Preface to 'The Battle Roar of Silence - Foucault and The Carceral System' - Meinrad Calleja Faraxa Publishing
At
the end of his ‘Discipline and Punish –
The Birth of the Prison’ Foucault alerts ‘in this central and centralised
humanity, the effect and instruments of complex power relations, bodies and
forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of ‘incarceration’, objects for
discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the
distant roar of battle’.[1]
This essay is primarily concerned with illustrating the complex power relations
and their strategies for the silencing of this roar, as well the political articulation
of the roar of silence and its battle for radical freedom.
Foucault’s afore-cited text opens with a gruelling description
of the torture of Damiens the regicide that occurred in March 1757 as reported
in the Gazette d’Amsterdam.[2] Nearly three centuries later, consumers of
‘statist’ democracies are to some extent still being acquainted with the imagery
of inhuman and degrading forms of punishment. The spectacle of people who are
publicly beheaded, stoned to death, flogged, have their hands amputated, shot
by firing squads, hung from cranes, electrocuted, administered lethal
injections, kept in concentration camps, chained, gagged and caged, is widely
disseminated. Less spectacular unjust punishment is also perpetuated by
governments who claim to champion human rights, promote democracy, set
standards of justice, and uphold doctrines of global policing. Guantanamo Bay
prison, for example, appears to have been hastily set up for assumed terrorists
after the 2001 9/11 attacks on the United States of America. This prison
presents globally disseminated imagery of degrading, inhuman, harsh and cruel
punishment of offenders who have been arbitrarily detained without recourse to
adequate justice. It is also symbolic of
an alliance of regimes deploying unlimited resources to apprehend anyone they
label as worthy of punishment, wherever they may be, without any legal
constraints. If this is how democratic governments operate, we can begin to
imagine how inhumane punishment must be in traditionally despotic
jurisdictions.
To answer the question why unjust
and cruel punishment is tolerated, we need to look at some recent historical
landmarks that seem to have changed public opinion dramatically, while actually
always having existed as a possibility. Since 9/11, consumers of political
discourses seem to have experienced a form of anxiety, if not paranoia, that
exposed both their vulnerability to assumed transnational terrorism and their
impotence in the face of domestic tyranny inflicted by their own immediate
political regimes. Again, a domestic tyranny not exclusively restricted to the
regimes Westerners traditionally accepted as ‘despotic’ and expect no better
of. Now, the label ‘despotic tyranny’ may apply just as appropriately to the
seemingly freely-elected ‘democratic’ parliamentary governments.
The predictable four suicide attacks
carried out in the United States of America, including attacks on the New York ‘Twin
Towers’ and Washington’s ‘Pentagon’,
shocking, ruthless, and spectacular as they were, followed by attacks on other
urban centres elsewhere, spell out a number of obvious conclusions. Far too many
political economies are characterised by uneven development, ruthless dictatorships,
unequal exchange, lack of basic freedoms, inhuman depravations, and virtually
no hope or prospects beyond subsistence. Burning effigies of empire and
chanting militant slogans were to be taken to their logical conclusion. The
writing had been on the wall for ages. It had been dismissed in a state of
denial as mere ‘graffiti’ – an inconvenient fact of life we simply had to put
up with given the wide disparities in development and standards of living, and
within a context of seemingly unrestricted freedom.
The images of the ‘Twin Towers’
collapsing amidst shock and panic disseminated in real-time were unprecedented
both in their force of violence and in the fact that they were not the act of
war of a legitimate state against another. State centric and super-power
security was given yet another colossal blow by a group of adherents committed
to a contestatory ideology, Islam. Led by a figure of relative humility and
deviously innovative courage and determination, Bin Laden appeared to be
articulating the battle roars of the disillusioned and disenfranchised
irrespective of whether they adhered to the same religious faith. The
vulnerability of state security in the West was compounded by the fact that
many potential terrorists are willing and able to die for their cause. This
required an exponentially greater counter-initiative to both reassure law-abiding
citizens and dissuade potential terrorists, while also temporarily silencing
the ever-approaching and rapidly intensifying battle roar.
The unfolding of events also
displayed the inherent dangers of Eurocentric ‘democracy’ and statist
‘parliamentarism’, and the myths of freedom and justice that sustain them,
particularly the ability of statist interests to recruit consent, or simply by-pass
it. In the aftermath of 9/11, Saddam Hussein was incapacitated on false
pretences when consumers of discourse were led to believe Iraq had
‘Weapons-of-Mass-Destruction’, which it clearly did not. The initial ‘axis of
evil’ singled out by the Americans responsible for harbouring, aiding and
abetting international terrorism included North Korea, Iran, Syria and Libya.
