Week 5 The Means of Correct Training

Questions:

1.    the system of oppression specifically through the gaze

2.    page 181  links between indulgences, the good/bad scale, truth, and individual

3.    difference between the circle and the pyramid and the significance of the head of the pyramid

4.    177 what kind of a whole is constituted by the apparatus of disciplinary power and how do we figure this whole if we are to try to map out the whole, what would that look like

5.    191

6.    183 distinction between penality of norm and penality of law.  How is F. conceptualizing norm?  What must a norm be for law not to fall under it as a species? What is Foucault’s concept of norm?

7.    185 “it is not simple at level of consciousness….” Ideology of human sciences.  Circulations of knowledge and power and the method.

8.    What he means by “epistemological thaw?”

9.    Relationship between disciplinary power and biopower?

●     Difference between law and norm page 184 “how power of norm functions…”

○     F. using word norm differently than how we use it in contemporary philosophy.  using it to talk about the middle point of an average

○     the norm is normal

○     a way that discipline functions because you want to be normal

●     treatment of law 183 distinction between belief in natural law developed by norms and changed by practice

○     imposition of human sciences

●     the gaze as a normalizing power

○     gender neutral bathrooms

○     freak shows, the pleasure in looking

○     the mean defining the outliers 184

○     normalizing gaze - examination

■     examination in school differs from doctor examining

■     normalizing relation, the gaze of the teacher/doctor established relation with other person who comes under the scrutiny

○     Bentham - legal positivism (opposite of natural law - attempt to derive true laws by divine or scientific inquiry)

○     not always good to be norm (ex. school, want an A+, not average grade)

■     how would we specify this difference?

●     the law the norm fills the  field because no matter where you are, you show up on the curve.  the law does not. you always stand out when you break the law

●     we think of statistics as turning you into a number and taking away your individuality

●     normalizing, everyone gets individuated in a different way

●     192-194 explains positive definition of power and notion of individualization

●     exhaust data comes out of the relationship between the examiner and examinee that comes back into crafting the norm.

○     intentionality in data collection?

○     bottom 190 opens up two correlative

○     difference in degree or difference in kind?

○     anachronism?  inscriptions on files, no mention of information or data at this time.  those concepts are so powerful today but not available during his time. Techniques precede data.

○     technology of writing accompanies examination. documents, files, have historicity prior to our own concept of these technologies in modern times

●     dynamic relationship between algorithm and individual. produce population management strategies that feeds back into the individual

○     process of individualization

○     not telling story of how norms change or what kind of individuals this process makes

■     cant think of norms as mathematical number, it is a whole process that circulates through 185 on technology

■     is he telling story of how normalization of political investment

●     epistemological thaw 185

○     what is the valence of the term knowledge in this passage

○     does it make it possible to know things we didn’t know before or does it make it possible to have a whole other category of knowledge that we didn’t have before?

■     doctor as technician versus doctor as healer

○     organization - epistemological thought in medicine

■     different in kind and in degree.  difference in categorization

○     in French (un blocking, unfreezing de-blocking)

○     circulates knowledge differently

○     thaw - remove dogmatic, allow for change

○     discipline maintains power by arranging objects 187

●     two kinds of power: power to restrict or power to discipline but also positive power

○     is this idea in discipline and punish?  it is present in Foucault’s other works

○     Spinoza has similar distinction

○     Foucault distinguishes two modes of knowledge

■     depth power over surface powers

○     not in terms of positive or negative power

■     what increases/decreases the capacity of the body

○     power produces reality

○     discipline, can we describe it in negative terms?

■     no, discipline is productive

■     sovereign power can be productive

■     disciplinary power doesn’t operate reductively

■     deduction and repression are terms he comes back to

■     we shouldn’t always see power as repressive

●     production include negative repressing power, it produces knowledge, the multiplicity of it could include deduction

●     ontological claim?

●     power is productive and producing the individual, but not in a mysterious ontological sense, but is productive of one kind of object, which produces files, which produces other individuals. We tend to think individuals are more interesting than files, things with dignity

○     humble technicians with instruments and devices

●     is there a distinction between individuals and subjects

○     what power means, way in which certain actions modify others. power exists only when it is put into actions. power does not function or consent in itself. transference of power to a few. relationship of power can be result of prior or permanent consent. (The Subject in Power)

○     subject connotes agency whereas individual can be numerical distinction

●     importance of writing on 192

○     heroization. objectification and subjection

○     subjection - subjectiviation - connotation with subjection in English, but subjectiviation is also the process of making a subject. a double process of making a subject that is bound to itself or subjected to who it is. a life as being repressed.  productive of the subject.

