coerced treatment

Alec Ramsdell aramsdell at yahoo.com
Wed Jun 13 09:48:19 PDT 2001


Yoshie wrote:


> I'm not arguing for coercion.

Yeah, I didn't take it that way.

I'm
> saying that the
> distinction between explicit coercion by the state
> (e.g., sentencing
> an offender to mandatory addiction treatment) and
> other measures
> (e.g., voluntary participation in support groups)
> can't be very well
> sustained on the Foucauldian grounds, since Foucault
> is not so much a
> civil libertarian as a genealogist of "the
> technologies of the self."

There is that impasse between the institutional analytics and the technologies of the self (or, sociology of knowledge and philosophy).


> From the Foucauldian point of view, to take just
> one example, the
> self-help narrative of "hitting the bottom" &
> seeking salvation from
> the pit of addiction, through the "confession" of
> one's self first as
> an "addict" & then as an "addict in recovery," may
> be seen as the
> creation of the soul that imprisons the body, even
> though the body in
> question is outside of the literal prison walls.

Most definitely.


> That is because capitalism as a mode of production
> demands that one
> submits (if one can) to a limited range of models of
> personhood
> compatible with capitalist class relations:
> utility-maximizing
> economic man (a la Bentham); & legal person with
> autonomy & free
> will, morally independent of causal determination,
> thus fully
> responsible for one's actions (a la Kant). When one
> fails to
> approximate the models offered by Kant & Bentham,
> one becomes (by
> default as it were) subject to the medical model . .
.

This is why I was wondering about capital, or the capitalist mode of production, being the prison of the soul, which is the prison of the body. The hermeneutics of self involving confession is so clearly the necessary flip side of the responsible, positive model.

Alec

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