These were subsequently all given the generous benefit of doubt much to the
chagrin of their respective populations. These despotic regimes were not only rehabilitated,
but engaged in international dialogue and in some cases allegedly covertly
assisted to retain power and eliminate opposition, reportedly using inhuman
torture and punishment to quash dissent through ‘rendition’. All forms of
potential Islamic militancy had to be swiftly eradicated, giving many
totalitarian states a convenient pretext to eliminate all opposition in the
name of ‘counter-terrorism’. This event
thus also illustrated that governments can pursue any agenda, no matter how
sinister, if they manage to recruit sufficient consent and foist a plausible ‘security’
scenario alarm-card.
The subsequent outbursts of sporadic
violence generated by the very citizens of so called ‘democratic’ states (in
Europe, for example) illustrate that people not only need outlets to vent off
their accrued frustrations, but new modes of politics beyond the discourse of
representative parliamentary statist democracy. These forms of popular protest
are actually the results of ‘democracy’ in real terms as a despotic form of
parliamentary governance that reduces participation to mere symbolic
representation of indifference and complacency with no real ‘political’ value
or any affirmative or secure freedom. However, they also seem to infer that so
called ‘democratic’ countries can tolerate and encapsulate a degree of
rebellion without any serious challenge to the apparent legitimacy of their
institutions.
The ‘thematic’ of the non-religious
protests vary considerably from economic respite to racism or abuse of police power. The ‘narrative’ within which the contextual
features are framed usually portray the protestors as violent hooligans or
rebels without a cause. This tends to reduce the intrinsic metapolitical
features to their extrinsic socio-economic and cultural mode of expression
without ever posing any serious challenge to the mode of production of politics
and statist democracy. This singles out the glaring lack of any articulation of
a political ‘contestatory’ ideology that can challenge neo-liberalism. The
corollary of this seems to infer forceful and affirmative ‘contestatory’
ideologies are only subsumed by the illicit as an act of ‘transgression’ or ‘aggression’.
Legal ‘compliance’ infers a harmonisation of the flattened and pacified, even
if apparently nuanced, ‘political’ within the exclusive institutional framework
of parliamentary democracy or tolerated dynastic oligarchies (that also serve
to make parliamentary democracies appear more humane and pluralistic). Thus
construed, parliamentary democracy appears to accentuate its ‘consensus’
feature, while intransigently ignoring at its peril the ever approaching battle
roars that it manages to silence by divesting of political articulation and
encapsulation, but not sufficiently address, quash, extinguish or permanently
exterminate. Consensus may appear to simply mean surrendering, even if only
partially and temporarily, one’s convictions, while backing one’s convictions
appears always more intransigently irrational. The spectre of violent protest
is lurking with intent in silence.
The accumulated suffering in certain
Arab jurisdictions, for example, reached its tipping-point in 2011 after entire
regions realised they would not be saved by anyone but themselves. The globally
disseminated Jasmine Revolution and the Arab Spring quixotically seemed to
offer some degree of temporary gratification. The dramatic and relatively
accelerated fall of the Tunisian, Egyptian and Libyan leadership offered
respite, if not hope. Some intermediary dominos were quickly pulled out to save
others from also falling. However, as one model of dictatorship reaches its
expiry date on the shelves of political discourses, a new model replaces it.
The new product, as Chomsky and Kellner have often alerted, may indeed be more
subtle and sophisticated in design. There can be no doubt that the Tunisian and
Egyptian power shifts were hijacked by ‘internal’ coups secured by the military
establishment, subsequently endorsed by popular vote in a form of parliamentary
democracy engineered to appease consumers, while also guaranteeing the status
quo for the international establishment. The de facto United Nations’ sanctioning
of the Libyan regime, and its secured vote to allow NATO military intervention,
ensured the West would enjoy all the credit for this supplanting of a former
foe turned ally, and again, turned foe. Other despots were tolerated to
dissuade further rebellion fuelled by the apparent victories of the ‘popular
masses’. The fact that other dictators were not so easily dethroned illustrates
the crude reality that popular revolt and social networks have their
limits.
We seem to have ushered in a
ruthless international ‘franchise’ of autocratic despots that care little about
human life. The international elite seem to be teaming-up to augment the
privileges of a select caste, bound only by their insatiable urge to retain
power and pursue profit, while consumers mortgage the future of humanity. This
alliance of regimes hides behind a façade of meaningless democratic rhetoric
while actually perpetrating and facilitating more violence and injustice than
it claims to oppose. In advocating urgent interventions to reduce despotism, it
claims to be bound by democratic constraints and international conventions that
inhibit efficacious solutions. However, when convenient it simply ignores or
by-passes these political and juridical obligations. Recent events have illustrated clearly that
in some cases the international power elite tolerate despotism and violence by
default of adequate intervention, (or simply convenient complacency and
procrastination), while in yet other scenarios it foists what it would like
consumers to believe is forceful intervention. Syria is a clear example.
