> In my view, F's graetest work is Discipline and
> Punish, nominally about the history of punishment, but
> more generally about the mechaniism of bureaucratic
> control in the modern world. He starts out with an
> unforgetable discription of the horrible death of
> regicide, by way of making the point that back in the
> premodern world most people lived off the radar of the
> state altogether, no files, no dossiers, no lists,a nd
> that when you got on that radar, it was often to makea
> spectacualr example of you. He then talks about the
> birth of the prison not as an example of progress and
> humanitarian reform, but as an instance of the needs
> of bureaucrtic systems of managege laefe populations.
> He chapter on The Examination is essential reading for
> anyone who has ever taken a test. I think that D&P is
> one of the immortal works of political philosophy, up
> there with Capital and Mill's On Liberty and Hobbes'
> Leviathan and Rousseau's Social Contract and Rawls'
> Theory of Justice.
>
> F's writing is not opaque. It is plain and
> workmanlike. If there are differences in idiom, bear
> in mind that he is French. If it is a bit difficult,
> that is because it is very deep and he struggling to
> say new and important things. You have to do some work
> too. He is not as easy to understand as Chomsky, who
> is not trying to say anything new or deep in politics,
> but only to remind you of what you already knew.
Of course that doesn't apply for his work on language, but in Chomsky's world there is no such thing as Social Science everything that can be said about society can be written on the back of a postage stamp and only a particular subset of linguistics has pulled itself out of the mud. Hence people like Foucault, who seem to be saying sophisticated things that do not fit on the back of postage stamps must be deceiving the foolish and building cults. There is something nasty about this way of construing the situation, a kind of sugestio, even if it is unintentional... At least it is hypocritical, but in a way it is opposed to independent thinking, it's highly disciplinarian and it extols the authority the True Scientists.
Thiago