Back in school, I knew a girl, quite thoughtful really, who decided to read Foucault. She should've dropped out right then, her politics classes thereafter rendered pointless. After mainlining Discipline & Punish, she’d landed on a universal, irrefutable concept for interpreting modern power structures. It’s name? The Panopticon. Why bother reading anything else after such an all-encompassing idea? Everything, she kept saying, is a prison. “Even bowling alleys.” Hearing this, I decided to never read Foucault.

“Everything is a prison.” Maybe there's some emotional truth to the idea, I remember thinking. But everything? For fuck's sake, little Timmy sees the prison warden in his fourth-grade math teacher, but that doesn’t make him an inmate. But years pass, and things change. The undergraduate world recedes along with your hairline, day-to-day life starts resembling a maze of bureaucratic constraints, you learn the full meaning of the words “wage slavery,” your health wavers, and more and more often you find yourself ceding agency to the experts and their institutions. Basically your ego gets filed down, and one day you wonder: Could we have been a bit pig-headed about Foucault and this world-as-prison idea? So I bought my own copy of Discipline and spent the weekend reading.

And when I'd finished?... No road to Damascus moment. An undeniably useful way of thinking about modern power structures, sure, but my opinion on the world-as-prison idea remained largely untouched. Some places are more prison-like than others, but not everything is a prison. Bowling alleys included.

Then, one day, comes along Erving Goffman, who swaggers up to the table and raises Foucault one better, saying, "not everything is a prison—everything is a monastery.” And then, as if wielding the enemy’s weapon, constructs a portrait of the undeniably monastic prison! There it sits in mysterious social isolation, inaccessible to law abiding citizens. Life inside is all ritual, all regimentation. Residents clad in identical clothes get herded through a ward system by mysterious supervisors, also wearing identical clothes. All human activity, from eating to sleeping to recreation to defecation, is regulated by a strategic meting-out of punishments and rewards, ensuring all behave according to the prison’s private rules and public mission. For how else does the prison justify its circumscription of human life than by laying claim, like a monastery, to a community—no, a custodial service? The outsider sees the prison wall and wants a peek inside. Perhaps he feels a vague sense of guilt for both himself and the inmates. “Peace,” the prison preempts him. “This isolation is necessary for cleansing fallen souls.” And thanks to this spiritual guardianship, the uninitiated laity trod the streets in blissful innocence...

Finally, the world-as-prison is dead! I'm right, and I was always right. Let the world-as-monastery now supplant the world-as-prison as the conceptual skeleton key for understanding institutional power!

Well, this actually isn't at all what Goffman says in Asylums. This book-length collection of essays deals mostly with psychiatric wards, not prisons, and he hardly mentions monasteries. He doesn't make absurdly blunt comparisons between them either, like I just suggested. But the bizarre soteriology of incarcerated life does make uncomfortable blood cousins of the slammer and the nunnery, which gets me closer to introducing the primary project in Asylums: the “Total Institution.”

Here we have a unique category of social institution. It groups prisons, monasteries, and a large host of seemingly distinct organizations, their most obvious shared trait being very, very exclusive membership requirements. A quick list of total institutions includes merchant marine ships, psychiatric hospitals, prisons, monasteries, military barracks, boarding schools, orphanages, concentration camps, and leprosaria. Each of these is a place where, shut off from broader society, a group of staff enforce absolute uniformity on residents to achieve a formally administered goal. This goal can be anything—economic, remedial, spiritual, or genocidal—because what makes an institution “total” isn't necessarily its goal, but rather the tight-ship approach servicing its aims.

Goffman researched these essays from within St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital where he worked under cover as an athletic director. Like an artist who traces the projection of a cityscape from inside a camera obscura, his man-on-the-inside positioning gives him a magnified peek at the inpatient’s “moral career,” which is another way of saying how someone copes with being thrown in an asylum. From this covert vantage point, he translates his observations into a psychoanalytic guidebook for all other total institutions. And what does he conclude about total institutions broadly? What else—the tight-ship method for people-management is psychologically deleterious, often rendering people less capable of living "normal" lives upon release.

Consider your own life. Every day, you pass the threshold of any number of social institutions. You go to the office, you step inside your apartment complex, you grab a drink at the bar, and so on. These normal, non-total institutions can be thought of as small worlds in which you participate with the expectation that you’ll return to your life in the bigger broader world. As such, they cannot deprive you of your property or community or rights or liberties, and so you retain ownership over the medley of objects and relationships that constitute your capital-S self. Finding yourself a resident of a total institution, on the other hand, you’d be expected to relinquish your claim on those self-building elements entirely. Because you can’t easily leave the premises, you are required to think of the total institution as your only world, and via its alienative coalition of managerial staff and administrators, it forcefully blocks access to your self, erects obstacles to rebuilding it, and then requires you to adopt its institutionally-approved, formally prescribed idea of who you should be. Goffman highlights this process of psychological mortification when discussing the retroactive rationale for mental patient intake:

…until the point of hospitalization is reached, [the patient] or others may not conceive of him as a person who is becoming a mental patient. However, since he will be held against his will in the hospital, his next-of-relation and the hospital staff will be in great need of a rationale for the hardships they are sponsoring. The medical elements of the staff will also need evidence that they are still in the trade they were trained for. These problems are eased, no doubt unintentionally, by the case-history construction that is placed on the patient’s past life, this having the effect of demonstrating that all along he had been becoming sick, that he finally became very sick, and that if he had not been hospitalized, much worse things would have happened to him—all of which, of course may be true.

So the total institution has a narrow definition of who its residents ought to be, based simply on their use of the facilities. If you were in such an institution, how would you make sense of your stay? Do you think that, just maybe, you'd feel compelled to accept this prescribed identity? There's a solid chance you would, given no chance of immediate escape. But there's an equally likely chance you'd push back. This psychological game of tug-of-war between the resident and the total institution is what Asylums is all about.

How again is this relevant to life on the outside? If you're like me, you're not posting from a jail cell, and you're not yet a mental patient. I feel free, I am free, and I feel like I can do and say most anything I want, most of the time. Well, Goffman's total institution speaks to the pernicious nature of all social institutions. For what else is the total-institution besides an institutional, evolutionary end-goal? An apex institution, so to speak. The kind of institution that all others wish they could mimic.

Walking into the office, the office prescribes you an identity; it would prefer that you be the perfect worker and nothing else. Stopping inside the bar, the bar prescribes you an identity; it salivates at the thought of you drinking and drinking and never leaving. Imagine the bowling alley's excitement when it fantasizes about locking the doors behind you, condemning you to bowl forever. Any room, building, park, warehouse, and club you enter, there the institution lives, following you, groping you with invisible hands, trying its best to mold you into an ideal, yearning, forever striving to determine what you are. We walk within an ecosystem of predatory rooms and walls that would, in an instant, lock us up, if they could.

So yeah, turns out everything is a prison. I owe my ex-classmate an apology. I should text her.

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