Dragons and Foucault: A History of the Dangerous and Unseen
Dennis Wilson
Dragon-a scaly lizardlike serpent of various types and sizes,
with one to many heads, wings or no wings, legs or no legs.
Some can talk with humans and many guard treasure.
Western dragons are fierce, powerful, wise, and miserly.
They breath fire and are generally destructive.
- Eric Carle, Dragons, Dragons, and Other Creatures that Never Were.
Oh, tongue, give sound to joy and sing
of hope and promise on dragonwing!
- Anne McCaffrey
As children, some of us had a fascination with dragons: sleek, prismatic scales, curling tails, long, milk-white teeth, sur- rounded by a temperate mist of steam and the possibility of guttural fire. And those eyes-slitted, bright as wet stones, deeply intelligent. It was the contradiction between those eyes and the rest of the creature that drew us in; wisdom in the context of terrible power, lonesome knowledge guarded by an almost sardonic, possibly tragic context of fire and claws. We imagined dragons alone, without companions, steeping in their dark and humid caves. Guarding something-treasure, themselves, ancient secrets.
In our mind's eye we saw the dragons hunted, torn from their caves by straining men with thick nets and gleaming swords, exhaling fire and unfurling their wings against what they must have known was coming: their terrible extinction, the time when men became too afraid of their fusion of knowledge and power to allow them to lead even marginal, secluded lives. The dragons were captured, slain, and their eight-chambered hearts were presented to the king for consumption.
Some of us, having grown, still see dragons in the world around us. We sense their heat, their nearby sleeping potency, their shrouded secrets. We sense dragons not as tangible, living creatures but merely the essence of what they represent; dangerous knowledge, frightening and discerning. We sense not literal dragons but what we as a national community have sought, captured, and hidden to the best of our ability- unsettling thoughts or realities, uncomfortable or abnormal individuals, keen and powerful institutions, alternate lifestyles, medicines, behaviors, apparent contradictions that do not fit our simple assumptions and prejudices. We approach these modern dragons with the same fascinated trepidation as we did when we were children; we want to know them, but not too closely. We respect and fear them.
I have seen a few dragons in my lifetime.
They can quote Ralph Waldo Emerson, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and ancient Greek gods and goddesses.
They can connect with the foundation of other human beings in an instant, searing through the layers of rhetoric and protection we wind around ourselves and getting straight at what bothers us, what we have hidden from ourselves and others because it is painful, difficult, and real.
They have bodies thick as castles, with sharp moats and sinuous pillars showing vaguely through nondescript t-shirts and white cotton sweatpants.
They have a combined list of convictions and felonies that might be considered exhaustive. Most of them have accumulated multiple life sentences after being charged with such acts as first- or second- degree murder, rape, possession of a deadly weapon, robbery, drug trafficking, and so on.
I first met them in November, at the Delaware County Correctional Center, where many of them will be spending the rest of their lives. They are all members of a program called Project Aware, a multi-step and holistic counseling and prevention program that targets troubled teens who are often moments away from making the same mistakes the prisoners made years ago. It is not a program centered around scaring children by yelling in their faces and depicting the brutal realities of prison life. It is aimed at getting the children to confront their own pasts, to admit to their own human needs and weaknesses that have often been brutally exploited or simply remiss. This is done through group counseling, follow-up sessions, and parent-child meetings, and it is all organized and led by the prisoners.
I have seen this program work. I have watched as the prisoners stood in front of a group of troubled children and talked about their own pasts, their own unchangeable mistakes, their own regrets and anger. I have seen the prisoners question individual children, allowing the children to come to important self-realizations about their own actions and their own very-much avoidable future mistakes, regrets, and anger. I have witnessed these prisoners as they began to affect and alter the course of dangerously unstable lives.
And yet they remain prisoners; which means that they are not only locked away but invisible to the general populace, unspoken syllables in our national dialogue. This is because they represent a fundamental contradiction that is in opposition to what some people and institutions want everyone to believe: that prisoners are not people, that they are merely guilty, evil, unintelligent, vindictive, unrepentant. The men of Project Aware are anything but this; they are compassionate, very intelligent, gentle, and genuinely concerned about the lives of troubled children. Because of this, they are largely unseen and the program that they began over twenty years ago is in a constant threat of extinction.
