not knowing of this collection, in the first week of march i presented a paper at the international narrative conference in chicago. this was about stonewall and contemporary queer anti-state activism. i took discipline and punish as a central text. in it i stated:
Let’s turn to Discipline and Punishitself. Despite its clear resonation with the 20th and 21stcenturies, the book rarely comments on events as late as those surrounding May 1968. Foucault makes one notable exception in the first chapter, “That punishment in general and the prison in particular belong to a political technology of the body is a lesson that I have learnt not so much from the history as from the present” (30). After contemplating the character of recent prison revolts he concludes that, “I would like to write the history of this prison, with all its political investments of the body that it gathers together in its closed architecture. Why? Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing the history of the present” (30-1). Repeat, “Yes, if one means writing the history of the present” (31).
Even as it theorizes a way to understand societal control through a disciplinary model, rather than through ideology, a certain leap must be made to keep it current, a leap that consists of writing the history of the present, not a history merely acknowledged by the present. To his credit, considering the vast amount of scholarship that draws on Foucault’s account of the panopticon for our present situation, this leap is not difficult to make. I believe this application of Foucault, for one, is a way of thinking through continuities of tendency, perhaps without even realizing it. In other words, to apply Discipline and Punish to contemporary society, origins and beginnings need to be set aside from what we aim to set out to do: to enact a politically incisive critique on the moments we are facing. You may wonder then, how does this match up with the Stonewall riots, or the sexual revolution?
First and foremost, a certain strain of Foucauldian analysis, historicist or irreverently otherwise, is bound up with the concepts he coined or made popular: biopolitics, biopower, governmentality, docile bodies, disciplinarity, etc. What the above passages make clear is that this widely applicable descriptive vocabulary does not automatically accomplish the sort of historical analysis Foucault undertakes in Discipline and Punish, or later work. This sort of analysis cannot proceed from origins by way of causality, nor does it see the present as an anxious or hopeful beginning. Rather, it sees tendencies arising over time that once controlled and continue to control the very terms in which politics makes sense at all, that is, the value attributed to dominant or marginalized, free or incarcerated voices. In this way, it would be an unfortunate oversight to avoid putting Discipline and Punish in close relation to Stonewall
the paper mostly bombed. a professor snubbed me when they found out i was a first year phd student and when i intuit their position above me (i think... it was a confusing exchange), the rest of the tiny audience seemed vaguely interested but no dialogue continued. yet the panel organizer, very friendly, invited me to submit a proposal for the panel they were organizing at MLA next year. i came up with a part two (not knowing about this new publication on foucault which was out by then for sure) that continued my project into sylvia rivera’s continued activism into the present, citing again that key phrase “the history of the present.” this proposal was rejected with “sorry, we’re going a different direction.”
all in all, academia is not a meritocracy. it has no way of evaluating ideas. they’ll be opposed based on egos alone. those who do have publishing power get the credit for everything. i can’t put “i intuited the zeitgeist” on my cv. anyway, i feel somewhat vindicated given the thoroughly negative experience i’ve had so far in grad school, yet i’m not sure that vindication will translate to anything other than my own already inevitable exclusion. /vent....
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