Should we read Foucault?

It seems silly to invite strangers to read with me parts of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Surveiller et punir : Naissance de la prison) by Michel Foucault. I assume everyone has read it. A foundational text! But I realize I’m basing that only on my own experience. Not everyone was forced in their undergraduate years to read queer theory. Anyway, Foucault is more than that. Anyway, the widespread abuse of Foucault seems to suggest that he is mostly picked up second- or third-hand. And to go deeper into later texts, it is good to start here.

I believe it’s a difficult text to say anything new about, but we should try. I’m particularly interested in Foucault’s conception of power. I would like general comments on the legacy of Foucault. Perhaps nothing will come of it.

Let me speak of Foucault as if you had never heard of him. He was born in 1926. He was a French homosexual and rumored pederast that died of AIDS. His first philosophical idol was Heidegger; he discovered Nietzsche next. He left France in 1966, shortly after publishing The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Les Mots et les Choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines), a work about historical epistemologies (the idea, simplifying too far, here, that history should be divided into epistemes, which are temporal structures that give us the order of things by defining the base of knowledge in any period). He was not in France for May of 1968. It was, he said, March in that year in Tunisia, rather than any French intellectual movement, that drew him into the political debate. When he returned to France, he founded the Prisons Information Group, which was dedicated to research on and activism for prisoners. He began working on this book—Discipline and Punish—in that period.

I would like to start with "The body of the condemned" (“Le corps des condamnés”) which is the first section of the first part of the book, titled “Torture” (“Supplice”).

https://monoskop.org/images/4/43/Foucault_Michel_Discipline_and_Punish_The_Birth_of_the_Prison_1977_1995.pdf

https://monoskop.org/images/2/22/Foucault_Michel_Surveiller_et_Punir_Naissance_de_la_Prison_2004.pdf

This is an attempt to describe two phenomena. The first is the disappearance of public punishment of criminals. The second is the shift away from corporal punishment. Inflicting pain in public on the body is replaced by reforming the soul in private. This is focused narrowly in this section on the legal system but will be expanded further in the book, based on Foucault’s understanding of the relationship between power and knowledge.

It begins with the story of Robert-François Damiens, convicted for the attempted assassination of King Louis XV in 1757 and sentenced to dismemberment. It describes his torture, after which each of his limbs is fixed to a horse. When the four horses, unaccustomed to the task, proved unable to tear him apart, two additional horses were brought in and tied to his thighs. After some tugging, the executioners were forced to make several cuts to his body, allowing the horses to work. His dismembered body was burned.

The next description, intended as a contrast with the blood and guts, is of Léon Faucher, who was at work reforming the French prison system. There is a timetable provided, written by Faucher eighty years after Damiens was torn to pieces, giving strict guidance to the men that watched over prisoners. The men were kept on a tight schedule.

The public execution and the timetable, Foucault writes, “each define a certain penal style.” The old laws and customs were disappearing by the time Faucher was at work, and they were being replaced with supposedly modern theories of crime and punishment, with “a moral and political justification of the right to punish.”

Foucault considers "the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle." There was an Enlightenment-era humanitarian concern behind this, but, he argues, more important was the fact that the public spectacle came to be seen not as the conclusion of a monstrous crime, the end of the possibility of violence, but as connected to it, furthering it, and potentially encouraging violence.

There was no mystery about who carried out the punishment. It was done by the servants of the sovereign. Punishment could not be hidden—and the responsibility would have been clear to the observers, who, if they decided it was unfair, could direct their anger at the perpetrators. This could happen, since, if punishment is public, everyone was, in a way, implicated, and might be forced into action.

<Punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process. This has several consequences: it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness; its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity; it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime... As a result, justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice. … The apportioning of blame is redistributed: in punishment-as-spectacle a confused horror spread from the scaffold… Now the scandal and the light are to be distributed differently; it is the conviction itself that marks the offender with the unequivocally negative sign: the publicity has shifted to the trial, and to the sentence; the execution itself is like an additional shame that justice is ashamed to impose on the condemned man; so it keeps its distance from the act, tending always to entrust it to others, under the seal of secrecy. It is ugly to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing. Hence that double system of protection that justice has set up between itself and the punishment it imposes. Those who carry out the penalty tend to become an autonomous sector; justice is relieved of responsibility for it by a bureaucratic concealment of the penalty itself.>

This was also the end of "the body as the major target of penal repression."

<Physical pain, the pain of the body itself, is no longer the constituent element of the penalty. From being an art of unbearable sensations, punishment has become an economy of suspended rights. … As a result of this new restraint, a whole army of technicians took over from the executioner, the immediate anatomist of pain: warders, doctors, chaplains, psychiatrists, psychologists, educationalists; by their very presence near the prisoner, they sing the praises that the law needs: they reassure it that the body and pain are not the ultimate objects of its punitive action. Today a doctor must watch over those condemned to death, right up to the last moment - thus juxtaposing himself as the agent of welfare, as the alleviator of pain, with the official whose task it is to end life.>

The “constituent element” became the soul of the prisoner, which is subject to constant discipline, or to translate differently the title of the book, surveillance. Information is generated and stored about the mental state of the prisoner. This is analyzed.

Instead of killing or corporal punishment, the prisoner can be reformed. This is where psychological categories begin to be defined. A prisoner has abnormal psychology and must be cured.

