Anne and I managed to meet for Foucault this morning. As always it was a productive and wide-ranging discussion. We changed location from the library (somewhat clinical and grey, although nonetheless pleasant) to our favourite coffee place (dynamic, vibrant and noisy). Arriving at work I wondered if this had altered the tenor of our conversation. Usually we meticulously work our way through the chapter – often page by page and line by line – dissecting, analysing, criticising. This morning we just jumped straight into to a broader discussion of what the reading told us about Foucault’s historical practice. As Anne neatly noted, Foucault’s practice of history is connective, rather than the traditional practice of narrative history. This is the history of the resonances of the past in the present. So while he is writing about the development of modernity using archival sources and accounts of the development of social institutions, the connections with contemporary culture frequently freak both of us out! Particularly me, as although I have read this before – and indeed quoted it liberally throughout my phd – I am starting to wonder if I read it with my eyes shut! However, maybe this is just the mark of a dense and rewarding book – one that offers new ideas and inspirations on each return reading. Or maybe I am dense….?

Enough, introspection!

Amongst Foucault’s detailed elaboration of the practice of the examination and the process of normalisation, what I found particularly thought-provoking was his discussion of the turning of real lives into writing (p. 192 if anyone is interested). He writes:

For a long time ordinary individuality – the everyday individuality of everybody – remained below the threshold of description. To be looked at, observed, described in detail, followed from day to day by an uninterrupted writing was a privilege. The chronicle of man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of this power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description of means of control and a method of domination. It is no longer a monument for future memory, but a document for possible use. (p. 191)

Further on Foucault writes:
This turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure of heroization; it functions as a procedure of objectification and subjection. The carefully collated life of mental patients or delinquents belongs, as did the chronicle of kings or the adventures of the great popular bandits, to a certain political function of writing; but in a quite different technique of power. (p. 192)

For Foucault, it seems that this political function is executed by the operations of the examination, classification and distribution etc – by which individual differences are illuminated and recorded in the movements of normalisation. It is these differences that mark one as “individual” – “when one wishes to individualise the healthy, normal and law-abiding adult, it is always by asking him how much of the child he has in him, what secret madness lies within him, what fundamental crime he has dreamt of committing.” (193) Our secret madnesses – what might be considered abnormal – are at the very centre of the normalising examination, they are fundamental to its success. And it seems it is this that produces the reality of the individual within the disciplinary regimes.

Foucault’s comments on the democratisation of turning real lives into writing is interesting to consider in light of the technologically-enabled collapse of the public/private opposition. Indeed it would seem that the endpoint of discipline is now fully in view, particularly with the intense proliferation of the practice of exhibiting/writing real life in public platforms (such as for instance, this blog). And what does it mean that as individuals we now take responsible for illuminating our own “secret madnesses”, through the throes of public self-examination. I guess it means they aren’t so secret any more for one. This, I suppose, is an example of what Deleuze calls the society of control, where the disciplinary operations have become so profuse throughout the social field, that the institutionally specific operations Foucault uses as his examples, have been superceded, so that the social field is “all-at-once”, open and modulating.

hmmmm.