On Apr 1, 2009, at 4:36 PM, Miles Jackson wrote:
> According to F, the modern penal system is an emergent property of
> social/discursive formations; it is not a product of individual
> planning and motives. (Man, you walked into that one!)
Yeah yeah yeah. I've read Foucault, a fair amount in fact. And I admire a lot of it a lot. But really, you can use this sort of formulation to say pretty much whatever the fuck you want. You never have to prove anything - you just say "the episteme made me do it." You never have to contend with the facts that SA brought up, like the trajectory of crime rates - or the fact that other societies didn't have the same crime or incarceration booms as the U.S. Why?
Tell it to the judge, man.