“Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.”-Michel Foucault; Archeology of Knowledge

Foucault: The Politics of the Police

Andrew Johnson, LSU

Thesis: Michel Foucault addresses the institution and practice of the police, throughout

his entire career, as an important element of his political-historical philosophy. The first

part of my essay proves how the police play a fundamental role in his history of the

prison and the analytics of disciplinary power. The second part of my essay addresses the

methodological questions raised by the recent publication of Foucault’s College de

France lectures. Foucault unearths a “secret history” of the police and I argue that the

role it plays in his narrative of bio-politics complicates the traditional interpretations of

Foucault’s analysis of power. The third part of my essay provides a new interpretation of

Foucault’s divergent masks of power, specifically as it relates to the police. The police is

best understood as a type of governmental reason (Governmentality), rather than a

specific institution of the State. I argue that Foucault’s account of the police in terms of

the neo-liberal economic theory described by Gary Becker breaks down when compared

to the expansive privatization of security apparatuses after Foucault’s death. This

disjunction illustrates the importance of Foucault’s philosophy of the police in terms of

contemporary political science.

I.

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In a late essay, “The Subject and Power,” Michel Foucault provides a clue that is

instrumental for a new reading of his earlier publication Discipline and Punish.1 Foucault

says,

It consists in taking forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point [my emphasis]. To use another metaphor, it consists in using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, find out their point of application and the methods of use… For example, to find out what our society means by… ‘legality’ in the field of illegality.2

I would like to put forth the thesis that Discipline and Punish, normally considered as a

history of the prison, can be read as a political commentary on the police. Foucault in

Discipline and Punish distinguishes the changes in punishment, by the State upon its

criminals, between the 18th and the 19th Century. The transition from sovereign power to

disciplinary power is illustrated in the figure of the criminal, who is first tortured upon

the scaffold and then confined in the prison institution. However, the “power relations,

positional locations, points of application, and methods of use” mobilized against the

criminal have normally been reduced to the institution of the prison and its strategies of

coercion. However, this is a narrow reading of Foucault’s analysis. For Foucault, the

prison represents the shift from sovereign power to disciplinary power, but these

strategies of coercion are not unique to prison institutions. The strategies of the prison are

present in the strategies mobilized by the military, by hospitals, by schools, and in

factories. The prison, therefore, represents a system of control, but the strategies that

reinforce this control are analogous to various other measures adopted by the State: that

1 Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Tr. Alan Sheridan. Vintage Books: New York, NY. 1995. Hereafter cited as DP.2 Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Power. Ed. James Faubion. The New Press: New York, NY. 2000. pg. 329.

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is, the constant surveillance of an enclosed territory and the incessant normalization of a

productive population.3 Therefore, taking Foucault’s methodological observations in

“The Subject and Power” seriously, I would like to inaugurate a new reading of

Discipline and Punish: by analyzing the punishment of illegality in prisons, we can

understand the management of legality by the police.

I argue that this reading of Discipline and Punish can be justified through two

separate interpretations. First, Foucault addresses the institution of the police and its

relation to the prison in Discipline and Punish through the term ‘police-prison system.’

Second, it is imperative to recognize the the architecture of Bentham’s Panopticon is not

reducible to understanding prisons, but is instead a political schema that can be identified

in numerous institutions and a mechanism mobilized pervasively throughout all of

society, specifically within the institution of the police.

For Foucault, the prison cannot be reduced simply to the prison building. Instead,

it is a field of multiple forces.4 It organizes space, it controls actions and bodies, and it

watches and analyzes its population. The prison, as exemplified by Bentham’s

Panopticon, is an architectural blueprint. It is a strategy of normalization, and, in effect,

an educational and moralizing power. It is a legal annex and a compound of police

intervention. The prison serves a social function. The prison poses as a laboratory for new

studies in the human sciences, and therefore perpetuates a process Foucault calls

discipline. The prison is an experiment in managing an excluded and dangerous

3 The term ‘population’ has a specific meaning throughout Foucault’s oeuvre. I will use this term liberally, at first, to describe prison populations as a group (as opposed to individual criminals), and then the outside population, ‘civil society,’ as a population-group opposed to the enclosed prison-population. Only after the publication of DP does this term take on a unique value in Foucault’s discourse, including the description of ‘the Police.’ 4 On pg. 297 of DP Foucault calls this field a carceral continuum and, also, a carceral net. These metaphors of continuum, net, and field are imperative for understanding Foucault’s analysis of the interplay of these various power mechanisms. The prison is a part of a larger social network.

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population, but also takes the knowledge that it derives as a way in which to manage the

population outside the prison. The criminal therefore becomes a model in which to

distinguish patterns of delinquent abnormality in the larger population. Simultaneously,

the prison practices tactics of social and corporeal control (generalized by, what Foucault

calls, the creation of docile bodies), and then utilizes this knowledge in fostering a ‘docile

society.’

Foucault resolves all of these various intuitional mechanisms and political

strategies into an analysis of the social organization of illegalities. He calls this the

‘police-prison system.’

Prison and police form a twin mechanism; together they assure in the whole field of illegalities the differentiations, isolation and use of delinquency. In the illegalities, the police-prison system segments a manipulable delinquency.

This delinquency, with its specificity, is a result of the system; but it also becomes a part and instrument of it. So that one should speak of an ensemble whose three terms (police-prison-delinquency) support one another and form a circuit that is never interrupted. Police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send back a certain number of them to prison.5

The prison is an institution of the police no doubt. It serves so as to house, punish, and

discipline criminals. This is a police action. In doing so, it not only analyzes delinquency

it creates the concept. Therefore, by confining criminals, a profile of the delinquent can

be created. The prisoner never stays a prisoner for long. Once released into the general

population the prisoner habitually reproduces criminal behavior. This is because the

prison is not a space of rehabilitation, but punishment.6 The prisoner is then released into

5 Foucault, Michel. DP. pg. 282.6 Social theorists have long debated the social function(s) of punishing delinquents or criminals, and surely prisons are different in every state and/or historical situation. However, Foucault is squarely in the camp that depicts prisons as punishing institutions, as is evident in the title of DP. Rehabilitation maintains its own subtle forms of punishment that are oddly analogous to liberal variants of power that operate

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freedom in which he stands little chance of employment, faces certain discrimination in

finding a residence, and, even more so today, is controlled by probation programs.

