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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