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]

Week 7 - Complete and Austere Institutions

Week 7

Complete and Austere Institutions

Group Generated Chapter Outline:

• Self-evident deprivations of liberty and transformation of individual (double foundation) (232-233)
• Prison as part of an active field  (235)
• Prison as omni-disciplinary, “exhaustive”
• Prison to Penitentiary (235-248)
• Birth of the delinquent (248-255)
• Twins: penitentiary technique and delinquent (255)

Group Questions:

• Why is the reality of delinquency non-corporal (255)?
• What’s the relationship between the non-corporeal reality of delinquency and the body of knowledge made possible by this new procedure?
• Difference between how MF and Marx understand political economy?
• What’s the role of reform in the transition from the prison to the penitentiary?
• Can we elaborate on the relationship between viewing the prison as a field, site,  institution?
• What does MF mean by “technological ensemble,” and how is that different from an apparatus (255)?
• Can the distinctions made on 231 be mapped onto MF’s essay on the history of origins verse history of emergence?
• How to take/read the shift from in context on page 237-8?

Group Thoughts/Comments/Responses:

• Understanding reform
• What do we mean by analytic in this context? The lens, methodology, through which we look at a field of study.
• Reform as a way of tracing transitions/how MF traces movement in the archive. A retelling of reform?
• What type of thing is MF trying to see? If he wants to see an active field (an active technological ensemble), then one would have to look at the pressures of initiations. The prison and reform movements seem to go hand in hand (mutually transformative)
• gets to his power/knowledge - the way you’re looking changes what you are looking at
• 235 “the theory of the prisons…” Clear positioning of the theoretical components
• theory sets up not expectations, already suggesting the next move in historical development
• This chapter has a lot of movement (historical and field of activity) - the reform does a lot of the work
• 264, prison and reform as a package verse prison as an inert thing. “In a very strange way….”  
• When the model is active field, how do we know we are accounting for variations, since he treats reform as part of the field of prison
• Reform as not contained exclusively within the prison but as just one of the forces as constituted with the prison
• Recognition of the difficulty of drawing this distinction and how can be procede
• Analytic rather and Metaphysic
• Does the metaphysic verse methodological distinction really work?
• Is MF bracketing the question of morality, and what are the consequences? Normative is a better term. Good reform/Bad reform
• Does his analytic alight the possibility of a normative? His analytic makes it difficult for us to think we have access to normative distinction; the analytic as designed to block that possibility (could backfire)
• The non-corporeal reality (255); the french translation “in corporal”

Week 6: Panopticism

Questions:

1. Page 200 – Foucault gives three functions to the dungeon and argues that Bentham only uses one – enclosure, but isn't there a way to read Foucault's take on Bentham and argue that Bentham is actually using all three functions of the dungeon in his formulation of panopticism?

The three functions are to enclose, to deprive of light, and to hide. Bentham's conception just encloses and drops the other two. On 201, he discusses how there is a hiding and a deprivation of light. Rather than a systemic change and functional inversion, perhaps Bentham's discussion represents more a systemic inversion and functional change. Are the guardians subject to a kind of enclosure? Is Foucault conducting an argument against the see/seeable dyad? What are the stakes? The touching touch would be a phenomenological example that is expressive of a certain type of ontology that goes beyond the perceptive?

2. What is the social for Foucault and how does it function in Foucault's genealogy? Is the social operating as part of the analytic or the object of the analytic? (209, 212, 214-215) What is the distinction between society and population?

The social exists in a strange vacuum (or empty material) for Foucault as what is produced through power or the material through which power moves. Is the social operating as a kind of analytic (a particular conceptualization of the social such that he is applying it to the archives) or whether the social is what emerges from the archive or both? Are society and the social different?

