Foucault Surveillance

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

Crime is inevitable in society, whether it be in traditional societies or in modern society. However, with an action, there are always has to be a consequence, however when breaking the law, the consequences are rather bad, and sometimes harsh. This is called punishment. Discipline is enforcing acceptable patterns of behaviour and teaching obedience. In an excerpt called Discipline and Punish, contemporary theorist Michael Foucault explains these two concepts. This paper will summarize the author’s main points; provide a comparison with a theorist previously lectured on in class, as well as a personal interpretation of Foucault’s arguments.

George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman are two theorists in the study of sociology that have impacted the way we see sociology today. Their works, when closely examined, actually share some extreme similarities. Both of these men seemed very interested in the perception of self in the eyes of others as well as yourself. “Mind, Self, and Society” is an article written by Mead which was placed in the book entitled “Social Theory: The Classic Tradition to Post-Modernism” which was edited by Farganis with the copyright of McGraw-Hill in 2004. This primarily deals with the development of one’s self, or their identity. “Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” is an article written by Goffman which was arranged to be in the book “Inner Lives and

Almost everything someone does in today’s society is under surveillance. It does not matter if you are surfing the web, going to the store, or even driving a car; it is almost always under surveillance. While Michel Foucault does not specifically talk about modern surveillance technology in Discipline & Punish (1977), much of the primitive technology that he does talk about is directly related with today’s surveillance technology. Michel Foucault believes that societal surveillance began to take effect during the 1600’s to control the masses. Many modern surveillance technologies reflect Foucault’s ideas helping to categorize, differentiate, hierarchize, and exclude people from the masses.

The paragmatic standpoints of the sociologist are different. Simmel’s vision is detacher from the particular individuals and in concentrated on the group as the analysis item. Group, according to Simmel, is an entity that has an independent reality, exists according to its own laws and is independent of the individual agents. A group, just as an individual, has a tendency to self-preservation due to a special vitality, the basis and process of which Simmel studies. Mead, in his turn, seeks to solve the problem of the individual self and consciousness about world and society. The key concept in his research is the concept of action, active activity (and not just a passive reaction according to the stimulus-response scheme as in classical behaviorists). Both of them mind action as the part of the social life, however,

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.

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 this task of adjustment, discipline had to solve a number of problems for which the old economy of power was not sufficiently equipped. It could reduce the inefficiency of mass phenomena: reduce what, in a multiplicity, make it much less manageable than unity; reduce what is opposed to the use of each of its elements and of their sum; reduce everything that may counter the advantages.” (Foucault 208). This is an example of Logos, he talks about the prison and how “With all the corrective technology at its disposal is to be resituated at the point where the codified power to punish turns into a disciplinary power to observe” (Foucault 213).

Foucault in theorizing the relationship between power and knowledge basically focused on how power operated in the institutions and in its techniques. The point is how power was supported by knowledge in the functioning of institutions of punishment. “He places the body at the centre of the struggles between different formations of power/knowledge. The techniques of regulation are applied to the body” (Wheterell et al., 2001: 78)

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.

There is not a day where my own life lacks social events. A basic day consists of going to work or school, completing homework, and attempting to have a social life with those who are important to me. Being able to manage my social self is a task worth reviewing using the sociological theory of Max Weber and Erving Goffman. Each decision made to manage my life pulls from Weber’s theory of action and rationality; moreover, each situation requires a bit of face by Goffman’s dramaturgy.

It was by doing this that the disciplinary self was created - “discipline ‘makes’ individuals”, a phenomenon of the disciplinary era (1977, p.170). Our movement through the institutions defined our individualisation; normalising, examining and hierarchically observing each member of society (Foucault, 1977) - our sense of self emerged from their intersections. In Postcript on the Societies of Control (1992), Deleuze states the S.O.D have made way for the S.O.C. He mainly attributes this shift to the environments of “enclosure” (1992, p.4) – the institutions – beginning to crumble, and the factory – a typical workplace on the S.O.D – being replaced by the corporation (1992). In the S.O.D Foucault claimed that the soldier can be moulded like “a formless clay” (1977, p.135) – these rigid institutions formed us. Now without these institutions we lose this mould, and therefore our concept of the ‘self’. Imagine if instead of pushing clay into a mould we placed it on a desk; it would be shapeless and adaptable. This according to Deleuze is a defining characteristic of the S.O.C; flexibility in our structures moving us from moulds to “modulations” (1992, p.4). These modulations are “a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other” (1992, p.4). Instead of experiencing these rigid disciplines, we are left in this soft, malleable environment, which constantly

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

For Foucault you cannot understand imprisonment without looking at torture first and how they both correlate to one another. Throughout this essay I will assess Foucault’s theories about torture and his views of how it has come about. I will look at how torture is a technique and the forms of disciplinary techniques that accompany torture. I will assess the power structures and how it manifests into other institutions in today’s society. Lastly how torture is needed to understand imprisonment. Torture was used as a scare tactic in the past to keep individuals under control. Society was aware of what may occur to them if they disobeyed the law. This initiated power and discipline over citizens which helps us to understand power relations today in terms of imprisonment.