Against Universalism

Against the possibility of contemporary universalism, [Foucault] makes a double critique. First, there is his substantive historical demonstration of absent reason. The rationalization of modern society, as manifest particularly in the thought and activity of the scientifically trained professions, is a fraud (e.g. Foucault 1977, 1978). Professionals actually engage in the manipulation of reason; their ministrations are forms of surveillance, their goal technical control. Enlightenment universalism amounts to [388] the particularism of power; it results in the suppression of subjectivity, not in the exercise of present reason.
Foucault’s second critique is an analytical one. In his later work he insists on the virtually complete identity of knowledge, or discourse, with power. In doing so, the very possibility of decentered experience is denied. The subject, Foucault is fond of repeating, is completely constituted by discourse. In this way, discourse becomes both the basis for power and merely its manifestation in another form. Because truth is relative to discourse, it is impossible to appeal to universalizing standards against worldly power: “Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power… Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true” (Foucault 1980: 131). To set about rationally to evaluate the logical consistency, theoretical implications, or explanatory value of a given discourse is obviously a waste of time.

- Jeffrey Alexander, "The Post positivist "Epistemological Dilemma"" pg. 337-338, POSTMODERNISM & SOCIAL THEORY Ed. Seidman and Wagner

on sensitivity (not)

Humanitarianism is found only in a small minority of highly sensitive people…. Such humanitarianism is too easily confused with a somewhat different sentiment, that of prudence…. But it is one thing to condemn pornographic films because they are immoral and sully the viewer’s soul; it is quite another to condemn them because they turn the human persons who are their actors into objects.
[Gladiators] … aroused ambivalent feelings, both attraction and a prudent repulsion. On the one hand there was the taste for watching people suffer, the fascination with death, the pleasure of seeing corpses; on the other hand there was the anguish of seeing that within the very confines of public order it was legal to murder not only enemies or criminals but others as well. Society no longer provided a bulwark against the law of the jungle.

- pg. 148, “Foucault Revolutionizes History” - Paul Veyne, transl. Catherine Porter - 1978

On the dangers of the gladiators versus that of the stage

While the pleasure of seeing blood flow brings intrinsic satisfaction, the pleasure of onstage indecency inciters spectators to lascivious conduct in their daily lives.

- “Foucault Revolutionizes History” - Paul Veyne, pg. 147 (of Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Davison) transl. Catherine Porter - 1978

on drawing large generalizations, terrifying universality of prisons

What is now imposed on penal justice as its point of application, its "useful" object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual. The extreme point of penal justice under the Ancien Regime was the infinite segmentation of the body of the regicide: a manifestation of the strongest power over the body of the greatest criminal, whose total destruction made the crime explode into its truth. The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgment that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity. The public execution was the logical culmination of a procedure governed by the Inquisition. The practice of placing individuals under "observation" is a natural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labor, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

- Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 485-486

on disciplinary comparison

If a historical equivalent or at least a point of comparison had to be found for [disciplinary techniques], it would be rather in the "inquisitorial" technique.

- Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 484

how the new state emerged

It is a double process, then: an epistemological "thaw" through a refinement of power relations; a multiplication of the effects of power through the formation and accumulation of new forms of knowledge.

- Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 483

on discipline

In short, to substitute for a power that is manifested through the brilliance of those who exercise it, a power that insidiously objectifies those on whom it is applied; to form a body of knowledge about these individuals, rather than to deploy the ostentatious signs of sovereignty.
- Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 481

on master controls

That is why discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways; it establishes calculated distributions. It must also master all the forces that are formed from the very constitution of an organized multiplicity; it must neutralize the effects of counter-power that spring from them and which form a resistance to the power that wishes to dominate it: agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations, coalitions -- anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions.

- Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 480

on panopticonism and the state of the self

It is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.

- Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 478

bodies, i have in mind

A "discourse": in the first instance, a plurality of words, a diversity of elements come from elsewhere or a former time; but also a singularity, orienting these fragments of divers pasts, adjusting them to tally with the initial spell, and fashioning them into the language of the same ineffable something that had been given first in the form of a smell. (37)

Thus broken down into so many divisions and subdivisions, the primitive "flair" is transformed into verbal analysis.
That strange discourse [of questioning the possessed nuns] establishes a code. Proper names create points of reference and delimit regions within the neutral anonymity of the diabolical terrain. The naming might appear to be a deciphering, as if the goal were first to delineate, in that mass of gesticulations [which reveal the specific demon], the nocturnal forces moving the bodies from below, and then to give a verbal identity to those demons. In reality, the process is the opposite. Here, it is rather of the scientific type. The names of the demons superimpose a grid on the surface of phenomena. The task of exorcism is to draw out of the "mixture" presented to it by the possessed the body proper, the pure element corresponding to the conceptual model.
Today we can say that the verbal imperialism does not provide the necessary conditions for a real verification. It leaves the possessed few possibilities of resistance, since they themselves "enter" into the system and conform to it. The coding always "works" because the functioning is purely tautological, since the operation takes place within a closed domain. For the exorcists, the difficulty resides not in securing a means of verification of the code, but in keeping "the girls" within the closure of the discourse. (39)

…as is often done, they go to the next girl: In order to keep the discourse homogeneous, the terrain into which the outside has crept in is abandoned, and the work is resumed in a language demonologically "proper." (40)

…no personal element [must] be permitted to compromise the automatic functioning of the diabolical grammar. (40)

A question of language, then. But a closed language. It is reached through the unconsciousness, as in a dream. The devil’s language is an other language, into which one does not enter by means of an apprenticeship. One must be "possessed" by these words, without understanding them. (41)

- Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language, on the possession at Loudun