuals.”
To clarify the concept of discipline, I would point out its three features and argue that the reciprocal, economic and biopolitical nature of discipline connects modern disciplinary system with hospitality ethics. Firstly, both hospitality ethics and
disciplinary power are practiced in an implicit reciprocal manner. Hospitality implies a reciprocal interaction between the host and the guest while Foucault’s model of disciplinary power is also a “reciprocal form of power of power relations” (McNay 100). Disciplinary power is similar to power, which is “always reciprocal and
productive” (Taylor 298), and this power is a reciprocal form of power, a “reciprocal adjustment of body” (Foucault Reader 209). It is operated in various disciplinary institutions, such as school, hospital, army, camp and so on. In these institutions, we can observe the “reciprocal adjustment of bodies, gesture and rhythms, differentiation of capacities, reciprocal coordination” (Foucault Reader 209). This results in a
“carceral network” (Discipline and Punish 304): “[We] are in the society of the
teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social worker’-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is bases; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behaviour, his aptitudes, his achievements” (Discipline and Punish 304).
Without the reciprocal interaction, discipline loses its power. It is best illustrated with the well-known paradigm of Bentham’s Panopticon, “a circular architectural structure where cells are arranged around a central viewing tower in such way as to unsure permanent visibility and surveillance” (McNay 93). It exemplifies “the perfection of power.” As Foucault argues, it “reduce[s] in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power”
with discontinuous “actual exercise” (Discipline and Punish 201). Inside the machine of Panopticon, every prisoner cannot help but feels being seen (without ever seeing) while the supervisor sees every prisoner without ever being seen. This scheme
ingeniously called by Foucault as “see/being seen dyad” (Discipline and Punish 202).
The sense of invisible surveillance threatens each inmate and successively this panoptical system will reciprocally produce an internalized self-surveillance
mechanism in which each individual is embroiled. Consequently, the prisoner himself spontaneously plays the role as his supervisor and he automatically assumes the responsibility to subjugate himself to a power relation unconsciously. In a word, “he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (Discipline and Punish 202-3). The power “in its compact or disseminated forms, with its system of insertion, distribution, surveillance, observation” (Discipline and Punish 202) influences each individual who “inscribes in himself the power relation.” The interchange of reciprocal
“see/being seen dyad” cannot function without the “consciousness” of the individuals.
In short, the dynamic of the reciprocity constitutes of disciplinary power.
Secondly, on the economic function of discipline, as Foucault accentuates, disciplinary control “is unquestionably linked to the rise of capitalism” (Foucault
Reader 18). In Discipline and Punish, he claims that disciplinary techniques make
“the accumulation of capital” possible:
If the economic take-off the West began with the [disciplinary] techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle,
calculated technology of subjection. (Discipline and Punish 220-221) To be clear, discipline is “a subtle, calculated technology of subjection” and it centers on the accumulated production of docile bodies. To provide a submissive, productive and “trained source of labour power” (McNay 92), discipline aids social organization, socialization, and subjection of human body. Therefore, it prepares the contemporary economic a swarming mass of useful laborers and pushes ahead with the accumulation of wealth. In return, with the expansion of capitalism, the
disciplinary mechanism becomes much powerful. The two systems are mutually dependant: “Each makes the other possible and necessary; each provides a model for the other” (Discipline and Punish 221). This is the economic facet of disciplinary power.
Thirdly, discipline, as one form of power that centers on human body, relates to biopower, a political technology of power used to manipulate human collectively and individually. Firstly introduced in The History of Sexuality (1977), bio-power literally means the power over bodies. It is depicted as “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations”
(The History of Sexuality 140). To connect disciplinary power with biopower, I would
like to say that disciplinary power characterizes an application of biopower while the former increases “usefulness and docility” of human body “as a machine.” Foucault argues “the disciplines [is] an anatomo-politics of the human body” (The History of
Sexuality 139), as he coins this term “anatomo-politics
35” he means the disciplining,the controlling, and the regulatory controls of the human bodies which he names the
“bio-politics.”
