Foucault's history of the present

[Paul Nightingale]

My last post on Foucault wasn't worthy of a response so I imagine this
one'll be ignored also. But anyway, here goes ...

The earlier work, from the 1960s to the late-70s, outlines the importance
Foucault attaches to discursive formations. The Order of Things was first
published in French in 1966 and begins with an analysis of Las Meninas.

>From the Routledge, 1989 ed.

Looking at the painting you are captured by the gaze of the painter making
eye-contact: "[The spectator] sees his invisibility made visible to the
painter and transposed into an image forever invisible to himself" (p5).

Meanwhile: "At the far end of the room, ignored by all, the unexpected
mirror holds in its glow the figures the painter is looking at ...; but also
the figures that are looking at the painter" (p8).

Finally, the painting deals with "the representation ... of Classical
representation, and the definition of the space it opens up to us" (p16).

So - not only is knowledge a construct but the knowledge of knowledge also.
How do we know anything? And how can we be certain of the existence of
whatever 'thing' we, for whatever reason, want to know 'about'?

Fast-forward to Ch5 ("Classifying"). Foucault discusses the so-called
"sciences of life" associated with the Enlightenment: "Historians want to
write histories of biology in the eighteenth century; but they do not
realise that biology did not exist then, and that the pattern of knowledge
that has been familiar to us for a hundred and fifty years is not valid for
a previous period" (p127). This is what he means when, frequently, he refers
to the writing of a history of the present, as opposed to history from a
present-day perspective. This distinction has always been central to the way
I read M&D: It is not 'about' the C18th. And anyway, what the hell is 'the
C18th'?

Faster-forward to Discipline and Punish, first published 1975.

Justice must be seen to be done; that is to say, it must be signified. But
how? What form will such signification take? Who sees what? What messages
are being sent? By whom? To whom? Useful questions to be asking at the start
of the C21st ...

>From the Penguin ed, 1991.

"By the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, the
gloomy festival of punishment was dying out ... The ceremonial of punishment
tended to decline; it survived only as a new legal or administrative
practice" (p8).

"The apportioning of blame is redistributed ... it is the conviction itself
that marks the offender with the unequivocally negative sign: the publicity
has shifted to the trial, and to the sentence; the execution itself is like
an additional shame that justice is ashamed to impose on the condemned man;
so it keeps its distance from the act" (p9).

"The disappearance of public executions ... also marks a slackening of the
hold on the body" (p10).

"The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary: if one intervenes
upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the
individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property.
The body, according to this penalty, is caught up in a system of constraints
and privations, obligations and prohibitions. Physical pain, the pain of the
body itself, is no longer the constituent element of the penalty" (p11).

Foucault argues that punishment-as-spectacle, and this included of course
the very public spectacle of hanging, characterised the period before the
appearance of social institutions such as the prison; in the C18th there was
nothing that we would now recognise as 'policing' (ie something purporting
to be a 'social service').

Therefore, and not for the first time, a question. How is the above a
'history of the present'?

And another. To what extent is the novelist simply providing a little bit of
period colour, background detail?