George Herbert and the "Discipline" of History

From its beginnings, New Historicism has had a Foucauldian fascination with the operations of disciplinary power. One tendency of such criticism is to read what appears to be a humane, enlightened, or even spiritualized discipline as only a method of political control more effective than corporal punishment. Jonathan Dollimore's well-known essay on Measure for Measure classically illustrates this tendency. Recognizing that critics such as J. W. Lever have seen the Duke using power benevolently to enact "a process of moral education," Dollimore counters that in such criticism "moralistic and patriarchal values are reinstated the more insidiously for being ostensibly 'caring' rather than openly coercive." ¹ The skeptical attitude toward discipline that this essay exemplifies and that critics already suspicious of the claims of humanism and the Enlightenment have found so appealing can, I think, be linked most accurately to the Foucault of Discipline and Punish. Foucault notes the importance of seeing the "positive" as well as the "repressive" aspects of discipline, and observes that "this power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who 'do not have it'; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them; it exerts pressure upon them, just as they themselves, in their struggle against it, resist the grip it has on them." ² But the possibility of resistance glimpsed here tends to elude even the most careful surveillance as one progresses through the book. We hear that the methods of discipline "made possible the meticulous control of the operations of the body, which assured the constant subjection of its forces" (137); that "in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the disciplines became general formulas of domination" (137); of "the attentive 'malevolence' that turns everything to account" (139); and above all, of coercion, "an uninterrupted, constant coercion" (137), "the individual and collective coercion of bodies" (169), "a mechanism that coerces by means of observation" (170), "the coercive technologies of behaviour" (293). Discipline and Punish thus suggests a principle that can be seen to underlie many recent studies of early modern disciplinary power: "bad" discipline drives out "good." I want to ask whether it should or must, whether a more positive view of discipline can be successfully defended.

My test-case is a lyric poem, George Herbert's "Discipline." The poem is an obvious choice, and its argument clearly invites a Foucauldian reading. Herbert (or his speaker) repeatedly urges God to throw away his rod and to let the more effective power of love, pictured as "a man of warre," produce an obedient subject, "For with love / Stonie hearts will bleed." ³ We could manufacture such a reading by adapting one of the more fully articulated applications of Foucault's theory of discipline to literature, Richard Brodhead's "Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America." ⁴ Brodhead explores the relation between mass-market fiction written in the 1850s and the contemporary "theory of socialization . . . that might be labelled disciplinary intimacy, or simply discipline through love." ⁵ As in Herbert's poem, discipline through love was proposed as an improvement over the rod, but Brodhead is suspicious of the claim for what he calls "a kind of miraculous transcendence" of the "apparently inevitable" need for physical force. Noting "the sheer emotional manipulation this system mandates in practice," and maintaining that the rod has "been replaced by psychological weapons with new orders of coercive power," Brodhead argues that in this literature "discipline through love reveals itself as a strategy not, finally, for the humanization of authority but rather for a superior introjection of authority with humanization's aid." ⁶ It would be easy to apply this reading to the details of Herbert's "Discipline," especially to its presentation of a love that claims to be "gentle" but in fact resembles both a piece of long-range artillery and...