Foucault on Discipline and Power

I thought this passage from "Panopticism" might be interesting in thinking through the political origins of the sciences, e.g.:

"the sciences of nature, in any case, were born, to some extent, at the end of the Middle Ages, from the practices of investigation. The great empirical knowledge that covered the things of the world and transcribed them into the ordering of an indefinite discourse that observes, describes and establishes the 'facts' (at a time when the western world was beginning the economic and political conquest of this same world) had its operating model no doubt in the Inquisition - that immense invention that our recent mildness has placed in the dark recesses of our memory."

Many people have pointed out that Bacon's discussions of the investigation of Nature sound a lot like a torture session: "make it speak," etc.

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I think attempts to figure out how ordeal "really" worked are beside the point. As a couple of the commenters pointed out, you might as well ask how "reading" bird entrails helped "seers" predict the future. Or any ritual--they don't have to serve a "real" purpose. We can't transport out understanding of rationality and evidence to earlier social forms--maintaining social solidarity and the sacred was always more important than being right, or fair or just in any particular case. We're not as different from that approach even today as we would like to think.

Foucault doesn't really have an overall theory of any value but he was very good at discovering these pathways through which power works, and that liberalism obscured. The notion that the natural sciences result from inquisitorial juridical practices is extremely interesting, and confirms the political dependence, not just institutionally but conceptually, of the sciences. The whole concept of "panopticism" is obviously extremely relevant--that new Chinese social value reward system is really panoptic thinking.

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Interesting.