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3026086 No.3026086[DELETED]  [Reply] [Original]

Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish!

Give me your thoughts, and any discussion points you think are relevant

>> No.3026096

I've got to participate in a group discussion tomorrow on this work, and to say it has been a tough read would be an understatement.

>> No.3026121

>>3026086
Your library probably has JSTOR. Search "Discipline and Punish" & Review in JSTOR. Read any review of the quality of the historiography. Rape the class with critique.

>> No.3026134

>>3026121
Thanks, hadn't thought of that. Have you read D&P recently or are you just being helpful?

>> No.3026149

You're not going to get any help here, especially since we're interested in how it applies to urbanism. The chapter isn't even that long, don't be so lazy.

>> No.3026160

>>3026149
Chapter? It's an entire book!
I'm 145 out of 308 pages in :/

>> No.3026180

>>3026160
oh you're clearly not the person i thought you were. I do feel sorry for you if you have to read the entire thing. Its pretty dense

>> No.3026193

>>3026180
Yea, it's my first semester of grad school and this so far has been the only work to really make me want to say fuck it.

>> No.3026225

I'm about 15 more pages of Panopticism from saying fuck it..

>> No.3026245
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3026245

>>3026086
I've got the same thread going on /b/ and its about as helpful as aids

>> No.3026295

What you guys talking about. I read about 80 pages of that book and it was pretty fluent and pleasant. And I'm not even very used to philosophical books.

>> No.3026323

>>3026295
Give me whatever aderal you're popping please

>> No.3026339

>>3026134
I've read D&P in the last five years. I wasn't impressed. My discipline is history. I've read reviews of D&P in the last five years. They weren't impressed. Their discipline was history. I've had discussions about D&P in the last five years. They weren't impressed. My colleagues are also historians.

Foucault is interesting, but he fails to substantiate his theoretical categories in relation to his historiographical analysis because of the poor quality of his historiography (comes under "making stuff up"). See the discussion of Foucault's misreading of the panopticon and surveillance technologies in the 19th century.

>> No.3026345

>>3026193
Hold it, you're in grad school and you read the text before reading the JSTOR reviews of the text? Wut. Always read the reviews, they tell you how to read the text. Reading a review costs about 20 minutes. Reading a monograph costs around 20 hours.

>> No.3026373

>>3026339
Yea, his total lack of traditional footnotes and his sweeping theories come across as more of a stream of consciousnesses ramble than a history text.

>> No.3026376

>>3026345
It's my first semester after some time off, but yea that makes sense now lol

>> No.3026404

>>3026373
Let me give you guys a free Tutorial.

Dense footnoting is a style in use by Anglophone historians, who rely on a disciplinary methodology to establish "truth" within the limits of the human capacity to read empirical data from texts.

Foucault suggests that all epistemic systems are disciplinary systems of power—namely, that it is impossible to conduct a Marxist critique on the basis of reading texts, because the act of reading a text occurs entirely within a disciplinary epistemology. For Foucault, disciplinary epistemologies are totalising, and inflict themselves on the entirity of society.

So Foucault is an anti-empiricist, idealist (knowledge precedes social being) mystagogue—whose excuse for not obeying the epistemological customs of his discipline are an excess of Frenchness and a claim that all textual readings are corrupted by an underlying system of social control.

Why is he wrong:
a) from an instrumentalist liberal-bourgeois perspective
b) from a Marxist perspective (use anyone before Negri)
c) from his own perspective
d) from the perspective of contemporary critical theory

>> No.3026447

>>3026404
ok, So you've wowed me with your knowledge of vocabulary. Continue please lol
I'll be the first to admit, I've felt in over my head throughout the entirety of D&P and with Foucault in general.

>> No.3026478

>>3026447
>>3026447
It'd help if I knew which discipline you're in. For historians, Foucault's content can be ignored, and outside of cultural history his theory can be too. Even in cultural history the idea of these disciplinary epistemological systems as explained in Foucault comes off second best compared to, for instance, "ideology" or "class consciousness" or "hegemony" or the "dominant ideology" thesis.

I've heard that philosophers take him more seriously—they can shine a stone and the inherent ideas may be more worthy than Foucault argues for them in a historical context.

I've also heard that lit crits take him seriously…I have no idea why…if they want to start tangling with concrete social reality then sociology and history are those ways.

Foucault excites some people, I don't understand why, everything good was already said in Gramsci and Lukacs.

>> No.3026487

>>3026478
I'm in an intro 6000 level Historiography course, we've been tackling the Annales school, Marxist history/theory, and this week is D&P and Foucault.

>> No.3026491

>>3026404
I also dislike Foucault, but he says none of the things you claim he says.

>> No.3026500

>>3026478
Oh, thank you for at least giving me something to work with here lol
You and Spark Notes have been better than anything in the actual text so far....

>> No.3026516

Apart from the fact that internalization of power was nothing new when Foucault wrote (Reich, Stirner, etc.), notice how even despite his ridiculously selective examples, he does not manage to make even half of the examples in the Panopticon chapter exhibit the two primary features of the panopticon: lateral invisibility (inmates cannot coordinate) and internalized surveillance (inmates police themselves just in case). Parisian police hoarding files on everybody? Requires actual surveillance rather than imaginary, no panopticism. I forgot the other examples, they were dumb as well.

>> No.3026526

>>3026491
That's strange, because the SEP says he does, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/

>> No.3026539

>>3026526
>http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/
lol. I don't know whether their depiction of Foucault's notion of episteme is as far off the mark as yours, and frankly I don't care.

>> No.3026541

>>3026526
>http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/
OP here, that's a great link and some great discussion LOL
Keep it coming!

>> No.3026578

>>3026539
Excellent Foucaultian analysis—please extend by failing to meet standard scholarly expectations regarding, say, citation density and appropriate referencing of sources.

>> No.3026626

Historical geneology as a method isn't discredited just because Foucault himself did it poorly in the eyes of historians. Plus he gives us a model for a perspective that isn't either the Great Man theory or Marxism. I'll be goddamned if I have to read anything using either of those models ever again. Consider me already goddamned though, I'm reading a Marxist history right now.

>> No.3026629

>>3026626
>a model for a(n) historical perspective

typo

>> No.3026671

>>3026626
marxist history blows!

>> No.3026751

Is that the one where he says "the soul: the prison of the body"?

>> No.3026769

>>3026751
Yes, that is the French philosophical work you were looking for!

>> No.3026954

>>3026626
You know, as opposed to annales which you're going to accuse of being Marxist. I've seen the use of genealogies well deployed in the history of ideas, by scholars who cite. Notice how this discussion is more or less related to the futility or relying on Foucault for anything?

Also if you find Marxism distasteful then you are going to have a constant uphill battle in history.