(no subject)

[stormdog]

Given that Foucault wrote this in 1975, long before things like the internet enabled an unprecedented proliferation of various entities collecting the most minute scraps of personal information they can get their hands on, it feels quite prescient. As I read through this part of the book, I think of my zeal for documenting so many of the events of my life, big and small, on blogs for all to read. Could that behavior be looked at as a colonization of the mind by the power of discipline that Foucault is imagining and describing? How curious.

"For a long time ordinary individuality – the everyday individuality of everybody – remained below the threshold of description. To be looked at, observed, described in detail, followed from day to day by an uninterrupted writing was a privilege. The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination. It is no longer a monument for future memory, but a document for possible use."

-Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault, 1975