From: "David McInerney" <borderlands-AT-optusnet.com.au>
Subject: Re: AUT: Hooliganism and class composition
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 09:07:20 +0930


> While you're at it, it might be worth checking out Foucault's thesis on
delinquency if you haven't done so already - his basic line is that the
ruling class invents the category of delinquency to divide and rule the
working class, dividing it into a "criminal" section trapped in an
underworld open to surveillance and infiltration and to use as
strikebreakers etc., and an "honest" section which is impeded in its
resistance by unwillingness to break the law - a far cry from the pervasive
social banditry and widespread lawbreaking of the early capitalist period.
(though obviously it's far more complicated that the ruling class deciding
to label people - it's all about constructing people through apparatuses of
control and territorialisation so they actually become what the capitalists
say they are, and in any case this is a knockon effect of the failure of
prisons to curb deviance, but you get the drift...) - see chapter 2, "Prison
Talk", in the collection "Power/Knowledge", and the chapter in "Discipline
and Punish" dealing with delinquency.

I would also recommend as an example of this form of analysis that of
Nicholas B. Dirks in _Castes of Mind_ (Princeton, 2001), where Dirks
provides an account of the separation (by the British Raj) of the more
intimidating communities in India into 'martial races' and 'criminal
castes', basically along the lines of those who chose to play along in
return for positions within the army and those which continued to resist.
The British government tried out many of their tactics of divide and rule in
India first.  The word "thug" comes from one of these "criminal castes".

DM





     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---