Another feature: the “machinery” of the legal system has required the “proliferation of the authorities of judicial decision-making and extends its powers of decision well beyond the sentence.” This has the effect of dispersing responsibility, as well.

What follows this are the rules that Foucault lays out for his study, which he describes as looking at “the metamorphosis of punitive methods on the basis of a political technology of the body in which might be read a common history of power relations and object relations.” I won’t summarize them here.

But so this was an analysis of power that broke with the Marxism of the radical left in France. Power is a strategy, rather than something possessed by the state, then granted piecemeal to an individual or institution. Power is defined by the nodes through which it passes in a social network. This opens up, as Gilles Deleuze writes, “a different praxis of struggle, a different set of strategies.” I will quote another few lines from Deleuze on Discipline and Punish:

<As the postulate of localization, power would be power of the State and would itself be located in the machinery of State to the point where even 'private' powers would only apparently be dispersed and would remain no more than a special example of the machinery of State. … [O]n the contrary, the State itself appears as the overall effect or result of a series of interacting wheels or structures which are located at a completely different level, and which constitute a 'microphysics of power'. Not only private systems but explicit parts of the machinery of State have an origin, a behavior and a function which the State ratifies, controls or is even content to cover rather than institute.

… [M]odern societies can be defined as 'disciplinarian'; but discipline cannot be identified with any one institution or apparatus precisely because it is a type of power, a technology, that traverses every kind of apparatus or institution, linking them, prolonging them, and making them converge and function in a new way. … This is all the more so since the origin of the person does not lie in the 'juridico-political structure of a society': it is wrong to make it depend on the evolution of law, even penal law. In so far as it administers punishment, prison also possesses a necessary autonomy and in turn reveals a 'disciplinary supplement' which goes beyond the machinery of State, even when used by it.>

Extra material:

“Foucault through Strauss” by Blake Smith, https://im1776.com/2021/02/19/foucault-through-strauss/.

"A New Cartographer" by Gilles Deleuze, https

What should I be trying to learn by reading Foucault?

I wish I had a simple answer to that question. Most basically, as Foucault's style and theory have become so important to modern sociology and political theory, there is a lot about the present preoccupations of those disciplines that can be discovered by reading him. Even if you would like to subvert them, sorting out Foucauldian vocabulary is a good place to begin.

That's too negative, though. From this era of Foucault text, you could learn from about prison reform, the modern legal system, and the history of psychiatry. You could learn from his actual approach to writing history, as well. The idea of history as a genealogy, not as a supposedly objective record of evolution, as antihumanist, rooted in the epistemology of one's own time, was revolutionary once, and it can still be turned to novel purposes. This is stylistic and theoretical. I think there's a lot to learn from Foucault as a historian.

You should learn from Foucault how to construct a theory of power. This is harder than it sounds. This is stylistic and theoretical, too. One of the reasons that Foucault became so widely read is that he was a good writer.

There are other things to learn. Foucault's appeal, separating the philosopher from his interpreters: He teaches methods to liberate yourself and shape history in the process.

>>1141
> What should I be trying to learn by reading Foucault?

Foucault can productively be read as a find-grained theorist of power, in its structures and channels.

One weakness of Yarvin is that he sometimes writes of power as if it were some homogeneous thing, the way the energy industry speaks of megawatts. But power in human institutions is highly structured and flows through many different channels. Foucault is good at describing this and providing theory for it.

Another thing that's good to keep in the back of your head: he is often read by progressives and assumed to be somehow supporting progressive politics –– but his work is mostly descriptive and easily adapted to quite different ends. It takes no great stretch to read him from a Right-Nietzschean perspective, for example.

We should read Foucault. But did we read Foucault? I'd love to hear thoughts, especially from people not already disposed to receiving him well.

Huge fan of the book. But there's something about his lifestyle that makes me question if I'm not seeing the end game of what he's really going after

>>1276
lmao well said anon. That said, I trust that our guy here has taken that into account in his recommendation.

>>1276
BAP takes some time to examine the development of this lifestyle in Bronze Age Mindset as an example of "potentially high life that has been thwarted". It can be read in a number of ways, I don't think that BAP is limiting his analysis in this passage to only the lifestyle that Foucault was known for.

>In becoming "gay" he believes he is escaping that sense of primal limitation and subjection that he felt as a small boy: he has reinterpreted his entire drama as a maudlin story of sexuality suppressed or oppressed by retrograde social and political norms. In this he becomes an unwitting pawn himself of the very power that as a young boy he had intuited to be the enemy, the great and suffocating shadow of our time, that smothers all higher life out. The gay is the spiritual foot-soldier of the new regime, when he is born to be its enemy. This is the unusual part of this realization, that some of the most sensitive and perceptive youths, those maybe imbued with spark of inspiration and a conquering, expanding
spirit, end up becoming the vanguard of that which has smothered and broken them.

Foucault does analyze the mechanics of the regime very well, even if he might be known more as a critic of power than a theorist of power. With regard to that one could read the engineering of the lifestyle itself as one of the tools of the regime.

>> 1276

I must say, his methods for resisting power are intended for the mentally ill and homosexuals, if those should be separated, but his conceptions of those categories are different from those popularly used at present, and they can still be adapted for other people...