French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault is obsessed with the dragons of today. He has shown throughout his studies that the men of Project Aware do not represent isolated circumstances, but rather stand, as we all do, as participants in the unraveling of a present that has been shaped by a history of deliberate light and shadows. Most (if not all) of his studies are directed at an analysis of the ways in which social power, or relationships of power, shape our modern institutions (prisons, hospitals, schools, military, families). The specifics of this power are sometimes revealing, in the way that the visibility of a monarch's crown and staff add to his atmosphere of power. Many times, however, relationships of power do their best to conceal or simplify; modern-day prisons and asylums are built to be invisible to the surrounding communities; the brutal aftereffects of corporate globalization are rarely seen in news broadcasts or accepted media; homeopathic medicines remain mythical and unaccepted. Like the dragons of juvenile fantasy, these realities are hidden away because they escape the accepted order, they contradict established notions of what is normal and what is not.
As Foucault shows throughout his literature, there are very definite reasons for these acts of concealing and revealing. These reasons, Foucault shows, are identified by a careful analysis of history that takes into account the objectives and potential of relationships of power and the ways in which knowledge, always subjective, can be created by those individuals or institutions that wield sufficient power. In this way, the powerful can afford to imprison, execute, or make abnormal those modern-day dragons that represent a threat to an unthinking acceptance of the way things are. And by that definition, Foucault himself would be a dangerous dragon, indeed.
Perhaps Foucault understands that oftentimes the human mind deals best with images-images of violence, of passion, of incomprehension, of failure, or of some kind of victory; human silhouettes on the whitewashed walls of Hiroshima, or a single frozen kiss in the middle of a combustive Parisian avenue. Perhaps this is why Foucault begins his book Discipline and Punish with a sequence of images that resonate long after the book has been filed away. The first image is of a man who has committed that most unforgivable of crimes, regicide; he has threatened the king's body, and the unashamed power and authority that it manifests. The man is displayed, cut, burnt, humiliated, judged, drawn, quartered, dismembered. His remains are choked with fire and dispersed. The second image, following immediately, is a list of rules for juvenile criminals, which we can imagine posted eminently on the wall. In this list, composed eighty years after the death of the regicide, there are no less than 28 rules, separating and directing nearly every aspect of the inmate's lives-their work habits, their sleeping schedule, their recreation time, their prayers. With these two concrete images, Foucault has both introduced and concluded the project contained within the pages of Discipline and Punish-the project of tracing the generation of the prison system and its adaptation to different contexts of power and a changing productive world. All of these changes are tied together with certain technologies and innovations and an interconnecting web of truth, power, and knowledge whose implications reach well beyond the steel confines of the prison.
The transition from the kind of open punishment represented in the first image to the implementation of the less overt yet more insidious form of discipline displayed in the second cannot be explained by simple images. The maturation of the former to the latter represents not the progressive or slowly victorious nature of humanitarianism but the gradual disembodiment and dispersal of societal power. As Foucault states in Discipline and Punish and throughout his writings, this kind of development went hand-in-hand with the transition from an economy of feudalism to one of capitalism- the methods of production shifted, and so too did the manifestations of wealth, the ideas about health and human sanity, the discourse surrounding sexuality, the institutions of criminality and punishment, and so on. These changes were all representative of the changing character of power throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, in Europe and elsewhere; a power that was alternating from prohibitive to proscribed, from visible to invisible, from localized to diffused-a power that "traverses and produces things, [that] induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse."1
Once again, Michel Foucault uses concrete representations to attest to his theories. Throughout Discipline and Punish, Foucault uses the depiction of the body to add depth to his conjectures-the body of the king, and the body of the condemned. Both of these bodies assert themselves as the manifestations of power in the early history of authority and punishment. The body of the king, draped in all the startling regalia of royalty, signaled the undeniability of sovereign power-the cloak, the jewels, the oceans of velvet all attested to a sense of authority that was overt, overbearing, collected, and restrictive. At the opposite end of the spectrum was the condemned, whose torn body represented not authority but the carrying-out of authority, not law but the application of the law-collected, yes; collected and displayed because it shared with the body of the king the necessity of public exhibition and all the formalities of conspicuous power.
