Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault, generally in his philosophy, has created a system wherein he understands the relations of source as they are transmuted d consume in a companionship (not sensationthat it is held by individualsand, indeed, it is not so perpetuated), wherein the push downment of talk all everyplace magazine allows for the normalisation of manners and therefore thatindividuals are encouraged, as sheeplike bodies, to adhere to this course of normalization.Foucault locates the origins of this process in asylums and prisons, and considers them anEnlightenment technological development, which he calls technologies of the self save I became more and more aware that in all societies in that location is another showcase of techniquetechniques which permit individuals to affect, by their avow means, a certain number ofoperations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct,and this in a manner so as to transmogrify themselves, modify themselves, and to attain acertain state of perfection, happiness, purity, supernatural power. let us call these kindsof technologies technologies of the self. (Foucault sexual urge and Solitude 367)Foucault locates these technologies of the self at the digest of the process ofnormalization that has shifted the process of penalization from an outward display ofpower as in medieval executions to an internal process in which the prisoner becomescomplicit in his own punishment. By employing these technologies of the self anincreasingly analytical and invariably more refined manner power is able to normalize nearlyall of life and make the distinction between punishment and fosterageal practise trivial.In attempting to diagnose the ontogenesisary trend of the manner in whichpunishment has been historically meted out throughout the ages, Foucault suggests thatthere has been a gradual evolution from tactics of raw displays of power to more subtle word forms of learn. While this expertness s uggest a certain amount of progress in that it is aprogressive movement towards a slight obvious brutal form of maintenance of the statusquo it is nonethe slight a permeative manner of cordial control and thus the obfuscation ofmeans of complaisant control over the passage of time, especially since the enlightenment,should not be mistaken for true firing off or the work of trus tworthy progress toward a deeper terminus of accredit some eternal truth about human rights.Whereas medieval societyemployed the public display of punishment in intricate and executions of the close toexcruciating form ( much(prenominal) as beheading, drawing and quartering, hanging etc.) to help allege social order by showing the direct result of a failure to comply with law,contemporary society uses more indirect and less overt methods for encouraging itssubjects to adhere to the traditional social order. Indeed, where medieval societies employovert displays of brute draw off, modern society prefer s processes of normalization, whichare less meddlingAnother instrument used to achieve discipline is the normalizing judgment.Instead of apprehended offenders for wrong doings, the administrators with power choose torehabilitate them to attempt to normalize task individuals and make them a functionaland law abiding. This type of corrective attempt is used through training techniquesincluding the use of repetition. This could be used in the classroom for a student thatcould not salvage cursive tumesce enough to pass to the next level. For a punishment, theycould be wantd to write cursive sentences over and over again. Additionally, toprovide the society with this normalization or conformity, rewards become more frequentthan penalties.For those students that tend to fall behind, the prospect of a reward couldbe more appealing to do well than the flagellum of yet another punishment. This givesindividuals something to strive to achieve and creates incentives for being discipline d.What Is Discipline?Here, we leave the ideas of punishment couched in the language of teaching and reformation. What is a deviant behavior is simply a mistaken approach to learning basicsocial rules that can be corrected and analyzed and subjected to extensive handle.Moreover, in this instance, there is not only the electric outlet of negative reinforcement via thecoercive handbill of the threat of punishing action in response to a acknowledged misdeed, but,moreover, there is the extension of a metaphorical carrot being drawn-out to theperpetrator of a violation should he manage to conform to the claim processes that thecaptors. In this movement, this ability to make the punished complicit in his own punishment, is the real power of the indirect method revealed because not only does it notrequire an exercise of power, but allows those being punished to aid in their ownpunishment.This idea of creating docile bodies by means of indirect punishments that seekto examine and to r ehabilitate kind of than to torture is their chief use. Indeed, for docilebodies are sound because they are given the illusion of freedom, in being offered a cream between two possibilities they have the trappings of testament but when it has been official ahead of time for them to choose one of the options of the other this merest veilof volition is quickly revealed as just another discursive element rather than aneffectively real choice with meaning and consequence.Docility is a major bene livebecause it allows the docile soundbox to assist in his own rehabilitation and normalizationand, by extension, his own punishment per se The term docility, or to be docile, means tohave a certain amount of control exercised over you. Foucault says a body is docile thatmay be subjected, used, transformed and modify (Foucault Discipline and Punish,136). Docility was the way in which someone was trained, a way in which someone coldbe molded like clay to fit the needs of those that are in c ontrol. This was