Young michel foucault discipline

The standard Whiggish narrative is that Europe progressed from an arbitrary, cruel, might is right system to a rational, humane, enlightened law-based system, with the whole historical process driven by an impelling, rationalist teleology. Foucault makes it quite clear that, though the Enlightenment has many valuable ideas, many if not most elements of the Whig narrative are nevertheless fictitious.

Such excesses are generally not perceived by the public and possibly willfully ignored by the judiciary. His analysis goes even so far that the logic and demands of the disciplinary penal system are actually overriding the ones of the juridical system. This bleak assessment makes only sense if an even larger historical context is taken into account than the three modes of punishment so far.

The leading idea of this context is the correlation between systems of punishment and systems of production. What Foucault borrows from this study is the idea that the penal system is not merely there to reduce crime with a series of negative mechanisms to prevent, deter and exclude criminals and their behavior, nor that it is just the effect and appendage of the juridical system as its executive branch, but that it has primarily a positive, formative social function within the context of the political-economic structure.

In short, modes of punishment are subordinated and made serviceable to the means of production. Concretely, in a slave economy punishment takes the form of enslavement to provide extra labor; in a mercantile economy there is forced labor and prison factories to get the idle to work and provide cheap labor; and an industrial economy needs corrected, docile, trainable, flexible bodies to be added to the pool of the free and ever changing market in labor.

Foucault stepped into this lacunae and found a whole world of bodily power points and bodily techniques of domination diffused throughout the body politic. As Foucault stated it:. But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.

Young michel foucault discipline: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of

This political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection … ; the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body DP: In short, the police-juridical-penal complex is an instrument of the prevailing economic system to create docile workers and extract maximum profits for a small upper level of owners and managers.

Towards the end of DP Foucault executes an analysis which shows a similar logic of class domination and class justice. Here he feels forced to assume again that penalties are not to punish and diminish illegalities in general and equitably, but are applied in such a manner that a differentiation is established between illegalities which lead to prosecution and incarceration and those which are tolerated and benefit its offenders without legal consequences.

Concretely, and here in the USA, one can think of, on one side, police officers getting away with murder and big bankers getting away with massive fraud, while on the other side petty crimes by young black males can lead to cycles of incarceration, recidivism and the establishment of a semi-permanent under-class of delinquents, the depressing dynamics of which Foucault also analyses.

Throughout DP it is clear that with the exertion of power on the body, a correlative sense of identity is established. Within the modern disciplinary institutes persons become cases and are identified by the specifics of their case. And the more one is subjected to disciplinary measures, like the delinquent, mentally ill, the sick, the deviant, etc.

As discussed earlier, this dynamic flows forth from the intricate manner that knowledge about people is entwined with the possibility of having power over them. It is not just true that through better knowledge one attains more power, but also that knowledge can only be extracted through power. Constructed might be the right word, because the predicates applicable to the identity are not referring to young michel foucault discipline, intrinsic aspects of that person, but are valuations in reference to certain norms, statistical comparisons and other contextual frameworks of measurement and valuation.

This expression is preceded by a philosophically most pregnant contemplation on the politico-ontological status of this soul. This real, non-corporal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power.

On this reality-reference, various concepts have been constructed and domains of analysis carved out: psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, etc.

Young michel foucault discipline: Michel Foucault was born

But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technical intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of the theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself.

The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body DP: Is it possible to gather all these aspects of discipline and combine them in a paragraph? Looking over the headings, they seem to fall into the two familiar categories of systematics and history, i. Penal discipline can also be clarified by the categories of space cellular distributiontime punctuated segmentsbehavior conditioning of the body-machine and tactics the combination of integrated bodies.

Correlative with penal discipline comes the constitution of the delinquent individuality, not as a personality with intrinsic characteristics, but as a product of extrinsic valuations and measurements. Genesis: The history of penal discipline and discipline in other institutions might be best understood by the logic of the demands of early capitalist, mercantile production processes which profited by the ongoing disciplining of idle bodies into docile, usable workers.

The prison and its penal disciplines incrementally replaced the more spectacular, but wasteful and politically risky manner of punishment by tortures and executions. Reformers tried to humanize the whole juridical and penal system and succeeded to a certain extent, but also provided unintentionally the ideological cover for the now more hidden cruelties of penal discipline and the creation of an under-class of delinquents.

Many of the techniques comprising discipline came from other institutions, especially the monastery and military, and circulated into and through other institutions like hospitals, psych wards, schools and especially the workforce, all optimizing their own efficiency by borrowing and adapting these techniques from young michel foucault discipline other.

Bouchard, Donald F. Introduction to Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Internet Arcade Console Living Room. Open Library American Libraries. Search the Wayback Machine Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Sign up for free Log in. Discipline and punish : the birth of the prison Bookreader Item Preview. It appears your browser does not have it turned on.

Please see your browser settings for this feature. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Towards the end, he sums up the main critiques that have been made. He states, "the major critical theme which emerges, and is independently made by many different critics, concerns Foucault's overestimation of the political dimension. Discipline and Punish consistently proposes an explanation in terms of power—sometimes in the absence of any supporting evidence—where other historians would see a need for other factors and considerations to be brought into account.

Another criticism leveled against Foucault's approach is that he often studies the discourse of "prisons" rather than their concrete practice; this is taken up by Fred Alford:. More precisely put, Foucault presents the utopian ideals of eighteenth-century prison reformers, most of which were never realized, as though they were the actual reforms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

One can see this even in the pictures in Discipline and Punishmany of which are drawings for ideal prisons that were never built. One photograph is of the panopticon prison buildings at Stateville, but it is evidently an old photograph, one in which no inmates are evident. Nor are the blankets and cardboard that now enclose the cells.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. Dewey Decimal. Summary [ edit ]. Torture [ edit ]. Punishment [ edit ]. Discipline [ edit ]. Prison [ edit ]. Reception [ edit ].

Young michel foucault discipline: Disciplinary power involves surveillance

See also [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. How to read Foucault's discipline and punish. London: Pluto Press. ISBN Journal of Management and Governance. S2CID Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. The New York Times. The prison has become a symbol of power and control, and it has shaped the way that we think about crime and punishment.

Foucault argues that the prison system is a form of torture, and that it is designed to create a sense of pain and suffering. The prison is a place of isolation and deprivation, and it is intended to break down the will of those who are incarcerated. The prison system is a form of violence, and it is intended to create a sense of fear and intimidation.

In his conclusion, Foucault argues that the prison system is a key part of our society, and that it is designed to create a sense of discipline and obedience. He suggests that we need to rethink the way that we approach crime and punishment, and that we need to find alternative forms of justice that do not rely on the prison system.

It is a must-read for anyone who is interested in the history of crime and punishment, and it offers important insights into the ways in which the prison system shapes our society. Check out my youtube channel to listen to new book summaries everyday.