Week 8 - Illegalities & Delinquency ch. + Carceral ch.

The group began with a brief outline of the chapters.  Then we turned, as per usual, to a few orienting questions from the group:

1. Relationship between emergence, transition, and moment (pp. 257, 264, 283, 296).
What marks the duration of a moment for Foucault?
How does the temporality of a moment relate to his historical work of genealogy?

2. "In short, penality does not simply check illegalities... It differentiates them... It provides them with economy."  (page 272)  What is the sense of economy here?  Circulation?  Arrangement?  Multiplicity?

3. Discussion of transformation of delinquency into discourse (284).  What is the notion of discourse here?  What work is that doing?

4. Foucault describes imprisonment as a "technical project" and involves a "technical mutation" (257).  One question here is: What is Foucault's conception of the technical?  A second: What is informing this conception? (Was Foucault reading Simondon? Why don't I already know the answer to this?) Or who else...?)  A third concerns: how does Foucault's category of technics inflects his categories of temporality?

5. Mechanisms (302), technique (303), technology (???).  How are these functioning for Foucault?

6. How do we see Foucault operating in contemporary milieu?
 - The spectacle of torture (262).  Is this preserved today?  Are there contemporary festivals?
 - With respect to viral videos of, e.g., police brutality, is this a counter-surveillance?  What does it mean in terms of surveillance? Is it resistance?

7.Claims about necessity and 'must' on the last page (308).  What's going on here?


Discussion

We focused on discussing relation between "success" and "telescoping" as two temporal notions (or perhaps historiographical analytics, & perhaps also as two modalities of 'transition'?).

Transition - Txy

Succession - Judgment of the summation of a series (x, not-x, y, ....)

Telescoping - [picture to follow]