Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, social thinker, and "historian of the system of thought" He had a great influence on literary criticism and its theory, philosophy, critical theory, history, the history of science (especially the history of medicine), critical pedagogy, and the sociology of knowledge. From the perspective of historical development, Foucault mainly pays attention to the relationship between knowledge and power - how power is expressed through discourse power, and cooperates with various disciplinary means to infiltrate power into all details of society, such as the prison system and sexual issues.
This article is foucault's introduction to a collection of essays published by gallimard, which is based on the archives of the general hospital and the prisoners in the Bastille, and Foucault, who wrote Madness and Civilization, also participated in the compilation of these archives. Based on the English translations of Paul Foss and Meaghan Morris, Professor Li Meng refers to the original French text and translates them into Chinese for Chinese readers.
Foucault is not concerned with historical figures with brilliant deeds and high prestige, nor with the evil-filled, seemingly discredited but in a different way that has left their legends behind, but with the truly nameless, and now we can obtain only a few words about their lives through archives, and the preservation of these records can only be achieved through their accidental and brief confrontation with power.
These records, which remain in the incarceration-royal seal documents, are seen by Foucault as an immature beginning. Here, the Christian-style fleeting confessions are recorded in the form of instruments, and the authorities have not yet obtained intermediaries such as medical institutions and news media to discipline their subjects, so that the people face the king's body directly, and distort the despicable and violent life in ritually manneristic language to gain the support of the power for their demands. This transformation also heralds the future direction of literature, that is, to confess the private secrets that cannot be confessed.
As Foucault summed it up, The Life of the Nameless "embodies more of the role of power in life and the discourse that arises from it in the midst of riots, noise, and sorrow," foucault is concerned with every nameless person who is as nameless as those on the record, and the shaping and impact of power on their lives and lives through words.
Li Meng translated by Wang Ni School
This book, in every way, is not a history book. The choice of texts to make up this book focuses on my own tastes, my pleasures, a passion, laughter, shock, some kind of horror or some other emotion that has persisted so strongly that it is perhaps hard for me today to say that the initial excitement of discovering them has passed.
This is an anthology of survival. The life contained in it, only a few lines, or just a few pages, countless sufferings, many hardships, but condensed in a few words. A short life is only an accident that you have the opportunity to stay in books or literature. They are also exempla, but in contrast to the sages who shine when their life's achievements are read, they offer less lessons to ponder than short-lived effects whose power is fleeting. It seems to me that the word "nouvelle" is best used to refer to these texts, embodying the two-fold character of their involvement: the narrative is fleeting, but the events are true; and it is precisely because the many things told in these texts are condensed in short words that one does not know whether the forces that run through these lives come from lifelike words or from the violent facts that collide around them. These unique lives, through some accidental events that I could not understand, turned into some strange poems, so I brought these texts together in a specimen atlas.
One day, I was reading a record of detention written at the national library in the early eighteenth century, and I believe it was at this time that the idea came to mind. Even, when this thought came up, I might have read the following two records:
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Mathurin milan was admitted to the Charente Hospital on 31 August 1707: "He has been hiding his madness from his family, living an unclear life in the countryside, litigated by lawsuits, lending usury without scruples, putting his poor spirits into the paths of those unknown to him, believing that he can do the greatest things." "
Jean antoine Touzard (jean antoine touzard), sent to The Castle of Bikate on 21 April 1701: "An apostatistic priest, inciting everywhere, may become a heinous criminal, a sodomite, who, if possible, become an atheist; this is enough to be an unforgivable demon, and if he is set free, it is better to suppress him." "
I find it difficult to accurately express how I feel when I read these fragments and many other similar texts. There is undoubtedly one aspect of these impressions that can be said to be "physiological". But to say so, it seems as if there would be some other impression. I confess that these "stories", which have gone through two and a half centuries of silence, have popped up and touched my heartstrings more than the literature we usually call them, and I cannot say even today whether it was this classical beauty (a completely insignificant tragic life that was revealed in just a few words) or the excesses of these lives. This excess, mixed with simple stubbornness and viciousness, people can feel the destruction and tenacity in those words polished like stones.