Foucault details the organization of a delinquent milieu designed specifically to recycle a

culture of criminality.

Once the delinquent is no longer a prisoner he becomes the object of the police.

The ways in which the prison governs its population becomes mobilized against the

civilian population. “The organization of an isolated illegality, enclosed in delinquency,

would not have been possible without the development of police supervision.”7 Foucault

asserts that the strategies of the Panopticon are organized throughout society. What is

important to Foucault’s analysis in these sections of Discipline and Punish is that he

conceives of the police as mobilizing the delinquent in a larger attempt at social

surveillance. The delinquent has a choice of either repeating criminal activity or

becoming a spy for the police. Foucault provocatively alludes to an entire history of

secret police forces comprised of ex-convicts and prostitutes.

Delinquency, with the secret agents that it procures, but also with the generalized policing that it authorizes, constitutes a means of perpetual surveillance of the population: an apparatus that makes it possible to supervise, through the delinquents themselves, the whole social field.8

What better way to control the criminal underworld than a properly disciplined criminal?

Once imprisoned and subsequently released, the delinquent is counted upon to either

reproduce patterns of criminal behavior or to spy upon the criminal underworld. Either

way, the ex-convict becomes an important tool for the police: by internalizing the

specifically to mask their effects.7 Ibid, pg. 280.8 Ibid, pg. 281.

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disciplinary techniques of surveillance, a properly disciplined delinquent becomes a

conduit for a larger policy of social supervision.

I think that these few pages at the end of Discipline and Punish are really

important for understanding Foucault’s history of the prison. The prison cannot exist in

isolation; the prison is but an institution that exists as the product of a relationship

between society and the State. This is why Foucault’s use of the couplet “police-prison

system” is so crucial for understanding this relation. As Foucault says, “they support one

another and form a circuit.” It is inappropriate to locate a first-term. Quite simply: the

prison creates a delinquent knowledge but also delinquent individuals, who then get

released onto the outside public, which is the object of the police, who then mobilize

these delinquent populations for surveillance of criminals or further prosecution for their

own criminal behavior, finally, sending new prisoners into prisons, recreating the entire

cycle.

The chapter entitled “Panopticism,” in Discipline and Punish, begins with the

measures taken, in the late 17th Century, in response to the appearance of the plague in a

given city. It concludes with the provocative and famous lines: “Is it surprising that

prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”9 It

is obvious that Foucault does not think that Bentham’s Panopticon is simply an

architectural blueprint for a prison. The technology of panopticism is readily present in

everything from quarantine operations to our education systems. The Pantopticon is a

framework in which to structure and govern all of society. I believe that Foucault’s

depiction of the Panopticon illustrates a model which can be transferred from the prison

9 Ibid, pg. 228.

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to the management of the society as a whole. This disciplinary strategy creates a form of

constant surveillance and normalization of society that can be called the police.

Foucault facilitates this reading in many different places throughout his oeuvre. In

The Birth of Biopolitics,10 for example, Foucault argues that Bentham’s Panopticon was

never intended to simply be a prison, but was, from the outset, a plan for all types of

governmental institutions. Foucault asserts:

At the end of his life… Bentham will propose that the Panopticon should be the formula for the whole of government, saying that the Panopticon is the very formula of liberal government… Panopticism is not a regional mechanics limited to certain institutions; for Bentham, panopticism really is a general political formula that characterizes a type of government.11

And in a footnote:It is worth recalling that the Panopticon, or Inspection-House, was not just a model of prison organization, but the idea of a new principle of construction which can be applied to all sorts of establishments. See the complete title.12

That is correct. Bentham titled his plan for the Panopticon an “idea of a new principle of

construction” “applicable to any sort of establishment:” “Prisons, Houses of industry,

Workhouses, Poor Houses, Manufactories, Madhouses, Lazarettos, Hospitals, and

Schools.”13 The Panopticon demonstrate mechanisms of surveillance and control via the

prison, but also mobilizes these strategies onto the whole social field.

After reading the section “Panopticism” in Discipline and Punish, this would be

intuitive. However, what I would like to argue is that the Pantopicon is specifically

organized as a technology associated with the police. The importance of the Panopticon,

and Foucault’s analysis of prisons more generally, is that all of society works like a

10 Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978-1979. Tr. Graham Burchell. Ed. Arnold Davidson, Michael Senellart, François Ewald, and Alessandro Fontana. Palgrave MacMillian: New York, NY. 2008. Hereafter cited as BBP.11 Ibid, pg. 67. 12 Ibid, pg. 72.13 Ibid.

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prison, everyone is under surveillance, being constantly disciplined and normalized

according to the organization of modern liberal society. In his essay “Truth and Juridical

Forms,” Foucault adds:

The prison is isomorphic with all of this. In the great social panopticism, whose function is precisely that of transforming people’s lives into productive force, the prison serves a function much more symbolic and exemplary than truly economic, penal, or corrective. The prison is the reverse image of society, an image turned into a threat. The prison conveys two messages: ‘This is what society is. You can’t criticize me since I only do what you do every day at the factory and the school. So I am innocent. I’m only the expression of a social consensus.’ That is what we find in penal theory and criminology: prison is not unlike what happens every day.14

The police embody the rationality of the Panopticon par excellence. The LSU

Daily Reveille, our campus newspaper, published on the front page of their newspaper the

police motto: “We are Everywhere!” in bold type.15 The Police are everywhere! They

establish secret video cameras that monitor student movement on campus. They walk

around in plain clothes and pretend to be students. They do not just want to surveil

campus; they want the students to know that they are being watched on campus. It is not

enough to establish technologies of surveillance and control; they must publish this fact

and therefore discipline the student population into governing themselves. The mere

presence of their ubiquity is enough to deter crime and minimize risk. The organizing

principle of the local LSU police department is present in Foucault and Bentham’s

description of the Panopticon.

The mobilization of social surveillance and crime deterrence is embodied by the

police.

