> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John Lacny" <jplst15+ at pitt.edu>
> Christian Parenti, in
> his book *Lockdown America*, does an excellent job
> of taking apart
> "left-wing" economic determinist analyses of state
> repression: the US system
> isn't building prisons for narrow profit reasons
> (prison labor is not
> terribly profitable to use, and private prisons are
> a small part of the
> prison-industrial complex and far less profitable
> than other industries --
> like the military especially -- that are lavished
> with state largesse in any
> case); rather, state repression is a way to contain
> the immense
> contradictions of the system AS A WHOLE by
> imprisoning the "surplus
> population."
As I recall it, Parenti's book is a good example of how Foucault and materialism might work together.
One question that still stays with me from _Lockdown America_ is about the significance of the reemergence of the spectacle of police violence. I think the example in the book is from cop tactics in Fresno. I wonder though, with violence such a part of the media spectacle, isn't street cop violence in a lot of ways an invisible spectacle, its disciplinary underpinnings already successful in other ways (in the already formed soul of the neighborhood)? It certainly lacks the central, imperious organization and will behind the beginning scene of _Discipline and Punish_. When a neighborhood is "balkanized" to what extent does violence become naturalized, thus losing the disciplinary value of spectacle we read about in Foucault? I suppose this precisely is an indicator of how successful the discipline has been.
Alec
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