Michel Foucault In Discipline And Punish Sociology Essay

Michel Foucault In Discipline And Punish Sociology EssayMichel Foucault in Discipline and Punish and The narrative of Sexuality, demonstrates that the tools of disciplinarity (which emerged in the confluence of critical, historical upheavals immediately preceding the neo age, much(prenominal) as geometric demographic expansion, reconfiguring global financial and mer commodetile apparatuses, the redefinition of territorial boundaries by means of global explosion and the ensuring establishments of empires, the ad hoc on determine of the Industrial Revolution, etc.), upon world brought into proximity to rough the only things that presently we ar able to catch to it, such(prenominal) as a proclivity towards petty moralizing, our hearty prejudices, our racial intolerances, the petty agendas of the bourgeoisie empirical lifestyle enclaves, etc., croak what they befuddle been knowing to do, namely the re-proliferation, expansion, multiplication, amplification, production of manipulated strategies for administering worlds, below(a) the guise of it redounding to the so-called mankind interest, which on the whole underwrite unconscionable amounts of paralysis, cordial dissatisfaction and numerous suffering.At the nubble of Michel Foucaults epistemic discussions on the reorganization of familiarity in the human sciences is his line of reasoning during the 1970s that such reshaping established contemporary arrangements of queen and domination. Power, he defines, is the numerosity of force relations inherent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization.1His comprehensive historical analysis on the approaching of disciplinal apparatus in Discipline and Punish and discourses on miscellanea of sex and sex activity, and bio-power in The biography of Sexuality postulate an apparent policy-making positioning of power in the sphere of modernity, accordingly, paving agency for a dynamic interpretation of his own understanding of it and the comprehend entity of acquaintance.This pedantic writing aims to expound on the place of power and fellowship in Foucaults historical studies on prison and some former(a)(a) modern forms of disciplinal institutions, and scientific discourses about sexual practice and its deployments. The paper is divided into two parts and will prompt accordingly. The inaugural part comprises the reiteration of Foucaults claims on tools of disciplinary institutions as polymorphous, on that pointfrom the interwoven appearance of raw forms cognition and power during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By having constructed the reciprocity in the entrainment of acquaintance and power in the linguistic context of use of the penal formation, Foucault tries to demarcate the bounds of these two entities, exclusively in equivalent manner ensures that separately converge on the confines of modern disciplinarity (such as geometric demographic expansions). In other words, Foucault does not concern himself with distinguishing the identity of experience against power, or vice versa, but having and understanding knowledge and power in a mutual reinforcing relation so that each is sustaining the authority of the other.2This paper overly argues that what drove the tools of disciplinarity as reinvigorated forms of knowledge and power to operate the way they do, as in seemingly paralyzing humanity on its actions, is because, in the first place, they were programmed to act as the antithesis to the utopia vowed by the Enlightenment indeed are at loggerheads to begin with, yet realize been stabilized by mans hopeless landed e enunciate to resist them, as implied in the works of Foucault.The second part is a critical analysis on two viz. (1) pedagogization of childrens sex, and (2) culture of productive behavior of what Foucault labels as four great strategic unities that formed item mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex at the blend of the eighteenth speed of light whence the proliferation of the production of sexuality started to surface and became a historical construct. Their ontological and epistemological position allowed them to government agency in shore leave by which they imposed an explicit but restricted methodology in the generation and dictums of bare-ass knowledge saturated with sexuality through with(predicate) which these deployments assert their own perilous power.3IThe cardinal theme of the reorganization of knowledge in Foucaults works was broadened and highlighted by the introduction of the contemporary prison scheme in Discipline and Punish. By having the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries explicitly set in the realm of discipline, observation, and chains of restriction, Foucault made it attainable in his bind to produce new knowledge even as they created new forms of social control.4The new penal system has its fateto be redefined by knowledge.5Davidson argues tha t Foucaults modern prison in any case serves as a reference point for his religious analytics of power6hence, the horrific revelation and comparison of the spectacle of the early eighteenth century punishment e rattlingplace the knowingty of the new penal structure embody the scope and the measure of steadiness of power throughout its transformations under contrasting circumstances.This is unity of the about crucial points that Foucault purports. As menti unrivalledd preceding(prenominal), the prevailing prison system became his reference point in the analytics of knowledge and power, and it is not hard to interpret why. As it were, it can be seen that Foucault was indulging himself in the line that separates the convulsive yet sporadic carrying out of detrimental force that targeted the body (e.g. public tortures and eventual public executions) and the imposition of a mass of juridical absurdities7by the modern-day form of disciplineIt was a question not of treating the body, en masse, wholesale, as if it were an indissociable unity, but of working it retail, individually