Linguistic Turn...History with an Opinion

Second only to Zombies, my other sociological fetish is prisons and I can never pass up a prison documentary, so I have been excited about this book since seeing it on the syllabus.  That being said, it was not what I expected as a history of prisons...but that discovery in itself demonstrates the purpose of this very course to introduce us to the various historiographical approaches.

Fortunately, Prof. Bristol has helped us out by labeling the syllabus with the weekly theme, so I went ahead and googled ‘Linguistic Turn’ which described this method, “…as a shorthand for the impact of the focus on the relationship between philosophy and language, which began to be significant in the early 20th century.”

Interestingly, the description continued to discuss how some traditional historians oppose the linguistic turn as it, “…has challenged the traditional tenets of historical objectivity, which assume that there is a real past which can be described (to the extent to which sources are available) as it actually happened.”

“Proponents of the linguistic turn argue that the past does not exist outside our textual representations of it, and that these representations cannot be separated from the ideological baggage that historians bring to them.” (http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/themes/linguistic_turn.html)

Unfortunately, I read the book before researching the above and thus, not understanding the author’s method or motives, struggled to read it as a history.  However, armed with this new perspective, I did go back through the book and now appreciate the authors approach much better.

As a linguistic turn, Foucault does not present a traditional history of penal reform in the 18th and 19th century, rather he attempts to put words to the underlying socio-political shifts and the moral motivations.  I appreciate how transparent Foucault was in his motives, a point which I think both reflects and answers the concerns with objectivity presented by more traditional historians.

As an example of this transparency consider Foucault’s “four general rules”, presented on p.22-23, which conclude with, “Thus, by analysis of penal leniency as a technique of power, one might understand both how man, the soul, the normal or abnormal individual have come to duplicate crime as objects of penal intervention; and in what way a specific mode of subjection was able to give birth to man as an object of knowledge for a discourse with a ‘scientific’ status.”

A linguistic turn is not intended to be objective presentation of facts, but instead uses observable, documentable events to help put subjective ideas like this into an understandable context.

To put the discussion in the context of Brandan’s prompts, considering the above I believe Foucault presents the agent of change as the ‘body politic’, or as I understand it society in general but with definable power structures to set the rules and then apply the resources to enforce them.  While those in power set the rules, the masses increasingly influence those rules and there are several continual transitions of ‘power’ in its various forms.

Discipline and Punish differs from Bloch’s Feudalism in that Bloch examines specific and observable social structures and behaviors to understand the origins and evolution of Feudalism, while Foucault’s more philosophical approach must go much deeper to questions of the ‘soul’ and understanding of ‘knowledge’.

Ultimately Foucault’s book is an indictment against the system whose historical origins he is presenting.  This is clearly established in the closing paragraph of the first chapter and the books ending.  While the book presents consistent tones of Marxism, these are presented as factual socio-historical events rather than an endorsement of the Marxist perspective.  I believe that while Foucault routinely uses ‘scientific’ analogies and language, he actually opposes their validity and believes that these flawed ‘sciences’, including Marxism, have created an immoral and dysfunctional penal system.