○     subject is bound to the limits of its own constitution

●     the whole is absolutely indiscreet and discreet p 177

○     176 insidious extension by means of surveillance disciplinary power…

○     mechanism, integrated system, network of relations

○     177 functions like a piece of machinery

○     apparatus as a whole, indiscrete and discrete functionality

■     how does is form a whole and what kind of whole is it?

■     the mean as discrete and indiscrete

■     the power in the school, shift to disciplinary forms of power

■     the whole in terms of production of subjecthood, power doesn’t work just when boss is on the floor, but norms are established that all abide by

■     the whole as whatever institution he is discussing

■     174 pyramid system as uninterrupted network - the whole

■     rules become apart of ones own subjecthood

■     discrete means it is silent

■     a localized whole

■     the worry over the constitution of the limits over the boundary of the whole. disciplinary power is everywhere phenomenon

■     analysis through modality of economics

●     surveillance as economic operator

○     same techniques at work, makes seamless movement into economics

"The Subject and Power"

JSTOR Link here.

Docile Bodies Session 4; 10/22/15

10/22/2015: Critical Genealogies Meeting Notes

Questions:

1. What constitutes the convergence of a multiplicity of minor processes? p. 138

2. How does Foucault’s methodology interrupt the genetic time of disciplinary power? P. 160

3. p. 139 “Discipline is a political anatomy of detail.” – IS there a connection btw F’s method and

the affective disposition which he brings to it? Reciprocity

4. p. 160 Disciplinary methods: dynamism, specific chunks of time established; how much consistency and how much dynamism?

5. p. 152 “time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power” – How does this relate to previous regime, is this a new form of how torture operated on the body in the old regime?

6. p. 156 Can we understand disciplinary power as a link that illuminates nature and the natural imaginary -à biopower à cellular analytic, how is nature being mobilized? NATURE

7. p. 169 parenthetical – Making a link between military and rise of bourgeoisie? Or not.

8. Composition -à at two levels,  bodies /// and forces

----

With regard to question 8, use of the word machine……

……..

Distribution ----

Composition of forces ---- meta-, second order, relation between parts and wholes

What would produce a necessity to reconfigure the machine?

162. economic demand, need for maximum efficiency.

How would a specific economic need …. Enter into the machine.

Mutate the machine, vs what makes it run.

What would make it mutate? ---- and what is the relationship btw the spatial disciplining and the temporal?

The organic as a component of the ‘machine’  or mechanization –

Organic/mechanization relationship, is one a limit on the other?…..

What is his sense of ‘Organic’? p. 167

Is ‘organic’ the same as ‘natural body’? – reciprocity of bodies – p. 164

Mechanical/machinic -à the natural bodies

Concepts/ vs. analytical categories à ‘power’ would be an analytical category

D&P Part Two 'Generalized punishment' & 'The gentle way in punishment'

CGC

October 15, 2015

Questions

1 1) Writing history à need to create a time slice: What does that necessity do to the study? Does Foucault have an answer for that?

2 2) How does Foucault explain the coherence of divergent interests in an economy of power? How do they coalesce?

3 3) Unpack the relationship between subject of the law and imprisonment as an apparatus of knowledge.

4 4) Where is Foucault located in identifying this pattern? (p.89) – Especially in the roles that scales, series, and principles play.

5 5)  How does humanity emerge as an effect of measurement? (p.75); (p.90) criminal as “juridically paradoxical being?”

6 6) What is the significance of an “ultimate crime”? (p.92)

Discussion

RE 1):

Transition point – tracking movement from torture/excessive spectacle to punishment/different economy of power. Slice marking vague boundaries of transition? Worry about clean narrative – point at which something beginning and ends. Marking a transition period, movement? Is this tracking the concern in the question? Effect and cause as happening at the same time – reading causality into the two moments? Simultaneous emergence, but a function of the medium – having to write a text (text as providing a causal form because of its particular medium?) Neither causal nor incidental, but co-constitutive? Capital/accumulative relationship – shift in economy shaping and shaped by form of punishment. Tendencies to establish causal relationships as part of his project of questioning power relationships? Is there anything residual and unintended that comes with that? When Foucault takes a time slice, where is he locating himself?

à Q.4 – providing a novel way in identifying patterns – linearity and causality as distinct concepts – text as providing linearity, but not necessarily causal. Making a claim about what was “really” happening? Sounds a little bit (perhaps not really doing this) like he’s saying, “I’m going to uncover to “real” story; what really happened” – Compelling in his narration, but not actually grappling with this question. – Practicing his method that fits into a linear, narrative style? Uncovering – different way to problematize and question. What does it mean to say (on p.89) that these principles are the essential raisons d’etre of penal reform – contingently essential/necessary à What’s the criteria of what counts as establishing this story? Status of the essential here? Identifying a pattern via his particular time-location? Is he using ‘models’ (p.120) as schematic? Moving in and out of the local and the general? If he’s making claims about what is happening/what is really happening, does it make a difference that (p.89) he’s talking about new technologies, objects, but principles are just one of the elements?

