Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault, in the main in his philosophy, has created a system wherein he understands the relations of queen as they are transmuted down in a confederacy (not onethat it is held by individualsand, indeed, it is not so perpetuated), wherein therefinement of discourse oer time exclusivelyows for the standardisation of carriages and and then thatindividuals are encouraged, as yielding bodies, to adhere to this program of normalization.Foucault locates the origins of this process in asylums and prisons, and considers them an knowledge technological development, which he calls technologies of the selfBut I became more and more aware that in all societies there is another type of techniquetechniques which permit individuals to affect, by their own means, a real issuing ofoperations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct,and this in a air so as to trans social class themselves, modify themselves, and to attain acertain state of perfecti on, happiness, purity, supernatural power. Let us call these kindsof technologies technologies of the self. (Foucault Sexuality and Solitude 367)Foucault locates these technologies of the self at the center of the process ofnormalization that has shifted the process of penalty from an proscribedward display ofpower as in medieval executions to an internal process in which the prisoner becomescomplicit in his own penalty. By employing these technologies of the self an progressively analytical and ever more refined manner power is able to normalize almostall of life and make the distinction between penalization and education trivial.In attempting to diagnose the evolutionary tr discontinue of the manner in which penalisation 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 discerning varietys of control. While this might suggest a certain amount of progress in that it is a a dvanced movement towards a less obvious brutal form of maintenance of the statusquo it is nonetheless a pervasive manner of social control and thus the obfuscation ofmeans of social control over the overwhelmage of time, especially since the enlightenment,should not be mistaken for true liberation or the work of existent progress toward a deeper end of recognize some eternal truth about human rights.Whereas medieval golf clubemployed the public display of punishment in intricate and executions of the mostexcruciating form ( such as beheading, drawing and quartering, hanging etc.) to helpmaintain social order by showing the exact result of a failure to comply with law,contemporary society uses more indirect and less loose methods for encouraging itssubjects to adhere to the traditional social order. Indeed, where medieval societies useovert displays of brute force, modern society prefers processes of normalization, whichare less intrusiveAnother instrument used to give area is the normalizing judgment.Instead of strenuous offenders for wrong doings, the administrators with power choose torehabilitate them to attempt to normalize problem individuals and make them a serviceableand 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 write cursive well enough to pass to the next level. For a punishment, theycould be bespeakd to write cursive sentences over and over again. Additionally, toprovide the society with this normalization or conformity, retaliates 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 threat of yet another punishment. This givesindividuals something to strive to achieve and creates incentives for being disciplined.What Is Discipline?Here, we see the ideas of punishment couched in the language of teaching andrehabil itation. What is a deviant behavior is simply a mistaken approach to learning basicsocial rules that fanny be correct and analyzed and subjected to extensive discourse.Moreover, in this instance, there is not altogether the issue of negative reinforcement via the exacting measure of the threat of punishing action in response to a putative misdeed, barely,moreover, there is the address of a metaphorical carrot being extended to theperpetrator of a violation should he pull off to conform to the exact 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 rehabilitate quite than to torture is their chief use. Indeed, for docilebodies are effective because they ar e given the head game of freedom, in being offered achoice between two possibilities they deplete the trappings of volition but when it has been ordained 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 advantagebecause it allows the docile body 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 alter (Foucault Discipline and Punish,136). Docility was the way in which someone was trained, a way in which someone coldbe molded the like clay to fit the needs of those that are in control. This was done in thearmy, the schoolhouse, essentially anywhere people were subjected to control on aneveryday basis.Docility is nothing more then discipline, where discipline is a policy-makinganatomy of detail (Foucault Discipline and Punish, 139). The body was no longer beatenand abused rather it was explored, broken down 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 consecrate 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 transparent aim, which is of course the corresponding ends of enforcing thestability and standard of behavior that is normative and therefore beneficial to theinstitutions of power.Through the universe of such docile bodies who no longer need tobe tortured but inste ad can be subtly goaded towards the process of rehabilitation andergo normalization, the standards of normalcy can be diverted and reinforced withinthe individual by the individual. Indeed, even 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 look of identical with the very processes of identification, analysis, and education. Part of the reason for this is that possibility 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 entire project of enlightenment refuses to end in any categoricalliberation (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 past the only recourse wouldhave been the use of raw and terrible amounts of force The enquiries have theirmethodological coherence in the at once archaeological 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-critical reflections to the test of concrete practices. I do not knowwhether it mustiness be said today that the critical task still entails faith in Enlightenment Icontinue to think that this task requires work on our limits, that is, a patient labor givingform to our impatience for liberty. (Foucault What is Enlightenment? 50)Here, we see that the capital-E Enlightenment has resulted in little more than arefinement of the stra tegic 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 equallyimpossible 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 reality of the increasing and encroaching light 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 to a fault multiples, creating possibilities for discourse where nosuch possibility even existed before.Thus, the teleological goal of the penal system then seem to be one in which it isalmost impossible to distingu ish 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 public 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 conclu sion we reach at the end is that the goal of increasing discoursesince the enlightenment is to make powers reach ever more mobilise 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 within 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 mod 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. Discipline and Punish The Birth of Prison. Alan Sheridan, trans. New York Vintage, 1979.