foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

24 Foucault's Discourse
same sacred position. Knowledge about an object involved a combination
of rational and magical discourses.7 Each text had infinite interpretations,
and each interpretation was the object of a rther discursive reading. Then,
in the seventeenth century, there was a great break-a mutation in thought.
Foucault wrote nostalgically about what was lost in this period, when, with
the introduction of the empirical sciences, the "profound kinship oflanguage
with the world" ended, and one "began to ask how a sign could be linked
to what it signified?" (1973, 42-43 ). Language became arbitrary, representing
something else. Then Hobbes, Berkeley, Hume, and Condillac led the
way toward the creation of a new scientific domain, with man at its center.
New theories in the fields of grammar, natural history, and economics soon
"toppled the whole of Western thought, " and undermined the intrinsic relationship
that had existed between nature and its objects, and between words
and things {239}.8 Only in the realm of literature, in the writings of Friedrich
Holderlin, Stephal1e Mallarme, and others such as Antonin Artaud, did language
maintain an "autonomous existence" outside the empirical world {44}.
Foucault famously ended The Order of Things by proclaiming the death of the
modern humanist subject: "Since man was constituted at a time when language
was doomed to dispersion, will he not be dispersed when language
regains its unity? . .. One can surely wager that man would be erased, like a
face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" (386-87).
Foucault made a similar argument in Discipline and Punish, first published
in 1975. The book began with the description of a grotesque 1757 execution
in Paris by torture, which Foucault then contrasted to the methodical timetables
of modem Western prisons. At first glance, the reader might assume·
that Foucault was condemning the horrible bodily torment of the pre-1789
system of justice, but this was not the case. Here again, he seemed to echo
Nietzsche, who had famously declared, "when mankind was not yet ashamed
of its cruelty, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now" (1967, 67). Foucault
constructed a historical narrative in which he argued the following: Our
modern world has replaced public torture with a less visible penal system
that pretends to be more humane and less cruel, but is in fact quite the opposite.
Modem society has invented new disciplinary practices that are more
subtle, but also more insidious. These methods of controlling the body and
the mind are not limited to the prisons, but permeate our entire society, in
the military, schools, factories, and other workplaces. Moreover, the disciplinary
practices of modem society are internalized by citizens, who police
themselves. To Foucault, these modem disciplinary practices in fact allow less
freedom than the earlier physical punishments of the insane or the criminal.
This is because in the premodern era individuals at least had the freedom to