Expertise: An excerpt from Joy Anderson's PhD Dissertation

The written work below from Joy's studies at NYU on prisons provides a backdrop for understanding our thinking about the the construction of expertise in a democracy.  It focuses in particular on this question:

Who has the authority to shape public institutions?

 

Conclusion: The Public, Public Opinion, and Public Institutions

The members of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons articulated a series of paradoxes in the relationships between the public and public institutions.  Associations defined the public good through a corporate, rather than private, interest; and association corrupted individuals through a process of contamination and strengthened corporate power against the rights of individuals.  Knowledge and information ensured a thinking public and improved public opinion; and information perverted public opinion without proper understanding of the variables on which the information depended.  The institutions of the public must be visible, apparent to the naked eye; and the mechanisms of observation and documentation, which made the system visible, were only accessible to the expert.  Public institutions were based in experimentation, in the state’s ability to test systems of punishment or other forms of improvement; and public institutions were dependent on a measured certainty created through calm, precise exercise of authority over individuals.  These paradoxes reflected the dynamics within Jacksonian democracy between publics, public opinions and public institutions.

From their seat of philanthropy, couched in their associations, the members of the Society privileged the role of the public, as witnesses to public institutions.  The Philadelphia Journal of Prison Discipline declared, “The public are to be called on, the general judgment enlightened, and the force of popular will aroused and directed, through the machinery of legislation to the desired results.”¹   In their discourse, the Society appropriated public opinion, claiming the legitimate authority to shape or to disregard the public when interest or ignorance has swayed it.  Public opinion was valorized.  In the language of Francis Lieber, “real public opinion on public matters of a generally free people under and institutional government is generally the wisest master to which the freeman can bow.”  Philanthropists in association interpreted real public opinion.  Much of what the public was to see, the reformers deemed self-evident.  While the public watched institutions, it did not, as a whole, interpret them.  The prison reformers applied narratives of expertise and the language of the market to establish legitimacy for their role as mediators between an imagined public and the shifting national, state and local political systems.  As a discursive trope, the public represented an expression of the collective good although its representations were, at times, pure rhetoric, and like associational life, embodied only temporary alliances.  To counter the impermanence and fluidity of the public and it expressions, associations and reform societies applied formal mechanisms of defining membership and building permanence through constitutions and incorporation.  These formal mechanisms, combined with observation and statistical representations ascribed the reformers with a similar authority to the inspectors of the penitentiary, watching the system and its effect on the prisoners.

 According to Michel Foucault, the penitentiary represented a new technology in establishing circuits of governmental authority.²    The solitude of the penitential system necessitated observing the operations of the institution.  The state was both to punish prisoners, to protect society and, in the process, the institutions of the state were to do no harm to the prisoners through punishment.  To ensure the aims of the state were met, inspectors and philanthropists watched and evaluated the impact of the institution.  This represents a new technology of power within a democratic political culture: to make visible the operations of the government embodied in the execution of justice. The system’s innovation was not the ability to watch the prisoners but the authority to watch public institutions.  Associations, the multiple alliances navigating these accountabilities, ensured the various functions of a democracy remained true to themselves. While not directly placing private, associational, corporate power in competition with state power, they claimed a right and a duty for corporate bodies to shape the decisions around public institutions.  Within their argument, an elected legislature (influenced by public opinion) was not capable of rational policy alone, lacking the expertise gained from careful observation and the disinterestedness gained from corporate philanthropy. 

In effect, the reform societies were constructing a process of accountability within which democratic governments would be able to make informed decisions.  As self-appointed representatives of public opinion, the reformers monitored the prisons in order to protect the prisoners from their jailers, to regulate the progress of the prisoners’ self-reflection, and to investigate for the purpose of further, and more precise, moral reform of the institutions.  In this sense, reform societies formed a kind of Habermasian public sphere, independent of the state, where rational decision making could be effected.³     According to Habermas, “the public sphere in the political realm...through the vehicle of public opinion, [puts] the state in touch with the needs of society.”⁴   This philosophical construction certainly expressed how the reformers imagined themselves and how they constructed themselves within their texts.  The technologies of expertise silenced “society” and allowed the reformers to position themselves above both the popular voice and the decision-making of government representatives.  According to Michael Meranze, this “institution of the public sphere not only generated disciplinary strategies; they did so by asserting that they were only concerned with general norms and conditions of debate.”⁵   Through the discourse of expertise, the reformers established “scientific” systems of measurement that guided the institution and administration of the penitentiaries.  Within this rationalized system, the “public” remained a discursive trope, serving only to ideologically justify the reformers status as mediators of public opinion.  They constituted an imagined public and located themselves outside of that public as representatives and arbitrators of its opinions and in order to establish their power as inspectors of public institutions.

