Disorder

Prison authorities call it maintaining accountability consistent with a structured environment. This defines prison—the perpetual prevention and suppression of disorder.

“The leper and his separation; the plague and its separations. The first is marked; the second analyzed and distributed. The exile of the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society. Two ways of exercising power over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous mixtures. The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies—this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city.”

It is fashionable to call prisons, ghettos, and anything blighted or depressed areas of social exclusion. But exclusion implies a throwing away, a pushing aside, but also a turning aside. It implies a kind of disregard, a removal from the map of modern knowledge and study. This is ironic, since prisons, ghettos and places of blight and depression are some of the most studied, monitored, and observed areas of society. Foucault, then, is right to call them places of social discipline. But he doesn’t make an absolute distinction. He synthesizes the two:

“to the space of exclusion of which the leper was the symbolic inhabitant (beggars, vagabonds, madmen and the disorderly formed the real population) [was applied] the technique of power proper to disciplinary partitioning. Treat ‘lepers’ as ‘plague victims’, project the subtle segmentations of discipline onto the confused space of internment, combine it with the methods of analytical distribution proper to power, individualize the excluded, but use procedures of individualization to mark exclusion—this is what was operated regularly by disciplinary power from the beginning of the nineteenth century in the psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory, the approved school, and, to some extent, the hospital.”

Isn’t Foucault intense? The active and passive aspects of power, of the power-ful, driven by the social fear of all forms of disorder, including, of course, criminality.

Apollonius locking down the Dionysian districts of society.

Total disorder is never good; but neither is total discipline.