of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of mechanism itself transactions, gestures, attitudes, rapidity an infinitesimal power e reallywhere the active body.8The imposition of discipline reconstructs power in the manufacture of new behavior newfound techniques, newborn gesticulation, new actions and ultimately, new breeds of people. Now, power is not merely power per se in its traditional sense, but it is a power that involves obedience on influence and exploitation. This is what Foucault meant in his discourse on sheepish bodies. Indeed, the human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it megabucks and rearranges it.9It is a power that is autonomous, ad hominem and utilitarian. Allen argues that those who discipline, apart from having a hold all over the mobilization of others bodies, break down compelled in invariably ricocheting back on specializer knowledge, whence knowledge and power come into a mutual print to finally augment each other. Everything comes in tandem there can be no criminology without prisons or medicine without clinic for knowledge is only viable in its compromise with the reciprocating patterns in the exercise of power.10Borrowing the words of Robinson and Davies, disciplinary apparatuses, indeed, cater to a compulsory captive audience.11Thus, Foucault says, discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, docile bodies.12The above mentioned means of loyalty, along with the time cards, bundy clocks, expected movements, documented schedules, etc., operated subtly through the shake-up of space and time by which peoples perform hence, the saying of an indirect flow of action, cellular segmentation, and organic control, given over by the partitioning and distribution of activities. They served to economize the time of life and to exercise power over men through mediation of time, leaning on a subjection that has never reached its limit.13The above interventions paved way for the turn- most between power and perceptibility. at that place was a swing in policy-making strategies from the presentation of power as spectacle to its employment in perceiving the target thoroughly, i.e., to see and hear him, to monitor and valuate him, even at a distance. Surveillance, or panopticism, which proved to be outlying(prenominal) more than complex than the sheer exhibition of force, became the autonomous impetus that massively drives action. By being everywhere, surveillance forces the target to always stand on circumspection as he is constantly located it allows the disciplinary power to be absolutely indiscreet and to be exercised without division an automatic carrying out of power.14Rouse provided a physical description of surveillance. According to him, surveillance was not only manifest as affixed to the walls or structures of instit utions, whose primary aim, again, was to better the capacity to perceive, but excessively in the creation or quotation of rituals, particularly examinations such as psychiatric tests, job interviews, meetings, and even military machine exercise wherein the commander only stands aside to witness the passing of a marching troop instead of actually being its forefront figure.15Foucaults production line of panopticism and how it is improbable for people to not be observed shows its extent in The History of Sexuality. He argues that with the assimilation of the discourse of the sins of the flesh in the Catholic confession after the Council of Trent (Counter-Reformation), and even just traditional confession per se, the church created a hold on its faithful by subjugating them to perfect obedience. regular(a) through the screens of confessional boxes, one is compelled to allow himself to be audible, hence perceived, by an authority. Foucault arguesWe chip in since become a singula rly confessing fiat. The confession has spread its effects far-off and wide. It plays a part inthe most ordinary affairs of casual life, and in the most solemn rites one goes about signalizeing, with the greatest precision, whatsoever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to ones parents, ones educators, ones doctor, to those one loves one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone else, the things people write books about. One confesses-or is forced to confessman has become a confessing animal.16Such manifestations of panopticism and process of keeping records chains behavior incisively by the manner in which it creates more and more access for things and phenomena to be known. thus far, digging more deeply, it must be argued that such new forms of knowledge also assume new sets of constraints, which in turn allow peoples movement to be perceived. Rouse asserts that such more specific knowledge mak es live for also a more omnipresent constraint on peoples actions pass towards the vast probabilities for more intrusive inquiry and disclosure.17These knowledge and power techniques have two-fold insinuations. First, they operated to control, or, to a higher extent, neutralize, societal factors that are deemed perilous and threat to what has already been established. Second, having controlled such unusual and abnormal elements, they provide an avenue for the enhancement of productivity and utilization of their subjects. By doing so, the use of these knowledge and power that was initially relevant only to quarantined institutions, such as prisons and mental wards in other words, exclusive and extreme entities was slowly emancipated and incorporated into an assortment of new contexts hence allowing the expansion of their application. Foucault named this as the swarming of disciplinary mechanisms and arguesWhile, on the one hand, the disciplinary establishments increase, their mechanisms have a certain tendency to become de-institutionalized, to emerge from the unlikeable fortresses in which they once functioned and to circulate in a free rural area the massive, compact disciplines are broken down into flexible methods of control.18He adds thatOn the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social