From Stay in Touch:
1975–1978
Leprosy, Plague, and Smallpox. Three Paradigms of Modern Governmental Techniques
Michel Foucault’s »Discipline and Punish« and the »Lectures on Governmentality« revisited
There are key points in Michel Foucault’s oeuvre concerning a typology of modern governmental techniques, where he repeatedly refers back to epidemics. Already in Madness & Civilization (Fr. orig. 1961), he described the measures for the sequestration of lepers from medieval society as a model for later social and institutional practices of exclusion (Chapter 1. Stultifera Navis [= »Ship of Fools«], 7f.). And later on, he analyzed how combating epidemics, such as the plague or smallpox, led to the evolution and implementation of new modern governmental techniques.
For example, in the likely most-cited section of Discipline and Punish, the chapter about panopticism, Foucault surprisingly does not begin his analysis of Bentham’s Panopticon with Bentham, but with an account of how the plague was contained in the seventeenth century. He presents the measures taken by the government against the plague and those against leprosy as two exemplary paradigms: on the one hand, »exclusion«, banning the complete group of people from the community and declaring them »lepers«; on the other, in the case of the plague, »confinement«, which facilitates an individualizing disciplinary control over space and the people. For the plague is »the trial in the course of which one may define ideally the exercise of disciplinary power«. (Foucault 1995, 198) The two models of leprosy and the plague, which differ at the core, are however not irreconcilable, as Foucault stresses, quite the contrary:
It is the peculiarity of the nineteenth century that it applied to the space of exclusion of which the leper was the symbolic inhabitant (beggars, vagabonds, madmen and the disorderly formed the real population) the technique of power proper to disciplinary partitioning. (Foucault 1995, 199)
In this way, Foucault traces Bentham’s Panopticon as well as the general surveillance principle of panopticism back to the political-administrative techniques developed to combat leprosy and the plague:
The constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, by applying the binary branding and exile of the leper to quite different objects; the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear of the plague gave rise. All the mechanisms of power which, even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter him, are composed of those two forms from which they distantly derive. Bentham’s Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition. (Foucault 1995, 199–200)
But these are not Foucault’s last words on the role of epidemics....
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