A long time ago, I wrote a book with a similar document. These insignificant lives were reduced to wreckage in the brief words that destroyed them. When I touched these words, I felt a jolt. And this vibration, even today, I can still feel it. And I wrote that book, no doubt, out of this shock, of dreaming of restoring the power of these lives in an analysis. But because of the lack of the necessary talents, I have long been preoccupied with this kind of analysis; to grasp the poverty and dryness of these words; to try to find out the reasons for their existence, what political systems and political practices they involve; and why, in a society like ours, "étouffés" (the word "suppress" seems to mean to stop a cry, to extinguish a fire or to suffocate an animal) a notorious monk or a whimsical, The upside-down usurers were once very important; I wonder why it is so fervently preventing the spirit of poverty from taking the unknown path. But the enthusiasm that initially drove me remained untouched. And since it may not be possible to incorporate them into the rational order, since my words cannot express them properly, wouldn't it be the best way to keep them as I first experienced them? Therefore, as soon as I had the opportunity, I thought of compiling such a collection of essays. This collection of essays is neither a hasty consideration nor a clear purpose. I have long wanted to publish these texts in a systematic and orderly manner, to give some preliminary explanations, even if only to give them a minimum historical meaning. For the reasons which I am about to deal with, I abandon this idea; I decide to simply compile a batch of texts, the criterion of which is how strong it seems to me; for each text, I add some description of the basic situation; and the way in which I arrange the texts (which, in my opinion, is the least regrettable way) is to keep each text effective. My limitations forced me to limit myself to the simple lyricism of the selected essays.
Pictured is Foucault
As a result, the book will not satisfy historians, let alone others. Is this book a purely subjective and willful work? I'd rather call this book a mundane book or a game, but with some self-contained quirks. Maybe for some people, that's the same thing. But in fact, I believe that the poems of the whimsical loan shark or gay priest were a model for me from beginning to end. It is in order to re-emit such a shining state of existence as the phenomenon, such as this "life-poem", that I prescribe to myself some simple rules:
What should be considered is the story of the person who really is;
Their state of existence should be both vague and full of misfortune.
Tell their stories as short as possible, just a few pages, just a few lines would be better.
These accounts not only constitute anecdotes, but in some way (because they are complaints, denunciations, orders, or reports) really play a role in the insignificant history of their existence, misfortune, fanaticism, and insidious madness.
In the shock of their words and lives, they should once again bring us an effect mixed with beauty and terror.
However, the subject matter of these rules may seem arbitrary, and I must explain them further. I hope this book deals with people who have actually survived; people should be able to find out where and when these things described in the book happened. But these short stories often tell us nothing other than the names of the characters, and these short descriptions may be full of errors, fabrications, injustices, exaggerations, but behind them there are always people who have lived and then died, through suffering, evil, jealousy, and clamor. Thus I exclude all texts that may be fictional, or literary-like: the images of dark heroes created by literature have never been as enthusiastic as the shoemakers, deserters, peddlers, brokers, or wandering monks before me, though all of them are irritable, hateful, or both pitiful and contemptible; and this is undoubtedly because we know that they did exist. Similarly, I have deleted all texts that might be reminiscent, reminiscent, reproduced, etc., and although they are also speaking of reality, they are kept at a distance from this reality from an observational, reminiscent, curious, or entertaining point of view. And I insist that these texts should always maintain a relation to reality, or an infinite number of possible ones: these texts are not only concerned with reality, but they play a role in reality; they should play a role in the dramatic scene of a true story, they should be instruments of revenge, weapons of hatred, an interlude in a battle, a gesture capable of expressing despair, jealousy, supplication, or command. It is not the texts that make up this book that are most faithful to reality, but, if so, chosen from the point of view of the value of the text reproducing reality; the texts which I have chosen play a role in the real life in which they speak, and in turn we will find that, however inaccurate, exaggerated, or hypocritical, the text itself permeates real life: these fragments of discourse drag with the fragments of reality in which they participate. What one is going to read in this book is not a compilation of portraits of people, but the texts collected here are traps, weapons, shouts, postures, attitudes, schemes, or conspiracies, in which words are tools. Real life is "performed" in these short sentences; I say this not to say that these words reproduce those real lives, but to say, in fact, it is here that at least in part determines the freedom of these beings, their misfortunes, and often their deaths, at all times, determine their fate. These words did affect their lives; in fact, it was in these words that their survival went through a sinister and uncertain end. I also hope that the characters in the book themselves are not conspicuous; that nothing is destined to make them famous, that they do not possess any definite, recognizable, brilliant features, whether by origin, wealth or holiness, or heroic deeds or gifted talents; that they belong to the thousands of beings who are destined to live in a hurry without leaving a trace; who are to be in the midst of misfortune, whether to love or hate, to be passionate, but apart from those things which are generally regarded as worthy of recording, Their existence is dark and mundane; but they will at a certain moment also pour out a passion, they will be inspired by a violence, a certain energy, an excessive evil, a coarseness, a meanness, a stubbornness, or bad luck. In the eyes of their contemporaries, or in comparison with their mediocre lives, these give them a certain splendor, a shock to the heart, or pity. What I've been searching for is these particles with some kind of energy, which are insignificant and difficult to distinguish, but their energy is huge. However, if we want to have the opportunity to encounter such a thing, we must also have a light, at least for a moment, that illuminates them. This light comes from somewhere else. These beings wanted to be in the dark of night, and they should have stayed there. What freed them from the darkness was precisely their encounter with power: there is no doubt that without this impact, it would have been impossible to leave a piece of paper for their hastily lost life. Power lurks there, waiting for these beings, watching them, tracking them, and power pays attention to their complaints and petty fights, even if only occasionally; the minions of power attack them and leave a mark of power on them. It is this power that gives birth to these words, giving us the opportunity to glimpse these beings: either because someone himself presents himself to the power and uses these words to denounce, complain, plead, or plead; or because the power wants to intervene and then use a few words to adjudicate or pronounce judgment. All these lives, which should have been destined to live at the bottom of all discourses, disappeared without even being mentioned. It was only in this fleeting contact with power that they were able to leave their mark, short, profound, like a mystery. It is therefore impossible to regain what they were when they were "free"; we can grasp them only if they settle in the profane eloquence, tactical rhetoric or ordered lies presupposed by power games and power relations.
