Michel Foucault
1926-1984
Genealogy and History of the Present:
The Prison Information Group
“In recent years, prison revolts
have occurred around the
world…. They were revolts, at
the very level of the body,
against the body of the prison …
its very materiality as an
instrument and vector of power.
I would like to write the history
of this prison, with all the
political investment of the body
that it gathers together in its
closed architecture” (DP 30-31).
Damiens (1757)  Time Table (1838)
• 1791 abolition of
Damiens style torture
or the amende
honorable (the first
time!)
• 1830s chain gangs end
in France; Panopticon
popular
• 1850s end of public
execution in France
History of the Present
Why [write the history of
this prison]? Through a
pure anachronism? No, if
one understands by that
writing a history of the
past in the terms of the
present. Yes, if one
understands by that
writing a history of the
present (D&P 31).
As for what motivated me, it was curiosity: not
the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what is
proper for one to know, but the curiosity that
enables one to get free of oneself. What would
be the value of the passion for knowledge if it
resulted only in a certain amount of
knowledgeableness, and not in the knower’s
straying afield of himself?
There are times in life when the question of
knowing if one can think differently than one
thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is
absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking
and reflecting at all…. The object was to learn to
what extent the effort to think one’s own history
can free thought from what it silently thinks,
and so enable it to think differently.”
The Use of Pleasure (1984), 8-9.
Who was Professor Foucault?
1926-1984
Chair of the
History of
Systems of
Thought
December
1970 until his
death in 1984
Sweden, Poland, Tunisia
“Nietzsche was a
revelation to me. I
read him with great
passion and broke with
my life, left my job in
the asylum, left
France: I felt I had
been trapped. Through
Nietzsche, I became a
stranger to all that.”
Oct 25 1982 Technologies of Self, 13.
“For someone who was twenty years old shortly
after World War II ended, … to become a bourgeois
intellectual, a professor, a journalist, a writer or
anything of that sort seemed repugnant. The
experience of the war had shown us the urgent
need of a society radically different from the one in
which we were living, this society that had
permitted Nazism, that had lain down in front of it.
A large sector of French youth had a reaction of
total disgust toward all that. We wanted a world
and a society that were not only different but that
would be an alternative version of ourselves: we
wanted to be completely other in an entirely
different world.”
1978 “Interview with MF” Power, 247-248.
So what did Foucault think he was up to?
“Experiencebook”
Antonin Artaud
Bertolt Brecht
Samuel Beckett
Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison
surveiller-to supervise, survey, observe, catalogue, inspect
Discipline = surveillance + punishment
Senses of the term “discipline”:
• Punishment/ consequences
• Training exercises and regimen
• Academic disciplines you might major in
NORMS bond surveillance and punishment
Power-knowledge relations
Damiens (1757)  Time Table (1838)
• 1791 abolition of
Damiens style torture
or the amende
honorable (the first
time!)
• 1830s chain gangs end
in France; Panopticon
popular
• 1850s end of public
execution in France
Power Produces
“We must cease once and for all from describing
the effects of power in negative terms: it
‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censors,’ it ‘abstracts,’
it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact, power produces;
it produces reality; it produces domains of
objects and rituals of truth. The individual and
the knowledge gained of that individual belong
to this production” (D&P, 194).
The Eye/I
“Our society is not
one of spectacle, but
of surveillance…. [in
which] the individual
is carefully fabricated,
according to a whole
technique of forces
and bodies.”
(D&P, 217)
Military
The Paradox of Subject Formation
“Discipline increases the forces of the body
(in economic terms of utility [and
vocational ability and empowerment])
and diminishes these same forces
(in political terms of obedience).”
(D&P, 138)
Schools
Hospitals
Leisure (Versaille Zoo)
Prisons
“A whole problematic then
develops: that of an architecture
that is no longer built simply to be
seen (the ostentation of palaces),
or to observe external space
(fortresses), but to permit an
internal, articulated and detailed
control – to render visible those
who are inside it; an architecture
that would operate to transform
individuals: to act on those it
shelters, to provide a hold on
their conduct, to carry the effects
of power right to them, to make it
possible to know them, to alter
them. Stones can make people
docile and knowable” (DP 172).
Making a Murderer
This modern soul “is
produced permanently
around, on and within the
body by the functioning of a
power that is exercised on
those who are punished –
and more generally, on those
one supervises, trains and
corrects, over madmen,
children at home and at
school, the colonized, over
those who are stuck at a
machine and supervised for
the rest of their lives”
(D&P, 29).
Foucault: Surrealist Poet of History
“Cultivate your own legitimate
strangeness.” -- Rene Char
History of Madness (1961)
“The history of humanity is one
long synonym for the same word.
Duty is to change it.”
–Rene Char
Care of the Self (1984).