How is punishment configurated in
such scenarios? One of the very conditions of possibility of abuse of power is
a readiness of brutally enforcing one’s will and defiantly getting away with it.
What better way to express such absolute power than through inhuman punishment
that cannot be restrained by the international and domestic institutions of
democracy. Allegations related to torture in Guantanamo Bay and other allegedly
notorious detention centres presumed to exist in covert jurisdictions, for
example, continue to feed images of a new ruthless and omnipotent despotism of
democracy with allegedly multi-national stockholding. These cabalistic
manoeuvres would not be possible without a notion of punishment, indeed
arbitrarily enforceable harsh and cruel punishment – ‘tellishment’, lurking in the consciousness of consumers of these
political discourses. Indeed, these forms of ‘tellishment’ are actually
allocated space (of possibility/ actualisation/as practises) by democracy
itself. Western governments and their satellites use the logic of ‘tax-evasion’
or ‘tax-avoidance’ to by-pass human rights issues through the use of customised
‘offshore-punishment’ and ‘offshore-law-enforcement’. In ‘rendition’ this
includes torture, and inhuman and degrading punishment, illustrating the
difference between the ‘letter’ of the law and its assumed ‘spirit’, which is
the very expression of ‘power’. The great loss of human life and lack of
fundamental human rights appears to simply be a ‘moral-overhead’ consumers need
to rationalise and fatalistically accept as a consequence of potential dangers
lurking in their midst. They are rendered plausible to citizens by the very
discourse citizens of democracy have consumed, including a plausible
‘blameworthiness’ catalogue and ‘criminogenic’ narrative.
Punishment is rarely grounded on any
consistent moral or ethical values. Quite frankly, punishment seeks to veil an
oppressive ideology embedded in law that we repress. These atrocious abuses are
possible because the contemporary political culture has initiated consumers of
carefully articulated political discourses to be passive observers at the very
best, if not totally disinterested, complacent, and apathetic, to all forms of
injustice and human rights abuse, of which ‘tellishment’ is one example. The dissemination
of hegemonic ideological content through various fonts has created a model of
citizenship and indeed an ontological abstraction of humanity that is devoid of
active political literacy simply because indoctrinated consumers fatalistically
accept the disciplinary boundaries they have been confined within. This essay
seeks to explore these dynamics which to some extent are codified and
articulated through ‘punishment’ and carceral system discourses that feed this
plausibility structuring.
The essay is not concerned with any
single polity, any particular mode of legal justice, or any specific context or
temporalization. While trying to avoid being reductive, I have been obliged to
make certain generalisations. Punishment, for example, simply refers to coercive punishment, particularly its
actualisation as ‘incarceration’. States and society refer to Euro/
State-centric models based on industrialised democracy – ‘democracy’ that is
upheld by institutions, rules, and social practises, that are based on an
alleged consensus, usually of a majority, that is tested, usually though not
necessarily, through elections, in which consent is recruited through
information dissemination relays and exchange, and then takes the form of a
representative parliament. An essay about ‘punishment’ is intrinsically linked
to the values a group agree upon, the goals of this group, the legitimacy of
‘authority’ they bestow on decision-makers acting on their behalf agreed upon
by consensus, the ‘rules’ that they agree ought to regulate the desired
behaviour and normative order, and the relations of power and subordination
that come into existence or play. Put differently, ‘punishment’ may ensure the
preservation of ‘values’, the achievement of ‘goals’, the legitimacy of ‘authority’,
the compliance to ‘rules’, and the delineation of ‘power’. It is essential to
any mode of state-centric power exchange based on a notion of consensus.
Contemporary Euro/ State-centric
models of industrialised democracy are governed by a political culture which
combines knowledge, information, science, and technology. This political
culture imposes forms of vigilance and discipline we are often oblivious to.
These ‘strategies’ are upheld by institutions and the social practices they
encourage. Consent is recruited through subtle and not so subtle forms of
socialisation that shape public opinion and achieve consensus. Multi-national
media industries and academia extend their sphere of influence on a global
scale. This essay situates these forms of discipline and vigilance within an
institutional power structure that is an integral feature of a specific mode of
production based upon an ideology of unequal distribution and exchange causing
a number of social antagonisms. What is being ‘antagonised’ is actually an
unfair or unequal distribution of resources, particularly intangibles like
‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, but also tangible material welfare. This then
appears to consumers to be consonant with the contemporary crisis of modernity,
a crisis of ‘meaning’, ‘values’, and ‘certainty’. The combination of the lack
of access to these resources and constant legitimacy deficits currently being
experienced in areas as far apart as ‘welfare’, ‘peace’, ‘environment’, ‘human
rights’, ‘civil liberties’, and ‘cultural tolerance’, make this a ‘metapolitical’
project.