But over time, the realities of that power shifted. Feudalism began its long march to free market capitalism; wealth shifted from land ownership to speculation and industrial profit; the useful body shifted from the indebted peasant to the alienated factory worker; ideology rejected the power of the king in favor of the power of the people-but in reality, according to Foucault, the people merely became vehicles for a new kind of power rather than the bearers of a power that was, in the original sense of the words, truly democratic. The power manifested in the body of the king, once so concentrated and acute, had measured itself out into and throughout the population-in the architecture, the medicine, the family, the schools. This new power, as Foucault later demonstrates, was embodied not in the king but on the parade grounds, where thousands upon thousands of "docile bodies" were regimented, disciplined, controlled from the inside. In the realm of penality, the spectacle of punishment had disappeared; the body of the condemned was now held in private, as the authority vested in the penal system now rested almost completely on the conviction itself, and on the myriad threats exhumed from the mere existence of the prison and the machinations of the justice system.2 Today, these same bodies remain invisible; the bodies of the five prisoners of Project Aware are enveloped by the very same institution, men who like straining dragons unfurl against their cages but remain largely unseen and forever marked, in Manichean totality, as "criminals."
This new distribution of power came about not as an act of chance nor as a result of some international conspiracy-the lines of its development simply trace the accumulation of "local and particular" benefits for those groups of people who sought to gain or perpetuate their governing hold on society.3 These benefits both differ and overlap with each discipline, be it medical science or the military, international business or education; Foucault notes that "the interplay of the family, medicine, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, the school and justice doesn't have the effect of homogenizing these different instances but of establishing connections, cross-references, complementarities and demarcations between them which assume that each instance retains to some extent its own special modalities."4
In the realm of the penal system, Foucault points out some of the benefits accrued by those in charge of the system, benefits obscured beneath the language of humanitarian progressivism. Foucault states that, among other things, "justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice. If it too strikes, if it too kills, it is not as a glorification of its strength, but as an element of itself that it is obliged to tolerate, that it finds difficult to account for. The apportioning of blame is redistributed...Now... it is the conviction itself that marks the offender with the unequivocally negative sign: the publicity has shifted to the trial, and to the sentence; the execution itself is like an additional shame that justice is ashamed to impose on the condemned man...those who carry out the penalty tend to become an autonomous sector; justice is relieved of responsibility for it by a bureaucratic concealment of the penalty itself."5
A socio-historical exploration of the various technologies and disciplinary mechanisms that made this new kind of power possible helps to reveal the nature and reality of this power. Foucault speaks of 'discipline' as a "modest, suspicious power" which "'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals as both objects and as instruments of its exercise."6 Along these lines he highlights numerous examples that bring attention to the ways in which the new distribution of power has manifested itself in institutional, largely self-perpetuating practices-practices that generate obedience to a certain idea, establishment, or way of life.
In the realm of the penal system, Foucault discusses at length the idea of the all-seeing gaze, or the panopticon. Foucault states that whereas earlier (in the prison system and elsewhere) power had been exerted through its display of force and "patches of darkness," after the disembodiment of power that took place during the 18th century, authority became an exercise in the "eliminat[ion] of the shadowy areas of society and the institution of an inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself."7 There are many benefits that came along with the development of this powerful gaze; namely, in comparison to previous machinations of control, the panopticon was both less expensive and more total. Foucault states that the panopticon creates "power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be a minimal cost."8 The power of this new panopticism stems from the fact that it is self-perpetuating and internalized, and as such its implications reach well beyond the penal system-panopticism has been realized not only in the architecture of modern prisons but also in the distribution and functioning of health and the medical sciences, in the disciplinary regions of the military, the cubicled labyrinth of the workplace, and in society in general, where conspicuous consumption and the ever present camera keeps us all watched, judged, and controlled. This is the kind of technology of power that Foucault refers to throughout his writing-the new disciplinary mechanisms that enter our everyday discourse and lay at the root of our assumptions, a form of power that has been so dissolved that "no one, either the watcher or the watched, can escape."9
Foucault does not end his discussion of disciplinary mechanisms with the panopticon. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault mentions other forms of widespread and internalized control; he mentions the examination, which derives its power from its ability to individualize, objectify, compare, judge, document, produce knowledge, and carry sentence.10 Foucault's exploration of this topic seems to acquire a near-mystical quality as it pre-empts a world in which standardized testing is the norm and the education of persons from the ages of 3 to 23 is shaped completely by questions that already exist, and answers that assert themselves as true without any verification.
