Douglas Caddy Posted January 4, 2020 Share Posted January 4, 2020 Ghosts of the Disciplinary Machine: Lee Harvey Oswald, Life-History, and the Truth of Crime By Jonathan Simon* https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1058&context=facpubs [Robert Morrow sent me this document, which I am posting for educational purposes only] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Andrews Posted January 4, 2020 Share Posted January 4, 2020 (edited) Actually...a very interesting analysis of how the Warrren Report employs, and "validates," the tropes of 1950s juvenile delinquency studies. Probably the next best example is Truman Capote's "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood, only a few years after the WR, and possibly informed by the WR. If Oswald had had a collection of violent comic books, the noose would have been cinched. One wonders how, or if, any of the case history and the family legend (absent father, orphanage abandonment, truancy, etc., producing a malcontent and misfit), might have been allowed in court as "backgound" against an Oswald who survived. Odds are, though, that his survival was never part of the plan. The essay is also a portrait of the FBI's non-evidentiary methodology. Well worth reading. Inspirational quote: ("The introduction of the 'biographical' is important to the history of penality," Foucault noted, "because it established the 'criminal' as existing before the crime and even outside of it."' ) While this new vision of causality took the individual as its object, then, it also dispersed the origins of criminal behavior across the social field; the individuation of a criminal act through life-history simultaneously represented a kind of death of the individual subject. "Behind the offender to whom the investigation of the facts may attribute responsibility for an offense," wrote Foucault, "stands the delinquent whose slow formation is shown in a biographical investigation .... [O]ne sees penal discourse and psychiatric discourse crossing each other's frontiers; and there, at their point of junction, is formed the 'dangerous' individual, which makes it possible to draw up a network of causality in terms of the entire biography and present a verdict of punishment- correction." In the Warren Report, Oswald is Foucault's ultimate "dangerous individual." He is the perfect poster boy for a disciplinary society: the youthful deviant who, diagnosed but untreated, went on to strike a lethal blow at the core of national security. This image of Oswald was all the more potent because the Commission's biographical truth was to be the final legal word on his life, undisturbed by the discourse of moral and legal blame that a criminal trial in Texas would have produced had Oswald lived. Edited January 5, 2020 by David Andrews Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Douglas Caddy Posted January 5, 2020 Author Share Posted January 5, 2020 David: You are one talented writer with a perceptive mind that constantly amazes me with keen insights that I missed seeing in whatever matter that is posted. Our forum is fortunate to have you and so many others like you. What a group of exceptional people from all walks of life united in the common cause of searching for the truth. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Carter Posted January 5, 2020 Share Posted January 5, 2020 Very interesting post re: Foucault. See also Life Magazine’s February 1964 issue (backyard photo cover) with Oswald biography anticipating the later WC conclusions. The asserted narrative obliterates any necessity of factual grounding. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Andrews Posted January 5, 2020 Share Posted January 5, 2020 (edited) Doug, thank you, but I doubt it's true. I'm more of a JFKA critic than a researcher, being tied up in my own projects. Like a broken clock, I'm right twice a day. I'll try to do that here. Edited January 5, 2020 by David Andrews Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Andrews Posted January 5, 2020 Share Posted January 5, 2020 (edited) Delete, please. Edited December 25, 2020 by David Andrews Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Jolliffe Posted January 6, 2020 Share Posted January 6, 2020 Hmm. Since "Oswald" did NOT shoot anyone, who cares what influence comic books and/or pop culture had on him growing up? Why does any of that matter? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Brancato Posted January 6, 2020 Share Posted January 6, 2020 David - in some ways I agree with what Mr. Joliffe posted, but also am interested in your well articulated theory(s). According to RFK Jr., Joseph Kennedy has been much maligned by revisionist history. Have you read his book American Values? Dinkin - I think he was ultimately coerced into changing his source from coded intercepted messages to psychological sets. We know now, through sleuthing by Steve Thomas (and myself) that the official recording misstates Dinkin’s record. He was attached to a high security military group tasked with nuclear security. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Andrews Posted January 6, 2020 Share Posted January 6, 2020 4 hours ago, Paul Jolliffe said: Hmm. Since "Oswald" did NOT shoot anyone, who cares what influence comic books and/or pop culture had on him growing up? Why does any of that matter? Did you read the article on Oswald and disciplinary methodology in the Warren Report. which Doug Caddy posted? The comic book influence, while not applied to Oswald, was part of the psychological "backgrounding:" of delinquency the shaped the legend of LHO in the WR. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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