I. the origin of species by means of natural selection

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society

Contemporary Sociology 7(5) (September 1978):566—68. When the intellectual history of our times comes to be written, that peculiarly Left Bank mixture of Marxism and structuralism now in fashion will be among the most puzzlingofourideastoevaluate.Aliteral “archeology of knowledge” (the title of one of Foucault’s earlier books) will be required to sort out the valuable from the obvious rubbish. I suspect that in this exercise the iconographers of the present (like Barthes) will fare less well than those who have read the past. Of such “historians” (a description which does not really cover his method) Foucault is the most dazzlingly creative. Discipline and Punish (which, shamefully, has taken over two years to be translated into English) follows Madness and Civilization (1961) and The Birth of the Clinic (1971) as the next stage in Foucault’s massive project of tracing the genealogy of control institutions (asylums, teaching hospitals, prisons) and the human sciences symbiotically linked with them (psychiatry, clinical medicine, criminology, penology). His concern throughout is the relationship between power and knowledge, the articulation of each on the other. Here (as he makes explicit in an interview recently published in the English journal, Radical Philosophy) he opposes the humanist position that, once we gain power, we cease to know——it makes us blind—— and that only those who keep their distance from power, who are no way implicated in tyranny, can attain the truth. For Foucault, such forms of knowledge as psychiatry and criminology (with its “garrulous discourses” and “intermidable [sic] repetitions”) are directly related to the exercise of power. Power itself creates new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. Thus to “liberate scientific research from the demands of monopoly capitalism” can only be a slogan. Placing such programmatic Big Issues on one side, though, a superficial first reading of the book mightstartatthelevelofitssubtitle, “The Birth of the Prison.” The key historical transition——at the end of the eighteenth century——is from punishment as torture, a public spectacle, to the more economically and politically discreet prison sentence. The body as the major target of penal repression disappears: within a few decades, the grisly spectacles of torture, dismemberment, exposure, amputation, and branding are over. Interest is transferred from the body to the mind; a coercive, solitary, and secret mode of punishment replaces one that was representative, scenic, and collective. Gone is the liturgy of torture and execution, where the triumph of the sovereign was symbolized in the processions, halts at crossroads, public readings of the sentence even after death, where the criminal’s corpse was exhibited or burnt. In its place comes a whole technology of subtle power. When punishment leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters into abstract consciousness, it does not become less effective. But its effectiveness arises from its inevitability not its horrific theatrical intensity. The new power is not to punish less but to In Retrospect: 1978 29

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0094306118815499a

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison:

The Limits to Capital

This paper outlines a way toward conceptual and historical clarity around the question of territory. The aim is not to define territory, in the sense of a single meaning; but rather to indicate the...

/pdf/land-terrain-territory-200lisumsl.pdf

Land, terrain, territory

Territory is one of the central political concepts of the modern world and, indeed, functions as the primary way the world is divided and controlled politically. Yet territory has not received the critical attention afforded to other crucial concepts such as sovereignty, rights, and justice. While territory continues to matter politically, and territorial disputes and arrangements are studied in detail, the concept of territory itself is often neglected today. Where did the idea of exclusive ownership of a portion of the earth's surface come from, and what kinds of complexities are hidden behind that seemingly straightforward definition? The Birth of Territory provides a detailed account of the emergence of territory within Western political thought. Looking at ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern thought, Stuart Elden examines the evolution of the concept of territory from ancient Greece to the seventeenth century to determine how we arrived at our contemporary understanding. Elden addresses a range of historical, political, and literary texts and practices, as well as a number of key players - historians, poets, philosophers, theologians, and secular political theorists - and in doing so sheds new light on the way the world came to be ordered and how the earth's surface is divided, controlled, and administered.

/pdf/the-birth-of-territory-2764u3xcap.pdf

The Birth of Territory

Secure the volume: Vertical geopolitics and the depth of power

Space, Knowledge and Power

Contents: Introduction: Space, knowledge and power: Foucault and geography, Stuart Elden and Jeremy W. Crampton. Part 1 Questions: Some questions from Michel Foucault to HA(c)rodote, Michel Foucault (translated by Stuart Elden). Part 2 Francophone Responses a " 1977: HA(c)rodote editorial, translated by Gerald Moore Response: Jean-Michel Brabant (translated by Gerald Moore) Response: Alain Joxe (translated by Gerald Moore) Response:Jean-Bernard Racine and Claude Raffestin (translated by Gerald Moore) Response: Michel Riou (translated by Gerald Moore). Part 3 Anglophone Responses a " 2006: The Kantian roots of Foucault's dilemmas, David Harvey Geography, gender and power, Sara Mills Overcome by space: reworking Foucault, Nigel Thrift Foucault among the geographers, Thomas Flynn. Part 4 Contexts: Strategy, medicine and habitat: Foucault in 1976, Stuart Elden Formations of 'Foucault' in Anglo-American geography: an archaeological sketch, Matthew Hannah Catalysts and converts: sparking interest for Foucault among Francophone geographers, Juliet J. Fall Could Foucault have revolutionized geography?, Claude Raffestin (translated by Gerald Moore). Part 5 Texts: The incorporation of the hospital into modern technology, Michel Foucault (translated by Edgar Knowlton Jr., William J. King, and Stuart Elden) The meshes of power, Michel Foucault (translated by Gerald Moore) The language of space, Michel Foucault (translated by Gerald Moore) The force of flight, Michel Foucault (translated by Gerald Moore) Questions on geography, Michel Foucault (translated by Colin Gordon). Part 6 Development: Geographies of governmentality, Margo Huxley The history of medical geography after Foucault, Gerry Kearns Maps, race and Foucault: eugenics and territorialization following World War I, Jeremy W. Crampton Beyond the Panopticon? Foucault and surveillance studies, David Murakami Wood Beyond the European province: Foucault and postcolonialism, Stephen Legg Foucault, sexuality, geography, Philip Howell The problem with Empire, Mathew Coleman and John A. Agnew 'Bellicose history' and 'local discursivities': an archaeological reading of Michel Foucault's Society Must be Defended, Chris Philo. Index.

/pdf/space-knowledge-and-power-foucault-and-geography-3614weeuki.pdf

Stuart Elden

Papers

Land, terrain, territory

The Birth of Territory

Secure the volume: Vertical geopolitics and the depth of power

Space, Knowledge and Power

Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography