[lbo-talk] Marx without quotation marks

[Philip Pilkington]

A comment or two on Foucault, 'cause I was thinking about him recently. I
was browsing my excessive digital TV channels recently and came upon a
lovely piece of home entertainment. It was a show that consisted in showing
violent criminals in overcrowded prisons being violently suppressed by
over-enthusiastic prison wardens. After watching/morally wanking for about
ten minutes I thought "Wow! Foucault's "Panopticon" model really is pretty
dead!". I'd thought something along these lines for some time, but actually
seeing it in a prison was cream on the cake. The prison system here was
nothing like the one which Foucault described and made his model for the
"disciplining" of society. Here was a system which actually allowed
gang-formation inside the prison walls; a system where drugs were easier to
obtain than porn; a system where brutal force was daily applied to the
inmates. There was no "disciplining" here. Order itself was tenuous.

A few days later I was reading one of Jacques Lacan's seminars and I
stumbled on something really interesting. In this seminar Lacan - before
Foucault made it popular, incidentally - said a few brief things about
Jeremy Bentham and his theory of fictions. (Its here, turn to pages 11 &
12... if you have a supple neck, that is:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/7102137/Lacan-Seminar-7-the-Ethics-of-Psychoanalysis).

What Lacan's saying is that Bentham's fictions and consequently Foucault's
"Panoptic Gaze" is basically what Lacan calls the "Symbolic". This has to be
taken in two senses: Firstly, it means something like the implicit rules
regulating society and mediating between various individuals. This
encompasses everything from the "Law" in contemporary society to the myth
structures which organise primitive societies. Something like the "moral
structures" that Durkheim talks about. Secondly, this concept refers to the
Freudian unconscious which Lacan believes can only be influenced under
conditions of sufficient social integration. These two meanings are, of
course, dialectically related.

Anyways, I mentioned a while ago in a different context that the extreme
manifestations of violence we see today (school shootings etc.) was due to
extreme social anomie and that I believed that this could be related to the
crisis in psychotherapy today - which Foucault, to bring him into the fold
once more, claimed (and I largely agree) was essentially a mechanism to
re-integrate individuals into society. All of this was, I won't say nice,
but it certainly fit nicely. My point is that Foucault's conception of
society is not that relevant today. On the one hand "disciplining"
mechanisms have become extremely vulgar, not even bothering to hide behind
moralism, while at the same time a violence bubbles beneath the surface
ready to erupt at any time - the modern prison exemplifying this. On the
other we have a society of people who prove extremely resistant to
psychotherapy and a breakdown of proper psychiatric facilities. This again
leads to what psychoanalysts refer to as people "acting out" in their
day-to-day lives which is... you guessed it: a form of social violence (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting_out).

It looks like Foucault's conception of society as merely a summation of pure
power relations has come true. Fun times, he should be proud!