richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

... and Now 135punishment/execution came to be seen as excessive and perhapseven ‘uncivilized’—certainly not in keeping with the new dignityof the ‘individual’. The dominant mode of handling exceptionalbehaviour thus shifted towards interventions carried out in enclosedspaces—the prison was born. One offended now against the state andits laws rather than against a god-king, and although the body wasstill affected by imprisonment, the goal was to affect what Foucaultcalls ‘the soul’; to change the person or, more precisely, to cause himto want to change him- or herself.In the prison one was subjected to constant scrutiny via systemssuch as the panopticon, which allowed a small number of guardsto observe the activities of a large number of inmates (1979: 201).This was a key innovation for Foucault, as it marks a hinge pointbetween the disciplinary regime of the prison and the technologies ofbiopower that began to arise in the 1800s. In The History of Sexuality(1990) and his lecture on ‘Governmentality’ (1991/1978), Foucaultdescribes how attention was shifted from the individual to thepopulation, from self-regulation to social regulation, from crime todeviance. One no longer offended the state or the king, one offendedthe social order; and in a sense, social control went public again, asthe technologies that were previously reserved for use in prisonsand other enclosures began to be deployed beyond their walls. Thisshift to a generalized surveillance/prediction mechanism, of a vastdispersal of state coercion, is what Foucault calls governmentalityor biopower. In such a system it no longer makes sense to speak of‘the state’ as a locus of relations of domination, since relations ofdomination are everywhere. It no longer makes sense to speak of‘the king’, since kings are now found in families, convents, factoriesand schools. We all become agents of social regulation, we all watcheach other; the state becomes, as Landauer suggested, a state ofrelationships. And it is not surprising that the population should goalong with this shift, for it was in keeping with the highest ideals ofthe European Enlightenment—responsible individuals, free to maketheir own decisions, were contributing to what was now defined asthe ultimate end of government: ‘the welfare of the population, theimprovement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity,health etc.’ (Foucault 1991/1978: 100).Biopower obviously remains with us today, but so do disciplineand punishment. Prisons are alive and well, and people are beingtortured and executed every day, all over the world. It is importantto remember that in identifying these shifts, Foucault was working