"That heavy machine": reprising the colonial apparatus in 21st-century social control.

• Date: 22 March 2005
• Author: Brown, Mark
• Published date: 22 March 2005
• Author: Brown, Mark

SVEN LINDQVIST (2002: 102) WRITES OF THE 19TH CENTURY AS A TIME "WHEN IT was still regarded as more natural to burn down a village than to undress in public." (1) The patterns of thought that allowed for such brutality and prudence have returned to find a place in contemporary debates and measures directed at the so-called dangerous offender. This figure, who appears as a kind of atavistic Other against which civil society might usefully seek to measure and reinforce its values, has in the last quarter century become subject to a variety of increasingly punitive sanctions and strategies of exclusion. In the sphere of sentencing, for example, governments have elaborated a doctrine of "public protection," placing it ahead of traditional juridical principles of parsimony and proportionality. This change has occurred against a backdrop of what Bottoms (1995) has termed the rise of a "popular punitiveness." Here traditional sources of authority on matters of punishment and crime control, such as bureaucratic and academic criminologists, have been shifted to the margins so as to allow a strong current of popular sentiment to enter and shape debates on punishment policy and responses to crime. Part of the novelty of these changes seems to lie in their sharp reconfiguration of certain previously solid relationships and expectations. The severing of the relationship between offense severity and sentence length, with its attendant expectation of proportionality, is one such case. Another might be the expectation of release upon expiration of a finite sentence of imprisonment--an expectation severed or at least considerably refigured by the advent of civil commitment statues (Janus, 2000). So widespread have these changes been in the English-speaking world that it has indeed become possible to speak of the rise of a "new punitiveness" (Pratt et al., 2005).

My concern is this article is to examine the logic and rationale of these new tactics of government through a lens that draws attention to the changing political relationship between government and offender that they portend. Previous analyses have focused upon what might be termed the anatomy of these new punishment practices--their shape, distribution, and effect (e.g., Brown and Pratt, 2000; Feeley and Simon, 1992; Garland, 2001a)--and the conditions of contemporary life that have brought the public to so central and powerful a position (e.g., Ashworth and Hough, 1996; O'Malley, 1999; Roberts et al., 2003). Yet these are only two sides to a triangle within which these changes have taken place. The shifting political relationship between government and offender (as distinct from general analyses of, for example, neoliberal or late-modern governance) forms the triangle's last and relatively neglected plane (cf. O'Malley, 2004; Vaughan, 2000). A key question to be answered is whether these new tactics and the rationalities of government that make them possible constitute entirely new forms and constellations of power. In their radical renegotiation of established notions about the rights and obligations of citizenship in a liberal-democratic state, these measures seem to hark back to a colonial model of state-subject relationship. Like the colonial subject, today's serious offender exists in an uncertain relationship with the state: induced to participate, but all the while excluded from a rapidly changing civil society. The remainder of the article addresses these issues and is broken into three sections. The first will develop in more detail what is meant by a colonial political rationality and tactics of colonial power, which may be finding their way back to the contemporary metropolis. At the heart of any analysis of colonial state formations stands the state-subject relationship. Accordingly, part two will look at how the colonial subject was constituted as a civic and political subject and at the structure of obligation that distinguished colonial subjects from the metropolitan subjects of emerging modern states. Finally, part three will examine how recent penal developments such as civil commitment statutes, sex offender notification schemes, and the rise of mass imprisonment might usefully be understood within this framework of a reprised colonial apparatus.

Colonial Political Rationality and Modern Government

What defines the modern state and modern forms of governance? Questions of such magnitude have understandably unleashed a bounty of theorizing and argument. One of the most important of those theorists, Michel Foucault, whose work has almost singularly reset the parameters for argument, has in his analysis a curious blindness to the expansiveness of the state he seeks so accurately to describe. Foucault's well-known account of the forms and rationalities of the modern state and government posits their emergence and limits their extension, in the 18th and 19th centuries at least, to within the (mainly) European West. He describes a transition in rationalities and tactics of rule from sovereignty to discipline to governmentality, resulting finally in a triangulated balance of these three forms of power (see Foucault, 2003). (2) Yet, how should colonial power, colonial political rationalities, and the colonial state (or forms of colonial state) be understood in relation to the modern state? Particularly acute is the question posed by postcolonial theorist Partha Chatterjee:

Does it serve any useful analytical purpose to make a distinction between the colonial state and the forms of the modern state? Or should we regard the colonial state as simply another specific form in which the modern state has generalized itself across the globe (Chatterjee, 1993: 14; emphasis added)? Does the colonial state formation, its institutions and tactics of power, represent anything more than a simple accommodation of modern power to the specific demands of rule in less-developed non-Western societies? Chatterjee thinks not and his analysis creates an opposition between modern and colonial states. The latter, he argues, are distinctive for the rationalities that articulate their administration. Through an analysis of British rule in India, he identifies what he terms a "rule of colonial difference" (p. 19) that operates across the colonial sphere to condition, or perhaps more accurately, to determine eligibility for participation across almost every sphere of government and civic life. This rule could use a variety of signs of difference depending upon the particular context in which it was invoked, but by far the most important, most potent, and most widely used, Chatterjee argues, was race. As a signifier of difference, race provided the emerging disciplinary society with a variable that would allow modernization to proceed apace while preserving the essential hierarchical relationship that defined the relationship between colonizer and colonized. As such, he believes, an understanding of the colonial state is crucial to any full understanding of modern power. Chatterjee's important insight is to identify how this "rule of colonial difference" enabled the colonial state to fracture the otherwise universalizing discourses of liberalism and disciplinary power that were at the heart of the British project in India. As he illustrates in The Nation and Its Fragments', whether in the extension of legal rights, the application of bureaucratic rationality, or in debates over issues like freedom of speech, invocation of the rule of difference provided the colonial state with an apparently rational justification for partitioning, restricting, or dividing off the benefits of ostensibly universal measures of social...