Bouvard on Ritual, Rationality, and Social Origins
The eighteenth century invented the techniques of discipline and the examination, rather as the Middle Ages invented the judicial investigation. But it did so by quite different means. The investigation procedure, an old fiscal and administrative technique, had developed above all with the reorganization of the Church and the increase of the princely states in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At this time it permeated to a very large degree the jurisprudence first of the ecclesiastical courts, then of the lay courts. The investigation as an authoritarian search for a truth observed or attested was thus opposed to the old procedures of the oath, the ordeal, the judicial duel, the judgement of God or even of the transaction between private individuals. The investigation was the sovereign power arrogating to itself the right to establish the truth by a number of regulated techniques. Now, although the investigation has since then been an integral part of western justice (even up to o
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.
This is very interesting. I keep having his name pop up (along with Nietzsche.) It seems to me here he is placing this mode of thought directly within the developments of power and that development is the expansion of central power into legal and social realms where it was not previously present. I used to take the whole trial by ordeal as an exaggeration or fraud, but having read myself of the legal developments of Henry II I find it is still there (he replaced all ordeals with simply ordeal by water.) It is something that is still confusing to me, why would trial by ordeal be a thing? Szabo has an interesting blog post on it: http://unenumerated.blogspot.tw/2006/01/trial-by-ordeal.html
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.
Bouvard on Ritual, Rationality, and Social Origins — https://center.study/post/reddit-foucault-on-discipline-and-power