From chapter 2 of Power/Knowledge, in Foucault's discussion of Discipline and Punish:
"I adopt the methodical precaution and the radical but unaggressive scepticism which makes it a principle not to regard the point in time where we are now standing as the outcome of a teleological progression...This doesn't mean not attempting to reconstruct generative processes, but that we must do this without imposing on them a positivity or a valorisation." (pg. 49-50)
Another great one is Foucault's continuing insistence that crime does not create prisons, but instead that prisons create delinquency, which justifies the existence of surveillance (broadly, the police.) It reminds me of another great inversion: Marx argued in the philosophical manuscripts that private property didn't create capitalism, but that capitalism brought about the very notion of private property.
It strikes me that the history of criminality would be a really rich, suggestive field to go into. Maybe I'll do that when I get my first tenure-track job at Harvard or Brown or wherever.
(Ha. Ha ha.)
-Chris
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