Abstract
Tamar Pitch, Pervasive Prevention: A Feminist Reading of the Rise of the Security Society, Ashgate Advances in Criminology Series: England and USA, 2010; 158 pp. (inc. index): 9780754675648, £60.00
This thought-provoking book endeavours to provide an analysis of contemporary mechanisms of social control from a feminist perspective, something clearly missing in the field. The book opens with a general overview of contemporary society – ‘extreme modernity’ as opposed to ‘solid modernity’. It proceeds to consider critically how prevention works in health matters, local urban policies, the market of security and the rhetorical support for war. It ends with an epilogue and a commentary on Jonathan Simon’s and Nikolas Rose’s new work, thus updating the book’s 2006 publication in Italian.
In the book, Tamar Pitch effectively synthesizes much recent literature by stating that our society works through the ‘imperative of prevention’ (p. ix). By this, she means that we are not only induced to act under the preventative principle as individuals but institutions and agencies work through it as well. Prevention is not a problem in itself as it has always existed; the problem is that its contemporary articulation imposes individualism, responsibilization and moralization. This has the effect of discriminating between the good and the bad citizen in relationship to her ability to take care of herself, which today is linked to economic social and cultural resources (p. 88).
The most original part of the book is its focus on how prevention works through women, how they are represented, how representation of women is used to support preventive actions and, crucially, how prevention impacts on their bodies. Much literature, in fact, following Foucault does not recognize different forms of subjectification (Sawicki, 1991). As Pitch highlights practices of control have different results as they encounter gendered bodies that are structured, sexualized and disciplined differently.
The theme of the body reappears throughout the book: the body of the woman who is subject to social control measures, target of medical intervention and/or located in the city space, the bodies of suicide bombers, of killers in wars ‘fought at a distance’, of those regulated by surveillance and those who are flexible in the information society. The latter point leads to the most controversial aspect of Pitch’s rendition of the security society, namely her claim that there is a ‘disappearance of the body’. According to Pitch, disappearance is evident in virtual communication and surveillance technologies, but also in diagnostic examination, plastic surgery, organ transplant and medical assisted procreation. By ‘disappearing’ she means that the body has become target of a multitude of disciplining techniques by which it becomes fragmented and transformed, a contemporary realization of the ‘myth of Frankenstein in its optimistic version’ (p. 36).
The rhetoric of prevention puts the body at the centre as the object of specific healthy practices; this, Pitch says, represents an attempt to ‘free oneself from the body’. Further, it is a sign that the body is losing ‘the role of the place of self in its historical and social, not to mention psychological and carnal “one-ness” assuming the role of a mere place of ongoing interventions aimed at modifying it, shaping it’ (p. 36). While freedom requires concreteness and corporeity and the attempt to get rid of the body is the negation of this, there is a sense that Pitch still reads the body as something ‘original’ or devoid of power relationship. The body has always been, as Pitch herself states, the product of cultural and natural inscriptions and power relations; biology, history, cultural representations, symbols, but also importantly desires. Its ability to challenge social normativity does not stem only from its being feminine, but by its standing outside the neutral landscape. In this sense, the difference is made by the ways in which the subject is structured and gendered and this in turn shall comprise desire as well (Butler, 1990). Today the body is ‘a battleground’, as Barbara Kruger’s famous art piece states, the malleability of which is both encouraged and celebrated. But this malleability presents some ambiguities. The Paralympics games, for instance, made evident not only the beauty and strength of all bodies but also how they can be used to their full potential: it is just a matter of will (or resources – financial resources as it were).
Women and migrants are corporalized as they are different. Their bodies are threatening as they violate current cosmologies of classification; violence is both a tool to establish their subalternity affirming specific hierarchies and the product of this understanding. And yet, those who put bodies at the centre of their politics recognize and affirm the potentially unsettling effects that the specificity of their bodies, their histories, may have in the current neutralized and normative landscape. Violence, one may add, is also linked to a specific understanding of notions of freedom and autonomy which are based on denial and domination of the relationship with others as many feminists have underlined (p. 31).
Pitch highlights many of the contradictory processes linked to the imperative of prevention in contemporary society, using interesting insights from anthropological and feminist literature and from the emergence of preventive practices in continental Europe. As usual, this leading legal scholar has opened up a space for a feminist reading of practices of control at a time of increased precariousness. It is to be hoped that others will follow her.