Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth and Foucault: Discipline and Punish - Response

Jeremy Corren
Sec
002

In the span of fourteen years, from 1961 to 1975, the scope and style associated with
sociocultural discourses in anthropology was far removed from that of the works of pioneering
French anthropologists working in the early 20th century. 1961 saw the publication of Frantz
Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, an incisive, aggressive appeal for decolonization in Africa.
In 1975, Michel Foucault continued his work in the history of ideas, in this case constructing a
multifaceted analysis of the transition from classic monarchical punishment to contemporary
penal justice reform. Fanon and Foucault tackle different questions with considerably different
approaches: Fanon outlines his revolutionary ideas in dramatic, evocative prose, while Foucault
calculatingly and carefully assembles a dense and richly-detailed collection of evidence and
theoretical assertions. Furthermore, their approaches differ in that Fanon concerns himself with
today’s problems, rarely looking over his shoulder towards colonial history in order to maintain
the urgency of his appeal. Foucault, on the other hand, draws slowly from a large bank of
evidence consisting of historical accounts as well as the treatises of well-regarded European
jurists and political theorists. He chooses to address contemporary concerns regarding crime
and punishment only after he has traced the historical trajectory all the way from the 17th
century to now. But these works, in spite of their ostensible differences, take up a critical lens
with the purpose of calling for change or reform in two controversial spheres of social life: Fanon
in colonialist societies, Foucault in the penal justice system. Here we will examine the means by
which these two seminal French anthropologists address these issues and what their
propositions entail.
Coming from an excellent background in psychiatry, Fanon distills the behavior and
cultural attitudes of both the colonizers and the colonized into their psychological essences. He
begins his assessment by introducing the relationship between these two disparate parties in
terms of its historical origins. He describes the ‘first encounter’ between the settlers and natives
as being “marked by violence and their existence together—that is to say the exploitation of the
native by the settler—was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons.” (36)
The colonizers asserted their power over the natives and have continued to maintain it through
means of physical violence, and as a result, “that same violence will be claimed and taken over
by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into
the forbidden quarters.” (40) Thus, the colonial world, forged by violence, is destroyed by
violence. And what is this division between colonizer and colonized, settler and native? Fanon
argues that it is “a world divided into compartments,” each compartment following “the principle
of reciprocal exclusivity.” (39) This “Manichean world,” as Fanon puts it, is divided into two
distinctly separate social spheres, in which the settler thrives and the native suffers. The settler
enacts this bifurcation by painting “the native as a sort of quintessence of evil”; as a result, the
world’s halves are ethically qualified: the settler’s community is absolute good, the native’s
community absolutely evil. (41) As violence erupts and spills over into both of these
communities, however, the “colonized intellectual” and the “colonialist bourgeois” attempt to
reach political compromise. (44) But both of these parties attempt to assuage colonizer-
colonized tensions with Western methods of diplomacy, values of ‘pacifism’: and when “the
native hears a speech about Western culture he pulls out his knife.” (43) These compartments
are irreconcilable, and so violence provides the only solution: through it, the Manichean
properties of whiteness and blackness are eradicated; the colonized replaces the colonizer in a
kind of substitution process.
As Fanon describes the revolutionary transition in colonial society, Foucault addresses a
similar kind of transition with regards to what he calls ‘technologies of power’ in penal justice. In
monarchical regimes of kingdoms past, “the crime attacked the sovereign; it attacked him
personally, since the law represented the will of the sovereign.” (47) When punishment was
carried out, it was an “aspect of the sovereign’s right to make war on his enemies.” (48)
Spectators in the public arena of punishment were terrorized with the purpose of deterring any
future crimes they may have committed. However, as history crawled into the next several
centuries, a remarkable shift occurred, by which the monarch’s power to punish was
transformed into the right of the people as a whole to exact a different kind of revenge against
criminals; those who broke the law infringed the rights of the “superior man.” As this transfer of
power from monarchical revenge to punishment by society was accompanied by a shift in the
punishment itself; reformers introduced a new aim, namely that of affecting not the physical
body of the criminal but his soul. Rather than erecting a physical mark in the body of the criminal
through violence and torture, the penal system adopted the use of a “complex of signs.” In what
Foucault terms the “theatre of punishment,” penal authorities employed a whole new host of
isolation and humiliation techniques to attack the soul of a criminal with representations of pain;
the public would witness these rectifications and thus be deterred from committing crime. But as
the public torture scenario transformed into a private form of punishment in which the criminal
was assessed and molded in a penal setting, the justice system set its sights on rehabilitation
over revenge or retribution. And thus the prison system as we know it was born.
The work of Fanon and Foucault attempts to critically examine power relations and
violence. The colonial system is defined by power and violence, a compartmentalized society in
which the settlers establish and maintain a racial and economic hierarchy through violence. The
monarch asserts his power over the citizen body and the condemned man in particular by
obtaining vengeance through excessive public torture and violence. Fanon and Foucault do not
offer similar propositions, however. Though their analyses of power relations in political and
social systems belong to a similar thematic realm, Fanon advocates a radical overthrow of
colonialism through violence while Foucault suggests a systematic reform of the prison system
based on strict principles of crime and punishment, based on a well-reasoned jurisprudential
mode of thought. Still, that both of these works call attention to such well-defined systems of
power and criticize them so relentlessly speaks to the power of the scholar. These two
publications cement the roles of Fanon and Foucault in the scholastic sphere not as
academicians with narrow interests but active intellectuals with bold visions for social change.