Throughout his writings Foucault also talks about the role of "experts" and public opinion in the maintenance of these new systems of power. Like the examination, the functioning of these two disciplinary mechanisms rests on one of Foucault's major philosophical and sociological concerns-the production of truth. For Foucault, the concept of truth does not carry with it the accouterments of its traditional definition-it is not somehow objective, somehow super-human, somehow impartially correct or quantifiable. Rather, truth is created by humans to govern humans, truth is a furnishing of a certain economic context, a certain political context, a certain society of desires and ambitions; truth is not a question of scientific verification but rather "a question of what governs statements and the way in which they govern each other"11 so that a sense of the scientific is created, causing truth to appear acceptable and unbiased.
With this said, it is easy to comprehend the pivotal role that experts and public opinion hold in the establishment of "truth" and the maintenance of disciplinary mechanisms; experts, through their perception as equitable, dispassionate "scientists" (and, as will be discussed, through the support of the power that their "truths" create) are able to occasion a system of truth whose implications, assumptions, and consequences are imbibed without question. The same goes for the manufacturing of "public opinion," which (through "scientific" polls, popular representatives, magazine and newspaper articles, ideology, and so on) seeks to tell us what we are thinking; or, perhaps more accurately, what is acceptable for us to think, to proclaim both in the company of others and in the invaded quietude of our own souls. In this way truth produces and thrives in "multiple forms of constraint," in the amazing capacity of the modern intellect to accept, to inter, to believe, and to obey.
At this point, the cyclical relationship between the creation of truth, the production of knowledge, and the perpetuation of power should be evident. In essence, each element produces and is produced by the others. The formulation of truth-by experts and public opinion, by institutions and corporations-creates a distinct kind of power that, in turn, allows these entities to generate more truths, to shape additional assumptions and opinions which will generate more power, and so on, ad infinitum. Thus, Foucault concludes that "'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth."12
It seems that the web of truth and power that Foucault has identified is all-consuming, even more airtight than the glass and sliding gates that contain the men and women and children of the Delaware County Correctional Center, of asylums and office buildings throughout the world. Foucault, however, asserts that there is a response to this cycle-a response that seeks not to break the cycle, but to dissect and understand it as it seeks to dissect and identify us; Foucault states that "The problem is not changing people's consciousnesses-or what's in their heads-but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth. . . It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power . . . but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time."13 The "problem," in other words, is to continue Foucault's unfinished project of compiling a history of the present to prepare for an understanding of the future.
The problem lies with images-seeing through them, through their truths and insinuations, through their transitions and their stability. It lies in being able to understand the relationship between a gallows and a time-table, between a bomb and a kiss, between a man in prison and ourselves. And perhaps Foucault does indeed understand the power of images, their sanctity and their irreverence, their headlights and their echoes. But perhaps, also, the strength of Foucault's writing is that it allows us, with the proper vigilance, to seek out and find these images, and to grasp at the beauty and tragedy that lies at their periphery, that spreads into their center; Foucault stands us at the entrance of the heated, dark, and intimidating cave, and asks us to find the dragons within.
End Notes
- Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings, 1972/1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) 119.
- Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1995), 9.
- Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 159.
- Ibid., 159.
- Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 9.
- Ibid., 170.
- Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 155.
- Ibid., 155.
- Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 159.
- Ibid., 184-194.
- Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 112.
- Ibid., 133.
- Ibid., 133.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House, 1995.
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings, 1972/1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.