Pictured here is Foucault's "Madness and Civilization"
People say to me: Just like you, you can't always cross that line, cross the other side, listen and let others hear language from elsewhere or below; always the same choice, always focus on power, always on what power says or power prompts people to say. Those beings are talking about themselves there, why don't you listen? But first of all, if these beings have not collided with power for a moment, to inspire their power, is there really anything else that awaits us there except these beings in the midst of violence or unique misfortune? After all, isn't fate manifested as a relationship with power, either fighting side by side with power or against power, which is not a fundamental feature of our society? The most enthusiastic point of life, the place where energy accumulates, is precisely where they collide with power, struggle with power, try to harness the power of power, or try to escape the trap of power. These pieces of paper, which flow between power and those of the most ordinary of existences, are undoubtedly the only monuments that have ever been erected to them; these words are the short light of noise and turmoil projected upon these beings, which travel through time and even give us the opportunity to see them.
Simply put, I want to collect some remnants and create a legend that describes these unsightly people, based on these words of people in misfortune or anger exchanging power. I call them "legends" because in these texts, like all legends, they can be both fictional and real. But the reasons for ambiguity are the opposite of the usual legends. Whatever the core of reality in the legend, those legendary figures or deeds are always nothing more than the things told in the legend. The great deeds of the legends, whether their protagonists really exist or not, do not matter. Even if there were such a person, the legend has inflicted so many anecdotes on this man that he has rendered so many impossible things that in the end, or almost so, he never existed. And if he is purely fictional, then the legend has been circulating for a long time, and the narrative of the word of mouth is associated with the story that tells him, and it also gives him a historical depth that seems to have existed. And in the text that the reader will read in the book, the lives of the men and women are left with only the brief descriptions that have been made of them: nothing but a few words has been preserved to tell us what kind of people they are and what they have done. In these texts, it is rarity, not verbosity, that makes it irrelevant whether true or false. They belong to the unknown people in history, they have not shown their skills in any event, or they have been prominent, and they have not left behind them worth mentioning, and they have no place to live outside the precarious shelter of these words, and they will not have it. And when we touch them with these words, they bring us no more signs of reality than the characters from Golden Legend or an adventure novel. They are left with only the form of existence in these words, which turns these unfortunate people or villains into some semi-fictional existence. These people have even almost disappeared without a trace, but fortunately or unfortunately, by coincidence, these documents have been rediscovered, so that these fragments of talk about them or about themselves have survived. A dark legend, but even more a poor legend, is preserved until we have only one person left today to talk about, or to meet unexpectedly. This dark saga has another characteristic. It circulates in a different way than stories that adorn deep-rooted inevitability and go through endless paths. By its very nature, it has no tradition; it is only through a series of breaks, ramblings, omissions, intersections and repetitions that this legend has reached us. From the very beginning, it was associated with chance encounters. Initially, it must have been many coincidences that surprised everyone, allowing the gaze of power, and the indignation that erupted, to fall on these least visible individuals, focusing on his mediocre life and, ultimately, on the shortcomings of what seemed too much to do. Although the authorities or the institutions are undoubtedly committed to the eradication of all disorder, it is like a roll of dice, purely accidental, that arouses the vigilance of the authorities or institutions, and detains the person mentioned here, not another person, the ugly and shameless monk, the abandoned woman, the drunken drunkard, the quarrel-loving businessman, and not many other people besides them, who have caused no less trouble than them. Moreover, among the countless scattered documents, it is this one, and not many others, that reaches us, is rediscovered and read by us. Therefore, there is no inevitability between these insignificant people and those of us who are as insignificant as they are. Nothing necessarily made them, and not someone else, suddenly emerge from the shadows, carrying their lives with them with misfortune. We would also love to see (if you will) that there is a remedy in this opportunity: the chance that brought these absolutely glorified people to suddenly emerge from so many deaths, and which also enabled them to show their posture again, still showing their anger, their distress, or their irrepressible stubbornness, which may compensate for their misfortune for the dazzling light of power(though they are mediocre and nameless).
