Foucault Discipline And Punishment

Although there are somewhat of similarities between Weber’s and Foucault’s relations of power and dominance, how they evaluate the concepts separately and the ways these concepts are practiced in society, can be distinguished differently. Webber appears to occupy the polar opposite with the respect to his claims of how power becomes existent with bureaucratic instruments and bureaucracy itself, Foucault argues that the power relations are everywhere in society and with expansive elements; society has no option but to internalize (Shaw 2011). His explanation of power is much broader than Weber’s. Focault rejects the hierarchical models of power, and believed that relations of dominance are formations of unequal power (McClaren 2002), and over time domination may seem fixed in society’s social structure (Shaw 2011). Additionally, Foucault looks at the concept of power from a functional strategy, with the functional practices administered by authority, and emphasises that authority commonly uses discursive power and the operation of discourse to maintain the dominance (Smart 2010; Shaw 2011). What is compelling about Foucault’s concept of power are his discursive claims. Unlike Webber, he suggests that power relations are not necessarily derived from state practices, but are all under state control, and highlights that “state and hegemony is in the every area of life” (Shaw 2011). Further, to understand some of Foucault’s functional examples, he focuses on the everyday lives of

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

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

“Foucault’s work gave the terms discursive practices and discursive formation to the analysis of particular institutions and their ways of establishing orders of truth, or what is accepted as ‘reality’ in a given society” (Goldberg). Discursive formations display hierarchical arrangement and are understood as reinforcing certain already established identities or subjectivities- in matters of sexuality, status, or class for example. These dominant discourses are understood as in turn reinforced by existing systems of law, education and the media”. Foucault’s work is to show that members of society such as intellectuals, “are implicated in discourse and in the discursive regimes or systems of power and regulation which give them their livelihoods

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 order to understand the power structures present in her description of life as a low-wage worker in Nickel and Dimed, we need to first understand Michael Foucault’s philosophy regarding discipline and surveillance. Rather than perceive power and discipline as strictly political and authoritative, Foucault believes that society is structured in a way in which constant observation disciplines us to abide by social norms and expectations. This constant surveillance is omnipresent in the sense that observation occurs in all realms of society, from education to sexuality. To further explain this idea of disciplining through constant inspection, Foucault describes Jeremy Bentham’s panoptican, a type of prison in which

Foucault began to compare this new idea of surveillance, power and punishment of the Panopticon to the power during the Middle Ages by the King which was more public in contrast to the Panopticon. The Panopticon was more discrete. It was not a show or form of entertainment when someone was punished unlike when someone is punished with the King. By exploring this, Foucault demonstrated how surveillance has changed overtime.

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

Foucault address the changing definition of crime and how power is exerted through the enforcement of punishment. During the monarchy, kings and queens showed their power and authority of the people by determining what punishment someone would receive for their actions. In the current political system, judges and juries are in the position to make these decisions. Judgement is the current system is based on motives and intent rather than on the severity of the crime alone. We care more about the psychological state of the individual and want to be able to change the person's soul to better respect society. The quote below addresses how punishment uses a variety of specializations and how the individual's mental state is molded to fit into standards we have created today.

Prisons have barbaric beginnings from the medieval dungeon and torture chamber in the late 18th century. They have always combined punishment with rehabilitation. The only difference is the way in which they are punished. French philosopher Michel Foucault said, “Punishment has changed from disciplining of the body to disciplining of the soul”. In 1779 the British government agreed to the Penitentiary Act which

The concept that I am having the most difficult time understanding is the first effect caused by the transition of society from a punitive mechanism to a penitentiary technique that Foucault listed. He states that this transition caused society to shift focus from order to offense and then back to the deviations of the norms of society, but I am confused on the transition from order to offense. By order, is Foucault referring to the use of punishment by the sovereign to control the citizens?

Michel Foucault is a very famous French intellectual who practiced the knowledge of sociology. Foucault analyzed how knowledge related to social structures, in particular the concept of punishment within the penal system. His theory through, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, is a detailed outline of the disciplinary society; in which organizes populations, their relations to power formations, and the corresponding conceptions of the subjects themselves. Previously, this type of punishment focused on torture and dismemberment, in which was applied directly to bodies. Foucault mentions through his literary piece, “the soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy: the soul is the prison of the body (p.30). However, today, the notion of punishment involves public appearances in a court and much more humane sentences. However, it is important to note and to understand the idea of power and knowledge; it is fundamental to understand the social system as a whole.

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 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

Sandra Bartky begins her piece by explaining Michel Foucault’s ideas about modern power dynamics. Unlike in the past, power in modern society focuses not only on controlling the products of the body but, rather, on governing all its activities. In order for this power to continue, people are disciplined into becoming “docile bodies” which are subjected and practiced (Bartky, 63). This discipline is imposed through constant surveillance in a manner similar to the Panopticon. Inmates in said prison are always visible to a guard in the central tower, so they mentally coerced into monitoring their own behavior. In the same way, individuals become their own jailers and subject themselves to the society’s whim due to being in a “state of conscious and permanent visibility” to its all-seeing eye (65). Bartky, however, breaks from Foucault’s theory by claiming that there is a clear difference in the disciplines imposed on men and women that are ignored in the latter’s writings.