Summary Of Foucault's 'The Body Of The Condemned'

Foucault however, argues that the prisons is one disciplinary institution that isn’t effective in reducing criminal activity through ‘self-surveillance’ as it urges an individual to deter from the rest of society and their shared norms and values. He said that this constant supervision and forced discipline broke the will of the criminal and made him into a “docile body”. His book ‘Discipline and Punish’ lays out Foucault’s thoughts on how the elite in society dominate and control the rest of society. Prison’s major goal was to reduce crime by punishing the criminal. Prisons should also deter others from committing crimes. According to Foucault, prisons did not meet their objective; in fact they made criminals worse and this has infiltrated into all parts of society.

Foucault goes through the way governments have attempted to control populations throughout history, and how power has exercised

Panopticism, a social theory based on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and developed by Michel Foucault describes a disciplinary mechanism used in various aspects of society. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish discusses the development of discipline in Western society, looks in particularly at Bentham’s Panopticon and how it is a working example of how the theory is employed effectively. Foucault explains, in Discipline and Punish that ‘this book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge’ (Foucault, 1977) and opens with accounts of public execution and torture revealing how law and order is created because of the shift from these to prison rules and discipline. Foucault describes the quarantining and

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.

The execution or punishment itself is most often carried out by a state-appointed executioner, working as a direct representative of the sovereign’s power in order to further dissuade the public witnessing the execution of committing other crimes (DP, 9). Around a hundred years later, there was a shift away from these public displays of power and violence to a more corrective and rehabilitating process. Foucault defines disciplinary power as the power to return a wrongdoer to the normative standards of society (DP, 179). As the years go on, power is taken away from a central body and is exhibited through institutions such as schools, prisons, and hospitals where power and knowledge is maintained through the sciences (e.g. psychology, sociology, and psychiatry) rather than laws. This new form of power is exercised over the individual’s soul rather by disciplining their body (DP, 30). In other words, these new houses of power prefer a correctional approach in order to rehabilitate the wrongdoer and cut down on the amount of individuals not adhering to the norms of society (DP, 19). By doing this, disciplinary power and punishment is exercised over subjects through hierarchical

It would seem rather apparent that in the institutions Foucault mentions are deluded forms of the panoptic prison, with the same intentions of controlling the masses and doing so economically and efficiently. Nevertheless, I do not concur with Foucault that the system is as prevalent when it comes to society as a whole. Unless the government or your neighbor were conducting sustained espionage, I do not see a strong connection to Foucault’s thought of the omnipresence of those overseeing bodies and connect them with the constant observation a prisoner would experience in a panoptic prison. Nor would I tie that Society attempts to instruct what is universally accepted and what is not. Regardless, many get away with doing things that society is against all the time. Even with that said society often evolves with the times, something that was looked upon with contempt before may now not be seen in the same light. Not to mention, as much as the government would desire to have the efficiency that a panopticon has there is no way without a massive move to remove all forms of privacy would society as a whole have a high correlation to

Although Foucault believes that people are not the authors of society, discourses are governed independently of anyone’s purpose (Learning Companion 2), the institutions he mentions help to keep order in society, although he is concerned about who can claim the authority of who has the power to rule how others should behave (Foucault cited by Silva, 2009, p319).

Foucault dug into the past investigating historical documents to question what is in familiar in the present ,The present order of things was thus made visible by accessing it from the past ,by viewing how it has been made through processes of social development .He did this through processes of social development ,through reading texts and documents to find traces of the present .In doing so he found a way of exploring his concerns about social life from a political and philosophical point of view. Discourses that organise particular fields of knowledge and power.P.323 E.B. Silva.

In other words, Foucault advocates for a kind of critique that is limited in scope. To quote, “we must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment”. Rather than to devise a theory of modernity that is universally applicable, it is more realistic to critically tackle specific issues locally. The attitude of critique then, is the belief that progress cannot be discovered by removing ourselves from the historical framework. Rather, real improvement is achieved when the issue is contextualized by the time it belongs

The guards would simply be able to threaten what would happen, and everyone would fit right into place, trying to be as normal and similar to the norm as possible. By making them all feel paranoid about themselves, Foucault knew the prisoners would try to fit in. Likewise, the prisoners all know through experience that those seen as different are also seen as wrong, and quite apparently would try to avoid that accusation and effect of the

Prisons were created with the intention of correcting and reforming those who have committed wrongful acts but this article implies that the prison system is not living up to its original purpose. Foucault was a big believer in understanding the intent behind an individual’s criminal acts. He was also in favour of training individuals to become disciplined people by manipulating the circumstances around them. A good example of this would be his opinion on the panopticon. He believed that a panopticon would benefit the people inside prisons because it would teach them discipline.

Foucault's analysis of power within institutions is persuasive, specifically his description of Bentham’s Panopticon, and the significance that power plays in modern society. In this essay, I will argue that in numerous contemporary institutions Foucault’s analysis is still relevant as tools are developed to modify and surveille our behavior. Furthermore, Foucault begins by analyzing the situation before the eighteenth century, when public executions, such as Damien's crime of regicide and torture were part of most criminal investigations. Punishment was ceremonial and directed at the prisoner’s body because it was a ritual in which the audience was important. Therefore, public execution reestablished the authority and power of the king.

More specifically, the importance of the soul of the “offender”. His writings illustrated a broader critique of how power works. He deemed it as biopolitics which are the various forms of how power works. Foucault continuously stressed the importance of studying punishment in terms with its positive and negative effects. These effects are in relation to its’ aspects of power. This power can produce and determine who you are and what you do. Positive power is considered production and negative power is seen as repressive. Consequently, productive failure is an enduring feature of the prisons. It is central to reform, which is central to how prison systems

Towards his later work Foucault realizes that the mechanisms of exclusion or separation (Madness and Civilization) and of surveillance or correction (Discipline and Punish), although still a way for the power of the state to exercise sovereignty over the subjects, were not the predominant mechanism of domination of the modern state. Since the eighteenth century, the construction and isolation or punishment of alterity gives way to a new mode in which the sovereign exercise his right over the people:

Michel Foucault (birth name Paul-Michel Foucault) was born on October 15, 1926 in Politiers, France. Both his father and grandfather were working in the medical field and his mother was a major part of his education. The Foucault Society wrote that “Foucault emerged as a brilliant young thinker while studying philosophy with the distinguished Maurice Merleau-Ponty” (The Foucault Society). After getting his diploma in 1952 he held a teaching position at the universities of Uppsala, Warsaw, and Hamburg for teaching French. Throughout his life he publish many different books about multiple topics. One book is Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison which was published in 1975. After reading this work I can say that I agree with Foucault’s idea of organizing students because it could help the students who need it and will let the teachers have an easier time making a lesson plan. It is also a good idea because it will solve the problem of a disorganized classroom.