Pictured here is Foucault's "Discipline and Punishment"
These beings, which did not seem to exist at all, had a chance to survive only because of the collision with power, which had hoped only to erase them, or at least erase their traces. It is the combination of many fortuitous encounters that enables these lives to reappear in us: and what I want to collect in this book is the rare remnants of these nameless people. There is a false infamy, gilles de rais, guilleri or cartouche, sade and lacene these horrible images or villains enjoy such a reputation. On the surface they are dishonorable, but it is precisely because they have left behind them repugnant memories, and people believe that they have committed countless evil deeds that have caused breathtaking terror, so these people are actually the protagonists of glorious legends, even if the origin of their fame is the opposite of what should have created a glorious image of a person. Their lack of reputation is nothing more than a certain form of universal fame (fama). But the apostates, the poor spirits lost in the unknown path, are the nameless in the strict sense of the word; today they are only able to live in people's memory with the help of a few terrible words aimed at reducing them to a penny. And the hope of opportunity, what remains is that these pieces of paper are only spoken, and only these pieces of paper are only spoken. They return to this real present in the same way that they were originally expelled from the world. It is useless to seek another picture of them, or to speculate in them another splendor; they are merely the short words left behind by the forces that hope to destroy them: no more, no less. This is namelessness in the strict sense, neither mixed with ambiguous scandals, nor producing private worship, nor mixed with any glory.
I am acutely aware that there may be a grand compilation of the Nameless, a collection of traces from various periods and places, and that the text selected below this book is mediocre, narrow, and somewhat monotonous than this vast compilation. It focuses on literature that is almost always from the century between 1670 and 1770; and the sources are the same: the prison and the police, the petition to the king and the lettres de cachet. Let's assume that this is only the first volume of The Life of the Nameless, and that it can be extended to other times and places. I chose this period and this type of text because I was familiar with them. But if my preference for these texts has endured for years, and I return to them again today, it is because I suspect that there is a beginning in these texts, in any case an important event, where political mechanisms and discursive effects are intricately intertwined. These texts from the 17th and 18th centuries are a ray of light, especially if you compare them to the clichés of later police or administration; with the help of a single sentence they can show a splendor, a kind of violence, and at least in our eyes, this splendor or violence, with the insignificance of these things or the fact that people can get lost, but to no avail, and now they are at the end of the road, but they hope for His Royal Highness the Prince. This is the situation of a miserable man who dares to let his cries go to the holy hearing." Or another time, the abandoned nursing mother demanded the arrest of her husband in the name of four children, "These children may have nothing to gain from their fathers other than the terrible example of misconduct, Your Royal Highness, your Holy Book should save these children from this kind of education that destroys them, so that I and my family can be spared from shame and notoriety, and free me and my family from the power of this undesirable subject, who only knows how to harm the interests of society." "People may laugh; but we cannot ignore this: the rhetoric of the text appears pretentious and pretentious only because the text deals with trivial matters with such rhetoric, and in our eyes the way in which power reacts with great restraint; but in spite of these contrasts, a bolt of lightning is drawn in the words of these texts, giving us the opportunity to see the decisions of power; and if the solemnity of these decisions is not to derive authority from the importance of the object of their punishment, At least because they impose punishment on business.
