‘The Battle Roar of Silence –
Foucault and The Carceral System’ - Meinrad Calleja - Faraxa Publishers
Having read most of Michel Foucault’s
works, this book primarily about the carceral system was not singularly
influenced by his ‘Discipline and Punish – The Birth of the Penitentiary’. The
book is influenced by Foucault’s general system of archaeological and
genealogical investigation of discourse, knowledge and power, explicated
forcefully and provocatively throughout his works. This investigation was actually conceived in
several stages, both readings related to Foucault, as well as the other topics
covered in my text. It was the result of systematic reading concerned with the
despotism of power, and the flaws of democracy. It was a text moved by the rapid
erosion of human rights and justice. This is a political text.
My readings of Foucault were
undertaken in an order that was different to the chronological order Foucault
wrote his texts. The Foucault texts I read were written by Foucault in the
following chronological order: ‘Madness and Civilisation’, ‘The Birth of the
Clinic’, ‘The Order of Things’, ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’, ‘Discipline and
Punish’, and the three volumes of ‘The History of Sexuality’. I started off reading his ‘Discipline and Punish’,
followed by ‘Madness and Civilisation’, the three volumes of ‘The History of
Sexuality’, ‘The, Archaeology of Knowledge’, ‘The Order of Things’, and
finally, ‘The Birth of the Clinic’, also reading some other texts of his at
some point during this reading. The point of this chronological presentation is
simply that Foucault’s thought was constantly evolving, and he was regularly
revising his own thoughts, as even the changes in various editions of his work
illustrate. Thus the order I undertook, quite unintentionally, allowed me to
note aspects of this evolution, and the relevance of this change. Having read
the above-cited major works, I then ventured to read a number of other French
thinkers that either influenced Foucault (like Bachelard, Canguilhem, and
Derrida among others), as well as those that were influenced by Foucault (like Badiou,
Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard). Some years later, I read a number of Foucault
‘readers’ by authors like Gutting, Oliver, and, one of my favourite ‘readings’
(for it corroborated my interpretation and reading), Deleuze.
Another part of my investigation
concerned the philosophy of punishment, including readings on morality, ethics,
justice, law, human rights, and carceral systems. Here my search, incidentally
via comments Said made about Bachelard, and Derrida about ‘the wisdom of the
prison cell’, also explored ‘space’ readings. This led to readings on
psychoanalysis, particularly the works of Freud, Fromm, and Marcuse, and the
relationships between psychoanalysis and mind. Other subjects like neurology,
institutionalisation, cybernetics, media imagery, organised crime dynamics, and
political culture were also useful. The relationships of these
knowledge-clusters to the carceral system discourse and globalisation
illustrated that the spirit of ‘democracy’ was rapidly being eroded by despotic
legal systems built upon the very carceral system discourse. Citizens in various jurisdictions were
suffering in silence the consequences of these despotic systems sustained
primarily by deception.
‘The Battle Roar of Silence –
Foucault and The Carceral System’ actually shows how these despotic forces
operate to deny political literacy, consciousness, and the exercise of
fundamental human rights. The importance of this book is that it actually
highlights the deficiencies and ruthlessness of neo liberalism, and the limits
of freedom it imposes. This book shows how freedom is gradually being
‘circled-in’ by ‘governmentality’, that actually structures the plausibility of
its logic and discourse through the carceral system. This text is a
politically-charged critique of a subtle ideology that has felt comfortable
enough to raise its ugly head safe in the knowledge it can despotically oppress
simply because the discourse it has created via institutions like the carceral
system, can be circulated to recruit consent and constrain contestation, while
consumers of this discourse suffer in silence. The accumulated suffering of
these citizens has now become ‘The Battle Roar of Silence’. People all over the
world are close to reaching their ‘tipping-point’, and many of those who have
realised they will only be saved by themselves, have in fact translated their
‘silence’ into a ‘battle roar’ of affirmative action of revolt. These citizens
now take to street to battle against vicious riot squads and power hungry
despots. Reading ‘The Battle Roar of Silence – Foucault and The Carceral
System’ allows readers to understand these complex dynamics. Its also liberates
citizens from the constraints of despotic dominance.
Meinrad Calleja
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