New Post New Post Oh Boy

So my next substantial post that I am working is an analysis of Foucault's Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. My analysis of the book is going to revolve around my experience with military history. In particular, I am curious about what I am calling 'society's implicit war', ie all of the violent and coercive elements that are necessary to maintain social order, and how they don't really register on us with a regular basis. Prisons, militaries, police, all have become so ubiquitous that we don't find them troubling anymore.

But think about it, if we don't do certain things people will hurt us. Plain and simple.

Anyways, it is gonna be a monster. Here is a working outline/table of contents that I am working with. As I continue to skim the rest of the book the latter half of the outline may expand with more subsections – but right now I have quite a lot of structure to work with, it is going well. I am in the quote gathering phase. Skimming the whole book and placing quotes in appropriate sections. Then I will start the real writing. Maybe tomorrow. Either way.

Title: Society's Implicit War: Foucault's "Discipline & Punish" and Military History

Part I: Society’s Implicit War from Monarchy to Republic
1. Society's Implicit War: From Managing to Disguising Civilization's Necessary Violence

Monarchical Violence as War
a. The Original Purpose of Standing Armies
b. Torture and the Monarch’s War Against Domestic 'Enemy Troops'

The Shortcomings of Monarchical Violence
c. The Unpredictability of Physical Violence
d. Capitalism and the Need for a New Political Economy
e. Discipline as Emerging From Military Institutions

Prisons as War
f. Prisons and the Abstraction of Judicial Violence
g. The Idea of the Social Contract as Disguising the Implicit War
h. Politics as the Continuation of War by Other Means: Disciplinary Society as Waging an Implicit War

2. The Monarch's Violence and the Government's Discipline: Truth, Power/Knowledge, and Strategies in Torture and Prison

The Corporeal Strategy of Torture
a. The Logic of Torture
b. Torture and the Production of Truth
c. The Centrality of the Body in Both Torture and Discipline

The Representative Strategy of Discipline
d. Discipline and the Production of Truth About Bodies: Power/Knowledge
e. Disciplinary Society’s Open-Strategies: The Worker Ants and the Big Picture
f. Criminals as Integral to Society’s Open-Strategies

Part II: Simulational Mindreading and Control in Torture and Discipline

3. Observation and Simulational Mindreading in Relations of Power/Knowledge
a. Power/Knowledge: Social Understanding and Simulation in Relations With Others in General
b. Power/Knowledge and Simulational Mindreading: Torture and Prisons as Enabling Different Ways of Simulating Other People's Thoughts
c. Observation of Torture and Simulational Mindreading
d. Observation and Simulational Mindreading in Disciplinary Society

4. From Low-level to High-level Mindreading: From The Spectacle of Torture to The Constant Observation of the Panopticon
a. Torture as Mirror and Resonance Based Mindreading
b. The Panopticon as Enabling Abstract and High-Level Mindreading
c. Panoptic Mindreading for Prisoners and Civilians: Structuring Incarceration and its Representation
d. Observation and Controlling Prisoners Through High-Level Mindreading
e. Abstract Penal Representation and Controlling the Population With High-Level Mindreading

Part III: The Pragmatics: Being A Guerilla of Power/Knowledge

5. Politics as the Continuation of War by Other Means and the 'Politics of Ourselves'
a. Disciplinary Society's Power/Knowledge and our Identity
b.War and Ethics
c. Practices of the Self as a War

6. Intellectual Insurrection: Waging Mental War
a. Histories of the Present as Tools for Battle
b. Freedom Within Open-Strategies
c. Meta-Strategic Thinking
d. The Neural War