To begin, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Foucault. His work is
as interesting as it is disturbing. It’s disturbing on the surface with its “atrocities”
of torture. More importantly his work has disturbing ramifications through his
notions and inferences, especially in relation to modern society. The entire
time I was reading his book, again, I could not shake the Orwellian universe
described in 1984. Suffice to say, this book sent chills down my spine.
Getting more to the prompt, I would say Foucault interprets
the agents of historical change to be the negotiation of power that exist between
the people and the government. I have chosen the word “government” here to be
broadly defined, encompassing not only the state, the individuals at the head
of state, but also simply those with the means of production and power. It is
the constant, sometimes unverifiable, negotiations that exist between the two
groups that are the agents of change. Foucault states the purpose of his work
to be “a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge; a
genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to
punish derives its bases, justifications and rules, from which it extends its
effects and by which it masks its exorbitant singularity” (23). He goes on to describe
it as a study of power relations in conjuncture with his concepts of “power-knowledge”,
“political anatomy”, the body, and the “soul”.
While reading Foucault, it is important to take into account
the core integral necessity of a states right and power to punish. For,
theoretically, with all our conventions and abstractions, the right to judge
and punish is the direct function of government. Boiled down to its essence,
the state/those in power/society, needs this power for it is what gives every
other limb its sustenance. It is the direct embodiment of power that Foucault so readily ties with the power to declare war. Whether against a foreign entity or one of its own citizens. One can almost
see such an embodiment as imbued on the physicality of punishment. The prison,
the barracks, the gallows, the medieval plaza, the execution chamber, the
Panopticon.
It appears evident, to me, that Foucault sprung out of the
framework of these Marxist Historians such as Bloch. But, it is equally as
evident that he turns the page of ideology. Part of his framework is a direct
dissention towards these Marxists. To begin with, Bloch and other Marxist
historians are all consumed with notion of classes, class conflict, and the
working/underclass. Foucault turns this
on its head through his “genealogy” of Discipline and Punish. Where Marxists
derive their reasoning and inferences from materialistic notions as means to
describe historical agents of change, Foucault looks deeper. A wonderful
example is the punitive revolution he describes moving from focus on the “body”
and moving towards that of the “soul”.
Foucault states “The ‘mind’ as a surface of inscription for
power, with seminology as its tool ; the submission of bodies through the
control of ideas; the analysis of representations as a principle in a politics
of bodies that was much more effective than the ritual anatomy of torture and
execution” (102) His work borderlines on so many subjects, but in particular psychology
and philosophy. Foucault is interested in ideas and the mind as the essential
machine of society. Perhaps then, through this lens and despite me sounding hypocritical,
he truly sees the agents of historical change to be found within the mind. “On
the soft fibers of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of
Empires” (103) Where the Marxist would have been interested in his notions of
the “body”, Foucault draws a line in the sand to explain society and the penal
system through the concept of the “soul”. He wields psychology, philosophy,
history, anthropology, and sociology to create his work. Simply put, it can be
boiled down to material vs. mentality notions. (30)
His work builds up a
case of the penal/punitive system and its ideological genealogy. But, Foucault’s
truth exists in the lack of a proper barrier to his subject. This isn’t a micro
history of some esoteric subject. The reason the boarders of his study waver
and permeate is to reflect the notions therein. Power, such as the struggle of discipline,
punishment, torture, incarceration, etc. is a symbol for the overarching power
of history and of society. His panopticism should not be confined to the physicality
of the penitentiary or a simple notion of penal revolution. It is again a
factor of society’s power relation at large. “The Panopticon must be understood
as a generalized model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in
terms of the everyday life of men” (205)
...perhaps we have more in common with Winston Smith than we
would like to admit. (Orwell, 1984)
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