But we can surely accept the general proposition that, in our societies, the systems of punishment are to be situated in a certain 'political economy" of the body:
Nonsense! Punishments tend to involve the infliction of fines or the confiscation of property as well as custodial sentences. There is no 'political economy' of the body unless it is the case that prisoners are cut open and their organs are extracted and sold to the highest bidder.
even if they do not make use of violent or bloody punishment, even when they use 'lenient' methods involving confinement or correction, it is always the body that is at issue
Foucault has made a great discovery. When a guy is sent to prison, his body too is incarcerated! Who would have thunk it?
- the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission.
But are prisoners required to submit or be docile while paying customers sodomize them? No. Foucault may be describing the victims of sex trafficking. He is not speaking of prisons in 'our societies'.
It is certainly legitimate to write a history of punishment against the background of moral ideas or legal structures. But can one write such a history against the background of a history of bodies, when such systems of punishment claim to have only the secret souls of criminals as their objective?
But no 'system of punishment' has ever made so absurd a claim. If they had, wealthy people could have bought some nice 'secret souls' for themselves and then traded them on the Satanic or Angelic Stock Exchange.
Historians long ago began to write the history of the body.
No they didn't. This is because the human body in its present form existed long before there was writing, let alone historians who could write.
They have studied the body in the field of historical demography or pathology;
No. Ask a historian who has written a book about medieval dungeons what the average size of the dicks of the prisoners was and he will say he doesn't know. Why? Because historians don't actually study bodies. Even a guy writing a history of the Trump administration hasn't examined Trump's body though Trump is still alive and would want historians to give a favourable account of his dick.
they have considered it as the seat of needs and appetites,
because the body does actually have needs and appetites.
as the locus of physiological processes and metabolisms,
what other locus could there be?
as a target for the attacks of germs or viruses; they have shown to what extent historical processes were involved in what might seem to be the purely biological base of existence; and what place should be given in the history of society to biological 'events' such as the circulation of bacilli, or the extension of the life-span (cf. Le Roy-Ladurie).
But this does not involve the study of the body. At best, it involves looking at data sets of a type assembled by Immunologists or those concerned with Public Health.
But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it,
No they don't. You can't tell by examining a body- living or dead- whether it was invested by anything of a political sort. You may be able to find bacteria or viruses of an invasive type but not 'infection' by political ideas or relations.
mark it,
Did De Gaulle tattoo Foucault? No. It was Giscard d'Estaing who branded him in the buttocks.
train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.
People, not bodies, are trained or tortured or forced to carry out tasks. We don't say, 'I trained a body weighing 90 kilograms to perform the duties of a Cost and Management Accountant' . We say 'I trained Iyer- that fat bastard- to keep the books for my enterprise.'
This political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination;
This simply isn't true. The body is invested with nothing. People are. True, a person has a body but a body also has a shadow. We may as well speak of the shadow being invested with 'relations of power and domination'. But why stop there? Why not say 'farts are invested with power and domination'?
but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which need is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated and used);
No. A person may contribute labour power under conditions of complete freedom as well of subjection. I need to take a shit right now. Pray tell, what 'meticulously prepared and calculated' political instrument is represented by my need to fart and shit?
the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body.
Maybe, Foucault's readers thought that Marx or some other such nutter had made such a claim. But this simply isn't true.
This subjection is not only obtained by the instruments of violence or ideology; it can also be direct, physical, pitting force against force, bearing on material elements, and yet without involving violence; it may be calculated, organized, technically thought out; it may be subtle, make use neither of weapons nor of terror and yet remain of a physical order.
Only if my need to take a shit right now is actually a meticulously prepared political instrument.
That is to say, there may be a 'knowledge' of the body that is not exactly the science of its functioning, and a mastery of its forces that is more than the ability to conquer them: this knowledge and this mastery constitute what might be called the political technology of the body.
Which features 'meticulously prepared political instruments' such as my need to take a dump real bad.
Of course, this technology is diffuse, rarely formulated in continuous, systematic discourse; it is often made up of bits and pieces; it implements a disparate set of tools or methods. In spite of the coherence of its results, it is generally no more than a multiform instrumentation.
I could shit in my bed instead of in the toilet. I suppose that is what makes my need to shit a 'multiform instrumentation'.
Moreover, it cannot be localized in a particular type of institution or state apparatus.
So, there is no 'Department of farting' at the Home Office. Sad.
For they have recourse to it; they use, select or impose certain of its methods.
Who the fuck does Foucault think is 'imposing' my need to shit on me?
But, in its mechanisms and its effects, it is situated at a quite different level. What the apparatuses and institutions operate is, in a sense, a micro-physics of power,
Physics is its own 'micro-physics' or 'quantum mechanics'. How fucking stupid was Foucault?
whose field of validity is situated in a sense between these great functionings and the bodies themselves with their materiality and their forces.
There is no such field. Not in any fucking sense- save nonsense. Field theories incorporate objects with mass as well as massless energetic particles.
Foucault, it seems, wasn't just ignorant of history. He also didn't know Physics or Mathematics or Economics or anything else. Still, he got very very excited by talking about docile bodies being 'marked' and 'tortured'. Also, he discovered that Neo-Liberalism is trying to get me to take a dump probably because my turds are very valuable. I should go shit on Foucault's grave as a mark of my veneration for his great discovery. This would make his ghost very happy indeed.
2 comments:
it's safe to assume he didn't know much history since his history of human sexuality doesn't involve any women at all (that and because he was a flamboyant homosexualist)
Foucault literally 'died of ignorance'. Interestingly, his psychiatrist was really smart and had contributed to the development of lithium salts in the treatment of paranoid schizophrenia. The Maoists drove this psychiatrist out of the profession in the early Seventies. (Foucault had briefly posed as a Maoist after 1968). Thankfully, the psychiatrist had a good French prose stye (i.e. he wrote high falutin' nonsense) and thus got elected to the French Academy. Philosophy is a compulsory subject for the School leaving Exam. It has rotted the brains of the French. That is the attraction of 'Continental Philosophy'. You can pose as a Leftie while writing ignorant nonsense.
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