The social could be a set of relationships that makes power possible or the social is what results from relations of power? But Power can also produce a particular kind of society, in this case disciplinary society, so a certain kind of society is the product of a certain modality of power. Is the distinction between disciplinary society as its produced or discipline produces a certain kind of society? Sometimes, the social seems like the material setting through which power moves producing a kind certain kind of society. What's the status of the social? Is it an empty signifier? What's the status of old form of power vis-a-vie the new form of power? As the social shifts, this shift becomes constitutive of of a new form of disciplinary society. Are human multiplicities the social? Is this the metaphysical Foucault? When the problem of power becomes a transcendental one and ceases to be historical, is this a problem or metaphysical move? The distinction doesn't need have to be transcendental or historically specific.

Is there another option where society is historically produced? Why is society be produced rather than disciplinary culture? Where do we want to stop asking ourselves about how things get produced? Power as a relational concept provides a repetitive architecture for his argument that is similar to the social, perhaps. But what is the concern here? Is there a causal relation between disciplinary power and the social? How are society, power, and history correlated? Is society synonymous with a system power? The ordering of human multiplicities is interesting as a universal is because it is anthropologically capacious. The concept of society is a particular creation of a particular socio-historical time. Ordering of human multiplicity is a problem that is solved a number of ways. Power doesn't produce the problem of human multiplicities, this problem is given. Universal not because of generality, but because of repetition. Would we be comfortable with the idea that other ways of organizing groups of people still had to organize and this organization is a problem that can be solved in a lot of different ways. It is not always solved by the production of something called the social – the problem persists. This an abstraction. Power is the conduct of conduct – is this an ordering of human multiplicities? He seems to not sufficiently accounting for the presence of something called the social in his analytical apparatus – why not conduct or culture or class relations? Is trying to account for society? No. Power is the assurance of the ordering.

3. 202 – Is sovereign power 'real' for Foucault ? What is Latour's take?

For Latour, the complicity of others is inherent in power – along this line, can sovereign power exist for Foucault? Can power be wielded for Foucault? Does this connect to the surface/depth distinction? It might be that Foucault would accept that sovereign power is relational or perhaps Foucault just didn't dig into sovereign power with the same attention that he did disciplinary power.

In the panopticon, you don't need depth. Sovereign power acts on the depth of bodies. Disciplinary power acts on the surface of certain encounters. Sovereign power (constraining) has passed to disciplinary power (surface). In disciplinary power, the moment of contact is ephemeral between the examiner and examined. Disciplinary power is non-corporal and continuous, while sovereign power is a discontinuous application of power – a spectacle.

Latour isn't interested in describing historical shifts of power, or even in describing history, but it seems he is more interested tiny shift or transitions of things (which isn't to say they are nonhistorical), or modalities of power. There is a distinction between Latour the social scientist and Foucault the historian. What Foucault does for history, Latour does for history?

4. 215 - How do we parse the distinction between discipline as an apparatus, modality of power, or institution? How do these map to 'spaces'/domains of discipline?

How do disciplines interact with one another? He seems to both want to say that these disciplinary mechanisms or techniques are internal to the institution but also some how escape and become deinstitutionalize? How does the swarm work?

How is the panoptical gaze, once it is internalized, different then the the internalization of the religious gaze internalized? Rather than transcendental identity based on the threat/hope of the afterlife, the disciplinary society offers reward and conditioning as an aspirational goal. You don't have to be a believer in disciplinary society. So there is a psychological difference, there is no intentionality – disciplined at a level below conscious intentionality. We would need to historicize this claim. Is an ominiscient god the disciplinification (spelling?) of religion? Is Santa Clause an icon of the disciplinary society? How do we think through disciplinary relations psychologically?

Other Questions:

1. Clarification (205) – What does Foucault mean when he says discipline is a mechanism power reduced to its ideal form?

2. What are the methodological implications of types of archival documents Foucault uses, such as 'edicts' or 'proposals?' ? What if he used different 'documents' such as lived experience?

3. Can we parse these distinctions: mixture versus purity (206), surface versus depth (216-217), horizontal conjunctions (219) and verticality

4. Is there a causal importance to the panopticon?