Postscript on the Society of Control

During the course he gave at the Collège de France between 1977 and 1978, Foucault investigated the passage of a disciplinary society into a society of security, by which he means a society in which there is a general economy of power which has the form of, or which is dominated by, the technology of security. He pays particular attention to the distinction between discipline and security in their respective ways of dealing with the organization of spatial distributions. He provides three examples from history.

The first is the project by Alexandre Le Maître, in which the city is defined in terms of sovereignty; a distinguishing feature of this spatial project is the capital and its role in relation to the rest of the territory. Indeed, the relation between sovereignty and the spatial arrangement is fundamental, since the city is essentially conceived in relation to the more global dimension of the territory, while the State itself is conceived as an edifice. Foucault associates this spatial project with the age of law, in which the security mechanism is a both a legal and juridical mechanism. To explain how this mechanism of security functions, he provides the example of the treatment of lepers, who were excluded from the city through laws and regulations.

His second example is the town of Richelieu, based on political thought that was established in the seventeenth century. The town was built using the form of the Roman camp, with the grid embodying the instrument of discipline: hierarchies and relations of power are established through the structural formation of the space. Discipline forms an empty, closed space; discipline belongs to the order of construction. Foucault associates this spatial project with the disciplinary age, the institution of the modern legal system. In order to explain how this security mechanism functions, he provides the example of how the plague was treated between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the territory was subject to regulations specifying when people could go out and how they should behave at home, prohibiting contact, and requiring them to present themselves to inspectors, and so on.

The third example is Nantes, where the space was organised to give structure to the problem of hygiene, trade and other types of networks.

An important problem for towns in the eighteenth century was allowing for surveillance, since the suppression of city walls made necessary by economic development meant that one could no longer close towns in the evening or closely supervise daily comings and goings, so that the insecurity of the towns was increased by the influx of the floating population of beggars, vagrants, delinquents, criminals, thieves, murderers, and so on, who might come, as everyone knows, from the country. In other words, it was a matter of organizing circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, making a division between good and bad circulation, and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad.

This spatial project is associated by Foucault with the age of security. To explain how this mechanism works, he provides the example of smallpox and inoculation practices beginning in the eighteenth century. The fundamental problem

will not be the imposition of discipline...so much as the problem of knowing how many people are infected with smallpox...the statistical effects on the population in general. In short, it will no longer be the problem of exclusion, as with leprosy, or of quarantine, as with the plague, but of epidemics and the medical campaigns that try to halt epidemic or endemic phenomena.

Nevertheless, Foucault cautions that these three mechanisms can be found in different historical periods and that one influences the other, hence, a complex apparatus of discipline is required to make the mechanisms of security work. They do not follow each other in succession and the forms that emerge do not cause the earlier ones to disappear. There is not the legal age, the disciplinary age, and then the age of security. Apparatuses of security do not replace disciplinary mechanisms; when a technology of security is put into action, for example, it may make use of or, at times, multiply juridical and disciplinary elements.

In other words, in a period of the deployment of mechanisms of security, it is the disciplinary that sparked off, not the explosion, for there has not been an explosion, but at least the most evident and visible conflicts.

Foucault’s schema helps us to arrive at a better understanding of how the wall built by the Israel to encircle Palestinian towns, for example, is indeed a disciplinary mechanism, but one which acquires force only thanks to the security mechanism of the road system. Indeed, if discipline acts in an empty space through isolation, hierarchy and repression, security, on the other hand, allows for a certain amount of circulation, making a division between good and bad circulation, since its objective is not to block flows but to monitor them. Security does not tend, like discipline, to resolve the problem, but, rather, to manage probable events that are only partially controllable while attempting to minimise the risks.

Discipline gives architectural form to a space and considers the hierarchical and functional distribution of the elements as an essential problem: I think of how the Israeli guard towers and military camps are organised in the layout of a prison plan, to allow for surveillance even when there is no one observing and guarding from the towers, because all that is needed to influence people’s behavior is that the mechanism exist.

Security seeks, rather, to structure an environment based on a series of possible events or elements that must be regulated within a multi-functional and transformable framework: I think about how the permanent and mobile checkpoints work, not by attempting to resolve the problem of armed attacks once and for all, but, rather, by reducing their probability, in the same way that taking digital fingerprints for the identity cards issued to Palestinians by the Israelis marks the passage toward a biopolitical power that invades the very nature of humanity, our DNA, transforming a people into a population, into statistical data.

For security, control of the road circulation is equally important as the juridico-legal apparatus and the disciplinary apparatus. The problem is not one of delimiting the territory, as it is for the disciplinary mechanism, or at least not exclusively so. It is a question of allowing circulation, controlling it, distinguishing between good and bad circulation, and assisting movements, but in such a way as to eliminate the dangers inherent to this circulation.

I began this piece with a story, attempting to describe the asymmetrical functioning of the roads, for which there are no road maps prohibiting access or even written regulations. What we are dealing with here is not exclusion, a crude but blatant separation like South African apartheid. What we have here is a much more sophisticated regime. The problem is not about imposing a law that says no (if such a law exists) but about keeping certain phenomena at bay, within acceptable limits, by encouraging their progressive self-annihilation. The mechanisms in this type of control become increasingly ‘democratic’. It is for this reason that the sociopolitical future of Palestine-Israel is so relevant to countries that consider themselves to be liberal democracies. It is here that forms of government will come into being which will juxtapose freedom and domination, access and separation, liberalism and occupation.