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.