14 Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Juridical Forms.” Power. Ed. James Faubion. The New Press: New York, NY. 2000. pg. 85.15 Adam Duvernay, “LSUPD adds more security on, around campus,” LSU Daily Reveille, March 9th, 2009.

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Panopticism is one of the characteristic traits of our society. It’s a type of power that is applied to individuals in the form of continuous individual supervision, in the form of control, punishment, and compensation, and in the form of correction, that is, the molding and transformation of individuals in terms of certain norms. This threefold aspect of panopticism- surveillance, control, correction- seems to be a fundamental and characteristic dimension of the power relations that exist in our society… Today we live in a society programmed basically by Bentham, a panoptic society where panopticism reigns.16

Foucault invokes the Panopticon as a pervasive disciplinary technology, that is not

simply reducible to prisons, but which operates through tactics of surveillance,

punishment, control, and correction, that are applicable to all sorts of social and

government institutions. The techniques of panoptic power are most pronounced in the

institution of the police. No other institution mobilizes the strategies of surveillance, and

imparts normalization, as effectively as the ghostly presence of the police.

Foucault asks that we understand the forms of power organized against the

criminal from the bottom up. By understanding the struggle of the prisoner, we can better

understand our own struggles. By understanding the forms of power implicit in the

prison, we can understand the forms of power present throughout society. By

understanding the discipline and punishment of illegalities, we can better understand the

enforcement of legalities. This is why Foucault’s history of the prison, provides a very

important grid in which to understand the police. This analysis is two-fold: First, the

prisoner was not born a prisoner, but was imprisoned by a legal-police apparatus that

subjects him/her to an incarceration of constant surveillance and control. This dispositif

creates a social understanding of illegality that is calls ‘delinquency,’ which it attempts to

foster and arrest throughout the larger social milieu. Second, the technologies this

16 Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Juridical Forms.” Power. Ed. James Faubion. The New Press: New York, NY. 2000. pg. 70.

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apparatus [dispositif] organizes against society, to foster and arrest delinquency, to

enforce legality, is indebted to the technologies created by the prison, specifically to

Bentham’s Panopticon applied as a vast policing schema.

II.

There is a transformation happening in the academic scholarship surrounding the

work of Michel Foucault. With his sudden and unexpected demise, as well as the recent

publications of his College de France lectures, the traditional points of analysis

describing Foucault’s philosophical work are changing. No longer can Foucault scholars

fall back upon the trite demarcations between sovereign and disciplinary power, or even

between discipline and bio-power. There are problems stemming from methodology. For

example, how does one distinguish the ideas published in a book versus a presentation of

lectures in a seminar? Or, in what ways does one distinguish the broad historical

brushstrokes ranging from the French Monarch, in Society Must be Defended and

Security, Territory, Population,17 to post-WWII neo-liberalism, in The Birth of

Biopolitics, and how can we incorporate this political history with that of The Order of

Things, Discipline and Punish, and the first volume of The History of Sexuality v.1?

Moreover, there is a completely original vocabulary in Foucault’s College de France

lectures: ranging from the use of terms such as Governmentality, Raison d’etat, security

apparatuses, or even the analysis of risk and insurance technologies. These terms fix new

horizons on the multiple angles Foucault mobilizes in his descriptions of power. This

17 Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978. Tr. Graham Burchell. Ed. Arnold Davidson, Michael Senellart, François Ewald, and Alessandro Fontana. Palgrave MacMillian: New York, NY. 2007. Hereafter cited as STP.

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reflects upon challenges facing Foucault scholarship in general: how does one isolate a

thinker so prone to multiple masks and divergent thoughts? What hubris it is to

reconfigure auxiliary thoughts which died mid-sentence, stillborn? This is resulting in a

splintering of the traditional interpretations of Foucault’s historico-political

commitments. Without spelling out the boundaries of this ongoing debate, I would like to

posit the police as one such State-institution that undergoes this “splintering-effect” in

Foucault’s later work.

As a methodological statement: I would like to assert Foucault’s nominalism as a

serious complication to any piecemeal interpretation. First, I take it that Foucault is a

historical nominalist. The historical moments that Foucault concentrates upon, no matter

how proximate in time, cannot be the momentum for any grand Hegelian narratives. I do

not believe that Foucault provides a history of the police, per se. Second, Foucault is

surely a political nominalist. The practices of the police during the French Monarch are

surely divergent from that of 21st Century American police, just as the modern day

American police are different from any other political system, past or present. Finally,

Foucault is a philosophical nominalist. His concepts, whether we are talking about

discipline or bio-power, pastoral power or neo-liberalism, are by no means easily

conflated. The politics of bio-power are surely evident in ancient politics, just as the

problems of sovereignty and the rule of law, hospitals and asylums, surveillance and

discipline, by no means diminish in our own political and social organizations. Therefore,

I would like to stake claim to my own position quite early: I propose a nominalist

reading of Foucault’s description of the police that is malleable to “a history of the

present,” while incorporating many, if not all, of Foucault’s divergent political schemas.

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Foucault’s use of the term ‘police’ is pervasive. I remain adamant that Discipline

and Punish can be read through the guise of the police apparatus. The difficulty of such a

project is complicated by Foucault’s fragmentation of the concept post Discipline and

Punish.18 In his essay “The Birth of Social Medicine” and “The Politics of Health in the

Eighteenth Century” he speaks of the ‘medical police,’ the Medizinischepolizei.19 In

“Space, Knowledge, Power” Foucault speaks of police as the result of urbanization.20 In

two of his late essays “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Critique of Political Reason,”

and “The Political Technology of Individuals,” Foucault separates the concept of ‘the

police’ into three modes: a) a model for a political utopia via Louis Turquet in 1611, b) as

a political programme or practice, from Nicholas Delamare’s 1705 Treatise of the Police,

and c) as an academic discipline, the German Polizeiwissenschaft that is provided by

Gottlob von Justi’s Elements of Police in 1756. In his College de France lecture Security,

Territory, Population Foucault speaks of the grain police21 and even as a larger

monolithic market mechanism that is coextensive with the rise of urban commerce.22

Finally, he heralds a Police-State, Polizeistaat, which is hyper-administrative.23 Also, one

cannot help but notice the new vocabulary of bio-power: police deal with the circulation

of populations and capital, with health, disease, and inoculation campaigns, but they also

police life and happiness in general.24 In an illuminating line Foucault says the police deal

