>>>There is nothing in Discipline and Punish, for example, once we
>>>leave out the French philosophy, w hich isn't that much of it, that
>>>Marxists and historical materialists should not hestitate to adopt
>>>if it had adequate empirical support.
>>>
>>>--jks
>>
>>What political direction, if any, does _Discipline and Punish_
>>suggest, though? Foucault ably makes an implicit argument that the
>>result of Benthamite reforms (emphasis on the rehabilitation of the
>>soul, etc.) may be an even more effective instrument of social
>>control than spectacular torture of the body conducted in the name of
>>pre-modern sovereigns, though the advocacy of Benthamite reforms was
>>cloaked in the mantle of humanitarianism. In the USA, however, the
>>trend in criminal justice, for the last couple of decades, has been
>>toward the reversals of the very reforms that were objects of
>>Foucault's critique: return of capital punishment; execution of the
>>mentally ill or retarded; trials of juvenile offenders as adults;
>>reintroduction of chain gangs; and so on (though prison overcrowding
>>has also led to a counter-trend that calls for addiction treatment &
>>the like rather than incarceration) -- in short, preference for
>>punishment rather than rehabilitation (symbolized by the execution of
>>Karla Fay Tucker).
>>
>>Yoshie
>
>What's your point, Yoshie, that we should support humanitarianism in
>prison reform against current barbarism, and that F's theory about
>how discourses of repression reflect institutional imperatives is
>defective because--because what? Because it offers aid and comfort
>to barbarism? Because ir criticises humanitarian reforms? Because
>it's not true?
Earlier in the thread, you said that "F the SoK [Foucault the Sociologist of Knowledge] is Weberian of a high order," & Jim Farmelant mentioned that "In his last years, Foucault began to take an interest in liberal thought, and he wrote on such people as Hayek." While Foucault's description of instances of panopticism, bio politics, governmentality, etc. is compelling in the sense that he captures a political logic of the modern welfare state (full-blown especially in the era of high social democracy -- _the era that has already passed_), Foucault suggests that what he found offensive is _inherent_ either in modernity (a la Weber) or in anything more than the minimal state (a la Hayek). So, Foucault's theory has a pessimistic cast especially in his Weberian strain, for he practically argues that modernity represents no progress whatsoever over the pre-modern state of affairs & that there is no way out of the iron cage that he describes, only an ever-present dialectic of power & resistance to it. That -- substitution of modernity for class relations as the cause of un-freedom -- is a theoretical error.
Yoshie