Discipline and the Lash in Melville's White-Jacket

Discipline and the Lash in White-Jachet PETER BELLIS University of Miami Melville’s n his 1975study,Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault speaks of an early nineteenth-century transition between two different concepts of “penality ”-from one regime based on the spectacular display of physical punishment to another founded on incarceration, surveillance, and control. The former is publicly enacted on the body and is epitomized by public torture and execution; the latter is withdrawn from public view and relocated within the disciplinary structures of school, factory,and prison.1 In White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-war, published in 1850, Herman Melville depicts a shipboard world in which Foucault’s two systems operate not in opposition but in an uneasy tandem. One strand of Melville’s book, its narrative thread, condemns the arbitrary and brutal punishment inflicted by autocratic captains. But another more descriptive aspect considers the frigate in quite different terms, as a rigidly determined system based on mechanistic discipline and spatial organization.2 My interest here is not primarily in Foucault’smodel for its own sake, or in a test of its applicability to the antebellum American Navy. Rather, it is in the way that Foucault’scategories intersect with and highlight other divisions: first, the structural split within Melville’stext and, second, a larger fault line in the political discourse of his time. Written in the midst of campaigns for naval reform, White-Jacket registers and responds to the changing forms of shipboard power in two contrasting ways. Its narrative uses the rhetoric of American democracy and egalitarianism in a forcefulattack on corpora1punishment, but its descriptive survey of the ship, as a space governed by discipline and surveillance , lacks that critical edge. The books inability to confront such disciplinary power is symptomatic, I would suggest, of an increasing gap between Disciplineand Punish: The Birth o f the Prison, trans, Alan Sheridan (New York Vintage, 1979); hereafter cited as Discipline. In a later formulation, Foucault substitutes for these two terms “a triangle , sovereignty-discipline-government, which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security” (“Governmentality,”The Essential Foucault, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose [New York: New Press, 20031, 243). Naval order, however, seems better described by his earlier model, since it is based on the control of the ship as a space more than of its a crew as a “population.” 2 Samuel Otter terms this aspect of the text an “anatomy”;see his MelvilleSAnatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 19991,4-6. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S2 5 P E T E R B E L L I S older kinds of political discourse and the forms of economic and social control that were emerging in the 1840s and 1850s.3 White-Jacket’s ideology of Revolutionary republicanism, with its emphasis on the representation and empowerment of individual citizens, cannot finally come to grips with an order based on the management and control of groups and categories of persons -be they blacks, whites, workers, or slaves. The Lash oucault describes “a certain mechanism of power” that was enacted in public punishments through the late eighteenth century (Discipline, F57). Under this regime, the body was “themajor target of penal repression ,” displayed and destroyed in public rituals of torture and execution (8): in monarchical law, punishment is a ceremonial of sovereignty; it uses the ritual marks of the vengeance that it applies to the body of the condemned man; and it deploysbefore the eyes of the spectators an effect of terror as intense as it is discontinuous, irregular and always above its own laws, the physical presence of the sovereign and his power. (130) In breaking the law, the offender has “touched the very person of the prince,” so punishment must be wrought upon his body in the most literal of terms (49). Essential to such punishment is not just its publicity but its theatricality , its demonstration or enactment of authority in the administration of violence . This form of...