18 This should not underscore the fact that Foucault discusses the police pre-DP as well. In The Birth of the Clinic, published twelve years before DP, Foucault already unveils the odd relationship between the police and its non-criminal functions. In Ch. 2 (pg. 25-26), Foucault details how the rise of epidemics results in the need for a national ‘medical police.’ This should only reinforce the point in question: the fragmentation of the police after DP is not accidental or ancillary to Foucault’s published corpus, but in fact, is clearly entwined in Foucault’s analytics of power relations and its constantly changing historical function(s). 19 Foucault, Michel. Power, pg. 94-95; Power, pg. 140-142; STP, pg. 58-59.20 Foucault, Michel. Power, pg. 350-352.21 Foucault, Michel. STP, pg. 53.22 Ibid, pg. 94.23 Ibid, pg. 318-319.24 Ibid, pg. 325.

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with living, and “with more than just living.”25 Moreover, Foucault begins to speak of the

police as an institutional example of his new vocabulary surrounding security

apparatuses.26 He provocatively calls the police a permanent coup d’Etat,27 also, an

instantiation of the Raison d’Etat, and finally, as one mode of his new schema

‘Governmentality’ (the science, or art, of government). Foucault claims that the term

‘police’ has vastly different definitions from the 16th Century, to the 17th Century and the

18th Century,28 finally, resulting in little, if any, semblance to our modern use of the

‘simple police.’ Foucault points to Nicholas Delamare’s Treaty of the Police as fixing 11

different functions of the early French police, but in reality the extent of their control is

indefinite. Foucault claims to unearth a “secret history” of the police: Foucault adds in a

footnote, that the size of such police literature/science “lists more than 4000 titles, from

1520 to 1850, under the headings ‘science of police in the broad sense’ and ‘science of

police in the strict sense.’”29 Foucault’s critical project is to illustrate these new domains

and an alternative genealogy of the police.

Foucault details the intricacies of this clandestine history:

The second great technological assemblage, which I would like to talk about today, is what at the time was called ‘police,’ which it must be understood has very little, no more than one or two elements, in common with what we should call police from the end of the eighteenth century. In other words, from the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, the word ‘police’ had a completely different meaning from the one it has today.

First, of course, some remarks on the meaning of the word. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the word ‘police’ is already frequently used to designate a number of things. In the first place, one calls ‘police,’ quite simply, a form of community or association governed by a public authority; a sort of human society when something like police power or

25 Ibid, pg. 326.26 Ibid, pg. 343-344; 353-354.27 Ibid, pg. 339-340.28 Ibid, pg. 312-314.29 Ibid, pg. 330.

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public authority is exercised over it. Very often you find series of expression or listings like the following: state, principalities, towns, police. Or again, you often find the two words republics and police, associated. A family, or a convent won’t be said to be a police, precisely because they lack the characteristic exercise of public authority over them. All the same, it is a sort of relatively poorly defined society, a public body. The use of the word ‘police’ in this sense will last practically until the beginning of the seventeenth century. Second, still in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, one also calls ‘police’ precisely the set of actions that direct these communities under public authority. Thus you find the almost traditional expression ‘police and regiment,’ ‘regiment’ used in the sense of a way of directing, governing, and which is associated with ‘police.’ Finally, there is the third sense of the word ‘police,’ which is quite simply the result, the positive and valued result of a good government. These are broadly the three somewhat traditional meanings that we come across up to the sixteenth century.

From the seventeenth century it seems to me that the word ‘police’ beings to take a profoundly different meaning. I think we can briefly summarize it in the following way. From the seventeenth century ‘police’ begins to refer to the set of means by which the state’s forces can be increased while preserving the state in good order. In other words, police will be the calculation and technique that will make it possible to establish a mobile, yet stable and controllable relationship between the state’s internal order and the development of its forces.30

In Security, Territory, Population Foucault inaugurates a new schema to describe

his political philosophy: Governmentality. Foucault abandons his model of politics as a

vast war of multiple asymmetrical forces, in exchange for a model of governmental

rationality. Governmentality is not reducible to the State. Foucault is quite clear about

that. Governmentality is a movement away from State-interest, personified by

Machiavelli’s The Prince and Raison d’État.31 Rather, governmentality is the art of

governing; more precisely, it is a calculus of negotiating conduct. Therefore, a plethora of

divergent practices collide, that might or might not have a vestige in the State-form: the

management of conduct by Hebrew pastors as it was incorporated into the policies of the

30 Ibid, pg. 312-313.31 Reason for being, i.e. the legitimacy, purpose, and domain of the State. Namely, the relationship of the State to itself.

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Roman Church and European politics, being the most noticeable example. The police is

one institution of this new schema of Governmentality (the other being European

equilibrium, or the military-diplomatic apparatus). The police are the internal array of

forces intended to modulate the conduct of domestic populations.

Within this model, the police employ entirely different strategies related to public

health, economic circulation and population management. Foucault begins his analysis

with the creation of the market town and the rise of urban planning. The police are a

necessary consequence of this development.

These are institutions prior to the police. The town and the road, the market, and the road network feeding the market… it is because there was a police regulating this cohabitation, circulation, and exchange that towns were able to exist. Police, then, as a condition of urban existence.32

With the rise of market relations and highly populated cities, the police become necessary

to maintain new forms of political and social life. Economic and market relations create

novel problems that the State must address.

’To police,’ ‘to urbanize’: to police and to urbanize is the same thing… Police and commerce, police and urban development, and the police and the development of all the activities of the market in the broad sense, constitute an essential unity in the seventeenth century and until the beginning of the eighteenth century… The market town became the model of state intervention in men’s lives. I think this is the fundamental fact characterizing the birth of police in the seventeenth century.33

Foucault takes the example of the French grain trade. Albeit in the periphery of

Foucault’s analysis, the management of the grain trade by the State takes place through

the intermediary of the police. In early mercantilism, the grain trade is strictly regulated.

