Seeing and Saying. Foucault’s Analytic of Knowledge Production 113
practices, the category of the ‘individual criminal’”64. Additionally, “the prison indirectly produce[d] delinquents by throwing the inmate’s family into destitution”65. This fabrication was accomplished by rendering the prisoner visible to authoritative scrutiny. Despite the identification of numerous defects with the modern western prison system, its dominance persists. Foucault explains this paradox by locating the category of delinquency as being deeply embedded within the wider strategy of political domination, and by arguing that the prison, much like other government institutions, carries out certain very precise functions. Foucault’s analysis demonstrates that the mechanisms and apparatuses of the prison, in both their visibility and invisibility, contribute to a wider socio-political context in which power and domination are paramount. In its advancement, the prison was intended to protect the public by controlling the criminal. Foucault’s research, however, reveals the converse to be true; by creating the criminal, the prison works to control the working-class population. For Foucault, this is the very basis for the endurance of the prison – domination of the population through the illumination of a category (the prisoner) in order to articulate something authoritative about it thereby generating new knowledge and solutions (discourse). This is discursive formation in practice. In his archival research on the medical and penal institutions of the nineteenth century, Foucault demonstrates how the relations of domination bring together all the little pieces of information necessary to generate discourses, “just like dust being kicked up by the storm”66. He does so by tracing the contingent circumstances under which these institutions are problematized in order to transform power through seeing and saying, that is by developing effective discourses of dominance. Foucault Addresses the ‘Actuality’ of Discursive Formations From the late 1960’s onward, Foucault relies on Nietzsche’s technique of genealogically tracing dominant discourses within institutionalized sites of power. Specifically, Foucault adopts Nietzsche’s point of view concerning how power gets organized as he sees relations of domination Ibidem, p. 832. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 268. 66 G. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 29. See also M. Foucault, The Lives of Infamous Men, in The Essential Foucault. 64 65