quarantine, to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of panopticism. Not because the disciplinary modality of power has replaced all others but because it has infiltrated the others, sometimes undermining them, but serving as an intermediary between themand above all making it possible to bring the effects of power to the most minute and distant elements.19These present-day techniques ought not to be understood as a place-over upon prior structure/s. Instead, these practices ought to be realized as constituting all different objects for knowledge to be tickled. Amongst these new sets are strategic statistics and inputs, such as geometric demographic expansion, and the redefinition of territorial boundaries according to the continuing modernised development in International Relations structures that incessantly tackles development, as in reconfiguration of global financial and mercantile apparatuses, or age-group and pedagogical attainments distribution patterns, like income distribution in fellowships, and a history of familial diseases like crab louse and diabetes and indications of the state of life like cholesterol and sugar count. Consequently, such practices draw redefined, if not new enough, types of human subjects in consanguinity with another figure of production of new knowledge, objects, and power modalities.These political practices constitute a very methodical comprehension of the individual, of course through the assistance of the elements that compose panopticism. Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, argues that such knowledge engraves a barrier that maintains the targets individuality in his very own individuality. Hence, there is a permanence of knowledge, a knowledge by which the progress of the individuality of the target is always under examination and evaluation.20The more important thing, though, is that this knowledge of individuality, individuating comprehension call it what you may plays a crucial role in the economization and politicization of the population. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that peoples have also been singled-out, i.e., instead of dealing with people or subjects, the government has now shifted its trouble and focused on dealing with a population with all its encompassing features that, just like the individual, had also been subjected to surveillance mortality rates, healthiness, history of diseases, immunity to them, etc. All this individualizing of the people as a population always involve a reflux into the politic and economic in the popula tion, i.e., population as labor force, population and efficiency in resource allocation, etc.21Foucault associates the above knowledge on individuality with the regulation of the individualized people, or population, with the concept of normalization, which purports mutuality with the knowledge and comprehension of populations by determining distributions. Lorentzen argues that norms admit the whole of society, yet impose the greatest influence on institutions like church, inculcate, and household22in short, the ones that hold specific populations, such as students and families. Hacking, in his book The Taming of Chance, defined normal distribution as something that tries to promote stability in numbers as implied in the survey of Europeans on their populations.23 on with certain populations, the individual also aids in the production of knowledge by being listed under a category hence, he is epistemologically located without degrading into the standard. For Foucault, normalizati on is individualization because, although it imposes homogeneity, it also individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialties and to render the differences useful by appointment them one to another.24In conclusion, it can be said that the influx of newly constructed knowledge and power operate directly the way they do because they were meant to replica the assumption and promise of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment was the advance of thought25that aims, in this case, to browse the prison and/or penal system as humanly as demanded by the modern society, and to emancipate mankind from sexual repression. But Foucault has presented it with a sense of hostility, if not real contradiction. As formerly vastly discoursed in this paper, the civilized prison and liberated sexuality further entangles humanity, and Foucaults presentation of these entities addresses the materializing learn to resist them as contemporary modes of knowledge and power . Yet, to go with this, he also insinuates that such resistance has no solid framework to come into existence, hence creating that in-between where there is a shocking paralysis engulfing man, and suffering and dissatisfaction looming amongst them.IISome of the increase in child abuse is due to the furtherance itself.26 Ian HackingThe History of Sexuality portrays the interrelation between knowledge and power through a historical account of the origin of the context of sexuality. It is not a given, but rather a historical construct of discourse. Its mode of deployments created new power relations parents on their offspring, psychiatrists and doctors on patients, men on women, juvenility and old, etc. and exercise further control on also all-inclusive areas hence, were able to legitimize the knowledge it purports.27Foucault discusses four great lines of attack which the government of sex advanced for two centuries,28yet are still familiar in the society today. Two of which sha ll be discussed shortly, viz. the pedagogization of childrens sex and socialization of procreative behavior.Pedagogization of childrens sex. The convergence of knowledge and power in and on the bodies of children allows the concourse of data on what is medically appropriate for them, in congruence with what is also necessary for their educators and parents to maintain that medically appropriate environment, influence, and other factors in which they are deemed to operate upon.A journal in 2008 by Kerry Robinson and Cristyn Davies regarding the relationship