Post Modernism

Foucault: power, knowledge and discipline

Michel Foucault is the most useful of the three for this syllabus, because his subject is very close to yours.

Power and knowledge are joined. What counts as knowledge in a society is not separate from its power relations. To define madness, criminality or sexuality is to exercise power, and the professions that hold the right to define, medicine, psychiatry, law, criminology, exercise it.

Discourse. A discourse is a way of speaking about a subject that fixes what can be said, what counts as evidence, and who is qualified to speak. Discourse shapes what a society can even think about a matter.

Disciplinary power. Foucault argued that modern power works differently from the old kind. Sovereign power was visible, occasional and violent: public execution. Disciplinary power is continuous, detailed and productive: it works through timetables, examinations, records, classification and observation, in schools, hospitals, factories, barracks and prisons.

His image for it is the panopticon, Bentham's design for a prison in which a central tower can observe every cell while the inmates cannot see whether they are being watched. Because they may be watched at any moment, they behave as if always watched, and the discipline is finally exercised by the inmates upon themselves. Foucault took the panopticon as the model of modern society at large.

For a law student this is a serious argument and not a metaphor. It suggests that the effective regulation of behaviour in a modern society is done less by criminal prohibition than by registration, licensing, inspection, credit scoring, attendance records and surveillance, and that a lawyer who watches only the statute book is watching the smaller half.

The post modern account of contemporary society

Six claims recur, and together they make an answer.

1. Identity is fragmented and chosen. Class, occupation and community used to be given and to last. Identity is now assembled and revised, and expressed heavily through what one consumes.
2. Consumption displaces production. People are placed by what they buy and display more than by what they make.
3. Culture is dominated by media and image.
4. Diversity and difference are asserted rather than assimilated: identities organised around gender, sexuality, region, religion and ethnicity make claims of their own.
5. Truth is plural and local. No single vantage point, science included, can pronounce for everyone.
6. The nation state weakens from above by globalisation and from below by identity claims.

The perspective applied to law

• Legal pluralism. If there is no single authoritative story, there is no reason to expect one legal order. This connects directly to [Legal Pluralism] in Module IV, and India, with personal laws, customary law and statutory law operating together, is an unusually clear instance.
• Surveillance rather than prohibition. Foucault's disciplinary power describes identification systems, databases, monitoring and data protection questions better than the traditional model of command and sanction.
• Who defines? Post modern criminology asks not why people commit crime but who has the power to define conduct as criminal, and what interests that definition serves.
• Rights talk fragmented. Universal human rights are themselves a metanarrative, and the post modern challenge to them, that they carry a particular culture's assumptions while claiming universality, is one a law student will meet again.

A worked example

Priya is twenty-two, lives in a flat in Andheri, and works for a firm whose clients are in three countries.

Identity as the perspective describes it. Her grandmother's identity was given: village, caste, family, and the occupation attached to them. Priya's is assembled: she describes herself by what she does, what she watches, what she eats, the causes she supports and the places she has been, and she revises the description. Almost every element of it is expressed through something she consumes, which is Baudrillard's point about the image and Lyotard's about the absence of a single story that would place her.

Foucault as the perspective's most useful half. Priya is governed very little by prohibition and very extensively by record. Her attendance is logged, her work is measured, her creditworthiness is scored, her movement is traced by the phone she carries, her building records her entry, and her employer can read what she writes. No rule forbids her to do anything unusual; she simply never does, because she is aware that all of it is recorded. That is the panopticon working exactly as Foucault described, and it regulates her far more effectively than the criminal law does.

And the criticism, in the same example. The woman who cleans Priya's office is in the same city and almost none of this describes her: her identity is not assembled through consumption, her work is not surveilled by software, and her constraints are material rather than discursive. Both women live in Mumbai in the same year. The perspective describes one of them well and the other hardly at all, which is the unevenness that any Indian answer on post modernism must state.

Criticism

1. It is self-refuting. The claim that no grand narrative is credible is itself a grand narrative about the condition of the whole world.
2. Relativism disarms criticism. If no account of the world is better founded than another, there is no ground from which to condemn an atrocity, and the perspective cannot support the political claims its adherents often make.
3. It is obscure. Much of the writing is difficult in ways that do not obviously repay the difficulty, and that obscurity has been the target of well-known parodies.
4. It exaggerates the break. Critics reply that we are not in a new epoch at all: this is late modernity, or modernity accelerated. Poverty, class and material production have not stopped mattering because images have started to.
5. It is weak on evidence. Sweeping claims about the whole of contemporary society are offered with far less empirical support than the perspectives it criticises brought to bear.
6. It applies unevenly outside the West. In a society where a large part of the population is occupied with subsistence, describing identity as chosen through consumption fits some parts and not others. In India both conditions exist at once, which makes the perspective useful in the metros and thin elsewhere, and saying so is a strong point in an answer.

The six perspectives, side by side

Quick revision

1. Lyotard: post modernism is incredulity towards metanarratives.
2. Baudrillard: simulacra and hyperreality; the image detached from the real.
3. Foucault: power and knowledge are inseparable; discourse fixes what can be said; disciplinary power works through observation and record; the panopticon.
4. Contemporary society: fragmented and chosen identity, consumption over production, image, difference, plural truth, weakened nation state.
5. For law: legal pluralism, surveillance over prohibition, who has the power to define, and the challenge to universal rights.
6. Criticism: self-refuting, relativist, obscure, exaggerates the break, thin on evidence, and uneven outside the West.

Test yourself

1. What is a metanarrative, and what is Lyotard's claim about it? A grand story that claims to explain history as a whole and to justify a way of organising society, such as the Enlightenment story of reason liberating humanity or the Marxist story of class struggle ending in emancipation. Lyotard's claim is that such stories are no longer believed, and that knowledge has fragmented into local narratives with nothing to arbitrate between them.

2. Explain hyperreality with an example. Baudrillard's term for a condition in which representations become more real to people than what they represent, so that the distinction ceases to matter. A televised event is experienced by millions who were not present and is remembered in the form in which it was broadcast rather than as it occurred; the broadcast, not the event, becomes the reality people act on.

3. What is disciplinary power, and how does it differ from sovereign power? Sovereign power is visible, occasional and violent, exemplified by public punishment. Disciplinary power is continuous, detailed and productive, working through timetables, examinations, records, classification and observation in schools, hospitals, factories and prisons. Its model is the panopticon, in which the possibility of being watched leads the watched to regulate themselves.

4. Why do critics say post modernism is self-refuting? Because the proposition that no grand narrative about the world can be credible is itself a sweeping claim about the condition of the whole world, and so is a grand narrative of the kind it declares incredible. A related objection is that its relativism removes any ground from which to criticise anything.

5. How well does the perspective fit Indian society? Unevenly, and saying so is the strongest answer. Its account of identity chosen and expressed through consumption, of media saturation and of assertive difference describes urban middle-class India closely. It describes far less well the large part of the population for whom material production and subsistence remain the organising facts of life, and for whom identity is given rather than selected.