The Great Shutdown - Selected Articles 3

The Great Closure discusses the causes and consequences of a great change that affected all of Europe since the seventeenth century. According to Foucault, this process is a direct result of the economic functioning of capitalism. An unemployed and homeless crowd, who were unable or unwilling to work, and who wanted to live under the sunlight, as in previous periods, instead of the stifling darkness of the factory, were confined to a place called Hôpital général, which was established in Paris for the first time in this period. The sick, the disabled, the mentally ill, criminals, immoral people, homosexuals were put in the same place without distinction between men and women. This process, which parallels similar practices in other European countries, resulted in the emergence of a number of institutions such as modern hospitals, mental hospitals, prisons and schools at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
These institutions, which ostensibly provide the treatment or rehabilitation of subnormal individuals such as patients, mentally ill people, and criminals under humane conditions, or the proper education of normal individuals, were essentially used to produce the productive and obedient bodies needed by micro-power capitalism, in which the disciplinary techniques of modern capitalist society were developed. As a matter of fact, these disciplinary techniques have become most competent in today's police states and "security societies" where the Great Lockdown and the Great Detention have penetrated all cells of society.
Based on this historical process, Foucault continued his work in the form of a completely archaeological excavation, revealing the internal workings and mechanisms of the institutions in the light of historical documents, while at the same time he was at the source and practice of serious objections and protests regarding the present of these closed institutions. Foucault, who made a detailed analysis of the government's techniques to subjectify, individualize and thus control people today, both his personal work with mental patients in clinics and his work as the founder and active member of the Information Group on Prisons, especially in Turkey, where the issue of prisons is constantly on the agenda. It contains vital analyzes for all intellectuals and activists of .
Why and how we were closed; Texts that will be read again and again by those who want to think about the forms and contents of resistance to confinement..



Number of Pages: 336

Year of Printing: 2015


Language: Turkish
Publisher: Details Publications

First Print Year: 2007

Number of Pages: 336

Language Turkish