The police was a statistical mechanism intended to calculate the amount of grain being

produced in any given province and then to enforce regulations on the amount of grain

32 Ibid, pg. 336.33 Ibid, pg. 337-338.

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produced to guard against famine and scarcity. The police, from this perspective, is

strictly a market mechanism. More specifically, it is a state apparatus designed to watch,

record, control, and regulate the market. Thus, Foucault points out a new governmental

rationality that is being formed at this time: political economy. This is an early modality

of bio-power.

This is what makes Foucault’s College de France lectures so important. It is only

in these supplementary comments that Foucault unveils the inherent connection between

bio-power and the economic conditions that gave rise to such a shift in political policy.

Foucault points out that during this hectic political climate a new criterion became

important for calculating political power: namely, political economy, or population as an

economic factor in the strength of a State’s forces. Hence police become responsible for

quarantine programs, the regulation of grain production, and the statistical measurement

of a State’s population.34 This is an important shift in Foucault’s analysis: the police is

not a punishing mechanism attempting to create docile citizens, but a liberal mechanism

designed to protect against health risks, manage and not control populations, and foster

economic expansion. Foucault summarizes: “The good use of the state’s forces, this is the

object of police.”35

Foucault says this great juxtaposed history of the police begins to break up

towards the end of the French Monarch, mainly based upon the pressures of industrial

capitalism and the new governmental rationality of the Ėconomistes. The description of

the police by Foucault’s during the Ancient Regime is that of a monstrous administrative

34 In fact, Foucault points to the police as a vital element in establishing the other modality of governmentality, European-equilibrium. To appease neighboring States, the police were necessary to count the population forces: “Police makes statistics necessary, but police also makes statistics possible… Police and statistics mutually condition each other” (Ibid, pg. 315).35 Ibid, pg. 314.

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bureaucracy whose functions are indefinite. However, Foucault believes this

administrative apparatus breaks up at the end of the 18 th Century. This fragmentation

scatters the functions of the police to new governmental institutions that take the

problems of population, health, and the market in isolation from that of law and order.

Thereby, the police as we commonly understand it morphs into the ‘simple police.’

You can see how that great over-regulatory police I have been talking about breaks up… On the one hand will be a whole series of mechanisms that fall within the province of the economy and the management of the population with the function of increasing the forces of the state. Then, on the other hand there will be an apparatus or instruments for ensuring the prevention or repression of disorder, irregularity, illegality, and delinquency… The elimination of disorder will be the function of the police. As a result, the notion of police is entirely overturned, marginalized, and takes on the purely negative meaning familiar to us.36

Foucault is clear why the early French definition of the police vanished from our

colloquial lexicon. The rise of market relations, of capitalism, severely limited the powers

of the State. Thus, the functions of the police fragmented into various auxiliary practices.

No longer would the police be charged with statistical analysis or economic regulation.

Instead, the police would retain their ability to enforce the law. Thus, the triad ‘police-

prison-law system’ comes into effect.

III.

Foucault’s status as an important cultural historian must be compared against his

importance as a political philosopher. However, let me be clear: I am less interested in

Foucault’s “secret history” of the police than its importance for his political philosophy. I

think that Foucault’s conceptualization of the police causes theoretical problems. Let me

pose some challenging questions.

36 Ibid, pg. 354.

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The apparent historical contradiction is immediately apparent. How is it that

Foucault’s description of the police, in a pre-disciplinary political organization, is

increasingly linked with the strategies of bio-power, supposedly a modern type of power?

How do we then, reconfigure the ramifications of Foucault’s histories? For example in

History of Sexuality v.1, Foucault claims that our modern age is age of bio-power, but in

his descriptions of the police the bio-political elements are emphasized in a pre-

disciplinary society. During the French Monarch, the police is understood as an

administrative bureaucracy that must manage all types of governmental concerns from

market regulations to population circulation. It is only after the police as an

administrative apparatus fragments, that our modern day conceptions of the ‘simple

police’ is developed. However, this pre-disciplinary police is discussed post Discipline

and Punish in Foucault’s oeuvre, and many, myself included, are cautious that Foucault

had begun to readjust his political commitments during this time.

The apparatuses of discipline are different than those of security. Discipline

allows nothing to escape, while security apparatuses, Foucault says, “let things happen.”37

Moreover, Foucault claims: “Police is not justice.”38 And on the next page he quotes

Queen Catherine II of Russia as saying: “Police has more need of regulations than

laws.”39 However, it is the very strategy of regulation, of “letting things happen,” that

Foucault uses to describe the increase in disciplinary techniques.

We are in the world of regulation, the world of discipline. That is to say, the great proliferation of local and regional disciplines we have observed in workshops, schools and the army from the end of the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, should be seen against the background of an attempt at a general disciplinarization, a general regulation of individuals and the

37 Ibid, pg. 45.38 Ibid, pg. 339.39 Ibid, pg. 340.

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territory of the realm in the form of a police based on an essentially urban model. Making the town into a sort of quasi-convent and the realm into a sort of quasi-town is a kind of great disciplinary dream behind police.40

It would appear we are at an impasse, a moment of contradiction. How is that we can

resolve Foucault’s elaborate histories with the philosophical schemas of power, that he

want to explicitly establish historically, but that appear to overlap? Foucault attempts to

answer this very concern with the establishment of his new political model:

Governmentality.

So we should not see things as the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a society of discipline, and then of a society of discipline, but a society, say, of government. In fact, we have a triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management, which has population as its main target and apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism.41

Governmentality complicates Foucault’s historical political philosophy, but as we can

observe, it is the very concept that Foucault uses to synthesize his various concerns into a

dominate model of explanation. Governmentality is a description of the rationale that

motivates all of these divergent masks of power. Therefore, an apparatus, mobilized by

Governmentality, such as the police, can be recalibrated indefinitely under all of

Foucault’s philosophical observations: the police is the ‘medical gaze’ of the hospital, the

police personify the techniques of surveillance and normalization in disciplinary power,

but moreover, and in tandem, the police watch over populations and the market. The

police is a fragmentary concept that shifts seamlessly between the elements of

sovereignty and justice, discipline and surveillance, and then bio-politics: population,

health, and capital.

