DD101 – TMA04 (2014)

TMA Question:Compare and contrast two social science views about the ordering

of social life.

Dr Craig A. Hammond (DD101 Preston Cluster)

Michel Foucault: Social Order as Discipline

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Knowledge Power& Control

Compare and contrast two social science views about the ordering

of social life.

Michel Foucault: Discipline & Punish (the birth of the

modern prison)

Surveillance• Michel Foucault’s is

concerned with discovering the ‘birth’ and development of the modern prison.

• The ways of thinking associated with this transition

• And the impact on modern society

• Read the following excerpt

Social orthopaedics:Grow/be shaped in ways required by the State …

The Panopticon (prison)

Modern Society: transition towards …

• Surveillance • Discipline

• Normalisation

• Discourse(s) to shape, perpetuate these characteristics – How do ‘discourses’ influence/regulate our lives?

• Foucault argues that one of the main [and most important] points of the modern prison system was that of achieving ‘discipline’ and control over the bodies and minds of the offenders.

• Whilst the ideas of Bentham’s panopticon were never fully implemented – clearly, the means of physical and mental control (and discipline) were.

• Consider the following points taken from Foucault’s book, which explains the impact of the modern prison system developed:

• “What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour.

• • The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it

down and rearranges it. A ‘political anatomy’, which was also a ‘mechanics of power’,

• • it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may

do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, • • with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus

discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, ‘docile’ bodies.” (Foucault. 1991, p, 138)

• What do you think Foucault means by ‘docile’ bodies?

• Education• Language• Control• Surveillance

– These are all part of the State’s Anatomy of Power– Discourse (again)– As prisoners of our own ‘social-space-that-is-totally-regulated’ – – We are held in ‘darkness’, prevented from observing our observers: – This reinforces Foucault's idea of a citizen who "is seen, but he

does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication" (Foucault, 1979).

• Docile Bodies• Carceral Society• Language• Power• Control• Surveillance• Discipline