Prisons of the "Self," cont'd

'Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants.' - Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 202

Of particular interest to me is the displacement in Foucault of the "subject," the manner(s) in which the self is broken down. If we assume, which I think Foucault is after, that we already live various Panopticons, to which determinations of our identity (or rather, identities) occur within these Panopticons, it is difficult to image how, with certainty, we could isolate that which is before social interaction and mediation. This is, perhaps, a bold and broad statement, but it appears to be what Foucault is suggesting. The link, for me, perhaps, between what is this "era" of Foucault and the "late Foucault" (a distinction to which I am not pleased with) appears to be the emphasis on the 'art(s) of living,' the ways in which life is performed, created and designed.

There is a tension here, and two 'conditions of impossibility': namely, if domination is solely performed by agents, should that/would that not defeat the Panopticon, where it's goal results in it's own demise? Rather, if agents perform their own subjection completely and the guard would disappear, rendering the whole system null? This is a difficult question, in fact, one should wonder if it is the first 'condition of impossibility' of the Panoptic model-as-society. But I think this problem can be addressed in this way: the job of the guard is to convince the prisoner that it is needed and that the direction(s) of the guard is necessary. If everyone is prisoner and guard at the same time, and such mitigation, production and formation is always occuring, this necessitates some, even the most minute, interaction with other agents. The second 'condition of impossibility' is the complete isolation of agents.

I make a distinction here between 'agent' and 'subject.' Though the Derridan critique would suggest, I would guess, that the utterance of 'agent' provides a presence to that which is supposed to be without any determinable presence. This I acknowledge. But here I draw the distinction as my answer: we can presume agents coding and acting with out any assertion of primary characteristics or a priori self-hood. Nietzsche stressed that the actor is 'fabricated' in the act (in the first treatise of the Genealogy, which, given most of my books in storage and in the US, I don't have at this time) and I share this view. Open to critique, these are interesting discussions to me.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans: Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1995.