system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What does Foucault mean when he says “everything is a prison”? Does he even say that or is that just a meme?
gpt
Broadly, it's a perspective on power, where power is less directly possessed by people and groups than it is distributed through institutions and their logics of flow. Bodies and statements are organized, shaped and channeled by power, the example of the prison demonstrating how bodies are materially organized into spaces (individual cells, counted and checked, allowed to flow under constrained conditions), with accompanying, collectively-observed expectations for talk and behaviour (defer to the authority of guards, don't talk to each other, etc.). On the meme side of things, the prison example leads people to miss his point here that power is not just oppressive as a result, it's PRODUCTIVE..

Yes, the prison is repressive on the terms of this combination of bodies and statements, but you can analyze a classroom in the same way: materially, bodies are organized in individualized desks, for x number of minutes a week to listen to a lecture, chairs are oriented towards the front of the class. And in terms of talk and behaviour, students usually speak much less than the lecturer, and there's a shared sense that the latter is more authoritative than the former. In other words there's an asymmetry of roles, akin to the prison guard and prisoner.

But in this case students and lecturer each get something out of it, eventual credentialing and knowledge and other things that contribute to driving the productive regimes of a given society. So it's less that "everything is a prison" and more that "every institution has a power diagram that organizes people and things and statements in certain productive ways, and let me use the prison as an obvious (but potentially misleading) example."