If you were to imprison a wandering fortune teller, it would be because "she did whatever she wanted." She has been defrauding, fooling and seducing the public for many years, but she has been at large, so that she immediately deported such a dangerous woman to prison so that the public would no longer suffer, in accordance with justice and compassion and benevolence". Or about a frivolous and debauched young man, "He's a wandering and disrespectful demon... Habitually engaged in all kinds of evil deeds: rogues, stubbornness, irritability, indiscriminate violence, even the deliberate murder of one's own father... Always hang out with some of the lowest prostitutes. He is indifferent to what people say about his rogueness, debauchery, and debauchery; he is just like a villain, smiling wildly, so that people know that he is an iron heart, let us understand that he is incorrigible." Just because of the slightest nonsense, a person is already in the category of abominations, or at least caught up in words of condemnation and cursing. Compared to Nero or rodogune, these immoral women or disobedient children are no less inferior. The discourse of power in the classical era is a discourse on power, and it creates demons. Why is this drama of everyday life so pompous? Christianity has arranged the power to grasp the ordinary places of life mainly around confession: it is obligatory to use language to dissect the trivial worlds of daily life, banal faults, even imperceptible faults, all the way to your disordered thoughts, intentions, and desires; in the avowal ceremony, the person who speaks speaks is himself; the person who speaks of a matter is himself; the person who speaks of a matter is erased by speaking about it, but likewise cancels the confession itself, because it must remain secret. Apart from repentance and repentance, nothing else is left. The Western world under Christian rule has invented this shocking constraint, which is imposed on everyone to say everything in order to erase everything, to express the slightest transgressions in a constant, desperate, exhaustive, meticulous whisper, but the action itself dies at the moment of expression. For millions of people over many centuries, faults must be confessed in the first person, in a fleeting, but obligatory whisper.
The picture shows Bosch's "Fool's Ship"
Then, probably at some point in the late 17th century, this mechanism was surrounded by another mechanism that operated differently, the latter overpowering the former. It is an administrative mechanism, not a religious arrangement: a mechanism of registration, not a mechanism of asking for forgiveness. However, the targets are no different. At least part of it is the same: to incorporate everyday life into discourse, to investigate the insignificant world of irregularities and disorder. But here, confession no longer plays the prominent role that Christianity once reserved for it. Because of this ancient framework, which had previously been used in a localized manner, it would henceforth be systematically used: denunciation, denunciation, inquiry, reporting, use of spies, interrogation. And everything that is said in this way will be recorded, accumulated, and constituted in the form of a written form, and shall constitute a file and an archive. The individual voices of confession, born and die, leave no trace, erasing themselves and obstinating; and this monologue is followed by multiple voices that store themselves in a vast pile of archives and, in this way, are permanently established as endlessly growing memories, remembering all the faults of the world. The slight transgressions of misfortune and misdeeds are no longer poured out to heaven by means of the almost inaudible secrets of confession; but are accumulated on earth, by means of traces of writing. This creates a completely different relationship between power, discourse, and everyday life, a rather different way of regulating everyday life and elaborating on everyday life. Thus was born a new "performance" of everyday life. We are already familiar with the oldest, but already complex, forms of this tool: petition letters, royal seal documents or orders issued by the king, various forms of imprisonment, police reports and rulings. I do not wish to retrace the ins and outs of these already well-known events; I would like to explore only certain aspects of them that illustrate why they are so passionate, astonishing, and beautiful, and which sometimes give rise to these fleeting images, and for those of us who have glimpsed them from afar, the poor supplicants who haunt them have the appearance of the nameless. Royal seals, captivity, ubiquitous police, all these ordinary things merely remind people of a tyranny under an absolute monarchy. But we must really understand in what sense this "arbitraire" is a public service. The "edict" (ordres du roi) suddenly descended from top to bottom in an unexpected way only in some very rare cases, marking the monarch's indignation.
Most of the time, these orders are issued at the request of people close to them, including their parents, a relative, their family, their children, their neighbours, sometimes priests of local parishes or some influential person; Squandering property, conflicts of interest, disobedience of young people, rogues or abuse of alcohol, and all those insignificant misdeeds. The Royal Seal Document, which claims to be intended to be used exclusively to express the king's will to imprison a certain subject outside of formal judicial channels, is actually responding to a request from below. However, the Wang Yin instrument does not automatically obey the person who made the request: an investigation is to be conducted before the publication of the Wang Yin document, aimed at judging the merits of the request; the investigation is used to determine whether this indulgent or the drunkard, the act of violence or the debauchery, really should be imprisoned, under what conditions, and for how long: this investigation is a task of the police, and in order to complete this task, the police must gather all kinds of testimony, the reports of the spies and all those suspicious whispers, They make everyone's surroundings