40 Ibid, pg. 340-341.41 Ibid, pg. 107-108.

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Once again, I would like to stake my claim to an interpretation of Foucault. Bio-

power, as well as disciplinary power, is better understood as a political technology than

a historical epoch. Governmentality is a schema that incorporates all of Foucault’s

political technologies and their particular applications of power.

I have two arguments: First, by no means do I think that Foucault conceives of the

police during the French Monarch as absent of disciplinary techniques. The police are

still concerned with law enforcement; Foucault’s point is that they are also concerned

with a whole lot more.

Rousseau began his most famous book with the line: “Man is born free, but

everywhere he is in chains.”42 Rousseau might have died chain-less, outside of the prisons

the French wanted him in so dearly, but he was constantly the object of police

surveillance. This history is detailed in Richard Darnton’s essay “A Police inspector sorts

his files: The anatomy of the republic of letters” compiled in his publication The Great

Cat Massacre.43 I believe that Darnton’s history of police inspector Joseph d’Hémery is

vitally important for our study of the police. Foucault concentrates on ‘police-theory’ and

says very little about actual police procedure during the French Monarch and provides

little historical evidence to back up his grandiose claims.

Joseph d’Hémery was the police officer in charge of the Republic of Letters

during the Ancient Regime. He operated in Paris, but managed operations throughout all

of France. He was responsible for the surveillance of over 500 philosophes during the

years 1748-1753, including Voltaire, Diderot, and even Rousseau. His job was largely

administrative. Darnton remarks, “d’Hémery represents an early phase in the evolution of 42 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Basic Political Writings. Tr. Donald Cress. Hackett Publishing: Indianapolis, IN. 1987. pg. 141.43 Robert Darnton. “A Police inspector sorts his files: The anatomy of the republic of letters.” The Great Cat Massacre: and other episodes of French cultural history. Basic Books: New York, NY. 1984.

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the bureaucrat.”44 Darnton’s primary historical focus is d’Hémery’s detailed reports and

vast statistical charts. d’Hémery was in charge of a population: namely that of French

enlightenment philosophers. His job was bio-political in that he compiled biological

information and organized vast statistical flow charts that analyzed each philosopher’s

position in comparison with the entire population of philosophers. Thus, Darnton via

d’Hémery, is able to prove that most philosophers during that age were young to middle-

age males and from largely urban areas. He is also able to deduce the percentages of

writer’s from noble birth versus those from ‘the Third Estate.’45 However, d’Hémery job

description is not limited to bio-political techniques. He is still responsible for law

enforcement, for example, at times certain writers overstepped what was legally

permitted at the time. Darnton details one example of a sting.46 He was even responsible

for the early arrest of Diderot. However, most of the philosophers who d’Hémery had

files on were never arrested. Therefore, we can presume that his job was not entirely

based upon the enforcement of law, but was intended as a mass surveillance campaign

against the French literati. Moreover, Darnton points to evidence that d’Hémery

effortlessly advertised his surveillance: each philosopher knew he must toe the line,

because his books were being read, his publishing houses and salons were being

infiltrated, and he was regularly being followed here and there. The effect of d’Hémery

police campaign was that every philosopher knew he was the object of a ‘thought-police.’

Their writings would, or would not, reflect this internalization. However, d’Hémery had

an autonomous function: he had to independently analyze how subversive each writer

44 Ibid, pg. 160.45 Perhaps alluding to another result of bio-power: race war. In his earlier College de France lecture Society must be defended Foucault argues that race war culminated in the Holocaust, but is present in theories of sovereignty in a French thinker Boulainvillier.46 Ibid, pg. 180.

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was. In fact, his entire job was to calculate risk: namely the risk of each philosopher’s

philosophy. Darnton points out that each police-file had its own vocabulary of risk: from

suspicious to bad to dangerous.47 While d’Hémery files are a great un-noticed attempt at

literary criticism, his major focus as a policeman was to ensure order and security. Joseph

d’Hémery’s job was essential that of a security apparatus.

I think that Darnton’s history of the philosophe-policeman is an excellent example

of how the French police, during the Ancient Regime, truly operated. There is every

reason to believe that d’Hémery’s history validates Foucault’s history of the police as a

vast administrative apparatus that incorporated bio-political strategies. In fact, there is

every reason to argue for more. This early portrait of the police allows us to conceive of

their organization as operating by numerous and various political strategies: from bio-

political power, to disciplinary techniques, to security and insurance analysis, and even

the instantiation of an Orwellian ‘thought-police.’48

Second, just as the LSU police force is publishing in our campus newspaper, on

the front page, that “[They] are Everywhere!”49 the New Orleans police force mobilizes

different strategies during their annual holiday Mardi Gras.

47 Ibid, pg. 177.48 Foucault says, early in STP: “This descending line, which means that the good government of the state affects individual conduct or family management, is what begins to be called ‘police’ at this time” (Ibid, pg. 94). Could the police literally be Big Brother? It would appear that Foucault admits a natural paternalism. 49 Interesting note: one year later as I prepare to present this paper at a symposium [Loyola University Chicago’s 2010 Graduate Conference: Justice: Foundations and Crisis] the same LSU campus newspaper has just published another announcement from the LSU police force focusing upon the role in campus safety. Using all sorts of catch-phrases loosely associated with bio-power and risk-insurance, this article presents a profile of the campus police concerned with all sorts of auxiliary interests than the mere disciplinazation of the student body or the surveillance of criminal behavior. In many ways, the procedures of the New Orleans police force are synonymous with the procedures of the LSU police force during home football games. Though the campus bans alcohol, most Saturdays during the Fall Semester students, sometimes parents, tailgaters in general, drink publicly without restraint. Police are still everywhere, but directing traffic, searching bags of those entering the stadium, often times just roaming the stadium or the surrounding campus just to make sure that everything is ‘going according to plan.’ In some respects, the police do play a latent function and help foster a sense of safety.

