Documentary Prison Films and the Production of Disciplinary Institutional "Truth"

Abstract

Documentary Prison Films and the Production of Disciplinary Institutional “Truth” Janet Holtman Abstract Drawing primarily upon Michel Foucault's theories regarding knowledge and power, this essay examines the discursive mode of the documentary prison film. Beginning with Foucault's brief discussion of the role of newspapers and crime novels in nineteenth-century France, the essay contemplates the similar ways in which humanist discourses might be imbricated within today's popular and documentary films and the particular ways in which social force is disseminated by documentary prison films. Steven Shaviro's conceptualization of the "double articulation" of the bodily and the textual within filmic discourse is a pivotal concept. The essay concludes with an examination of Frederick Wiseman's provocative prison documentary Titicut Follies, the only American film ever to be banned for reasons other than national security or obscenity (though the judge's original decision contained an argument relating to the latter, which the essay attempts to take into account). Foucault's discussion of the asignificatory "monument" in The Archaeology of Knowledge plays an important role in the essay's conclusions about Wiseman's film and other documentaries. --jh Power “produces reality” before it represses. Equally it produces truth before it ideologizes, abstracts or masks. —Gilles Deleuze, Foucault In The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Fredric Jameson distinguishes between a “properly Marxian notion of an all-embracing and all-structuring mode of production...and non-Marxist visions of a ‘total system’ in which the various elements or levels of social life are programmed in some increasingly constricting way” (90), thus setting his own totalizing theory apart from the “monolithic models” of the social body which, he claims, do not allow for an effective “oppositional or even merely ‘critical practice’ and resistance” but rather “reintegrate” such resistances “back into the system as the latter’s mere inversion” (91). One of the primary targets of this apparent criticism is, of course, the theory of Michel Foucault, whose “image” of the social “gridwork,” according to Jameson, provides for an “ever more pervasive ‘political technology of the body’” (90). 1 Of course, one of Jameson’s goals is to show how such theories may be subsumed under the umbrella of his own Marxist discourse in order to reopen pathways for such “resistance;” thus Jameson points out Foucault’s totalization but then is able to include his theory in an overall plan that manages to account for such “disturbing synchronic frameworks” (91). That Jameson’s theories and perspective have been enormously influential hardly needs to be (re)stated, but I would like to point out the fact that Jameson’s reading of Foucault has perhaps colored the reception, perception and manipulation of Foucault’s theories, particularly in terms of how the technologies of Discipline, often figured by the panopticon, have become a sort of metaphor of the “total system” that seems to shut down a useful deployment of Foucault’s theories of social force while enabling their subsumption within discussions that deploy very different theories. My interest in bringing up this influence, and in touching upon some current appropriations of Foucauldian theory tinged by it, is to provide a foundation from which to offer an alternative conceptualization through an extended example of the application of Foucauldian theory to a type of discourse, one that might be expected to be particularly rife with possibilities for such an analysis: the documentary prison film. While it is, of course, not possible or useful to trace out completely the Jamesonian influence on contemporary cultural studies, one may at least note certain uses of Foucauldian theory that bear a strong resemblance to Jameson’s incorporation of Foucault, or at least seem to owe a debt to Jameson’s conceptualization of disciplinary power as a progression of ever more oppressive technologies of the body that call for a Marxist dialectical framework to free it from a sort of political “grid”lock. Mark Poster’s Foucault, Marxism and History immediately comes to mind as employing a similar strategy if a somewhat different reading of Foucault. 2 And in film criticism, one sees occasional conscriptions of Foucault into the theoretical service of cultural studies analyses that are to a greater...