(p.127) – trying to find distinction between these reformatories and the reformers’ conception of punishment? Some focus on techniques that modulates a concern that he’s doing ideology critique or ‘unmasking’? Does it matter that his analytic has shifted from one of theories/laws to one of instruments and tactics/techniques? – Not making ideological claims, but a claim about techniques. Question about scale – empirical instances of models as “standing in” for something bigger? Pulling out patterns that are compelling, but presumably there is vast material in the archives and he is the person pulling out the pattern. Writing other causes not included in the genealogy – Question of selection?

Transition from language of tactic/technique to one of strategy (89). Techniques being used v. identifying a unifying strategy in relation to those techniques. Economy as a corollary to this? Tying together the narrative about techniques in a particular way. ‘Semio-technique’ relation to ideology (p.103)? Semio-technique = pattern/approach taken by gentle reformers. Relationship between punishment and crime. à semantic correspondence between your crime and your punishment in semio-technique (p.111-113). Description of the field, pattern he sees rather than the pattern through which he’s seeing. Location of the genealogy?

What’s the criteria for establishing the pattern he sees vs. the pattern through which he sees. Letting the story emerge through the material? Imposition of a pattern? Judgment being made in the methodology? Criteria of selection – what’s the status of the claim? What are some of the patterns Foucault worries about superimposing on the history? Shifts in the way he’s telling the story to destabilize the idea that he is superimposing some schematic on the material. Is there the “right patterns”? Are we assuming that this can be done “objectively” at all? Assuming a standard of history that’s never questioned? – What’s the geographical specificity? Not accounting for colonial encounter? Able to describe how the logic of avoiding colonialism can work…telling us a lot about how hegemony explains and masks itself.

Substantive claims vs. methodology? Method of avoidance? Is there an obligation to talk about every problem? Mode of exposing? Is this something we want? Exposure of penal system in France has certain implications…opening spaces of appeasement and new tactics of governance. Recent phenomena? Two ways of dealing with the gaps in what he’s doing. 1) Mount a criticism of Foucault 2) Mount a criticism of ourselves à negative philosophy as incredibly problematic – trying to pull something out of the text. Important to mark the gaps for ourselves, writing 40 years later. It is a history, but not the History. Critique of the content of the text of what he should have done or where he should have been located. Not arguing that this is the central story, but a story that opens up a way of critiquing certain relations. Style, approach, method – showing different ways of not falling into telling the story. Counter-conduct as forms of resistances – a conduct that is countering a conduct, but it is itself a conduct…Foucault’s work as a conduct that is aware of its own positionality.

RE 5):

(p.75) – humanity as the outcome of this new economy, this new measurement. (p.90) – Becoming an enemy of the people, punishment must have humanity as its measure – shift from vengeance of the sovereign to defense of the society. Questioning humanity and questioning measurement and how those are related for him. What do the reformers say in this chapter? (p.73) – Movement at end of 18^th C. to wipe out cruel and unusual punishment à humanity gets set up in the context of this claim – respect the dignity of humanity. Story about the great reformers, producing this great notion of humanity – sounds like a good thing. Part of this included society’s self-regulation. Freedom, like humanity, taken as an inherent good, but a produced/emergent concept. Humanity as an affective rejection of excessive violence – way of conceptually specifying what is betrayed in the excessive violence of torture and in the violence of rebellion. Skeptical of rhetoric, the rhetoric of ‘the human’ emerging at this time. (p.78)

Rhetoric vs. techniques à to be more effective and punish ‘better’. Not a new sensibility – just another policy. Enlightenment discourse à humanity becomes a ‘thing’ – something around which “strategic coincidence emerges” (p.78). Stepping back from the text – not reconstructing the argument, but moving past that level of theoretical architecture. Continues to evoke the theoretical architecture as itself a technique. Tracking how one does that – to maintain a hold on the theoretical construct, but putting it in motion with other things and seeing how its part of a broader strategic field à how it gets produced & with what else is it produced?

(p.77-78) – “remarkable strategic coincidence” à what’s the justification for this? – discourse & techniques of punishing “better” – Not justifying the reinterpretation of the reformers– attributing strategy where there is only technique? Techniques = specific tactics; Technology = the logic of the techne – seeing strategic patterns that he’s assembling together out of al of these specificities. à a strategy, a technology (bigger assemblage) rather than just a tactic – what level is this at (not at level of intentionality).