[lbo-talk] Marx without quotation marks

[Voyou]

On Wed, 2009-04-01 at 02:24 +0100, Philip Pilkington wrote: 
> I'm actually not being a smartass when I say this, but: did you read what I
> wrote? This has nothing to do with translation issues or anything else. My
> claim is that these institutions which are supposed to generate the norms,
> value judgements etc. are totally fucked and they no longer function. The
> prisons, for example, nowadays, with their serious overcrowding seem to
> resemble some sort of basic social segregation where troubled elements can
> be fenced in from society. There is very little in the way of aspiring to
> inculcate a regime of norms into the prisoner.

It may be a mistake to see this as a failure of the prison system,
though - after all, Foucault was very interested in how systems achieve
their wider function by not achieving their stated aims. The last part
of Discipline and Punish is all about this - about how the carceral
system produces delinquency, a break-down of social order that provides
the pretext for continuing low-level intervention by the police. If this
system of control is now moving from outside the prison into it, that's
not necessarily a failure of the prison system, but rather a modulation
of the way it functions.

-- 

     "The slightly richer ... eat in semi-darkness, preferring 

      candles to electricity. These candles make me laugh. All the   

      electricity belongs to the bourgeoisie, yet they eat by 

      candle-end. They have an unconscious fear of their own      

      electricity. They are embarrassed, like the sorcerer who has

      called up spirits he is unable to control."

                                                  -- Vladimir Mayakovsky
http://blog.voyou.org/                                   voyou at voyou.org