On the State Apparatus in Socialist China: How Foucauldian is it?

Kigan Chang
M.A. student, Philosophy
California State University, Los Angeles

The carceral texture of society assures both the real capture of the body and its perpetual observation; it is, by its very nature, the apparatus of punishment that conforms most completely to the new economy of power and the instrument for the formation of knowledge that this very economy needs. Its panoptic functioning enables it to play this double role… I am not saying that the human sciences emerged from the prison. But, if they have been able to be formed and to produce so many profound changes in the episteme, it is because they have been conveyed by a specific and new modality of power: a certain policy of the body, a certain way of rendering the group of men docile and useful. This policy required the involvement of definite relations of knowledge in relations of power; it called for a technique of overlapping subjection and objectification; it brought with it new procedures of individuation. The carceral network constituted one of the armatures of this power-knowledge that has made the human sciences possible. Knowable men (soul, individuality, consciousness, conduct, whatever it is called) is the object-effect of this analytic investment, of this domination-observation."

Discipline and Punish, p. 304-5

However, it seems to me, in a state apparatus such as mainland China, the mechanism by which power legitimates itself and circulates would operate according to a quite different principle. The centralized state machine legitimates its own sovereignty by projecting a utopian fiction onto the space of lived reality. Its exerts its ideological authority and leadership not through the individuation of its subjects a la Foucault, but through a different operation. To assert its authority, the state classifies its subjects into coded positions (class, gender, party ranking, kinship…), representations that are ‘moral exemplars’, clusters of signs that must be rendered visible in order to circulate throughout the social body, thereby generating the effects of power by making the party also supremely visible in a glorious display of ideological presence.

In socialist China, still we can surely see many technologies of power that at first appear to be fully disciplinary in the Foucauldian sense i.e. pinning down persons on a grid that makes even the most intimate areas of everyday practice visible to a panoptic gaze. The meticulous rituals of criticism and self-criticism we have witnessed in countless political campaigns and purges, for instance, would appear to be analogous to the individuating rituals of the confessional mode that Foucault alluded to. Another example would be the detailed dossiers filed by the state machine which records each citizen’s political history, resembling at least superficially the scriptural economy of the Foucauldian disciplinary state.

However, I would like to suggest that the knowledge these technologies generate is quite differently constructed. Subjects are not so much constituted as objects of knowledge in a science of the individual. Rather, they are classified into a system of signs that locates them as agents in a historical drama, namely, a master narrative about the consciously directed progression toward an envisioned socialist modernity. In this sense, the mere location (e.g. class position, party ranking, occupational status…) in this narrative becomes a mode of inquiry into a discourse that represents itself as more truly "scientific" (a la historical materialism) than any claims to knowledge of the bourgeois social science (a la Foucault). That said, in the discourse of historical materialism as spoken by the centralized state apparatus, history itself (vis-à-vis the Foucauldian historicist interpretation of ‘history’) becomes the fetishized object.

Perhaps what we are observing in China’s political culture is not altogether a disciplinary technology in Foucault’s sense, but rather something that resembles more closely what Deleuze calls a ‘socius’ that, in order to operate, must render its subjects visible -- not just to the panopticized gaze of an invisible, insidious and anonymous power, but with a visibility that is semiotically produced at large by the circulation of signs throughout the social body. Signs play on the surface of the subjects, reordering their overt practice rather than their inner psychical interiorities.

The fact of the matter is, in the Chinese scenario, it is not that these disciplinary techniques fail to affect one’s sense of the self, but they affect it to a larger extent in terms of an inculcation of the self into a moral category (e.g. as in a number of so-called ‘spiritualization campaign’), a state of selflessness that merges into the social collectivity, than by elaborating the self in all its particularities (e.g. Foucault’s ethic in the sense of relationships to self). The goal is not so much the normalizing refashioning of the individual, so that deviance is made to conform to a norm presumed to be present in the social body, as it is the radical reform of that very social body, in which all practices are radically displaced by new ones, all in the name of a teleological movement toward a modernity that identifies itself as socialist.

On a final note, although the spatial metaphor of the panopticon may still apply as an adequate figure of the operation of power in the Chinese post-socialist state, it must be reworked to suggest that its circulation is contingent on the hypervisibility of the power apparatus and its inscriptions on the body. (At this juncture, one can only imagine the ordeal of public humiliation that so many fine scholars and intellectuals in China had to endure during the Cultural Revolution which, by the way, had been so erroneously romanticized by the French intelligentsia on the Left: carrying placards of confessions literally on the body in public processions). In fact, the bestowal of guilt and shame on its subjects, through the issuing of ritual marches and public processions in political campaigns, precisely demonstrates the power of the state to define discursive positions through its classificatory strategies of ‘nomenklatura’ -- its power to name (e.g. ‘subversive reactionary’, ‘moral degenerate’) and to sort persons into the hierarchically arranged categories of a moral order (e.g. ‘engaging in counter-revolutionary activities’)

After all, the tower at the center is not just a darkened space inhabited by an invisible panoptic gaze of power. It may as well be an illuminated stage from which the Party asserts: "I hereby render myself visible to you. By looking back at me, your return gaze will make me complete and actualizes my power!"

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