Foucault Body And Punishment

Reading Foucault this year you become engaged in his philosophical exercises in self-transformation. Foucault also helps you to understand that the struggle for power in all human relations will never conclude. I also really appreciate how Foucault analyses the past to show us how we have been made docile. Docile bodies according to Foucault is subjected, used, transformed and improved. Discipline is a word Foucault uses that describes systems that are used to dominate docile bodies, in other words humans who are able to be controlled, basically all of us. How does the concept of controlling bodies through spatialization exist in other forms of trauma and violence?

Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman’s work was centralised around there two different concepts of how your identity is formed through the process of power and expert knowledge. This Essay will discuss the ideas of Michel Foucault who was a French Social Theorist. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge and how both of these are used as a form of social control through society. The essay will look at Foucault’s work in The Body and Sexuality, Madness and Civilisation and Discipline and Punish which displays how he conceptualised Power and identity on a Marxist and macro basis of study. The Essay will also address the Ideas of Erving Goffman who was A Canadian Born Sociologist who’s key study was what

In his view, the very architecture of school buildings, hospitals, prisons, and state buildings were designed to depict power (Foucault 1984, 190). To Foucault, power employed the “mechanism of panopticism” to observe and control (Foucault 1984, 206). The idea of panopticism here is being used to denote a system where institutions use open spaces as a means of exercising power. For example, Foucault saw great similarities in the spatial design of the military camp and high schools, hospitals, and prisons. In Foucault’s words, “this infinitely scrupulous concern with surveillance is expressed in the architecture by innumerable petty mechanisms” (Foucault 1984, 191). These ‘mechanisms’ Foucault refers to here include the unending tests, documentation and paper work that is carried out on students, patients, and military personnel, and it was through this that conclusions were made on whether a person conformed to societal expectations or not. Furthermore, conclusions can then be made on a person’s mental state, guilt, educational level, military competence, and so on. This led Foucault to ask if “the disciplines have now become the new law of modern society”? (Foucault 1984, 196). It is important to mention here that although Foucault viewed knowledge as controlling and stifling, he also saw it as productive and useful, and thus he insists that “we must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes”, it “represses”, it “censors”, it “abstracts”, it “masks”, it “conceals”. In fact, power produces reality, domains of objects, and rituals of truth” (Foucault 1984, 204-205). What this means is that although power can be used as a tool by institutions as discussed above, it can also be used by individuals to

The movie, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, is a film that relates to Foucault’s analysis of discipline and punishment. Foucault’s argument is that power works in a disciplinary way in current society. The movie can relate to this because the institution that the movie took place in was ran using Foucault’s disciplinary technique. There are many scenes from the film that give an analysis of Foucault’s argument. Foucault believes that people have the power to punish the docile bodies that they produce.

This is a summary of Michel Foucault's seminal work on the history of criminal punishment and social discipline as it transformed from punitive to correctional models during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In the chapter, “The body of the Condemned,” Foucault addresses the evolution of the punishment system and how it has gone from being a public spectacle to something that is done behind closed doors. Foucault opens the chapter with an extremely descriptive and gory representation of a public execution. The purpose of this was to display how execution have changed from being in the public eye to behind closed doors using the electric chair and legal injections. It was done in this fashion to deter individuals from committing heinous crimes. Today, the cost of prison time, fines, etc.. deter individuals instead. Punishment has become less about effecting the body and more about the changing the souls and integrating them back into society.

Foucault’s primary example of a disciplinary institution was the Panopticon planned by J. Bentham. It was what seemed to be precise in the aspects of control, power, discipline, and isolation. It was for all types of people such as a schoolboy, worker, sickly patient or a madman. It was created to stop all foolishness. Inmates needed to be watched constantly to make sure that everything and everyone were in order; therefore there was special architecture produced in order to accomplish that task.

