FoucaultIn the original text, Discipline and Punish discusses a very long and drawn out
torture scene. They continued to torture the body after the guy was dead. He argues
that discipline is more a performance.
A. Why do we have the death penalty?
1. Warning
a. A child does something bad so you punish them so they
don’t do it again
2. Eye for an Eye (Bible)
a. A child does something bad and as a parent you have to
punishment to show that the structure of parenting has
power
B. Foucault argues that neither of these ideas are important when it comes to
punishment
1. Hegemony- when we have a social system it doesn’t really matter
if you discipline someone for doing something wrong, power is
simplistic
2. Power becomes discourse, it is removed from just the judge or
police or dentist. This is representative of the distribution of
power in the social fabric of our society. We don’t just speak out
society or culture, we speak power. Discipline is an expression of
this power. What is important is the distribution of power, and
that power is centered in the base. We enforce this structure on
ourselves (like saves ratting out other slaves for rebellion).
a. Example: Star fucking; being obsessed with celebrities and
then ultimately want to destroy them to show dominance.
3. Movement from disciplinarily to govern-mentality
a. We think constantly about discipline, govern-mentality is
when you yourself get angry at someone transgressing. You
are invested because they are transgressing and that is
something you cannot do.
b. Transgression- the idea that we do not transgress (that we
more across the lines, you cross a social boundary.) An
example is trespassing.
i. If we transgress we will be punished by the power
structure
ii. If we transgress, we will be punished by our peers
iii. We use this distributed power to define ourselves,
and we ostracize others for transgressing
c. Punishment is just to remind us where the lines are, the
discipline is not the actual punishment. Peer pressure is
d.
e.
f.
g.
what the punishment is, like people will make fun of you for
wearing a certain type of shoe.
Can you ever act outside the system? No according to
Foucault. Like how hardpunk music was transgressive for a
very short time before it was accepted by the base again,
same with gangster rap. It is the process of appropriation
and reappropriation.
Transgression is a cycle, what was once “on the edge” then
just pulled into the norm, and then you must break out
again. Kind of like Marx’s eternal revolution.
It is nearly impossible to purely conform or purely
transgress. Example; you’re part of a purely prep group in
high school and all of the sudden you go gothic. You really
aren’t just purely transgressing because you’re just
appropriating to the gothic group.
By de-centering power, power has become sustained. Our
desire to control one another is what keeps power alive.
Killing a king won’t make everyone free.
4. Major works: Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish,
History of Sexuality Vol 1.
a. Madness and Civilization- studied mental institution
b. If you want to understand the power of institutions, you
must do case studies of governing institutions.
c. Studied the institutions of hegemony
i. Prisons/ Military/ Police
ii. School
iii. Church
iv. Mental institutions
d. Discusses how difficult revolution and resistance is, that is
is almost impossible to change the system.
i. He was constantly being active and speaking out
because it’s the drops of water that break down the
rocks
e. Mental institutions- Foucault was interested in the
structure of the institution and who went to these
institutions
i. That “crazy” is a hegemonic construction
ii. The norm defines the society, the people who are
crazy are the ones that act outside these norms
iii. Madness is all in the eye of the beholder, mental
institutions are about treating people who are not
mad. By constructing a “crazy” it is providing a
contrast to define what is not crazy.
iv. Systems like this serve two purposes
1. We pathologize certain behaviors
2. We cure those behaviors
v. Prisons don’t just contain problems, but that we
warn people to stay in line. We create an “other.”
Break down one institution and you just create
another institution. Like “we didn’t need jail when
we had slavery.”
vi. Once we say black men are in prison, we can
construct a signifying chain from that. Constructions
happen from an institutional basis. Like because
there are lots of black men in jail, we see black men
as threatening.
Foucault’s History of Sexuality
a. Repression
b. Sexuality based on repression
a. Repression isn’t about pushing down sexuality, but rather defining
sexuality.
b. This is when he discusses how to chart discourse, that our ideas of
sexuality are based on how we talk about it. Like in the Victorian era
they talked about how sex was bad all the time, so they probably had
weird kinky sex all the time because they were repressed. If they
really thought it was bad, they wouldn’t have said it so many times.
They are making this stark comparison because they see something
relevant to themselves that they don’t want to be there.
c. Making argument about different groups of people
a. Children
i. Constructed as asexual, but children are very sexual. If you
restrict it or punish a child for touching themselves, the
repression can associate sexuality with violence. Repression is
violence, and violence creates violence. You can respond to
external pressures with sexuality because that’s one of the first
things to be repressed. Prey to sexuality.
b. Women
i. Young- hypersexual (seduction), fertile, antisexual (innocence)
ii. Old – hypersexual (cougar, predator), postsexual (you were hot
once, don’t you want to have sex), asexual (grandmas having
sex)
c. Married people- repressed after fertility, healthy sexuality, “mature
enough to not have sex”
d. The perverse/deviant- creeper, predator, voyeurism, obsession,
pedofilia, (all of the –filia’s), hypersexual
e. Men