Michel Foucault

Genealogy and History of the Present: The Prison Information Group “In recent years, prison revolts have occurred around the world…. They were revolts, at the very level of the body, against the body of the prison … its very materiality as an instrument and vector of power. I would like to write the history of this prison, with all the political investment of the body that it gathers together in its closed architecture” (DP 30-31).

History of the Present Why [write the history of this prison]? Through a pure anachronism? No, if one understands by that writing a history of the past in the terms of the present. Yes, if one understands by that writing a history of the present (D&P 31).

Damiens (1757)  Time Table (1838) 1791 abolition of Damiens style torture or the amende honorable (the first time!) 1830s chain gangs end in France; Panopticon popular 1850s end of public execution in France

As for what motivated me, it was curiosity: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what is proper for one to know, but the curiosity that enables one to get free of oneself. What would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness, and not in the knower’s straying afield of himself?

There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all…. The object was to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently.” The Use of Pleasure (1984), 8-9.

Who was Professor Foucault?

Chair of the History of Systems of Thought December 1970 until his death in 1984

Sweden, Poland, Tunisia “Nietzsche was a revelation to me. I read him with great passion and broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France: I felt I had been trapped. Through Nietzsche, I became a stranger to all that.” Oct Technologies of Self, 13.

“Cultivate your own legitimate strangeness.” -- Rene Char History of Madness (1961) “The history of man is one long synonym for the same word. Our duty is to change it.” –Rene Char Care of the Self (1984). Foucault: Surrealist Poet of History

“For someone who was twenty years old shortly after World War II ended, … to become a bourgeois intellectual, a professor, a journalist, a writer or anything of that sort seemed repugnant. The experience of the war had shown us the urgent need of a society radically different from the one in which we were living, this society that had permitted Nazism, that had lain down in front of it. A large sector of French youth had a reaction of total disgust toward all that. We wanted a world and a society that were not only different but that would be an alternative version of ourselves: we wanted to be completely other in an entirely different world.” 1978 “Interview with MF” Power,

So what did Foucault think he was up to? “Experience- book” Antonin Artaud Bertolt Brecht Samuel Beckett

Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison surveiller-to supervise, survey, observe, catalogue, inspect

Discipline = surveillance + punishment Senses of the term “discipline”: Punishment/ consequences Training exercises and regimen Academic disciplines you might major in NORMS bond surveillance and punishment Power-knowledge relations

Damiens (1757)  Time Table (1838) 1791 abolition of Damiens style torture or the amende honorable (the first time!) 1830s chain gangs end in France; Panopticon popular 1850s end of public execution in France

Power Produces “We must cease once and for all from describing the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censors,’ it ‘abstracts,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge gained of that individual belong to this production” (D&P, 194).

The Eye/I “Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance…. It is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, or altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies” (217).

Military

“The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, or at the intensification of its subjectivation [its capacity to be a subject], but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful…. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility [and empowerment]) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)…. Increased aptitude is conjoined with increased domination” (DP 138).

Schools

Hospitals

Leisure (Versaille Zoo)

Prisons

“A whole problematic then develops: that of an architecture that is no longer built simply to be seen (the ostentation of palaces), or to observe external space (fortresses), but to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control – to render visible those who are inside it; an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them to alter them. Stones can make people docile and knowable” (DP 172).

This modern soul “is produced permanently around, on and within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those who are punished – and more generally, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives” (D&P, 29).

“Cultivate your own legitimate strangeness.” -- Rene Char History of Madness (1961) “The history of man is one long synonym for the same word. Duty is to change it.” –Rene Char Care of the Self (1984). Foucault: Surrealist Poet of History