MICHEL FOUCAULT, info.

HI Scott, Hi All,

Scott, if it is fair to summarize your position in the following  
terms. "where is the element/possibility for freedom in the shadow of  
Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" in which it appears that the  
'modern soul' is, in fact, a 'docile body'" then i would like to raise  
a number of points.
First read, carefully, everything Foucault wrote AFTER Discipline and  
Punish. THis is an issue that he was continually confronted with and  
wrestled with after the publication of DP, and he offers a number of  
possible solutions to it. Including, for example, criticizing himself  
for focusing too much on repression and domination in his previous  
analysis of modern power relations. [see for example, "Society Must be  
Defended"]/
Second, putting all his later thoughts and suggestions aside [although  
they are of major importance] I believe that part of the answer lies  
in our very experience of reading Foucault. Foucault wrote each book  
in order to achieve an effect in his audience. The effect that we  
experience from DP is a sudden critical awareness of the systems of  
discipline, domination, repression and normalization that exist in  
modern western liberal socieites. Obviously then, the eruption of this  
consciousness is testament to the fact that we are not simply so many,  
'docile bodies'. Perhaps, for some of us, this was an accurate  
description of our lives beforehand, but, if we have looked clearly  
and understood fully the portrayal he presents, then Foucaults  
historical and theoretical analysis serves to break down this  
docility. Foucault presents to us a book like DP as a critique so that  
we shall be docile, that is, complacent, conventional, uninterested,  
unaware, no longer! We can never look at our own socieity with quite  
the same eyes again.
Lastly, id like to speak as a historian as i believe that an  
understanding of Focuault's historical practice, as well as the  
practice of history generally, is usful in this context. Despite  
Focuault opening his book with a grandiose statement about describing  
the history of the 'modern soul', his analysis/description ends by  
1840. He speaks nothing about the 20th C. Thus to say that DP is  
describing our current social atmosphere is simply wrong. It is  
describing events from the 17th to the 19th C, he is decribing a  
delimited historical episode, one that is at least a hundred years  
behind us, a lot has changed since then, a lot has stayed the same,  
the question is, in both cases, how much? that is a question that is  
left open, it is for you to decide. Now, in conclusion, to say  
something about the practice of history, specifically my own long  
endeavours in historical research. One thing that one soon learns is  
that there is something myterious, something ineluctable, something  
irretrievable, in all the past events that we seek to bring to the  
light. The days when historians thought they could give a total,  
objective rendition of the entireity of a past experience is long  
since gone. As a historian i think Foucault knew very well about this  
evanescent, protean quality of historical inquiry. In DP, he spoke  
about a range of social institutions, about a range of social  
practices, and of the forms brought to bear under their supervision.  
He spoke about schools, prisons, hospitals, and monastries, but this  
is not to speak of the universal experience of the totality of a  
society. There were many people in the past that never went to a  
school, or a prison, or a hospital or a monastry, there is a limitless  
churning ocean of lost human voices which have never been inscribed in  
a single historical document, which never were snared, petrified and  
filed away by the tentacles of bureacratic machination. Put simply,  
Foucault as a historian, is not to be thought to be saying in DP,  
"before the modern era, there were no docial bodies, after the modern  
era, we are all docile bodies", no serious historian would float such  
an unbelivable generalization. No he talks about specific events,  
specific social spaces, a specific historical period, specific social  
classes, and he uses specific empirical evidence, well aware, as i  
imagine, of the endless silent depths of lost human experience flowing  
beneath the archives.

brad


"What good is a book that does not even carry us beyond all books?"
Nietzsche, 'The Gay Science'.