Discipline and Punish, "Illegalities and delinquency" (pt. 4, ch 2)

 Questions

1. Is there anyone to whom surveillance does not apply (200; 204)?

2. How is "work" operating in this chapter (and in The Punitive Society)? What is the relation between disciplinary power and work?

3. Production of delinquency appears as a demobilizing tactic, but how does his class analysis figure into Foucault's methodology with respect to discipline? 

4. The delinquent is produced "as a pathologized subject" (277). How does said production connect with the "usefulness" of delinquency in the relation to work-labor?

5. How does genealogy determine what is "a target" (276)? In this case it appears to be illegalities or illegalisms. 

6. How do we understand illegalities through the failure of penality (272)? Does this help us define illegalities/illegalisms?

7. Foucault anti-dialectical form of argument: prison and reform (264-265). Who are his interlocutors here? Or is this an argument geared at dialectics more broadly?

8. If the function of the prison is not to render docile those who transgress the law, how do we square this with the "opening illegalities" which function towards rendering docile (272; 277)?

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Discussion

Description of delinquency in relation to labor, labor organizing, and labor rights (and its relation to the formation of social class) was very interesting as forms of resistance or counter-conduct (274ff). This had not been developed before as clearly. 

Illegalities are targeted by disciplinary power and the constitutive failures produce delinquency in a way that favors or is useful to the bourgeoisie. In that sense, it is not only the production of workers but also the disruption of dissidence or sedition that is crucial for class (or capitalist) power. (see, e.g., 280). In that sense, the emergence of the delinquent is parallel to that of the worker.

Another important relation of delinquency with labor can be found in Foucault's analysis of the paralegal development of police to manage "the mass of reserve labor" (280). But the delinquent is also useful as a political weapon.

What is difference of this genealogy from a Marxist account of class formation? It could be seen as a response of why certain revolutionary attempts failed (the internalization of discipline). Different emphasis of the emergence of the working class and the reserve army but in terms of the productivity of power.

Diffusion of illegalities (273-275): the association of crime/criminality and class is something novel (the "classization" of crime) that Foucault is attempting to track. There is a production of class disymmetry as a vector through which penal discourse and practices travel. 

There is an introduction of the present in the text that brings into view the contemporaneity of the archive and Foucault's genealogy (268): the uprisings in French prisons are articulated as a "reform" and therefore as an "improvement" or "amelioration" of the prison that is thus unable to recognize its functional and historical specificity.

Notion of tactics as "reach[ing] their target" (285). This sounds intentional. How do we square this with Foucault's emphasis on power a non-intentional? Why is there such a "need"? Is it a need to solve a problem that arise in conflict/class/revolutionary struggles?

Tactics are bound up with articulations of a problem – The coming into power of a class is contingent upon it being able to articulate a "class dissymmetry" (276) successfully and functionally. 

Part of the argument could be that the moralization of the lumpenproletariat is a fuller story of this form of subjectivity. (the lumpenproletariat). Delinquency is nonetheless the vector for class differentiation. If you tell the story that way, you can tell a different story about the emergence and hegemony of the capitalist class that does not assume that they had power in advance.

Interesting that he refers to indiscipline in terms of a "native, immediate liberty" (292) when addressing the Fourierists.

The Punitive Society, March 28 Lecture

 1. Foucault's use of habit to describe disciplinary power? How do we understand its critical use?

2. What is the relationship between genealogy and habit? Particularly, the "change" of habit. 

3. Fleshing out distinctions between ideology and "strategies of power"? 

4. Can we track the four theoretical schemas of power? (pp. 228 - 229, 231, 233).

5. What is an "institution" for Foucault? How does this differ from something like "apparatus"? (p. 235).

Institution as social form? "... institutional condition of possibility..." (227). Institutions as "effects" of techniques, practices, knowledges -- Foucault's "nominalism." Institutions as something like "anticipatory dispositifs"?

Example:

power-knowledge ---> surveillance, examination, normalization ---> techniques(?) ---> institutions (e.g., prison, clinic, army, etc.).

Four schemas of power:

(1) power as exercised as opposed to appropriative (i.e., not a matter of possession) 

(2) power as diffused as opposed to localized (centralized?)

(3) power as constitutive of production, not subordinate to it 

(4) power as knowledge formation, not ideological (i.e., power-knowledge)

Who is Foucault mogging? Arguably, political philosophy hitherto.

(1) Hobbes and the social contract tradition.

(2) Althusser 

(3) "post-Hegelians," i.e. (early) Marx

(4) Critical theory, i.e., Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse (and Althusser, again). 

In terms of ideology, what is meant by "transparency" and "opacity." Against the idea that ideology distorts actual knowledge, whereas Foucault wants to suggest that we need not posit hidden motives and interests to understand the operations of power. Ideology critique as revealing how operations of power distort consciousness of subjects (false consciousness).

Foucault distinction between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-cenutury discourses. What's the exact nature of the shift? Foucault doesn't seem to be offering a comprehensive theory of habit -- wish he was saying more here.

Foucault: March 21, 1973 Lecture (Punitive Society)

The group began with questions: 

(1) p. 206: Is Foucault making a distinction between relays/multiples of power as opposed to productive power/powers that serve a specific function?

(2) p. 212: What is the second "function" of sequestration that Foucault mentions?

(3) p. 214: Double system of prevention of heterosexuality and prohibition of homosexuality?  

(4) p. 206-207: What is meant by hyper-power?

Discussion...

On Hyper-power: 

—Intensification of power on bodies

—Does hyper-power mean more power?

—Social bodies: power is predicated on membership; mechanical bodies: on productive function; dynastic: ?

—Is the prison the site of hyper-power? Site of multiplication (places where mechanisms of power, normalization, the examination, occur and then become diffuse through the social body). 

—State structure is a relay-multiplier of power "within a society in which the State structure remains the conditions for the functioning of these institutions" (209)?

On "Mono-functional institutions" (p. 212):

—Institutions appear to be mono-functional, but that is not the case. 

—Second function is to fabricate the social—"fabricate something that is both prohibition and norm, and that has to become reality: they are institutions of normalization" (214-215). 

—At first sight not implied in the institutional function itself 

—Establishes whole set of norms that exceed institution's stated/explicit functions. 

—Function in Foucault vs. Althusser/Marx

Prevention of heterosexuality vs. prohibition of homosexuality (p. 213-214): 

—Structure of a sex-segregated school system means that heterosexuality as a practice is prevented (cannot be exercised); it just is prevented but not on some moral ground; just a structural feature. 

—Homosexuality needs to be prohibited 

—Heterosexuality is the external norm that is diffused; homosexuality is internal 

—p. 214: is apparatus in footnote apparatus or dispositif  in French translation. 

New type of discursivity (p. 215) 

Michel Foucault - The Punitive Society, Lecture 10 (7 March 1973)

Questions:

1. (p. 178) Criminology and medico-juducial codification - what is the relation? What is transcription? 

2. (p. 175) Fascism as connecting military force and corporatism to protect apparatus of production. How does this relate to capitalist penality?

3. (p. 173) How is 'illegalism' different from 'infra-legal illegalism'? What marks the distinction between them? 

4. (p. 171) How does the earlier fear of the vagabond connect to urbanization? Is this the 'whole floating population turned out by poverty'? 

5. (p. 175) How is the 'record book (livret)' connected to militarism and corporatism?

6. (p. 174) How is the civil code connected to habit? Is there a temporal dimension here? 

Discussion

* Reference to the "text" and "discourse." We are not getting "behind" or "underneath" what is said. (p. 165)

• It seems like the concern is not the vagabond but the proximity of workers and how their habits are connected to profitability (Q4)
• Vagabond is the paradigmatic figure of delinquency - but now all of these other modes of punitive practices that are extended to workers
• Now, there is increase in state apparatus and production 
• The workers are quasi-delinquent; Foucault wants to show the connection between work and punishment
• Narrative is about the mechanism of control towards non-working populations moving to the worker as the central site of concern
• Immorality, concerning "the body, need, desire, habit, and will" (p. 176); "whole system of moral conditioning needs to be incorporated into penality" (p. 176)
• Vagabond in 1714 (p. 45) versus workers in 1830 (p. 172) (Q4)
• Technique - penitentiary applied to vagabond; then penality extends to worker
• Social enemy as a figure is transcribed into "immature, maladjusted, and primitive" (Q1)
• "moralizing modulation" (p. 177)
• Shift to morality of worker over the contract (p. 174) 
• Quakers not medico-judicial in their penitentiary 
• No psychologists in prison
• Beccaria isn't connecting the medical to punishment 
• Medicalization and moralization that are different
• Moralization now outside of prison 
• (p. 91) medical health and religious transformation
• Discipline or the crafting of habits (moralization) 
• Discipline and Punish - sovereign form of punishment versus reformers (Beccaria) versus disciplinary 
• So, Beccaria is not disciplinary
• These are all in the discourse; practices are also part of what is said (Foucault is not giving conspiratorial social theory) 
• (p. 179) "penal text" procedures of moralization
• Different functions of juridico-medical versus criminology (Q1)
• Criminology gives punishment to crime
• Medico-judicial gives the prediction of criminal 
• "homicidal monomania" creates a medical cause (p. 179) 
• Criminology transports medico-judicial model elsewhere
• Penal Code 
• We could think of a practicing judge who says "I'm not a psychologist" and "social dangerousness is not an infraction in the code" 
• Psychologist gives the law a way to identify social dangerousness - language of "dispositions"
• Branching out of a disciplinary society - not just people who commit crimes, but those who could potentially commit crimes (also extends beyond the domain of the courts)
• infra-legal illegalism - think of "infra" as "not quite" or "underneath" (Q3)
• But weren't the illegalisms already infra? 
• Examples of "infra-legal": lazy, getting drunk, being late
• "infra-legal" illegalism is not opposed to illegalism (?) 
• Disagreement on this point - weren't the earlier cases of illegalism cases which were illegal but not punished?
• Illegalisms that officially break the law versus those that don't 

Note: Recommendation to read 14 March, 194-196, for the next week + 21 March