Hey folks,
In a comment to this post, please list at least FIVE claims from the Foucault reading that you believe will be useful in your analysis of the stories. A good way to do this is to read the Foucault, then read some stories, and then return to the Foucault and try to apply the theory to the examples presented in the narratives.
1. "We must first rid ourselves of the illusion that penalty is above all (if not exclusively) a means of reducing crime" p171
ReplyDelete2. "We must show that punitive measures are not simply 'negative' mechanisms that make it possible to repress, to prevent, to exclude, to eliminate; but that they are linked to a whole series of positive and useful effects which it is their task to support" p172
3. on punishment: "It is always the body that is the issue" p.172
4. "In short, this power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the 'privilege,' acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions p174
5. "perhaps we should abandon the belief that power makes people mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit rather, that power produces knowledge." p175
1. "the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body." p.173
ReplyDelete2. These "power-knowledge relations" are to be analyzed, therefore not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not free in relation to the power system; but, on the contrary, the subject who knows, the objects to be known, and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and their historical transformations." p.175
3. "One would be concerned with the "body politic," as a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communication routes, and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge." p.175-176
4. In regards to Kantorowitz's analysis of the King's two bodies: "...the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king. We should analyze what might be called, in homage to Kantorowitz, "the least body of the condemned man.'" p.176
5. "This is the historical reality of this soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision, and constraint." p.177
1. "We should admit, rather that Power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another." p.175
ReplyDelete2. "A body is docile so that it may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved." P. 180
3."Then there was the object of the control: it was not, or was no longer the signifying elements of behavior or the language of the body, but the economy, the efficiency of movements, their internal organization; constraint bears on the forces rather then the signs." P.181
4. "Discipline increases the forces of the body, (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (In political terms of Obedience). In short it disassociates power from the body; on the one hand it turns it into an "aptitude", a "capacity", which it seeks to increase, on the other hand it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it to strict subjection." P. 182
5. "But there was also a military dream of society; its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs in a machine, not to the primal social contract but to permanent coercions, not to fundamental rights but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will, but to automatic docility." P.186
1. "In short, This power is exercised rather than possessed...an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated " P.174
ReplyDelete2. This is to say there may be a "knowledge" of the body that is not exactly the science of its functioning and the mastery of its forces that is more of the ability to conquer them. P.173
3. "Perhaps we should abandon the belief that power makes people mad and that by the small token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge" P.175
4. "That punishment in general and the prison is particular belong to a political technology of the body is a lesson that I have learned not so much from history as from the present" P. 177
5. "The Soul is the effects and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body" P.177
"But we can surely accept the general proposition that, in our societies, the systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain "political economy" of the body: even if they do not make use of violent or bloody punishment, even when they use 'lenient' methods involving confinement or correction, it is always the body that is at issue- the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission." 172
ReplyDelete"But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs." 173
"Rather than seeing this soul as the reactivated remnants of an ideology, one would see it as the present correlative of a certain technology of power over the body." 176
"The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power." 180
"A body is docile so that it may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved." 180
1. “but the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. “ pg. 173
ReplyDelete2. “...the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body.” pg. 173
3. “We should admit, rather, that power produces knowledge...” pg. 175
4. “The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power.” pg. 180
5. “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constrains of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.” pg. 228
1. “But the body is also directly involved in a political fields’ power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. This political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labor power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection…” p. 173
ReplyDelete2. “…the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body.” p.173
3. “This is the historical reality of this soul…is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint. This real, noncorporal soul is not a substance; it is the elements in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge…” p. 177
4. “By the late eighteenth century, the soldier has become something that can be made; out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed;” p.179
5. “A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformation, and improved.” p. 180
6. “But there is also a political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse; not the collective festival, “ but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary functioning of power; not masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual of his ‘true’ name, his ‘true’ place, his ‘true’ body, his ‘true’ disease.” p. 196
1. "Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how e is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in an individual way. etc.)." p. 197
ReplyDelete2. "The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. From the point of view of the guardian, it is replaced by a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised; from the point of view of the inmates, by a sequestered and observed solitude (Bentham, 60-64)." p. 198
3. "Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up." p. 199
4. "The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down, and rearranges it. A "political anatomy," which was also a "mechanics of power," was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others' bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed, and the efficiency that one determines." p.182
5. "The constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, by applying the binary branding and exile of the leper to quite different objects; the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear of the plague gave rise." p.197
1. "although legal punishment is carried out in order to punish offenses, one might say that the definition of offenses and their prosecution are carried out in turn in order to maintain the punitive mechanisms and their functions" p. 172
ReplyDelete2. "it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as lsbor power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection...; the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body." p.173
3. "If the surplus power possessed by the king gives rise to the duplication of his body, has not the surplus power exercised on the subjected body of the condemned man given rise to another type of duplication? That of a 'noncorporal,' a 'soul,' as Mably called it." p.176
4. "it was a question not of treating the body en masse, 'wholesale,' as if it were an indissociable unity, but of working it 'retail,' individually; of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of the mechanism itself - movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity: an infinitesimal power over the active body." p.181
5. "because they defined a certain mode of detailed political investment of the body, a 'new microphysics' of power; and because, since the seventeenth century, they had constantly reached out to ever-broader domains, as if they tended to cover the entire social body. Small acts of cunning endowed with a great power of diffusion; subtle arrangements, apparently innocent, but profoundly suspicious; mechanisms that obeyed economies too shameful to be acknowledged, or pursued petty forms of coercion - it was nevertheless they that brought about the mutation of the punitive system, at the threshold of the contemporary period." p. 183
“This political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination…” pg. 173
ReplyDelete“The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, or at the intensification of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely.” Pg. 182
“A meticulous observation of detail and, at the same time, a political awareness of these small things, for the control and use of men, emerge through the classical age, bearing with them a whole set of techniques, a whole corpus of methods and knowledge, descriptions, plans, and data. And from such rtifles, no doubt, the man of modern humanism was born.” Pg. 185
“Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up.”
“A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behavior, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations.”
Highlights from Foucault that point to the meticulous mechanics and strategies of the politics of power over the body.
ReplyDeleteWe must rid ourselves of the illusion that penality is above all (if not exclusively) a means of reducing crime …
The “invention” of this new political anatomy must not be seen as a sudden discovery. It is, rather, a multiplicity of often minor processes, of different origin and scattered location, which overlap, repeat, or imitate one another, support one another, distinguish themselves from one another according to their domain of application, converge, and gradually produce the blueprint of a general method.
[The different disciplinary institutions, with all their individual differences]… were always meticulous, often minute, techniques, but they had their importance: because they defined a certain mode of detailed political investment of the body, a “new microphysics” of power; and because since the seventeenth century, they had constantly reached out to ever-broader domains, as if they tended to cover the entire social body.
Historians of ideas usually attribute the dream of a perfect society to the philosophers and jurists of the eighteenth century; but there was also a military dream of society; its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal social contract but to permanent coercions, not to fundamental rights but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will but to automatic docility.
A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behavior, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations.