Partially Examined Life podcast - Foucault - Discipline & Punish

[@scottstorchfan]

I really appreciate your podcast. Been listening for 5 years but never wrote it. Thanks for being a shining beacon in a dark pandemicdecember in Sweden ❤️

[@cheri238]

This lecture I can relate with. MICHAEL FOUCAULT, "The Birth of the of the Prison." Disipline and Punishment. LOVED this philosopher. Thank you all for your insights. ❤

[@AlondraRuizHernandez]

brilliant discussion! Love hearing about Foucault! Thankyou

[@fruko1980]

enjoyed listening to this. thank you. I'll be checking out some of your other pod-casts too!!

[@MrMarktrumble]

and now every phone is a window to the panopticon....

[@Tamer_108]

Wow, yes. There is something very revealing about seeing things through the lens of power.

[@nickzinhamgjfs]

this is so tru dude

[@lukehall8151]

Well said. Time to master the art of disguise my friends.

[@Plu3e]

Okay, this was fun to listen to. Thanks for this.

[@juliusaugustino8409]

Excellent podcast!

[@munteanumichelle]

This is a great discussion, thank you!

[@Audioventura]

Introduction was hillarious!

[@Deleuzeshammerflow]

I think the role torture had in the process of extracting truth and the entire notion of truth formation through this process is fundamentally important here because from torture, truth extraction, and partial evidence formation and the later integration of 'experts' and doctors is foundational to part of Foucault's life long project. I wish there was more coverage on that

[@TheModernHermeticist]

That was fun, thanks.

[@jamesbaurus5928]

Discipline actually does rise as dominant form of power structure in the 19th century. His analysis locates punishment as the dominant mode of power before the "death of the soveriegn"

[@valibosoi]

“Between the crime and the return to right and virtue, the prison would constitute the ‘space between two worlds’ the place for the individual transformation that would restore to the state the subject it had lost.”

[@jimcypher]

The film THX1138 came to mind.

[@juliusaugustino8409]

So basically the U.S. and the N.S.A. Soviet Union in the 1980's also fits that description really well like the great film 'Lives of others' is basically what's described here

[@mmarkomilovanovic]

6:15 (!!) Foucault did extensively explore ancient Rome and Greece (including Sparta if I remember well) in his History of Sexuality, from a different point of view but conclusions can be drawn on power relations and society in general...

[@awhodothey]

Marko Milovanovic Nothing in that book is done extensively. Nothing.

[@mmarkomilovanovic]

Depends how you define "extensively" - the point is he did analyse ancient Greece, contrary to what was started in the podcast...

[@awhodothey]

Marko Milovanovic Pick any definition. Unless you make up a new one...

[@stephd479]

@@mmarkomilovanovic I think Moose is mad that it isn't a 'history ' in the sense that he understands

[@folumb]

How can I understand these guys better? They've mentioned all these names and ideas I just don't get or have never heard of

[@ChristopherChurnick]

Open ears, fast fingers and a search engine.

[@kategoss5454]

Honestly, finding someone experienced with the subject to tutor you (whether that be through a formal academic body or otherwise) still has no compare to me. I've learned so much more in conversation than I have from youtube- but that's not to say one can't learn on one's own! I would recommend trying to get on a philosophy/history/language course some time though, they often teach some useful techniques and attitudes.

[@VivaLaRevolucionViva]

Well there was a panoptical prison in Colombia, it was builded, now a days I think it is a museum.

[@ChristopherChurnick]

There are panoptical features to a number of U.S. prisons today.

[@Johnconno]

And so began the careers of Jake and Dinos Chapman...

[@EsatBargan]

Garcia James Perez Anthony Lewis Thomas

[@MCConfuz]

This is makin me think I oughtta get some smart guys on my podcast,lol. jk, I love it!

[@bogdaniordan409]

we must defend society, a book

[@camaples]

Greatest philosophy podcast EVAR

[@evad7933]

At least you didn't take a long time to get on task ... unlike in other podcasts.

[@yarazooom]

THKU foucault for exposing sickness of torture n prison system in modern society! ya the king might get his Head cut off too. Czar Nick n Louis XVI. in 2016 US we r all in prison of police state while we live in our home!

[@awhodothey]

Rascal All human life is a prison.

[@Tamer_108]

Where or what is the source of 'power'? It appears that there is no referential source, but instead that power is a central dynamic of human institutions that reflects something about human nature. Now that's not very Foucaultian, but what other explanation is there? This conception of power admits that power is not incidental, it seems an inherency of human experience, and ever more pervasively in the march to modernity. Maybe it is the collective desire for increasing order, and power is the tool by which our lives and so our psyche enjoy a greater sense of orderliness.

[@D13GOR]

Social contract theory, no?

[@kryptonickraze]

+Tamer Sadek I haven't read Foucault but I do know he was heavily influenced by Nietzsche, who held that the will to power is the dominant human instinct and is more or less an outcome of natural selection.

[@HarryS77]

This may not be the best answer, but I remember that Foucault spends a lot of time arguing that the disciplinary society is one in which the sporadic excesses of monarchical punishment where supplanted by a continuous, subtle system of coercion, reformation of criminals, and exercise that was almost inextricably interwoven with the procedure of production-whether the result is a lesson in school, merchandise from a factory, the good prisoner, the trained soldier, etc. Power in this system doesn't spring from no where; it comes from the transformation of the inquisitive, investigative model of the judicial system into the examination model. Power is transformed from a display of violent ritual to a permanent state of discipline that both hides and threatens violence, but only the minimum, or economical amount of violence to effect good behavior. In that regard, you're right: discipline/power is the surplus, if you will, of all of these institutions and mechanisms acting in concert. But I don't think that has to refer to a universal, immutable Human Nature because he's really just concerned, except very tangentially, with institutions in the classical period, how they arose from earlier forms of punishment, why they are so effective, and how they influence the fields of knowledge, specifically the sciences of man. He's writing about power of the type, "discipline," that is, the furtive punishment of constantly being monitored, examined, and analysed, and he ties it to material causes, like the need to produce more goods at higher cost, which leads to requiring a greater surplus from the labor of a multiplicity, and to social causes, like the constant rioting of the peasants and the corruption of the magistrates that lead to juridical reform. In the chapter on the panopticon he also argues that power of this sort can arise from sheer geometry, the arrangement of people so that one group is isolated and observed and the other is the unseen observer. I suppose that tells you something very basic and unspectacular about human nature.

[@tristanhurley9071]

Tamer Sadek The Will to Power.

[@awhodothey]

Harry Stoddard You can't say that power is transformed from one system to another without saying that power objectively exists. That this logical point did not concern Foucault is exactly the issue. It completely undermines his method for assessing the objective existence of everything else. Why should we assume that 'power,' and certainly 'excess power,' are not social constructions? What reason to do so doesn't point to the idea that human brains quite obviously have so preprograming to perceive things like power, sexuality, etc? It's all sophistry. He presents irrational arguments and ultimately doesn't believe he really needs to make a logical argument. At that rate, why not just assert whatever you wish? Why pretend to have any reasons for it?

[@gregpovy]

Society is a prison

[@awhodothey]

Larry N No, life is a prison.

[@awhodothey]

Public executions did not randomly stop being useful in the 19th century. Humans used public torture quite successfully for thousands and thousands of years, and it suddenly vanished in a century. Any way you slice that, it had some ideological cause. If you want to pin its cause on some secondary causation, like economics, the sheer span of millenia means there are still inescapable underlying causal ideological explanations for it, no matter how secondary you pretend those to be. Attributing it to inefficacy is incredibly lazy. Any brief investigation of the cause highlights several logical possibilities- none of which are that public execution was, for the first time, less useful. My observation is that people who refuse to admit that humans have made any significant progress tend to be the most adamant that society change. If you seriously think that being tortured in an actual gulag concentration camp and being a privileged Duke University student who gets racially profiled are basically the same thing on any level, like this professor, you simply do not have the intellectual honesty necessary for this conversation. Put your ideology down for a second, and deal with reality. Nevermind how much more ignorant and miserable these academics would be if they lived in any other millenia, you can't dedicate yourself to studying these topics and being an activist unless you have some hope of a vision for real progress. Why on earth do these fools think they know how to make real progress, when they can't even spot simple logical inconsistencies in their own perspectives of this world?