Punishment is seen as the corrective
mechanism to restore legitimacy and order, confer meaning, repress antagonisms,
and eliminate negotiation. This buttresses a conception of ‘the social’
understood as a ‘totality’ in which every actor imagines a degree of autonomy
and participation in ‘the political culture’, together with a rather simplistic
notion of ‘justice’. Punishment appears necessary, beneficial, and above all
rational. Contemporary problems like organised crime and international
terrorism make ‘punishment’ appear to be an urgent imperative that people need
and are prepared to pay a social cost for.
Punishment is a tool that is used to
sustain a particular narrative and deter or repress all forms of subversion and
contestation. Its actualisation often justifies coercion as a form of
‘deterrence’, ‘incapacitation’, and ‘rehabilitation’ or ‘reform’. What are also
being deterred and incapacitated are all forms of subversion of meaning, and what
are also being reformed are the strategies of efficient modes of dominance,
discipline, vigilance, and subordination that shape political consensus. The
urgency of ‘punishment’ allows notions like ‘governmentality’, ‘encapsulation
of conflict’, ‘domestic colonisation’, ‘domestic mission’, and ‘the logic of
emergency’ (all of which will be discussed in the text) to pave the way to a
ruthless global politics of incarceration.
In short, people are pacified,
domesticated, and massified into a more manageable and coherent ‘totality’ when
they accept coercive punishment without critically assessing its ethical,
metapolitical and logical ramifications. They are dissuaded from being seduced
by ‘other’ possibilities beyond those suggested by ‘legitimate’ authorities.
Punishment has a conservatising effect on people. While the hold of
‘traditional’ institutions like the ‘Nation-state’, ‘family’ and ‘religions’
may have diminished, other contemporary ‘institutions’ attached to ‘knowledge’,
‘science’, ‘technology’, and ‘information’, and the political culture they
produce, are adamant that their ‘verities’, ‘certainties’, and ‘meaning’ ought
to be dogmatised, when necessary by sustaining coercive punishment. Modern
panopticons ensure constant vigilance, but a notion of ‘punishment’ in itself
helps achieve a degree of compliance.
Such a narrative of punishment
discourse within a political culture could not be complete without some sort of
pseudo-scientific status being conferred on a professional, academic, collegiality
of ‘service-providers’ endowed with authority to confer and restore ‘meaning’
through the very knowledge it creates. This collegiality has been designated
with the task of justifying or legitimising ‘punishment’, while using
punishment to legitimise their authority. Their pseudo-science is assembled by
collating allegedly ‘positivist’ data drawn from empirical correspondences as
far apart as psychiatry, psychology, sociology, anthropology, physiology,
neurology, biology, and the economy, using punishment as their ‘object’. At
stake is the reproduction of a caste of sectoral interests who monopolise
intervention while enhancing the premium on their own cultural capital. These
dominant discourses attempt to sustain a notion of ‘responsibility’ expressed as
‘rationality’, denying ‘determinism’ in favour of an inflated and
over-determined ontology. This essay shall critically discuss this
‘hyper-scientization’ and ‘professional impairment’ and will argue in favour of
a ‘post-positivist’ approach, dismissing much of the epistemological basis of
this knowledge as ideologically value-laden and socially constructed to sustain
the despotism of democracy.
One question seems to frequently resurrect
– why should law-abiding citizens care about those that have chosen to
transgress against the law? Punishment
affects those that are never actually exposed to its material concretisation in
practise, but are nevertheless exposed to its force through ‘deterrence’. Their
ultimate compliance and subordination is an indicator of this efficiency. Thus
punishment coerces those that do not transgress or subvert by their very
reluctance to refuse consent, repress alternatives, and their mechanistic
contribution to social order expressed as ‘democracy’ and actualised by symbolic
concessions. How does this impinge on notions of ‘freedom’? Is the notion of
‘freedom’ contradictory, metaphorical, and polysemic? This essay seeks to
explore these facets of the production of ‘meaning’.
