Discipline And Punish Foucault Analysis

In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault introduces two idea of what he term 's 'technologies of punishment '. Within these technologies are two representations of punishment; Monarchal Punishment referring to the public and torturous punishment practices present during and prior to the 18th century, and Disciplinary Punishment which refers to the incarceration of offenders and their subjection to the power of the prison officers, which often leads to self-policing of behaviour through fear of being caught disobeying the rules.

To link these ideas to contemporary society, Foucault uses an adaptation of Jeremy Bentham 's idea of the panopticon to demonstrate the impact that constant surveillance has not only on an individual in an institution

In contrast When plague arrived, it was inconvenient to empty out an entire town. The solution was quarantine, and the technology was known as quadrillage.The affected town was divided into smaller and smaller sections, with administrators for each section appointing delegates for each subdivision, and so forth. Streets were guarded and movement thoroughly restricted. A twice-daily roll call required each resident to appear at a prescribed window; anyone who did not do so was assumed to have taken ill with the plague, and a team would be sent into the house to remove the newest victim, before they could infect others. The results would be compiled into registers.It is not a question of driving out individuals but rather of establishing and fixing them, of giving them their own place, of assigning places and of defining presences and subdivided presences.

IBut panopticon is not just a technology but also an architecture specifically designed for surveillance. t is the further elaboration of the means of control. There is no orgy of violence or social breakdown.As technologies of surveillance and discipline become more pervasive and efficient – as norms of behavior become more established – the population does most of the work itself. Power finds itself ever more easily creating the conditions of its

Power mostly benefits from the generation of vast amounts of knowledge complied from continuous surveillance, and, as the plague town example shows, cities are the most efficient means by which to accumulate that knowledge and therefore that power. Thus majority of the world’s population has gravitated towards this technology of power and control. The countryside, which is unevenly distributed and difficult to regulate, is emptying out. As people seek economic opportunity, they migrate towards the cities.

The modern society is thus based on the idea that all citizens are free and entitled to make certain demands on the state along with the techniques of control . This examination spreads throughout society. Schools, factories, hospitals and prisons resemble each other in examining pupils, workers, patients and prisoners, and try to make them conform to the "norm". The fact that the modern citizen spends much of his life in at least some of these institutions reveals how far society has