foggy and blurry. The system of incarceration-royal seal documents was only a fairly brief episode: it lasted less than a century, and was confined to France. However, it is important for the history of the mechanism of power. It does not ensure that royal arbitrariness can burst out spontaneously in the most everyday parts of life. Instead, it ensures that this power is distributed along complex loops throughout the game of demand and response. Is this an absolutist abuse? Perhaps; but not simply by the monarch's own abuse of his own power, but by the fact that every man can use the enormous monarchical power to use it for his own use, to satisfy his own goals, against others: it is a mechanism of sovereignty, a well-established way of dealing with possibilities: one can grasp it if one is intelligent enough to know how to adopt it and to make its effects biased in one's own interests. This has a number of consequences: the political monarchy instead places itself at the most basic level of the social body; from subjects to subjects (sometimes the problem involves the lowest status), between family members, between neighbors, business interests, professional peers, antagonists, love-hate relationships, from which one can be sure that this political power has an absolutist form, that its resources go beyond the traditional weapons of authority and obedience; and that everyone, as long as he knows how to play the game, For the other he would be a terrifying, lawless monarch: homo homini rex; a whole web of politics intertwined with the web of everyday life. But one must first possess this power, even for a moment, provide it with channels, mobilize it, and let it be skewed in the direction one desires; one must "seduce" it if one wants to adopt it for one's own benefit; this power, at the same time, becomes the object of one's desire and the object of temptation; therefore, one desires it, and one fears it to the same extent. Thus, the intervention of an unlimited political power in everyday relations becomes not only acceptable, habitual, but urgently desired, and at the same time becomes a subject of widespread fear. It is not surprising that this trend has gradually opened up coexistence or dependency relationships traditionally associated with the family, leaving them to administrative and political control. It is also common for the wanton power of a king who in this way works in passion, rage, misery, or meanness, though useful, or perhaps precisely because of it, to become the object of a curse. Those who make use of the royal seal instrument and the king who grant it are in trouble because of their complicity: the former is increasingly losing their traditionally beneficial power to administrative power, while the latter, because every moment is mixed with so many hateful tricks, has become hateful. I think that, as duc de chaulieu said in His Memoirs of the Newlyweds (Memoirs of the Newlyweds), the French Revolution cut off the heads of kings and the heads of every father of the family. For now, what I want people to remember is that with the help of this configuration of petitions, royal seals, imprisonments, and police compositions, there have been endless discourses that permeate all aspects of everyday life, albeit in a completely different way than confession, but also about grasping the trivial mistakes committed by insignificant lives. Along fairly complex loops, networks of power capture those neighborhood disputes, parent-child quarrels, misunderstandings within the family, alcoholism, public quarrels, and many hidden passions. It is as if there is a great and omnipresent call to put all these messes, every little painful misfortune, into words. A whisper that did not know any boundaries began to swell: through it, deviations in individual behavior, shame and secrecy were delivered through the words into the palm of power. Trivial things no longer belong to the realm of silence, no longer gossip or brief confessions. The mundane things, the insignificant details, the vague things and the faint of the people, the days of no glory and the ordinary life, all that makes up them, can and must be said. It would be even better if I could write it down. These things become descriptive and recordable, as if they were permeated by a mechanism of political power. For a long time, only the chronicles of the nobility are worth telling in a non-sarcastic tone; only the inheritance of blood, origin and heroic deeds give a person the right to enter history. And if sometimes it is true that some lowly people enjoy a kind of glory, it is also through the help of something extraordinary, which is either holy and glorious or a great sin. But it is only when the unrelenting gaze of power gradually resides on the chaos that people begin to unearth the secrets to be revealed in the order of daily life, and realize that, in a way, those insignificant things cannot be ignored. Thus a great possibility of discourse was born. At the very least, some kind of knowledge of everyday life (savoir) is a cause of it, and with that knowledge comes a grid of intelligibility that Western societies use to grasp our postures, our ways of being, and how we act. But to achieve this, the omnipresence of the monarch, whether real or fictitious, must be indispensable; for anyone who wishes to plead with the king to issue the royal seal, he should imagine that he seems to be immersed in all these sufferings, and is quite concerned with even the most unspecific unpeace; he must certainly have some kind of omnipresence, appearing everywhere. In its original form, this discourse of everyday life was entirely addressed to the king; it spoke to the king; it had to dive into the great ceremonial ceremonies of power; it had to adopt the form of the ceremonies, with the help of ceremonial symbols. These trivial and banal things can only be spoken, written, described, observed, delineated, and evaluated in a power relationship in which the image of the king is everywhere, in the power relations in which his actual power or illusionary potential power is haunted. From this comes the unique form of this discourse: it adopts a sculpted language mixed with curses and prayers.
