Power

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Foucault, M. (1994) Power:Essential works of Foucault, 1954-1984. James D. Faubion (Ed.) Robert Hurley and Others (Trans.) New York: The New Press.

Contents 1 Questions of method 1.1 Why is the birth of the prison so important? Overstated? 1.1.1 Genealogy of morals 1.2 Focus on "regimes of practice" 1.3 Eventalization, troubling to historians (226) 1.4 Polymorphism(s) 1.5 Is Foucault doing a (meta)history of rationality? 1.6 Programs, programming = "Ideal type"? 1.7 What is history ...? 1.8 Anaesthetizing effect of F's analysis: is it hopeless? 1.8.1 Paralysis? 1.9 Must action follow critique? 1.10 Working outside of schema 1.11 Horizon of analysis 1.12 History of objectification

Questions of method

Note: this chapter originally titled "Round table of 20 may 1978", published in 1980. Questions of various interlocutors have been edited down to a single "collective historian"!

• Not universalizing
• "between unfinished abutments and anticipatory strings of dots" (223)
• "Game openings" where those are may be interested are invited to join in (224)

Why is the birth of the prison so important? Overstated?

• Little extant work on imprisonment as a form of punishment
• Practice of imprisonment, came to be seen as self-evident, why? How? (225)
  • "Making visible ... its complex interconnection with a multiplicity of historical processes" (225)

Genealogy of morals

• Tracing "moral technologies" (224)
• To understand what is punished and why, ask how is it punished?
• Method: focusing on the HOW rather than the what or why...

Focus on "regimes of practice"

• Aim: "grasping the conditions that make these acceptable at a given moment" (225)
• Programs of conduct with both
  • "Prescriptive effects", what is to be done, jurisdiction
  • "Codifying effects", what is to be known, veridiction

Eventalization, troubling to historians (226)

• "Breach of self-evidence" (226)
• Re-discovering the various relations/etc from which self-evidence might arise (226-7)
• Constructing a "polyhedron of intelligibility" around an event (227)
  • Number of faces is not finite, cannot be known in advance
• Eventalization is NOT the development of "unitary" historical explanations

Polymorphism(s)

• ... of the elements brought into relation (228)
  • History of pedagogical practices, professionalization of armies, labor history, etc. etc
• ... of relations described
  • Technical models, tactics, application of theory
• ... of domains of reference
  • From micro to macro, new techniques of power

Is Foucault doing a (meta)history of rationality?

• No, he says, he is examining "how forms of rationality inscribe themselves in practices or systems of practices, and what role they play within them" (230)
• Reason, analyzed according to two "axes":
  • Codification/prescription, forming an ensemble of rules, procedures, means to ends...
  • Formulation (true/false), determining a domain of objects about which it is possible to make t/f propositions (230)

"My problem is to see how men govern ... by the production of truth ... By production of truth I mean not the production of true utterances but the establishment of domains in which the practice of true and false can be made" (230)

• Eventalizing singular ensembles of practices
  • Making them graspable as different regimes of "jurisdiction" and "veridiction" (230)

Programs, programming = "Ideal type"?

• Programs are explicit, result of reason
  • Determining what institutions, individuals, behaviors are legible, recognized
  • Not hidden meanings
  • Generalization and interconnection of different techniques themselves designed in response to localized requirements (231)

Not a difference between

• Purity of the ideal
• Impurity of the real (231)
• But different strategies (mutually opposed, composed, and "superposed") (232)

What is history ...?

"What is history given that there is continually being produced within it a separation of true and false?" (233)

• Is production, transformation of true/false "characteristic and decisive" for our historicity?
• What specific ways has this relation operated in Western societies (esp. wrt scientific knowledge)?
• What historical knowledge is possible of a history that produces the true/false distiction on which such knowledge is based?
• "Isn't the most general of political problems the problem of truth?" (233)

Anaesthetizing effect of F's analysis: is it hopeless?

• F is not himself confident, capable of revolutionary acts that might "subvert all codes" (234)
• F distinguishes evidence of "irritation" in specific disciplines from "anaesthetic" possibility "on the ground" (235) -- where is this "ground"?

Paralysis?

• Who is "paralyzed"?
• If it is because their self-evident activities are now called into question - so the better. (235)
  • Perhaps not paralysis but "demobilization" (235-236)

Must action follow critique?

"Critique doesn't have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, "this, then, is what needs to be done." (236)

• It can be an "instrument" in struggle
• Not a component in programming, law, but "a challenge directed at what is" (236)

Working outside of schema

• F references contradictory criticism as evidence that what he does isn't corresponding to available schema (237)
  • Plus he is not proposing a new schema

Horizon of analysis

• Others are working with "society" as the horizon (237)
• But F is concerned with "the discourse of true and false"
  • Their formulations and their effects on the real

History of objectification

• A history of the production of self-evident social objects on which other historians focus
  • "The objectification of objectivities" (238)