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usually directly leads to, a process of degradation of self, by which the
inmate is stripped of tokens of self-identity at the same time as the
ordinary components of autonomy of action are heavily constricted. 'Total
institutions', it may be said, both express aspects of surveillance and
discipline found in other contexts in modern societies and yet also stand
out in relief against those other contexts. 'Total institutions' ordinarily
involve what Goffman calls 'civil death' - the loss of the right to vote and
to engage in other forms of political participation, of the right to will
money, write cheques, contest divorce or adopt children. But in addition
inmates simply do not have separate spheres of activity where rewards
denied in one sector can be pursued in another. Goffman's comment on
such matters is very relevant:
There is an incompatibility, then, between total institutions and the
basic work-payment structure of our society. Total institutions are
also incompatible with another crucial element of our society, the
family. Family life is sometimes contrasted with solitary living, but
in fact the more pertinent contrast is with batch living, for those who
eat or sleep at work, with a group of fellow workers, can hardly
sustain a meaningful domestic existence."
Foucault treats the investigative procedures of criminal law, psychiatry
and medicine as illustrating the nature of disciplinary power in general,
especially as these are applied within carceral organizations. But again
'total institutions' stand out in this respect as different from the daily life
paths of those outside. What Goffman calls the 'territories of the self' are
violated there in ways which do not apply to those not within their walls.
Four distinctive features of 'total institutions' can be mentioned in this
respect.
(1) Interrogative procedures frequently transgress what for most of the
population are regarded as legitimate 'information preserves' about
the self and about the body. In other words, data about inmates'
characteristics and past conduct -which would often be regarded as
discreditable by them and by others and protected by suppression or
tact - are collected in dossiers available to staff.
((156))
(2) There is a dissolution of the boundaries between enclosure and
disclosure that ordinarily serve to protect a sense of ontological
security. Thus it may be the case that excretion, the maintenance of
hygiene and appearance not only have to be carried out publicly but
are subjected to regimentation by others.
(3) There are often forced and continual relations with others.
Hence just as there are no back regions for toilet activities,
there are no back regions in which sectors of social life can
be kept free from the disciplinary demands made elsewhere.
Like Betteiheim, Goffman notes that in 'total institutions'
human beings are reduced to states of childlike dependence. 13
(4) The temporal seriation of activities, in the short and long
term, is specified and controlled. Inmates do not have 'free
time' or 'their own time', as workers do. Moreover, those
who undertake serial examinations or pass through serial
stages of a career in the outside world are normally also able
to counterpose these to other temporal units which have a
different pattern. The temporal distribution of marriage and
raising children, for example, is initiated separately from
those pertaining in other spheres of life.
In carceral organizations the significance of the dialectic of control is still
considerable. There are contexts in which that autonomy specifically
characteristic of the human agent - the capability to 'have acted otherwise' -
is severely reduced. The forms of control which inmates seek to exert over
their day-today lives tend to be concentrated above all upon protection
against degradation of the self. Resistance is certainly one of these and no
doubt is an important consideration that in some degree imposes itself,
whatever policies the administrative staff might follow in the
implementation of disciplinary procedures. But various other forms of
reaction can be readily identified. These include what Goffman calls
'colonization', the construction of a tolerable world within the interstices of
managed time and space, and 'situational withdrawal', refusing, as it were,
any longer to behave as a capable agent is expected to do. But probably the
most common among prisoners, as among the 'mentally ill', is simply
'playing it cool'. This Goffman aptly describes as 'a somewhat opportunistic
combination of secondary adjustments,
((157))
conversion, colonization, and loyalty to the inmate group..
There is no doubt, as many sociological studies have demonstrated, that
such inmate groups can exert considerable control over day-to-day activities
even in the most stringently disciplined carceral organizations. But the
modes of control exerted by subordinates in other contexts, such as that of
work, is likely to be greater because of a further way in which these
contexts contrast with carceral ones. This is that superordinates have an
interest in harnessing the activities of those subject to their authority to the
enactment of designated tasks. In prisons or asylums the 'disciplining of
bodies' comes close to describing what goes on; the administrative staff are
not concerned with producing a collaborative endeavour at productive
activity. In workplaces and schools, on the other hand, they are. Managers
have to coax a certain level of performance from workers. They are
concerned not only with the time-space differentiation and positioning of
bodies but also with the co-ordination of the conduct of agents, whose
behaviour has to be channelled in definite ways to produce collaborative
outcomes. Foucault's bodies do not have faces. In circumstances of
surveillance in the workplace - where surveillance means direct
supervision, at any rate - discipline involves a great deal of 'face work' and
the exercise of strategies of control that have in some part to be elaborated
by agents on the spot. The time-space 'packing' of groupings of individuals
in confined locales, where continuous supervision in circumstances of
co-presence can be carried on, is obviously highly important to the
generation of disciplinary power. But the demand that agents work together
to effect some sort of productive outcome gives those agents a basis of
control over the day-to-day operation of the workplace which can blunt
supervisory efficacy. Supervisors and managers are as aware of this as
anyone, and often build that awareness into the type of disciplinary policies
they follow." Some of the forms of control open to workers in a tightly
integrated disciplinary space (e.g., the possibility of disrupting or bringing
to a halt an entire production process) do not exist where a workforce is dis-
aggregated in time and space.
Let me offer one final comment on Foucault and Goffman. Both writers
have as one of the leading themes in their work the positioning and
disciplining of the body. Like Foucault, Goffman
((158))
has also pursued at some length questions of the nature of 'madness'. Their
common concern with carceral organizations might lead one to overlook
the differences in their respective views of madness. Goffman's perspective
actually places that of Foucault radically in question in respect of the
relations between 'insanity' and 'reason'. Foucault argues that what we call
'madness' - or, following the triumph of the medical metaphor, 'mental
illness' - has been created in relatively recent times. Madness is the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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