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The police are surely present on the neighborhood street corner, but they do not

care if you are publicly intoxicated, they simply want to usher you into the next bar, a

new business-venue, and to continually maintain the circulation of capital by wild

carefree tourists or local partiers. The police are present everywhere during Mardi Gras

not to simply watch the public, not even to enforce the laws, but to manage the

circulation of mass populations. The police thus maintain a ‘bio-political’ function: the

free circulation of capital and peoples. However, they do serve a further political

function: security and risk aversion. During Mardi Gras hundreds of thousands of people

from across the globe travel to New Orleans to get publicly intoxicated, though

technically this is still illegal. This represents a sizeable risk. The police therefore are

present to guarantee insurance against such risk; however, their primary responsibility is

to “let happen,” to restrain against intervening. The police are not interested in enforcing

public intoxication laws, because they want to encourage mass spending and must make

sure to constantly free-up traffic for better circulation around the city. The police care

very little about surveillance and normalizing tactics, because they are more concerned

with preparing for and preventing emergencies. The function of the police, when there is

a large and disorderly population, is not to control them, but to successfully manage

them.

This is an important difference and an important function of the police that

happens everywhere, all the time, always already, in many places that are not New

Orleans. This is why you see the police everywhere on the highways, at airports, at all

types of transportation venues, at sporting events, at banks, at hospitals, and at all types

of institutions that are not normally associated with crime. Therefore, I think that we can

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see present three different and unique tactics of social control at work. First, modern

police forces still organize themselves as a disciplinary apparatus that attempts to “keep

watch everywhere,” while simultaneously normalizing the public into acting as if they

were being watched endlessly. Second, modern police forces utilize bio-political

techniques that attempt to best manage large circulating populations; at times they must

limit their own intervening power so as to foster life. Third, modern police forces are a

security apparatus, with insurance technology as a fundamental calculus: the analysis of

risk and the protection of capital investments. An entire study of this kind, Policing the

Risk Society by Richard Ericson and Kevin Haggerty,50 has been published that attempts

to argue this very thing. They take Foucault as their theoretical model: namely, the model

of risk and insurance, discussed by Foucault in his analysis of post-war neo-liberalism in

The Birth of Biopolitics . Their work offers a comprehensive evaluation of actual police

procedure in contemporary society that parallels Foucault’s observations of the police as

a political apparatus that operates using multiple and diverse tactics.

If you grant me the liberty to collapse Foucault’s various political schemas, this

transitions brings us to an important scission. What does Foucault’s critical project of the

police, tell us about the police in relation “to a history of the present?” I believe that the

reason why Foucault’s early work was so influential was that his analysis of the analytics

of power invested in confinement campaigns resonates with our modern condition. In

localizing the struggle of the madman, the hospital patient, and the prisoner, Foucault was

also implying a vast power mechanism, called the police,51 which govern these anomalies

50 Ericson, Richard and Kevin Haggerty. Policing the Risk Society. University of Toronto Press: Toronto, CA. 1997.51 However, the essay “Truth and Judicial Forms” allows us to extend this description to ‘law’ as well. The police is the force of such law. “This idea of a force of law is expressed in the frequently encountered word, enforcement… Law enforcement is more than the application of the law, since it involves a whole series of real instruments which have to be employed in order to apply the law… Law enforcement is the set of

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in the public sphere. However, the description of the police as an all-pervasive

surveillance mechanism in Discipline and Punish risks exaggeration into what Foucault’s

calls “state phobia” in The Birth of Biopolitics . Someone like Derrida, for example, in his

essay “The Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority” interweaves the

adjective “panoptic” to describe the police as a Ghostly presence, especially given the

modern technologies of surveillance, that is everywhere, especially where they are visibly

absent.52 This excessive “state phobia,” what Foucault would have called an inflationary

critique, depicts the police as solely that of a panoptic-technology organized against all of

society. This reductive interpretation risks ignoring the full political stature of the police,

as well as creating a “boogey-man and a circular ontology.” Therefore, to understand

modern police, we must recognize their use of bio-political and liberal procedures. The

police also exist as managers of large populations and as a security apparatus mobilized

to insure against risk. “They are everywhere” and, at the same time, they must “let

happen.”

Foucault again takes up the problem of police under the guise of American neo-

liberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics . This is an especially captivating and perplexing

lecture delivered very close to the end of Foucault’s life. It affords a special place

because it is the only sustained publication where Foucault discusses the great historical

and political changes that happened in the second half of the 20 th Century. Interestingly

enough it is entirely about economic theory after World War Two. In the tail end of the

instruments employed to give social and political reality to the act of prohibitions in which the formulation of the law consists” (BBP, pg. 254).52 Derrida’s analysis of the police, particularly as it depicted alongside the political philosophy of Carl Schmitt and the history that unfolds from the Weimar Republic to the Nazi Gestapo, as a ghostly and panoptic force of the inherently violent law of the State has its own merits. My analysis of Foucault and his political philosophy of the police is in large part due to an earlier essay where I explored Derrida’s own analysis.

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text, in the historical time period closest to his own, Foucault cites a policy-brief

analyzing the drug war by Gary Becker, a contemporary neo-liberal economist from

Chicago. By offering these marginal comments about the role of the police as Foucault

saw it in 1980, we are offered our final glimpse into Foucault’s political philosophy of

the police.

According to Becker, drug dealers accept the risk of crime and imprisonment as

entrepreneurs. Neo-liberalism interests Foucault for this very reason. The neo-liberals

envision an economic system in which everyone is an entrepreneur, what Foucault calls

homo economicus.53 The importance of this sleight-of-hand is the creation of an un-

alienated economic subject responsible for the risks and rewards of their economic

decisions. Point being: we each have the ability to fashion ourselves as self-made

economic subjects. Further, neo-liberals contend that all policy decisions can best be

determined by analyzing them economically. Foucault, through Becker, takes this as a

radical new way in which to understand the police: “[Police] is the means employed to

limit the negative externalities of certain acts.”54 Police, under this model, is an insurance

technology organized to protect against risks.

To demonstrate how this economic calculus is calculated and underscores public

policy, Foucault and Becker analyze the drug war. The war on drugs is exemplar as it is

the most prominent form of illegal behavior requiring police surveillance/enforcement in

contemporary American society and additionally the noteworthy result of a black market

relation. Becker concludes that if you analyze the drug war in terms of the neo-liberal

53 Humans, human nature, as understood and motivated economically.54 Foucault, Michel. BBP, pg. 253.

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economic calculus the State will see the inherent benefits of maintaining high prices for

first-time users and low prices for perpetual addicts.

