The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries experienced a surge of social reform movements linked to the Enlightenment, which transformed society into the modern culture seen today. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish examines how punishment was viewed and enacted prior to the “humane” awakening of the eighteenth century, while establishing the progression of change that shifted punishment from the body to the soul. Foucault was a student and professor of philosophy and psychology during the twentieth century, which influenced his writings and political activism. Discipline and Punish is a result of his active participation in prison reform, in which he outlines the history of the modern penal system and how it is linked to modern society, …show more content…
Spectacle and purposeful pain on the body was the norm of the time, however, Foucault contrasts this episode with a timetable for prisoners some eighty years later, a rigid schedule meant to control and reform the prisoner’s soul. By stating how “it was a time of great ‘scandals’ for traditional justice, a time of innumerable projects for reform,” (Foucault, 7) it becomes clear that the aim of these four parts are to gradually demonstrate how one follows the other. Torture of the body became punishment of the soul, which depended on discipline, ultimately creating the modern prison system. Foucault’s structure facilitates the audience to comprehend the forces behind this transformation. Part one, Torture¸ elucidates how torture and execution was “an organized ritual for the marking of victims and the expression of the power that punishes.” (Foucault, 34) Within part two, Punishment¸ the beginning of the “humanization” process is exposed by reform movements that called for a redisposition of power, the goal was “not to punish less, but to punish better.” (Foucault, 82) Thus was born the idea of a prison, a space where one’s soul could be corrected and reformed. Discipline presents how institutions were created in order to observe individuals’ behavior and to compare their behavior to the ‘norm’, and that perpetual observation could coerce people into this normative behavior. In this section, Foucault introduces 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 reading both Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents” and Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish” it is apparent that they have different views on the function of human society. Freud’s general claim in his writing is that the purpose of human life is happiness. Though our current civilization often does not offer direct, intense satisfaction of our carnal desires, it does offer a more stable lifestyle that avoids pain and results in smaller, simpler pleasures. Foucault’s claims, on the other hand, focus more on the mechanics of human civilization. We are given the illusion of choice but are actually being controlled and separated into organized groups that create a kind of hierarchy for the individual to climb. One specific context that
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
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’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.
As society has progressed, Foucault explains, these practices have expanded into other institutions such as hospitals, schools, prisons and asylums. Bentham’s Panopticon embodies such disciplinary
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
Humiliation, Pain and Death: The Execution of Criminals in New France,” is an article that puts
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.
Stability in terms of society can be defined as the state in which power is clear and defined, and the constituents abide to those in power. In modern day institutions, a certain amount of stability must exist or people would lack the motivation to get work done and would not respond to authority. To ensure motivation, employers will install cameras, or use other techniques to always keep an eye on their workers. If people are doing nothing wrong, there is no reason to have a problem with being watched. For this reason, it is not surprising that employers set their work station similar to a Panopticon, an institutional building that is step up with someone in the middle watching everyone, but the workers don’t know if they are being
In his book “Discipline and Punish”, Foucault theorizes that we live in “disciplinary society,” and that power exercised through disciplinary means is found in modern day institution i.e. schools, Universities, prisons, the military and hospitals. Focalult says “classical times discovered the body as a target of power to be manipulated, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases in forces” (p.136) Focalult states through the historical moment of discipline came the art of controlling the body. Which formed a policy coercion that acted on the body, and breaking it down. Thus Foucault says discipline makes practiced and subjected bodies “ docile bodies” that increase economic terms of utility and diminishes the body in terms of domination i.e. the body becomes a vessel of aptitude and capacity and a relation of complete subjection” Foucault states “if the economic exploitation separates the force and the product of labor, he would say disciplinary coercion establishes in the body a link between the increased aptitude and increased domination.(Foucault p.138) A blueprint for of general disciplinary methodology that overlapped, repeated and transformed spilling from education, to prisons, hospitals to the workplace according to the disciplines domains of application.
Foucault looks at public torture as the outcome "of a certain mechanism of power" that views crime in a military schema. Crime and rebellion are akin to a declaration of war. The sovereign was not concerned with demonstrating the ground for the enforcement of its laws, but of identifying enemies and attacking them, the power of which was renewed by the ritual of investigation and the ceremony of public torture.[5]
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
Foucault dates the completion of the carceral system to February 22, 1840: the date of the opening of Mettray prison colony. This colony is the disciplinary form at its most extreme. The chiefs and deputies at Mettray were technicians of behavior. Their task was to produce bodies that were docile and capable. Historians of the human sciences also date the birth of scientific psychology to this time. Mettray represented the birth of a new kind of supervision. Why choose this moment as the beginning of the modern art of punishment? Mettray was the most famous of a series of carceral institutions. If the great classical form of confinement was dismantled, it still existed albeit in a different way. A carceral continuum was constructed that included confinement, judicial punishment and institutions of discipline. The breadth and