The public sphere was composed of private people who came together as a public to regulate or inform a sphere of commodity exchange or social labor.  The sphere itself was regulated by a universal reason that informs public opinions.  In this sense, the bourgeois public sphere “served to mediate between the prerogatives of the absolutist state and the play of interest in capitalist society.  Its institutions—journals, clubs and constituent organizations—provided a forum where diverse interests and identities were forged into a public sphere capable of disseminated its dominant aims and ideals.  The legitimacy of this public derived from its openness, its commitment to formal equality and reasoned debate.”⁶   Habermas is fundamentally concerned with decision-making; when and under what condition arguments become authoritative bases for political action.  Rather than forming a public sphere, in Habermas’ definition, protected from the interests of the capitalist and removed from the restrictions of the government, the associations of the early nineteenth century were fully implicated in both.  They shaped the mechanisms of the market economy and articulated the practices of governance.  In the reverse, they drew authority as experts from the practices of governance and from the languages and mechanisms of market.  As a borderland, associations played between both fields, moving relatively randomly from one to the other and owning disinterestedness when it fit their purposes.

Paradoxically, the prison mirrored the values of the ideal public, seeking to produce thinking individuals untainted by baneful association and free and willing to participate in multiple voluntary associations.  “It seems to me that the beauty of solitary confinement consist greatly in forcing the prisoners to think, to abandon his thoughtlessness--so great a source of crime…  To make a prisoner thinking is half reforming him.”  The reformers engaged in constructing a thinking social body, accountable for their own actions.  In their understanding of the realities of a political economy, thinking was a requirement.  “Is it not necessary then to enlighten those prisoners who show themselves fit for it, in the most important points of their duties as citizens?”⁷   The narratives of reform around the prison promoted technologies that would create a calm, thinking social body that respected the rights of the state and desired the rigor of labor.  Thinking generated innovation, obedience, speculation and social conversation.  In general, the associations were grounded in building an educated society, reflecting on the collective approaches to capital and reform that designated the social body.  “Because the keepers communicate freely with each other, act in concern, and have all the power of association; while the convicts separate from each other by silence, have, in spite of their numerical force, all the weakness of isolation.  Suppose for an instant that the prisoners obtain the least faculty of communication; the order is immediately the reverse; the union of their intellects effected by the spoken word, has taught them the secret of their strength and the first infraction of the law of silence destroys the whole discipline.”⁸   The system was designed to remove the discursive power of those who fell outside the social body, at the same time the prison provided a strong reflection on the power of discursive practices in association.  The prison, as a symbol of absence of silence, reinscribed the authority of an exchange of ideas within association as critical to social world.  The public authority of the reformers was in their conversations, for they saw their knowledge as corporate.

The corporate expression of conversation became a public force as private individuals performed an expertise to shape public institutions.  Dena Goodman argues in her study of the discursive practices of the Enlightenment that it was “the zone of interaction between the state and the individual that formed the ground of an authentic public sphere.”⁹   Dena Goodman’s study, Republic of Letters, while a fascinating ideal of the salons of the Enlightenment, conflates the discourse with the institutions that fostered the discourse and therefore misses a more careful understanding of the operations of power within those settings. Studies of discourse are too often detached from institutions and therefore detached from the modes and mechanisms of power that operate to control, confine and provide relevance to the set of ideas.  Studies of reform have the same dangers, identifying a broad exchange of reform ideas and the breadth of that discourse and without contextualizing that in the practices of association that structured the literary sociability through authorizing, printing and disseminating the ideas.  The ideas of the reformers operated within the networks of associations, a form of sociability that defined philanthropy in Philadelphia.  These corporate bodies were not a diffuse public space but associations driven by capital and membership that applied recognized practices and standard narratives to the legislative and governmental activities around the prison.¹⁰ 

In conclusion, associations provided the corporate site for the exchange of ideas and confidence and a platform from which members could perform an expertise.  The practices and symbols of the societies (constitutions, actions of incorporation, publishing reports) formalized and legitimized their claims to disinterested benevolence. Paired with the scientific objectivity and inscribed with the governmental power of inspection, the philanthropists claimed the authority to interpret and evaluate the impact of systems of discipline on the prisoners.  They privileged the language and numbers of an experimental form and, through effective techniques of dissemination, mediated the national and international debates around the preferred American system of punishment. This discourse connected the corporate knowledge to the individual expertise as they exercised the authority necessary to define the terms of governmentality.  In the process of this performance, the philanthropists in the Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons defined not only the dominant system of discipline in the United States but terms on which a democratic government invents and evaluates their public institutions.

 

¹ Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy Volume 1, No. 4 (1845) 304.
² See Foucault’s argument in Discipline and Punish.
³ Recent historical discussions of the rise of public opinion and various incarnations of “the public” in the eighteenth and nineteenth century have been dominated by Jurgen Habermas’ work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1989).  A good collection of perspectives within the Habermasian debate can be found in Craig Calhoun’s Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Belknap Press, 1993).
⁴ Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 31. 
⁵ Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 10.”  Michael Meranze argues that the historical discussions of the public sphere have placed far too much attention on the spread of the communicative institutions of the public sphere rather than the social policies produced within it.  In order to understand the public sphere’s claim to disembodied discourse, one needs to look at the content of the public sphere.
⁶ Scobey, “Anatomy of the Promenade”205.
⁷ Lieber to Vaux, January 11, 1833, New York.
⁸ Beaumont and Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System, 63.
⁹ Dena Goodman, Republic of Letters, 13.
¹⁰ Francis Lieber, On Civil Liberty and Self Government, quoted in Lewis Harley Francis Lieber, His life and Political Philosophy  (New York, 1899) 423.