So we need low prices for addicts and very high prices for non-addicts… From this stems a policy of law enforcement directed towards new and potential consumers, small dealers, and the small trade that takes place on street corners; a policy of law enforcement according to an economic rationality of market differentiated in terms of the elements I have referred to.55

The novelty of this drug policy is based upon a rational economic calculus: “we must act

on the market milieu in which the individual makes his supply of crime and encounters a

positive or negative demand.”56 While it should be noted that there are lots of ways in

which to calculate the economic implications of a specific policy, sometime favorably or

unfavorably, what is at stake in Becker neo-liberal drug policy is the minimization of risk

associated with use and addiction, with economics acting as a deterrent.

The mobilization of neo-liberalism economics for police saturation and

international warfare is an important historic reality that only becomes transparent after

Foucault’s death. Instead, the politics of American government, and the resulting history,

since Foucault’s death, is vastly different from Foucault’s naively optimistic and narrow

analysis of drug enforcement.57 Foucault recognizes that the cost of police enforcement

causes its own negative externalities. However, he fails to account for the positive

possibilities of privatizing security apparatuses for economic profit. Reagan and Thatcher

never relented in their surveillance and imprisonment of drug offenders, but instead

sought to privatize prisons and the entire police-industry. The modern American neo-

55 Ibid, pg. 258. 56 Ibid, pg. 259.57 However, I still think that Foucault’s history of neo-liberalism is important for our study of the police. For example, Foucault’s analysis of risk, also posits an inversion: the post-War political rationality creates a public propaganda campaign to proliferate a “culture of danger” (BBP, pg. 66). This incites risk, and possibly even criminal behavior, so as to foster economic life.

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liberal police institution has instead adopted the position of an entrepreneur. The

American “police-prison-law” triad has become a vast corporate endeavor. Security

apparatuses, institutions of the State, have increasingly privatized their functions so as to

make money and increase profit. The expansion of the State and its resources has

proliferated confinement campaigns, the production of weapon and surveillance

technology, and has laid claim to employing millions of Americans each and every year.

Foucault’s investigation of neo-liberalism is surely important; however, the reversal of

perspective from Becker’s analysis to the reality of present-day economics is palpable.

Neo-liberalism, instead of fostering the economic independence and the minimization of

risk of a productive population, has ceaselessly attempted to synthesize the functions of

the State with economic expansion. The result is that security has become big business.58

While Foucault avoids the intellectual danger of an inflationary critique, or “state-

phobia,” this limitation can only lead us so far. I think that Foucault would ask us to

inaugurate our own critical project of the police in modern society. Foucault’s work lays

the groundwork, an operational tool-box, for what such a project would entail. This is

reflected in the work of his personal assistant Pasquale Pasquino and his essay “Theatrum

Politicum: The Genealogy of Capital- Police and the State of Prosperity .”59 Pasquino

58 Dr. Bernard Harcourt of the University of Chicago Law School/Political Science Department recently presented a public lecture: “Neo-liberal Penalty: The Birth of Natural Order, the Illusion of Free Markets” (available publicly on his website: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1278067). Harcourt attempts to apply Foucault’s concept of the police, specifically the grain police as it was practiced in Monarchial France, with the recent economic crisis. He ends up analyzing the various regulations of the French grain police with the regulations of the current the Chicago Stock Exchange. He concludes that the French monarchial model was less regulated and therefore a more sustained example of capitalism. It is no coincidence that Foucault’s work is his model; it attests to the important role that Foucault’s description of the police and analysis of neo-liberalism is playing in a variety of disciplines that are not philosophy, but often times sociologist, like Ericson and Haggerty, or political scientists, and now economists, such as Harcourt. 59 Pasquino, Pasquale. “Theatrum Politicum: The Genealogy of Capital- Police and the State of Prosperity.” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Ed. Graham Bruchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL. 1991. pg. 105-118.

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goes so far as to say that the governmental-reason that founds the police eclipses Marx’s

problematic of class struggle.60 The ultimate form of power, particularly when given the

force of law of the State and its inevitable violence, is indeed the police. Jacques

Ranciere, in his political manifesto Disagreements,61 caricatures all of State-reason as ‘the

Police,’ or police logic. He identifies Foucault’s work immediately as his precursor.

Ranicere uses this metaphor to create his own unique contribution to political philosophy

and is worth an entirely original investigation.62 He does offer one distinction that I

believe is important for what I would like to argue:

So from now on I will use the word police or policing as noun and adjective in this broader sense that is also ‘neutral,’ nonperjorative. I do not, however, identify the police with what is termed the ‘state apparatus.’ The notion of a state apparatus is in fact bound up with the presupposition of an opposition between State and society in which the state is portrayed as a machine, a ‘cold monster’ imposing its rigid order on the life of society… The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise… Policing is not so much the ‘disciplining’ [my emphasis] of bodies as a rule governing their appearing, a configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where these occupations are distributed.63

I take this to be the ultimate consequence of Foucault’s concept of governmentality. The

police cannot be reduced to the state institution we are familiar with. Rather, we are

policed in all sorts of ways, in all sorts of places, by people and institutions that are not

60 I also need to thank and acknowledge my debt to Dr. John Protevi and his article: “What does Foucault think is new about neo-liberalism?” Pli: Warwick Journal of Philosophy. V. 21(forthcoming and available on his website: http://www.protevi.com/john/Foucault_28June2009.pdf). Dr. Protevi taught the course this paper was written for and deserves my thanks for that as well.61 Ranciere, Jacques. Disagreements: Politics and Philosophy. Tr. Julie Rose. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, MN. 1998.62 I have recently extended my conclusion into a new and original paper. I take Alain Badiou’s revealing remark, in Metapolitics, that his concept of the ‘state of the situation’ is synonymous with Ranciere’s use of ‘the Police,’ as the focal thrust. This provides an interesting way in which to compare the use of set-theory as a political concept with the statistical account of bio-politics by Foucault.63 Ibid, pg. 29.

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authorized to enforce the law. Police is a mode of conducting conduct; police deals with

living, and more than just living. Is it surprising to find that police resemble factories,

schools, barracks, even our families and economic regulations, which all resemble the

police?

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