of sexuality with the childhood of Australian children ought to shed light on this first deployment under the scope of this paper. According to Robinson and Davies, the means by which Australian kids ought to acquire knowledge on sexual related phenomenon have been transformed into something controversial by the great debates whether the pedagogy on sexuality ought to occur at home, under the supervision of parents, or at school days by the childrens educators. Finally, for various reasons, the school was selected to address sexuality to children, yet Robinson and Davies argues that by the continuous denial of the culture curricula on sexuality as an important part of childrens identities, childhood and sexuality become compartmentalized as purely social constructions by which there is a naturalization of heterosexuality as the norm of sexuality and hence strengthening heteronormativity amongst children.29By having children perceived as docile bodies, schooling became a disciplining state apparatus, whence the knowledge-power nexus operates through the imposition of knowledge-regulating documents, such as Health Curriculum and Health and Personal Development/Health/ visible Education (PH/H/PE), which constitute the heteronormativity of children as subjects.30The practices involved in these documents in stages become assimilated in the general physical state of children, and whatever knowledge regarding se xuality was allowed to penetrate into the childrens minds was always highly regulated by social norms and religious taboos that depersonalised the processes for both the children and the teachers.31Earlier in 2007, Philo analyzed a receiving set broadcast that involved Foucault referencing to childrens games like tents around gardens or those that are compete on top or under their parents beds. He argues that, indeed, what these games imply is an attention to the reverberating theme of wider trans-disciplinary field of social inquiries into children, especially with sexuality, although he was apprehensive about some of Foucaults claims.32Both of the assertions of the above mentioned intellectual studies resonate to the underlying assumptions made by Foucault. On the one hand, Philos article is a test copy of half of the assertion of the deployment of sexuality currently at hand that children have the natural inclination to participate in sexual activities whilst, on the other, Robinson and Davies mull over constitute the significant other half that institutions, such as, in this case, school and families, are the intermediary entities that limit the dangerous sexual potential immanent in children.33Given the above assumptions, it is easy to go back to the premise of Foucaults disciplinary apparatus and relate this pedagogization as one of its most authoritative tools. Putting into context Hackings argument which was cited at the opening of this chapter, it can be said that such pedagogization does not much have of an impact to its mean target in children as much as it does for the people revolving around the target. With the prestigious promise of pedagogical, as well as medical, knowledge about sexuality on children, it has functioned as a regulatory tool in reshaping, and perhaps instilling imaginations that never surfaced until then, the minds of people in the hierarchy of societies that looks onto the childrens. By knowing the constraints of teach ers, doctors, and parents on maintaining the childs framework towards his sexuality, it has become easier for other people to figure otherwise hence, child abuse became and continues to become increasingly prevalent. In short, though the pedagogization of childrens sex allows children to be oriented in a pre-defined structure, it has had become more of a tool for disciplinarity on the outside audience therefore, another state of limbo, of paralysis, perpetuates around the surface of human action.Socialization of procreative behavior. As it was sacredly discussed at the earlier parts of this paper, population is one of the central themes of The History of Sexuality. Knowledge and power also converges on couples, allowing their growth on their circulation through the procreative capacity of the married pair.What could be the perfect example of this deployment other than the components of the current debate on the Reproductive Health Bill? Yet its discussion remains to be written on another academic paper. The issues on fertility, regulating procreation through contraception and abortion, and enhancing human extension service through modern reproductive technologies circumscribe the married pair to function accordingly in this deployment of sexuality.Indeed, often that this deployment of sexuality is understood in the context of the medical field and economic. How, for example, has impotence evolved from being technically uselessness and nonsensicality before to something that can be remedied by the science of medicine today? Having no children before yields into an immediate notion of non-productivity, but today one may think otherwise. Yet, one of the many implications of this deployment that is not necessarily given that as much attention as compared to medicine is sex differences, the very indicator of procreativity. Cook, in her work The Personality and Procreative Behavior of mental testing Judges, attempted to look into sex as an emerging concept in t he sphere of political participation, approaches, and socialization of men and women trial settle. For example, women trial judges decision on what political arena they would immerse themselves into is affected by socio-cultural factors like obligations at home or with children. Men judges, on the other hand, have a higher rate of participation in the political sphere, not only because of less pressure in terms of the constraints of household and domestic obligations, but also of less structured functions (i.e., as compared to womens political role being translated from their home-making role, men judges have definite and straight-to-the-point objectives in the realm of politics)