Battle-lines.

Doisneau, La Pendule, 1957

Total surveillance is increasingly the general condition of society as a whole.  The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.

"The prison" begins well before its doors. It begins as soon as you leave your house – and even before.
Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.

Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.

Michel Foucault

Jeffrey Foucault and Kris Delmhorst, "If This Ain't Heaven"

Jeffrey Foucault, "Dishes"

Do the dishes
With the windows open
Soak the dirt
From under your nails
Pour a double
Put a record on the table
The light's always perfect
Just before it fails

Bow your head down
When you break bread together
Close your eyes
Make a circle of hands
There is nothing
That cannot be taken from you
In this life we just hold on
To the love that we have

Swing the axe
In the hour before daylight
Note the sparks
That attend to the blade
A thing made free
Of itself leaps apart
And the heart divided
Would do just the same

Take the back roads
With nobody on them
Find a river
Make yourself clean
Go down to the water
If you would be delivered
Of sinner and sin
Seen and unseen

Step outside
Let the stars reel around you
Cup your hands
Around a bright flame
In that darkness
Let the heavens confound you
It's all just a story
Even the sound of your name

Happy birthday, Foucault.

Jean-Bernard Foucault was born on this date in 1819.

The stars appear to move in circles about a line through the poles of the earth. An ancient explanation of this (probably predating classical Greece) is that the stars are attached to a sphere, which rotates about the earth. Aristarchus of Samos (third century BC) explained the apparent motion of the stars and planets by proposing that the earth turns on its own axis and also travels around the sun. Hipparchus (second century BC) and Ptolemy (second century AD) rejected this view for two reasons. First, one cannot feel the rotation of the earth. Second, one cannot (without powerful telescopes) see annual changes in the relative position of the stars. The earth-centred view dominated European science until the seventeenth century.

Whether or not the earth moves used to be an important question for Christians, as well as cosmologists. Giordano Bruno taught that the earth moved. He held a range of heretical views and was charged by the Holy Inquisition in Venice. He was sentenced by Pope Clement VIII and was burned alive, with his tongue gagged, in 1600. Galileo also taught that the Earth moved. He was charged with the same heresy in 1633 but he was spared on condition that he renounced his views. (The Vatican has since changed its position: in 1992 Pope John Paul II officially expressed regret at the church's treatment of Galileo.)

The observation of Hipparchus and Ptolemy that one cannot feel the rotation of the earth is correct. However, the rate of rotation required for the heliocentric picture (0.0007 revolutions per minute) is so slow that one would not expect to feel it. How can one measure such a slow rotation? In 1851, Jean-Bernard-Leon Foucault suspended a 67 metre, 28 kilogram pendulum from the dome of the Pantheon in Paris. The plane of its motion, with respect to the earth, rotated slowly clockwise. This motion is most easily explained if the earth turns.

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