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 18th 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).
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