These everyday little stories, told to everyone, are told in an exaggerated tone that is only found in an unusual event, so as to attract the attention of the monarch. These trivial matters must be decorated with flowery rhetoric. In the future, this linguistic effect will no longer be found in the dreary administration of public security, or in the files of medical treatment or mental illness. In these texts, sometimes a glorious edifice of speech is merely to repeat a humble evil or a small ruse; sometimes a few short sentences crush a poor man and then immerse him in his darkness; or there is a long retelling of misfortune in a tone of pleading humility: political discourse about a mediocre life can only be solemn. But in these texts, there is another contrast. The demand for the imprisonment of a person is often made by people of very low social status, who cannot write, or who are not good at writing; when written to kings or nobles, by virtue of their shallow knowledge, or by the number of competent scribes, they are able to create to the best of their ability the wording and the procedures of succession and succession, and are also interspersed with clumsy, fierce words, rough expressions, which they no doubt think that the addition of these languages will make their petitions more powerful and more real; In the middle of solemn but unrelated sentences, next to incomprehensible words, some crude, clumsy, indecent statements erupt; intertwined with the ritualistic language that has to be said are impatience, irritation, anger, passion or resentment, and disobedience. A powerful wild passion, in its own way of telling, disrupts the rules of this pretentious discourse. In one text, Bienfe's wife said: She "took the liberty of pointing out to His Highness with great trepidation that this damn coachman Bienfe, who was so domineering, beat the woman to death, that he was about to turn the bottom of the house upside down, that the first two wives were killed by him, that the first wife was pregnant with a child in her stomach when she died, that the second wife was heartbroken and tortured to death by him, that he abused her, that she became thinner and weaker, and that he almost strangled her to death... He even wanted to roast the heart of his third wife, and everything else would be even worse; Your Highness, I bow down at your feet, and ask for holy grace and mercy, so that I may enjoy justice, for my life is in danger, and I will always pray to the Emperor to bless you with health and peace...".
The picture shows the design of the panoramic open view prison
Here, the documents I have compiled are homogeneous; and they are likely to appear monotonous. However, the effect of all the text comes from the contrast. The contrast between the repetition of things and the way of telling; the contrast between those who appeal and plead and those who have full authority over them; the contrast between the subtle order of the questions raised and the vast power used to operate; the contrast between the language of ritual and power and the language of madness and impotence. These texts appear to have been written by Racine, Pocheue, and Crabione; but they are filled with a popular uproar, misfortune, violence, and the usual "vulgarity" that probably no literature of any era would have liked. These words make beggars, poor people, or just ordinary people appear in this strange drama; in this scene they make their tones, make generous statements, and make manners; in the play, they dress behind a large number of embellishments, but apart from this line, what can they do to make themselves conspicuous on the stage of power? Sometimes, they are reminiscent of a group of tattered charlatans, dressed in fancy costumes that, though once popular, are now tacky and dilapidated, and they want to be able to perform in front of a wealthy public and win a laugh.
It is only on occasions like this, in the presence of those in high power who determine their life experiences, that they perform their lives. They were like the characters in Celina's novel, thinking of letting the princes and nobles in Versailles hear their voices. One day, these contrasting effects will slowly disappear. The power that begins to operate at the level of everyday life will no longer be the one who is both immersive and out of reach, omnipotent but capricious, the source of all justice and the target of all deception, with both political principles and the efficacy of witchcraft; power will become composed of a delicate, continuous network of differentiation in which various institutions of justice, policing, medical treatment, and psychiatric treatment are interconnected. The discourse that took shape in the new power no longer adopted the dramatic language of old-fashioned mannerism; but developed in a self-proclaimed neutral language based on observation. Trivial and banal things will be analysed by effective but bleak regulatory frameworks, journalistic frameworks, and scientific frameworks; only away from these frameworks, such as literature, will the glorious side of these things be explored. In the 17th and 18th centuries, people were still in an age of coarse savagery and barbarism, and all these intermediaries did not exist at that time; those unfortunate and poor people, whose bodies were almost directly confronted with the king's body, whose agitations were almost directly confronted by the king's rites; who did not have any common language between the two sides, only the collision between the shouts and the rituals, between the chaos to be told and the strict forms to be followed. For those of us who look back from a distant time, it is here that everyday life first appears in the code of political questions, and some strange flashes, some dazzling, something that leaves a strong impression appear, but thereafter, the so-called "affairs", social news or cases emerge from these people and things, and these flashes disappear. The text here records an important moment: a society "lends" to the nameless masses of words, phrases, and the order in which they conceive, and the rituals of language, so that they can speak of themselves, and publicly about themselves. Such a narrative has three conditions at the same time: the discourse is oriented to a clearly defined distribution of power and enters the circulation of this distribution of power; it shows the basis of existence that was previously