Weekend roundup

[khaosworks]

Had a few fellow students over for dinner after Cole's Theory and Practice class yesterday - in which I ranted a bit about my general disagreement with Michel Foucault's arguments and conclusions in "Discipline & Punish" (although I can't fault his methods... well, mostly). I'll save the real rant for the paper I'm supposed to do on it. Dr Hoffer has been hinting that since my legal background is what makes me unique, I might consider doing legal history. After all, Civil War historians are dime a dozen. He's got a point, but I'm hoping to delay consideration of what I want to do until next semester, just to mull it over. One of the MA class, Liz, has already switched her field from civil rights to Holocaust studies.

Back to Friday dinner: it was an all-Asian crowd, with Ichiro Miyata, Boram Yi (a Korean history grad student) and her boyfriend Jason, a Business PhD. candidate from China. She also brought along her room-mate Jessica, who's an Education Master's student.

I cooked Mom's recipe for Lion's Head stew, which she'd e-mailed me a couple of days before. It turned out much better than my last attempt... well, better in the sense that it was closer to what Mom usually makes at home. As a second dish, I did some egg noodles stir-fried with onions, garlic, bean sprouts, chestnuts, baby corn, chicken, shrimp and ham, seasoned with soy sauce and a splash of fish sauce, garnished with coriander. Boram brought over half a strawberry cheesecake she'd made. The food was excellently received all around, and the conversation and company were good. I need to do more of this.

The additional shelves from Walmart arrived during the week, and I've put up two of them - it spreads things out a bit, and my CD collection is up on the shelf, although I haven't organized it at all. Now all that remains to be unpacked from the boxes are my games and various action figures... and I'm not quite sure where to put them, or even if the last shelf can contain it all.

Doing a little tidying this morning, and then it's going back to re-reading Hoffer's book on the Salem Witch Trials - American Legal History is a split-level graduate/undergrad class, and so I'll be doing a midterm on Thursday with the proles. That, and I've got to pull together a tentative bibliography for the research paper on Miranda v. Arizona for Legal History as well.

*Sigh* I need to find time to listen to "He Jests At Scars..." and "Deadline", the two new Doctor Who Unbound CDs that finally arrived from Big Finish, too.

Comments

Interesting...

[tronchin.livejournal.com]

We are exactly flipped in our opinions of Foucault. I'm basically convinced by his conclusions, but his methodology drives me batty.

You know that "Farscape" comic with the mathematical formula on the board and in the middle of all the computations is the phrase "miracle happens."

That's what it feels like to me when I read Foucault. There's no cause and effect, no change over time. Nope. Instead, you just wake up one day in the nineteenth century and everything has changed. How that happened is no concern of Foucault. (Incidentally, I think that's why it's so hard for historians to argue against his conclusions. We have completely different tools in our tool boxes. And by we, I mean me. ;-)

Good luck on your paper! Foucault is a fun one! (Oh my God, am I really that much of a history geek? Did I just call Foucault fun?)

Re: Interesting...

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

[T]hat's why it's so hard for historians to argue against his conclusions. We have completely different tools in our tool boxes.

My feeling exactly. We're inclined to the specific, the details, and the documentation. Whereas what we need to respond to postmodernists and deconstructionists and other -ists is a more philosophical, abstract bent. I don't do abstract. I do theory grounded in examples.

Re: Interesting...

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

The thing about Foucault is precisely that - he doesn't give a shit about cause and effect. But you know he's seen it. You know he's read the material, because it's there in the bloody bibliography. But he doesn't tell you, doesn't show you all the stuff that's going on in his head because he's not writing it for historians, not writing for anyone except his own idiosyncratic POV. He's trying to make a point, so he only shows the evidence that he wants to show and leaves you to assume that the rest that he doesn't is stuff he's already dismissed.

Which is horrible historical writing, but that's not quite what he's driving at. Ultimately Foucault in the so-called "geneaological" phase, stripped of the context of whether he's talking about penal systems or sexuality (bad pun unintended), is his idea that statements mean something, that microrelations, discourses at that small level interacting give rise to an intricate web that can lead to a better understanding of the bigger picture. Look small, think big.

"Discipline & Punish" is his argument that the discourse of modern liberal society (discourse being the technical term) is unable to create any kind of penal system except the type that is essentially flawed in its purpose. That the idea of the prison and its power relations can be extended to the structure of the society itself.

Foucault and I part ways on many points. We see the same things, but we see it so differently. He focuses on the change of punishment from public to private and sees it as symptomatic of punishment being turned into part of the values of society. Me, I see it as symptomatic of society being unable to justify, in the face of increasing scientific knowledge, the "barbarism" (for want of a better word at this point) of the public spectacle. Society simply has become more squeamish as life expectancies increase, as social mobility increases, as life becomes less cheap.

Society still demands punishment - my view, based on my own observations first-hand of the way the criminal justice system works and the way the ordinary public seem to perceive and interact with it, cleaves to Durkheim, who saw punishment as an expression of the outrage of society and the state being an agent of same. But the climax of the drama of criminal justice has shifted from punishment being seen to happen to the moment of judgement. After that, society doesn't care what happens to the prisoner. Foucault seems to believe that there is still a power relationship going on that is continuous up to the ultimate "rehabilitation" of the prisoner.

I see a break - that the prison system has a power relationship, but it is not the same kind of interest as the public has. The public outrage has already been satisfied. Whatever else the prison system does to the prisoner, try to rehabilitate him, get him to work, early release, etc. is because of necessity - materialistic reasons, if you will - of dealing with this guy that now society has forgotten but dumped on the prison system. The whole thing is theatre - it still is. But the climatic moment has shifted, and there's a whole lot going on after the curtain has dropped which the ordinary citizen doesn't really give a shit about, in the end.

Anyway. There might be something more in this, if I develop it further.

Re: Interesting...

[maedbh7.livejournal.com]

I am greatly heartened to read that folks I respect as more learned than me also find Foucaults works to be inherently flawed. Is there a particular Durkheim text with which one should begin?

And please, once you've finished the paper, I would love to read it. -H...

Re: Interesting...

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

It's only going to be like a five pager... assuming I can get off my butt and do it. Agh. I can't believe I'm going to be doing a midterm!

Anyway, Durkheim. I didn't read all his stuff - just the material I was assigned when I did criminology and jurisprudence in law school. He's better known for his concept of "anomie", the feeling of despair when society is in crisis, outlined in Suicide (1897). The one where he discusses the nature of crime and punishment is The Division of Labor in Society (1893).