In his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, Foucault argued that French society had reconfigured punishment through the new “humane” practices of “discipline” and “surveillance”, used in new institutions such as prisons, the mental asylums, schools, workhouses and factories.
What does Foucault argue in Discipline and Punish?
Discipline and Punish is a history of the modern penal system. Foucault seeks to analyze punishment in its social context, and to examine how changing power relations affected punishment . ... Punishment was ceremonial and directed at the prisoner’s body. It was a ritual in which the audience was important.
What is Foucault’s theory of power?
Foucault challenges the idea that power is wielded by people or groups by way of ‘episodic’ or ‘sovereign’ acts of domination or coercion , seeing it instead as dispersed and pervasive. ‘Power is everywhere’ and ‘comes from everywhere’ so in this sense is neither an agency nor a structure (Foucault 1998: 63).
What is Michel Foucault’s best known for?
Michel Foucault began to attract wide notice as one of the most original and controversial thinkers of his day with the appearance of The Order of Things in 1966. His best-known works included Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) and The History of Sexuality, a multivolume history of Western sexuality.
What is a statement for Foucault?
Foucault writes that the statement is not a syntagma, a rule of construction, a canonical form of construction and permutation, but that it ‘ enables such groups of signs to exist , and enables these rules or forms to become manifest’ (AK 99, 116).
What is power theory?
power. The standard theory is that power is the capacity for influence and that influence is based on the . control of resources valued or desired by others.
What is repressive power?
The repressive hypothesis is the argument that power has repressed sex for the past three hundred years . ... According to this hypothesis, we can achieve political liberation and sexual liberation simultaneously if we free ourselves from this repression by talking openly about sex, and enjoying it more frequently.
How long does it take to read Discipline and Punish?
The average reader will spend 7 hours and 37 minutes reading this book at 250 WPM (words per minute).
What did Foucault say about punishment?
Foucault ultimately suggests that it is the use and subjugation of power that influences an institutions use of punishment . He rejects any notion that the development of this system had been motivated by any humanitarian ideals, or that this philosophy of punishment was initially intended as a form of rehabilitation.
What is the normalizing gaze?
Current conceptual models leave out what Foucault refers to as the “normalizing gaze,” which when internalized becomes a mode of power for social control and imposes self-regulation (Foucault, 1977, 184). ... DTCA becomes a new “normalizing” medium through which individuals are constituted and constitute themselves.
Is Foucault a structuralist?
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French historian and philosopher, associated with the structuralist and post-structuralist movements . He has had strong influence not only (or even primarily) in philosophy but also in a wide range of humanistic and social scientific disciplines.
What did Foucault mean by discourse?
Discourse, as defined by Foucault, refers to: ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them . Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning.
What is the panopticon effect?
The panopticon is a disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells . From the tower, a guard can see every cell and inmate but the inmates can’t see into the tower. Prisoners will never know whether or not they are being watched.
What does Foucault mean by genealogy?
Foucault also describes genealogy as a particular investigation into those elements which “we tend to feel [are] without history” . This would include things such as sexuality, and other elements of everyday life. Genealogy is not the search for origins, and is not the construction of a linear development.
Why is Foucault so popular?
Michel Foucault was one of the most famous thinkers of the late 20th century, achieving celebrity-like status before his untimely death in 1984. ... This unusual title was created because of the distinctive nature of Foucault’s work , which straddled disciplines such as philosophy, history, and politics.
What does discourse formation mean?
The term discursive formation identifies and describes written and spoken statements with semantic relations that produce discourses. As a researcher, Foucault applied the discursive formation to analyses of large bodies of knowledge, e.g political economy and natural history.