done in thearmy, the schoolhouse, basically anyplace people were subjected to control on aneveryday basis.Docility is nothing more then discipline, where discipline is a politicalanatomy of detail (Foucault Discipline and Punish, 139). The body was no longer beatenand abused rather it was explored, broken big money and rearranged. Rather then beingdestroyed the body was being entered into a political machine that produced docilebodies. Foucault talks about docile bodies because he is trying to explain the shifts thattook place from the practice of torture and the spectacle to the building of the prisons.Thus, the issue here is that by this method the body is forced to undergo a processthat, while substantially different from an experiential perspective than torture, has, as itsobject, a surprisingly simple aim, which is of course the same ends of enforcing thestability and touchstone of behavior that is normative and therefore beneficial to theinstitutions of powe r.Through the creation of much(prenominal) docile bodies who no longer need tobe tortured but instead can be subtly goaded towards the process of rehabilitation andergo normalization, the standards of normalcy can be entertained and built inwardlythe individual by the individual. Indeed, compensate more ingenious is that, by such a method,in which punishment is rehabilitation, the very distinction between the two begins tobreak down. Punishment becomes a sort of identical with the very processes of identification, analysis, and commandment. patch of the reason for this is that opening move of anend telos of this process, of any sort of true enlightenment, per se, becomes animpossibility, because such refinement and enlightenment leads only further into theconstricting web of discourse.Indeed, since the whole project of enlightenment refuses to end in any categorical dismission (which is indeed an improbability if not an impossibility) that can bedemonstrated, this should be no surprise. Advances in rationalization and logic only serveto further refine the methods by which processes like normalization take place, allowingthem to be now couched in doctrines of ethics, psychology, and criminology where theycan be used for the creation of docile bodies when in the retiring(a) the only recourse wouldhave been the use of raw and terrible amounts of force The enquiries have theirmethodological coherence in the at once archeological and genealogical study ofpractices envisaged simultaneously as a technological type of rationality and as strategicgames of liberties they have their practical coherence in the care brought to the processof putting historico- overcritical reflections to the test of concrete practices. I do not knowwhether it must be said like a shot that the critical task still entails faith in Enlightenment I march on to think that this task requires work on our limits, that is, a patient labor givingform to our impatience for liberty. (Foucaul t What is Enlightenment? 50)Here, we see that the capital-E Enlightenment has resulted in little more than arefinement of the strategic games of liberties, which, of course, serve to do little else to confine one to the rules of the game rather than allow for the possibility of a trueexit, and, similarly the possibility of little-e enlightenment for the individual is evenlyimpossible when each enlightenment only furthers the discourse and increases theprocess of education which is the form of expiation in the principle order of thingsanyway.Thus, enlightenment is an increasingly remote quantity whose value remainsunknown and unknowable, while the public of the increasing and encroaching science ofpunishment is advanced in discourse in such a way that the process of discipline isreinforced through the further and stronger normalization of every single social act, sincethe discourse about these acts also multiples, creating possibilities for discourse where nosuch possibility even e xisted before.Thus, the teleological goal of the penal system then seem to be one in which it isalmost impossible to distinguish between education and punishment and, indeed, prisonand the outside world. Through the creation of bourgeois docile bodies, prisonsincreasingly do not require walls because the normalization of every activity makes itsuch that the mere examination of the entirety of ones introduction links one to the veryconcept of the punishment that looks less and less like a punishment The ideal point ofpenalty today would be an indefinite discipline an interrogation without end, aninvestigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever moreanalytical observation, a judgment that would at the same time be the constitution of afile that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlacedwith the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same timethe permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptoticmovement that strives to meet in infinity. (Foucault Discipline and Punish 227)Thus, the conclusion we cause at the end is that the goal of increasing discoursesince the enlightenment is to make powers reach ever more diffuse but ever morepervasivethe inclusion of discourse into previously verboten areas allows for thenormalization of those areas and with that normalization comes control such that theideas of punishment and rational consideration seem to come inwardly a hairsbreadth ofmerging at the distance of an infinite regress.ReferencesFoucault, Michel. Sexuality and Solitude. On Signs. Marshall Blonsky ed. Baltimore Johns Hopkins Press, 1985.Santos, Tomas. Foucault and the Modern Day Panopticon. Retrieved January 05, 2008, at http//www.spelunkephobes.4t.com/foucault_and_the_modern.htmFoucault, Michel. What is Enlightenment. The Foucault Reader. Paul Rabinow, ed. Catherine Porter, trans. New York Pantheon Books, 1984.Foucault, Michel. Disc ipline and Punish The Birth of Prison. Alan Sheridan, trans. New York Vintage, 1979.