Following Foucault’s analytic methodology, I would draw attention to “how state operates to offer hospitality” and what “the strategies they take” (The History of
Sexuality 92-93). To be accurate, the state offers hospitality by “establishing the
relative hospitality institutions,” and then it applies “hospitality” as “a disciplinary strategy.” Hospitality, therefore, is a “bio-political disciplinary strategy that isoperated to normalize human bodies.” In this regard, I would start from analyzing the hospital as a bio-political disciplinary field. In Michael K, there are altogether three hospitals--(1) the Stellenbosch Hospital where Michael loses his mother, Anna K, (2) the hospital the policemen take him in, and (3) the one inside the Kenilworth
rehabilitation camp. I perceive the three hospitals as three different hosts who offer medical service to Michael. Among these, the former two reveal their “hostile”
attitude toward the guest Michael while the third one embraces him with a seemingly hospitable attitude. As the Latin root hospes unveils the essentially hostile face of a host who practices hospitality, in Michael K, both the hostile hosts (the former two hospitals) and the comparatively hospitable one (the last) suggest a conditional hospitality given by the medical system with an intention of normalizing the other.
Being subordinate to a huge network of discursive human sciences, the medical knowledge/power establishes a huge medical system permeated with power in order
35 Etymologically, the knowledge of anatomy denotes the scientific study of the structure of human or animal bodies. The discipline and biopower, as anatomo-politics, has strong impact on human bodies.
to “organize a national medical profession” and “[operate] general norms of health36” (Discipline and Punish 184). To take care of human bodies, improve the quality of population and maintain “a homogeneous social body” (Discipline and Punish 184), the hospital “normalizes” human bodies in accordance to ethics and norm. For example, two doctors show their intention to “normalize” Michael’s harelip that symbolizes one anomaly against the norm. The first one begins from examining him for “venereal infection” and then asks, “[h]ave you ever seen a doctor about your mouth…You could get it corrected, you know, said the doctor, but did not offer to correct” (Coetzee 72). The second doctor tries to persuade Michael to accept such surgery, and this passionate medical officer becomes an important figure when it comes to the issue of hospitality. The interaction between Michael and this medical officer, the patient and the physician, the guest and the host is significant and meaningful since they are both “vehicles” of power.
Throughout Michael and the benevolent physician’s inter-subjective
conversation and interaction, many complex aspects of power flow, power struggle and power relation involved in hospitality ethics are revealed. They meet each other for the first time and the medical officer begins to make medical judgment on Michael’s body--“A simple incomplete cleft, with some displacement of the septum.
The palate intact” (Coetzee 130). Body as the center of medical knowledge/power is carefully examined by the medical gaze: in entering the field of knowledge, the human body enters the field of power and become a target for manipulation. During this medical supervision, the physician asks Michael, “whether there had ever been an attempt to correct the condition [of your harelip]” (Coetzee 130). The doctor “point[s]
out that the operation is a slight one, even at his age” (Coetzee 130) and he even expresses his wish to arrange such operation. But Michael refuses:
36 The ethics of health is dependent on the social need.
“I am what I am. I was never a great one for the girls” [And the doctor feels]
like telling him that, never mind the girls, he would find it easier to get along if he could talk like everyone else; but [the doctor says] nothing, not wanting to hurt him. (Coetzee 130-131)
The doctor shows an unusual interest in Michael and his compulsive feeling to
exercise hospitality reveals the influence of the norm of ethos. He insists on practicing hospitality but Michael does not cooperate with him. He refuses the operation, the food and any other things the doctor wants to offer. For example, “This morning when I tried to be friendly he shook me off” (Coetzee 135). Michael rejects his kindness and questions that “Do you think if you leave me alone I am going to die?...Why do you want to make me fat? Why fuss over me, why am I so important?” (Coetzee 135).
Why is it so important for the doctor to offer hospitality? The truth lies in his
obsession with the strange physical condition of Michael but he cannot understand it at all—“Nevertheless [Michael] is right. I do indeed pay too much attention to him.
Who is he, after all?” (Coetzee 136). Furthermore, he expresses a compulsive feeling that drives him to practice hospitality upon Michael, this social other: “You have never asked for anything, yet you have become an albatross around my neck. Your bony arms are knotted behind my head, I walk bowed under the weight37
of you”
(Coetzee 146). Here, it reveals a complex feeling of the “self” toward the “other.” As a privileged elite with power and knowledge, the doctor assumes responsibility to practice hospitality. Whether this it is out of guilt or responsibility, he does feel that he owns moral debt to the other. In fact, both the feelings of responsibility and guilt,
37 There is one thing I would like to draw attention to the word “weigh.” Here the doctor expresses that he feels a heavy burden of moral obligation. Interestingly, in Nietzsche’s work on morality, he
highlights that the word ‘man’ “denotes a being that values, measures and weighs” (Nietzsche xxii).
