As Doug said, it's a seductive approach. But the problem with Doug's question, I think, is that Foucault wasn't engaged in explanation. He was engaged in *critique*. Genealogy is a *method*, the goal of which, (think of Grimes' post on Angela Davis) was to dislodge the present from the past. He's not interesting in tracing out any kind of inevitability. Instead, using genealogy, he's interested in radically criticizing the givenness, the naturalness, the inevitableness of the present.
In this way, Foucault begins with the present, moving to the past to locate *difference* -- focusing on the discontinuities and allowing them to *remain* unexplained.
He's not interested in causes or locating origins. He's interested in the singularity of events. For Foucault, genealogies examine the local, the ruptures, the discontinuities, knowledges that are considered suspect, illegitimate.
It is a form of critique, not explanation.
At 08:56 PM 4/1/2009, wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
>This has been an interesting discussion, and I am going to get to some of
>the other comments if I can, but I think that there is a fairly
>significant aspect of incarceration in the United States that Foucault's
>analysis cannot explain, and because of its historical frame of analysis,
>does not take into account, which is the way that structural of racial
>domination begin to be reproduced through prison, and criminality. You
>can look at the work of Davis, which draws from Foucault's work (although
>she is not the only one doing this work) for this sort of analysis.
>robert wood
>
> > On Apr 1, 2009, at 3:36 PM, Miles Jackson wrote:
> >
> >> Let's put Foucault's point bluntly: the purpose of the prison system
> >> is to create criminals and expand various social practices and
> >> discourse to "control" criminality. As far as I can see, the U. S.
> >> prison system is a wonderful case study that illustrates Foucault's
> >> point.
> >
> > I find this a seductive explanation, but just how does it happen? Did
> > Nixon sit down and plan it out when he unleashed the war on crime? And
> > what about the role of politicians pandering to the "get tough" crowd
> > of voters? In the U.S., the incarceration boom had pretty broad
> > popular support.
> >
> > Doug
"let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying the rules of debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in which, discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment)."
-- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08
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