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Power In Foucault's On The Penitentiary System

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Power is a fundamental characteristic of any system which governs a group of people such as prisons. Incarceration systems require a strict flow of power to run functionally and carry out their duties to control their inhabitants. Because the understanding of our prison systems is an important one, it is necessary to carefully examine the power structure within these settings.
In his text “Panopticism”, Foucault claims that power rests within the central operating organization of a governmental structure. However, this is a broad term, as it neglects the individual’s contribution to the success of an efficient system. Power is perceived to be a looming force over its subjects; however, this impending force actually relays individuals power, …show more content…

By focusing on the minister as a mechanism of power, it is evident that the minister serves not only exert power over the individuals but also lend the individuals of interest power. This would not have been seen without Foucault’s careful reading. This view, in turn, provides a new insight into Foucault’s theory—a power system is not successful without the will of its subjects to behave. In “Panopticism”, Foucault expresses his view that power lies within the operating system, thus, resulting in an efficient system. He analyzes this by utilizing the Panopticon structure as the leading model for his argument. In the panopticon model, all cells face the source of a strong, bright light located in the center of the building; this blinding light makes it …show more content…

This methodology of the prison system highlights the role of the minister and promotes him as a power figure. The minister comes to visit prisoners once a week to educate the prisoners on religious beliefs. Prisoners in this system are given no physical outlet for stress and have limited access to sources of relief, so the minister serves as “the only friend who is left to them” (Tocqueville and Beaumont 54). They naturally confide in the visitor about their problems, concerns, and feelings because of the limited communication opportunities they are given; they release their sentiments to the single person that will listen to them. This meeting fosters trust and mutual communication, which is integral in establishing a power structure between the minister and the inmates. The interaction between the two forces may be overlooked as simply a part of a casual weekly routine for the prisoners; however, understanding Foucault’s view on power and its forms hints to dig deeper. The minister is not merely a figure of religion, a title that is misleading as it takes away the emphasis of holding power; he is the “light” of the panopticon. He asserts a form of power on his subjects who are those who choose to receive education from the minister. Because the minister is one of the few resources in the prison that keeps the

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These findings are conflicting when mirrored with the previously accepted, although a very stereotypical interpretation, on what religion in prison ought to be. Inmates have been accused of practicing the “fakery that is jailhouse religion” (Dubler, 2013, p. 31, Location No. 684) in order to extort the privileges

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Surely, not only the enforcement of laws, but also the more general set of interventions - focused to guarantee the ordered development of societal intercourses - requires the presence of the public hand  it demands, in other words, those kinds of intervention that Foucault designates through the notion of discipline. What Foucault deeply counterclaims, however, is the idea that the state action can be always and mainly recognized and represented as a bundle of forces coming from ‘above’ and floating ‘down’ to the social structure taken as a whole. Actually, Foucault complains the idea that it is possible to identify and isolate a clear line dividing the public sphere and society itself, whereas the latter is meant as the sphere within which individuals negotiate their own position in front of the pervasiveness of public interference in order to preserve their freedom of action. Foucault, against the concept of state action that reduces the latter to disciplinary power, suggests considering the state  since its inception at the beginning of the modern era  as the central node of a broader network with a vast array of agencies whose aim is the government of individual life. According to Foucault, politics is nothing but the art of governing people.

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While the essence of the Constitutional Panopticon is still the same as with the Prison Panopticon, it has a certain modification to panoptic features. The special aspect of this panoptic structure is that the roles of the “watcher” and “watched” are reversed. Governors, who are used to surveying people, is now the subject of scrutiny by the mass public, who is usually the one being surveyed. This structure is in the form of a parliamentary building. It targets the government officials and serves to impede misrule amidst authority.

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Foucault 's chapter of Panopticism focuses primarily on the power adjustments implemented when a society works in a Panopticonistic way. The author writes that “Panopticism is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come” (Foucault 14). This

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In Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish, he discusses the history of the modern penal system. He seeks to analyze punishment in its social context, and to examine how changing power relations affected punishment. there is a section of the text titled “Panopticism”. The idea of this excerpt is to exemplify disciplinary power. It is shown through Jeremy Bentham’s vision of this building, a prison, that models the idea that individuals can be controlled and supervised efficiently.

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This essay will cover Michel Foucalt and his understanding of power and knowledge, and the relationship between them by looking at Foucalt’s works – Discipline and Punish and The History of Madness (or better known as Madness and Civilization), which is what the first part of this essay will describe. Further on, the second part covers Foucault’s pastoral diagram, the interests of the state and the inner workings of a police system, which will elaborate on the subject by going over a brief history of spiritual guidance that is present in both early Judaism and Christianity (as described by Foucault). Using Foucault’s study of power and his elaboration on it using the Pastoral diagram this essay will conclude how through the use of pastoral

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As the last one, neoliberalism could be seen in governmentality approaches. The concept of ‘governmentality’ is a term used by Michel Foucault (1991) in his work on modern forms of political power. It is a term that combines ‘government’ and ‘rationality’, suggesting a form of political analysis that focuses on the forms of knowledge that make objects visible and available for governing. In Foucault’s terms, governmentality refers to a distinctive modality for exercising power, one which is not reducible to ‘the state’ This interpretation of neoliberalism centers on acknowledging a processual character where neoliberalism’s articulation with existing circumstances comes through endlessly unfolding failures and successes in the relations between

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How can you identify power exactly? Maybe you would define it as being dominant, or the ability to do something or act in a particular way. As we think about this specific question, Foucault’s idea of power lies outside of many understandings to power. He does not hold any proper value in his idea of power. Foucault’s conception of power is a wide analysis.

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