Therefore, he promotes that “a new type of philosopher and commander will be necessary” (Nietzsche 152). His philosophy praises a beautiful gift of “irresponsibility” and “a transvaluation of values under the new pressure and hammer of which a conscience is steeled, a heart turned to iron, so that it can bear the weight of such a responsibility” (Nietzche 152).
as Freud comments, reveal the development of individual moral development:
“[Freud] holds that the move from the morality of the child to that of the mature adult comes when one face one’s own guilt and accepts responsibility” (Fingarette 9). More importantly, this individual moral development is a consequence of social disciplinary system. On the discussion of human development of morality and social cultivation, Nietzsche’s investigation is noteworthy and his viewpoints of ethos is consistent with the doctor’s moral debt to Michael. In On the Genealogy of Morality, through the discussions on bad conscience, responsibility and guilt, Nietzsche investigates the emergence of feelings of responsibility and debt38. He argues that “the disciplining of the human animal into an agent that has a sense of responsibility39” (Nietzsche xxii) has not taken place spontaneously but it is achieved by “the morality of custom and social straitjacket” (Nietzsche 36). In brief, it is a result of social cultivation. For Nietzsche, this “decisive historical period” (Nietzsche xxiii) of “the morality of custom” has significantly determined the character of man: “[t]he successful cultivation of an animal sanctioned to promise requires a labour by which man is made into something ‘regular, reliable, and uniform’” (Nietzche xxii). That is say, to use Foucauldian terminology, it is the production of docile bodies through social disciplinary system.40 In Michael K, the doctor’s obsessive compulsive responsibility toward the other is nurtured in the modern disciplinary system.
The officer, as a perfect product of power, discipline and knowledge, is naturally a moral host who owns moral debt to the socially disadvantaged. The formation of morality is in fact closely related to the production of knowledge, that is, rationality.
38 According to Nietzsche, the moral concept of ‘guilt’ comes from a concrete concept of ‘debts.’ He emphasizes that only in the field of legal obligations that we can find the origin of the ‘moral conceptual world’ of guilt, conscience and duty. (Nietzsche 38-40)
39 To discuss Nietzsche’s concepts of responsibility further, in Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze states “the two forms of responsibility, responsibility-debt and responsibility-guilt” (Deleuze 142).
40 Foucault is indeed influenced by Nietzsche greatly and he even states that “I am a Nietzschean. (Fox 169)”
Nietzsche claims a necessary connection between rationality and morality41. In order to live reasonably, happily and usefully, “man himself will really have to become
reliable, regular, necessary, even in his own self-image
42” (Nietzsche 36). Thus,“man assumes responsibility for the debt of being made responsible for the
“advantages” he is to enjoy in society” (Krieger 36). The installation of reason in the individuals by the society, on the one hand, produces men to be rational animals43 whereas it imposes arbitrary beliefs in the new disciplines of rational knowledge. “In this projection of reason underlying the formation of new disciplines, a rational knowledge was always juxtaposed to ignorance, humanity to inhumanity, new
territorial claims were instituted to fix the boundaries separating truth from falsehood, reason from unreason” (After Foucault 119). From the age of Reason, the world
“underlying a discursive formation” is divided into two parts—reason/unreason, humanity/inhumanity, civilized/uncivilized, and so on. “As a result, a cultural ethos was confused with an imperial ratio as the privileged position of morality was
increasingly identified with rational knowledge and the subject who was in a position to know it” (After Foucault 119). Accordingly, the civilized, normal, rational
individuals believe in the “privileged position of morality.” Thus, as a civilized, knowledgeable, moral subject44 (who is subjected to the disciplinary system), the doctor (or the host) has not only the power to divide the abnormal from the normal but also is imposed with a compulsive sense of responsibility to normalize Michael.
Belonging to the normal side, he is imbued with a compulsive sense of morality and
41 “Nietzsche’s criticism of this conception of rationality, it should be noted here, also concerns the connection of rationality that it asserts to exist between reason and morality” (Sedgwick 134).
42 As Krieger states, in Nietzsche, the issue of self-image has closely relation with the other concepts of morality, such as “responsibility” and “debt.” To sum up, all these concepts of morality manifest the
42 As Krieger states, in Nietzsche, the issue of self-image has closely relation with the other concepts of morality, such as “responsibility” and “debt.” To sum up, all these concepts of morality manifest the