The Punitive Society, lecture 3

Diagram 1.1. Archaeology to Genealogy

Discussion Questions:

1. Is Foucault analyzing the "vagabond" in terms of function or practice? 

2. Is the starting episteme medieval, feudal, and/or mercantile? (pp. 43-44)

3. Double reading of Le Trosne's work -- vagabond not just as enemy of society but also as a mirror image of the nobility. How can we understand this in terms of method? (pp. 51-52)

4. What is the relationship between production and reproduction? (p. 47)

5. Techniques of penalty that creates the vagabond and power/knowledge (pp. 49-50)

6. Is the vagabond a distinct kind of subject or an "archetype" of delinquency?

7. What is the French word for "vagabond"? Can we translate this into contemporary English term? Is criminality internal to the concept?

Idleness --> mobility as the "mother of vices"

The enemy of society is the vagabond because they are anti-productive, just like the nobility who "leech" off of the body politic. Foucault is talking about the emergence of bourgeois thought.

Initially, the prevailing criminal procedure was prosecution as a private offense, but later, the offender was conceived of as a public offender. Is this the case?

Rather, the concept of the public enemy was "re-transcribed" during the French Revolution.

Criminality as existing "outside" rather than "inside" of society. Criminality is not within society but is its exterior. Criminality as an affront to society, not just individuals (or to a sovereign).

In the initial episteme, the mode of punishment was torture, whereas in the newer one, it is imprisonment and "reform" -- the (re)creation of productive subjects.

The prison is "puissance," an empiricity or positivity we can perceive, whereas the power/knowledge relations are "pouvoir."

Today's punishment practices still primarily disciplinary? Biopolitical? 

The vagabond's "counter-society" is an enemy of civil society. The former must be spatially enclosed, surveilled, and disciplined. 

What is the savoir/pouvoir of these new techniques? It's not a shift from non-production or production. The shift at the level of how we understand things like production, the social body, etc. 

Note: in the archaeological method, we "find" the answers not at the conscious level of the people/authors propagating a given form of knowledge, but the depth conditions of such forms. 

Next steps? The Matrix. 

Order of Things, selections on work and labor

  We began the year, as we always do, with questions... 

1a. Clarification of the concept of "table" and its place in the episteme of Order (cf. 217). 

1b. Clarification of notions of historicity and its place in the episteme History (cf. 259).

2. Clarification of Foucault's concept of "event" (cf. 217), "archaeology, however, must examine each event" (218).

3. How or why do discourses/epistemes undergo mutation; contrast Marxism which "introduced no real discontinuity" (cf. 261).

4. Relation of History to economics (cf. 219).

5. What does Nietzsche represent for Foucault at the end of the discussion (cf. 263)?  Are we still, as of 1966, within the 19th century episteme?  Or beyond it?

6. How would/should we characterize archaeology?  Where is archaeology in all of this? 

 

   Then discussion ensued...

Archaeology is the study of depth conditions for rules of knowledge within a certain episteme.

Depth conditions make sense of "surface" knowledge (connaissance) in terms of depth conditions of knowledge (savoir).  This depth is a "positive unconscious".

Depth conditions = "Order and Representation" versus "History" 

Study of depth conditions = archaeology.

Smith versus Ricardo.  Smiths's analysis of the growth of wealth versus Ricardo's overt labor theory of value.

"Work and Labor" Reading Plan for Fall 2025

Theme for AY 25-26: Work and Labor 

Fall Term Reading Course: Work and Labor in Foucault’s Writings, 1966-1979

 

Recommended background reading (for first time CGC participants): “The Meshes of Power” (1976; link to version in Viewpoint magazine) is highly recommended as a preliminary reading, especially for those not already well-versed in Foucault’s political philosophy of the 1970s—this piece provides an excellent concise summary of central elements of his analytics of power. 

 

Week            Reading 

1	The Order of Things (1966) Part II, ch. 7 – “The Limits of Representations,” esp. sections 1 (introduction) and 2 (on the introduction of labor to political economy and, specifically, Adam Smith), pp. 217-226. Part II, ch. 8 – “Labour, Life, Language,” esp. sections 1 (introduction to new empiricities) and 2 (on Ricardo, Smith and Quesney), pp. 250-263.
2	The Punitive Society (1972-73, posth. pub.) 17 January lecture – Political econ. of vagabondage; criminal as social enemy
3	24 January lecture – Criminal as social enemy; comparing prison-form (discipline) and wage-form (capitalism)
4	31 January lecture – Comparison of prison/wage form; power’s hold on time and conditions of possibility for discipline and capital.
5	21 February lecture – Popular illegalisms; worker depredation
6	7 March lecture – Fear of the laboring class; pol. econ. of the working body
7	21 March – New form of confinement-sequestration; normal and abnormal
8	Discipline and Punish (1975) Selections (to be determined) from Part III – Discipline: “Docile Bodies” (pp. 135-169), “The Means of Correct Training” (pp. 170-194), and “Panopticism” (pp. 198-228).
9	Part IV – Prison: “Illegalities and Delinquency” (pp. 257-292).
10	The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-79, posth. pub.) 14 March lecture – Work as economic conduct, from homo oeconomicus to the entrepreneur of the self, the notion of human capital
11	TBD/Flex week (unlikely we will meet)

 

"The Birth of the Clinic" One-Day Symposium

The Rebirth of The Birth of the Clinic 

Monday June 9, 2025 at the University of Oregon

 

Session #1 10:00a-11:00a: Mapping Foucault's The Birth of the Clinic: themes and chronologies

  

Session #2 11:15a-12:15p: Presentation and Discussion:

Eli Lichtenstein (Lewis & Clark College), "Non-Discursive Practices in The Birth of the Clinic"

 

Session #3 1:30p-3:00p: Presentations and Discussion:

Maia Wellborn (UO), "The Depth of Death: Tracing Regimes of Visibility"

Colin Koopman (UO), "The Birth of Power in The Birth of the Clinic"

  

Session #4 3:30p-4:45p/5:00p: The Birth of the Clinic and the contemporary scholarly landscape in philosophy

 

Other participants not listed above included: Stephanie Jenkins (Oregon State University), Rebekah Sinclair (OSU), Brooke Burns (UO), Gonzalo Bustamante Moya (UO), Asher Caplan (UO), Chelsea Schwarz (UO), Matthew Tuten (UO), Sanjula Rajat (UO)

 

This event is sponsored by the University of Oregon College of Arts & Sciences, UO Philosophy Department, and the Critical Genealogies Collaboratory.