In Foucault’s influential work, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1975), he argues that discipline enables individuals to perform the duties assigned to them within the new forms of economic, political, and military organisations emerging in the modern age. Foucault’s argument is that discipline creates docile bodies, ideal for the modern age – bodies that function well within academic, administrative, service and manufacturing frameworks. In a refined world, there are subtle methods to maintain order and discipline and keep the system functioning. To construct docile bodies the disciplinary institutions must be able to constantly observe and record the bodies they control and ensure the internalisation of the disciplinary individuality within the bodies being controlled. That is, discipline must be enforced without excessive force and only by way of keen supervision; the moulding of bodies into exact forms must be done through observation alone. This requires a particular form of institution which Foucault exemplifies using Jeremy Bentham’s

Change over time; that is a common theme with everything in the world. The concept of punishment is no different in that regard. In the 16th and 17th century the common view for punishing people was retaliation from the king and to be done in the town square. In what seemed to be all of a sudden, there was a change in human thinking, the concept of punishment changed to a more psychological approach compared to a public embarrassment/torture approach. The following paragraphs will discuss the development of prisons and what in fact gives people gives people the right to punish; as well as the overall meaning and function of prisons. The work by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison will help with the arguments

In her article, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power”, Bartkey begins by summarizing philosopher Michel Foucault’s literary analysis of the Panopticon and how the prison system works tying it to modern society. Foucault begins by using the example of a student who is forced to sit in assigned seating based of class ranking. The scrutiny the student faces forces him to sit upright; he must keep feet his feet on the floor; his head must stay erect; and he may not slouch or fidget. With

The beginning of this essay will reference the judge’s traditional duty. Next it will explore the similarities between Michel Foucault’s Punish and Discipline and Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Madhouse. More specifically, it will address the increased authority of the judge, and the judge as a normalizing figure in society. After, it will compare Foucault’s definition of disciplinary institutions to Nellie Bly’s experience in Blackwell Insane Asylum.

According to Foucault, power does not belong to the individual, but to the system, to the institution. In his essay on Discipline and Punish, Foucault presents his idea of the panopticon mechanism, a mechanism in which visibility is a trap. With little importance over the actual individual in the role of the observer or of the observed, the object of the system is total power over the observed. Due to the unique shape of the panopticon, there are no corners and thus no blind spots for the observed to hide in. The private space is replaced by the public one. Furthermore, as final evidence of total control, the observed never knows for sure if they are being watched or not, as they can’t see the observer (Foucault 200-205). Foucault further argues that this system is followed by any government institution, placing the society under permanent observation. Individuals might try to evade the system, but achieving liberation and freedom is not something that anyone could do. Dostoevsky’s famous novel, Crime and

This part of the paper will provide a comparison with a theorist previously discussed in a lecture. The theorist with whom Michael Foucault’s arguments will be compared to is Emile Durkheim. Durkheim sees crime as functional. He says that if there was no crime, all our values would be dispersed--these values are laws. These laws are observed by sanctions and punishments attached to it. However, in order for these laws to exist, there must be a punishment, thus, for there to be a punishment, there has to be crime. Repressive law, according to this classical theorist was based on punishing for the evil doing of the criminal through revenge. Durkheim believes that a crime is not collective and when one goes against the core values of society, one threatens the entire order of society. Therefore, this theorist would agree with Foucault that when disciplining a criminal, he or she should be stripped of their freedom and when

In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault includes theories in which to control and surveillance individuals. He describes his theory that he referred to as “docile bodies” to control a person. “A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved.” (Foucault 136) “A body” suggests the mind is absent in the body, which appears to be a process similar to brainwashing. Foucault states that the body can be used “as object

Each culture has its own understanding of body: Chinese regards all parts of body as gifts from parents; when Qing Emperors demanded citizens to shave hairs, those who resisted stated that shaving hair was betraying and were killed. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault explains that "body politic" in modern era, which makes me wonder the body's history: whether western cultures have the same view in the past. Because of the "prevalence" of the body, I would like to rank it as the highest one. I am equally interested in the fiction course. Because of my reporting experiences, I often encounter this question: what is truth?