50 years of “monitoring and punishment” – alternative to Marxism

It is deeply anchored in pop-cultural awareness to imagine social relationships like a prison: although freedom of freedom is everywhere and the colorful variety of the world of goods Locke, you have to unmask this delusion as power and government technology- for example, as in John Carpenter’s film »They» They Live «, in which special glasses enable the manipulation of the media to see through as a” obey “command. This imagination ranges from subliminal discomfort to fanaticism to go in an armed fight against this order. But why is it so popular to believe and in a controlled manner?

If you follow the French philosopher Michel Foucault, on the one hand there is a truth in the fact that social development can be more or less accurate based on the prison. On the other hand, the tempting idea is associated with being able to understand itself as an intact and acting subject. Because where you are caught, you can finally break out! On such questions of social and self-relationship, Foucault presented his famous book “monitoring and punishing” 50 years ago- and thus completed a radical new foundation of the social theory.

Perfect power technique

“Monitor and punish” begins martial. Foucault describes medieval, bloodthirsty torture techniques up to public executions long. The purpose of this explicit representation is to make a contrast: the physical punishment and its enormous deterrence have gradually disappeared in modern societies, but not their disciplined functions in control and rule over whole populations. Instead of the body, “the soul” or man was increasingly at the center of the disciplines, which was also extensively researched in human sciences. With the “birth of the prison”, as the subtitle of his study is, these developments came together: people were chased and monitored at the same time, examined and shaped.

Foucault illustrates this effect on the famous Panopticon, that architectural design of a prison building by Jeremy Bentham. From a tower in the middle, the Übermache have an constant insight into every single cell, and “the panoptic facility creates room units that enable it without seeing and at the same time recognizing”. The prisoners are occasionally and unsure whether they are really monitored. Big Brother is watching you, but because you don’t know whether someone is actually watching, you have to assume potentially punishing surveillance from an ever present look. People internalize the prison in this way and foucault draws a decisive punch line: it is about “creating a conscious and permanent state of visibility in the prisoner, who ensures the automatic functioning of power” and at the same time “the perfection of power (…) to make their actual exercise superfluous «.

In this merging of subjectivation and the connection of power and knowledge, this was actually remarkable due to Foucault’s analysis. This is associated with the famous reinterpretation of the concept of power, which no longer represents the centralized and personalized sovereign rule, but, as he later carried out in “The will to know”, an “omnipresent of power”. This further development of the concept of power had a specific meaning: on the one hand, it solves a theoretical problem in Foucault’s work itself and on the other hand it provides an alternative to the hated Marxism at the time, which led the left -wing thinking into a dead end.

“Storms in the water glass«

With “monitoring and punishment” “politics appears at work and in life Foucault,” as Maurice Blanchot found. In fact, the turning point can be found here, where Foucault’s considerations are embedded in social practices. In his dissertation, Foucault had turned to the development of madness or its constitutive function for reason. His first works were historicizing reconstructions, which he captivated under the concept of archeology, as “a description that questioned what has already been said at the level of its existence,” as he explains in “The Archeology of Knowledge”. In these discourse analyzes, Foucault was also about demonstrating his thesis on the breaks of developments that the history of fundamental contingency is structured. “It is about decentralization that does not allow a center to privilege,” Foucault describes his approach.

However, this radical decentralization of the discourses also resulted in a problem: the changes within the discourse formations could only be explained from themselves if they were no longer an origin, such as the economic basis. With its redesign of power, Foucault finds a solution for this: from then on, he no longer thinks the phenomena from its origin or a center, but in terms of its effectiveness and its effects.

“Marxism rests like a fish in the water in the 19th century thinking,” mocked Foucault.

At that time, this delimitation primarily applies to Marxism and its economic reductionism and historical determinism. Foucault’s skepticism was whether “the critical discourse (…) directed against the oppression is not part of the same historical network as what he is suing”. Foucault saw the ideas of historical necessity as organic products of those bourgeois orders that he had criticized for their rationalism, including all exclusions of sick, insane and non-normal. “Marxism rests like a fish in the water in the thinking of the 19th century”, Foucault mocked in “The Order of Things”, and its reviews against bourgeois philosophy “are only storms in water glass”.

Foucault shared the dissatisfaction with the party and worldview marxism of the 1960s with an entire generation of young intelligence in France. His criticism of knowledge therefore met in the outcome of May 1968 of great interest within that search movement of the left -wing left -wing left. Foucault comments on his research himself with astonishment, because what he “tried to do was accepted by the left -wing intellectuals in France. After all, “only around 1968 (…) gained their political importance, and that with a sharpness that I had not suspected”.

Promise of resistance

However, the anti -authoritarian impulse, which Foucault’s thinking so attractive for the intellectuals on the barricades of May ’68, threatens to tip into mere voluntaryism. Foucault’s great promise against Marxism was: your resistance is possible at any time, it does not need a revolution in conditions – on the contrary, that would even be a wrong idea of ​​power. Because this had become a productive instead of repressive force at Foucault, something that produces the subjects and its options for action. The omnipresence of power was not the total rule, but the possibility of change in the here and now: “Where there is power, there is resistance,” says “The will to knowledge”.

Foucault power analysis wanted to understand those formations that develop in positive knowledge as a truth that “divides individuals into categories, assigns them their individuality, binds them to their identity and imposes the law of truth”, as Foucault in “” The subject and power “explains. With the political turn in “monitoring and punishing” it was then possible to make our own story as a subject, because we could bring “new forms of subjectivity by rejecting the kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for years «.

To think of social reality and development against the background of radical vaguity that makes resistance and change possible at any time, among other things – with Foucault, one of the new principles of critical social sciences, whether in constructivist, post -structural or postmodern version. However, the tempting resistance potential is only possible against the background of the departure from any social -theoretical concept of determination and thus strictly accepted by the materialistic analysis itself.

In the past 50 years there has been many disputes, criticism of Foucault, like numerous attempts to synthesize his theory with Marx. Can’t have both: a strong term capitalist socialization and a subject theory that enables the potential to “micropolitics” of resistance? However, more difficult than any such theoretical decisions weighs as an inheritance of “monitoring and punishment” that the left and its theory has actually occurred social knowledge since then, like a decision that can be made according to political advantages. You cannot educate this condition yourself with the Foucault power analysis.