Foucault on every corner

This is a post that I wrote a few months ago and posted here on the Berkeley Language Center's blog Found in Translation (in the blogroll on the right). This was (obviously) while I was immersed in Foucault readings for a class I'm assisting in, called Language and Power, taught by Claire Kramsch. (Sorry about the wacky spacing between all the images)

Over the coming months, I'll try to (cross)post on multimodality-related topics here; I'm looking forward to a blogging-dialog with you all here! --Dave

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"There is no difference between marks and words in the sense that there is between observation and accepted authority, or between verifiable fact and tradition. The process is everywhere the same: that of the sign and its likeness, and this is why nature and the word can intertwine with one another to infinity, forming, for those who can read it, one vast single text." (The order of things, p. 34)

From Foucault on every corner

"The fact that the crime and the punishment were related and bound up in the form of atrocity was not the result of some obscurely accepted law of retaliation. It was the effect, in the rites of punishment, of a certain mechanism of power: of a power that not only did not hesitate to exert itself directly on bodies, but was exalted and strengthened by its visible manifestations; of a power that asserted itself as an armed power whose functions of maintaining order were not entirely unconnected with the functions of war; of a power that presented rules and obligations as personal bonds, a breach of which constituted an offence and called for vengeance; of a power for which disobedience was an act of hostility, the first sign of rebellion, which is not in principle different from civil war; of a power that had to demonstrate not why it enforced its laws, but who were its enemies, and what unleashing of force threatened them; of a power which, in the absence of continual supervision, sought a renewal of its effect in the spectacle of its individual manifestations; of a power that was recharged in the ritual display of its reality as ‘super-power’" (Discipline and punish, p. 57).

From Foucault on every corner

"Discourse will become the vehicle of the law: the constant principle of universal recoding" (Discipline and punish, p. 112).

From Foucault on every corner

"Codification, definition of offences, the fixing of a scale of penalties, rules of procedure, definition of the role of magistrates…provided, in effect, by means of the theory of interests, representations and signs, by the series and geneses that it reconstituted, a sort of general recipe for the exercise of power over men: the ‘mind as a surface of inscription for power, with semiology as its tool; the submission of bodies through the control of ideas; the analysis of representations as a principle in a politics of bodies that was much more effective than the ritual anatomy of torture and execution" (Discipline and punish, p. 102).

From Foucault on every corner

"...the disciplinary institutions secreted a machinery of control that functioned like a microscope of conduct; the fine, analytical divisions that they created formed around men an apparatus of observation, recording and training" (Discipline and punish, p. 173).

From Foucault on every corner

"Disciplinary power ... is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection" (Discipline and punish, p. 187).

From Foucault on every corner

"It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form” (The order of things, p. xxiii).

From Foucault on every corner

Working List of References - AERA 2009

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