little noticed; and from these humble wars of passion and interest, it offers power the possibility of monarchy intervention. In fact, dennis's ears are nothing more than a simple little machine if compared to this kind of discourse. If power operates only to monitor, snoop, eavesdrop, to forbid and punish, then it must be very simple and easy to destroy power; but power is still inspiring, instigating, producing; power is not just eyes and ears; power also produces words and actions. Undoubtedly, this mechanism is important for the composition of new knowledge (savoir). And in a whole new literary system, it is not out of place. I am not saying that the Royal Seal meant the emergence of a previously unrecognized literary form, but that in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the relations of discourse, power, daily life and truth were intertwined in a new way, and literature happened to be among them. Fable, from the point of view of the meaning of the word, is something worthy of all languages. In Western society, everyday life has long been possible for everyday life to enter the discourse, which must be filled with allegorical and extraordinary things, and thus deformed; it must be carried out by heroic deeds, merits, adventures, divine wills or graces, and possibly by evil crimes that separate daily life from itself; and daily life has to carry the imprint of an impossible thing. Only then will everyday life become something to tell. In this way, daily life is placed in a place that ordinary people cannot reach, and it plays a role as a lesson and as an example. The more the narrative moves away from the ordinary, the stronger its impact and the more persuasive it becomes. So in this fabulous-exemplary play, the fundamental point is that it doesn't matter if it's true or not. And if someone happens to talk about the banalities of real life, it may only be to create a comedic effect, and telling this life will only make people laugh. Since the 17th century, the West has witnessed the birth of a whole set of "fables" about a life of obscurity that forbid the use of previously unusual tones. Only by starting from the impossible, from the point of view of ridicule, can we recount those ordinary worlds. A linguistic art was born, and its task was no longer to glorify what was unlikely to happen, but to make those things that did not appear—those that could not or could not be revealed—revealed: to tell the most fundamental, that is, the most trivial, parts of real life. At the same time, when a configuration is set up to compel man to speak of the "infime", of those who cannot speak of himself, of those who have no glory to speak of, of those who have no glory, of the "infame", a new law is gradually formed, which is used to constitute what one might call ethics, an ethic inherent in Western literary discourse: its ritual function will fade away; its task will no longer be to manifest the splendor that is easily visible in strength, grace, heroic deeds, or ability. Instead, it sets out to find the things that are the most difficult to detect, the deepest hidden, the most difficult to say in the display and telling, and ultimately the things that are strictly forbidden and least decent. Since the 17th century, a new command aimed at fully revealing the bleakest and most everyday aspects of existence (though sometimes revealing the most solemn images of fate) has charted the trend of literary development, because it was from this time that this kind of writing began to become literature in the modern sense. Thus this discourse is not merely a special form, a fundamental relation to form, and I prefer to call the conditioning of this discourse moral, which is characterized by it, and whose great movement is thus transmitted to us: the duty to tell the most ordinary secrets. Literature itself is not sufficient to encompass this vast politics, this vast discursive ethic; and it is certainly not possible to reduce this discourse to this ethic entirely; but it is precisely in this ethics that it finds its place, its conditions of existence. From this arises the dual relationship of discourse with truth and power. While those extraordinary allegories can only function in a situation where it is difficult to determine whether true or false, literature establishes itself in a definite non-truth: it appears explicitly as fiction, but at the same time strives to produce its own effect of truth, and it is also regarded as such; in classical times the importance of giving natural style and imitation was undoubtedly the earliest way of expressing the "en vérité" function of literature. Since then, fiction has replaced fables, and fiction has shed the fetters of the romanesque and can only develop itself by getting rid of this style. Literature thus forms part of the vast system of constraints in which the West compels everyday life to be perceived by discourse; however, it occupies a special place in this system: determined to seek hidden everyday life, to cross various boundaries, to expose secrets crudely or insidiously, to replace rules and codes, to prompt people to tell the unannouncable, and thus literature tends to remain outside the law, and in any case its task is to be responsible for scandals, transgressions and rebellions. It has been the word of the "dishonorable" more than any other form of language: its task has always been to speak of the most unspeakable: the worst, the most secret, the most intolerable, the unashamed. For many years, psychoanalysis and literature had been fascinated by each other, and now the reason is very clear from this point of view. But we must not forget that this unique position of literature is nothing more than an effect of some kind of power allocation. In the West, this power configuration permeates the entire arrangement of discourse and the real variety of strategies. To begin with, I said, I want people to read these texts in this book as if they were so many "stories." No doubt this goes too far; none of these texts can compare with even the most insignificant narratives of Chekhov, Maupassant, or James. These texts are neither "quasi-literary" nor "sub-literary"; they are not even a prototype of a genre; they are more of a reflection of the role of power in life and the discourse that arises from them in the midst of riots, noise, and sorrow. Manon Lesgo recounts one such story.
From: General Knowledge Simulcast