This essay is indirectly about
phenomena like xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, ethnocentricity, racism,
eco-imperialism, war, aggressive economic conquest, and widespread inequality
and intolerance, all symptomatic of modernity’s failures. This essay provokes a
politically-charged radical critique of the dominant rationality sustaining
these prejudices, upheld, albeit partially and indirectly, by punishment
discourses. Punishment is often the irrational response to misinformed and
misguided policy that in turn feeds other prejudices. The sum total of these
strategies feeds a particular configuration of power ‘structured-in-dominance’,
while ‘punishment’ is their crude and vulgar expression of subjectivity.
I feel I am bound to a strictly
‘political’ agenda. This essay seeks to critically reflect on the role of an
emancipatory and empowering conception of political participation from a notion
or position of ‘metapoltics’ (in line with Badiou’s use of the term) that deters inequality,
incapacitates oppression, and reforms political culture to secure radical
freedom. The text itself is ironically a result of a perspective transformation
brought about by prolonged and intense punishment, systematically punctuated by
various human right violations this author suffered. So the corollary of this
experience is the thrust of the argumentation and the accompanying choice of
bibliography that expresses the formation of this author’s bias. These are in
fact the actual sources of solace this author found in the solitude of a prison
cell while these injustices were being perpetuated that in turn garnered the
energy to see this project through to publication.
A literature review of the
literature cited will establish that this text is predominantly shaped by
philosophy. Why philosophy? A philosophy lecturer once told me that she enjoys
reading fiction to relax from philosophy; perhaps I read philosophy to relax
from fiction! Philosophy can be empowering. It can help those being punished
reflect and establish a critique of their reality. This is how this text was
initiated. Authors that have contributed
significantly to the formation of this text’s philosophy apart from Foucault (d.1984)
include Deleuze (d.1995),
Gauattari (d.1992), Baudrillard (d.2007), Lyotard (d.1998),
Derrida (d.2004),
Althusser (d.1990),
Canguilhem (d.1995), Marx
(d.1883), Wittgenstein(d.1951), Kant (d.1804),
Russel (d.1970), Bourdieu, Laclau, Mouffe, and Badiou.
This text may appear to be dedicated
to Foucault’s ‘Discipline and Punish –
The Birth of the Prison’. Indeed, his text was a major influence on the
ideas gathered here, however, all his texts contributed significantly. I draw
heavily on the works of Foucault, particularly his work on institutions, and
primarily his methodologies. I should like to declare my main bias; I have
privileged Foucault’s works and believe his work is essential to any critical
study of contemporary modes of rationality. Without harbouring any pretensions,
this essay is Foucauldian in scope. I attempt to reveal aspects of the
irrationality of punishment by critically assessing the dominant modes of
rationality sustaining these foundations in a format that relies of an
archaeological and genealogical approach to the dissemination and consumption
of contemporary discourse. This text specifically deals with the philosophy of
Foucault.
The essay modestly seeks to examine
‘punishment discourses’ as part of a configuration of power, expressed in a
specific ‘scientific’ language, within a political culture. Having been exposed
to first-hand experience of punishment within this political culture, Foucault helped me along
with this project in no uncertain terms. We are all part of this political
culture, and we are all exposed to the scrutiny of this scientific language,
and dominated by its power-structure. We are both ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ of
this mode of rationality that imposes constraints we may be oblivious to.
Foucault raises our awareness to these concerns.
By examining the flaws in
pseudo-scientific epistemological discourses that shape the rationality of
punishment, both philosophical and sociological, I intend exposing the archaic,
ephemeral, arbitrary, and subjective nature of punishment rationales. The
rationality governing punishment discourse is not as ‘rational’ as it claims.
It certainly lacks an intuitive perspective. I shall illustrate that often
‘punishment’ is shaped by mere ‘opinion’; it is a pseudo-science based on
conjecture, necessary illusions, constant-conjoins, and logical fictions that
together form ‘consensus’. Punishment is merely a passionate response fuelled
by emotive instincts whose irrationality is masquerading as ‘public opinion’,
‘common sense’, and ‘collectivity’. It is a form of ‘repression’. It is also an
ideological weapon deployed to accommodate contemporary prejudices and
institutional ‘functional-imperatives’. It is a defeatist tool deployed to
restore legitimacy in crisis. It is a prop in a specific political culture and
‘power-game’. It sustains modern slavery.
The bottom line is that this text is
quite simply about the coercive aspects of punishment many people overlook, deny,
repress, or are indifferent towards. People convince themselves they are safe
in the knowledge they will never be liable to punishment themselves through
their own compliance. They suffer in silence. This essay is primarily focused
on illuminating the fact that we are all victims of coercive punishment. I hope
the text will serve to enlighten whoever reads it. It may also allow us to hear
the battle roar of silence Foucault alerted us to.
