Discipline And Punish Foucault Summary

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3. Foucault argues in the conclusion that discipline is not just about control—it also produces new kinds of knowledge. He cites the rise of psychiatry and clinical medicine as examples. Apply Foucault’s ideas to your everyday life. How has discipline and surveillance produced who you are today and your ability to take action? Foucault is defiantly a post-structural theorist, but as for being post-modern he is and he isn’t. Let’s start with the basics between post-modern and modern. Power in the eyes of a post-modernist is a mess and there are a magnitude of intersections between each other in so many ways that constitutes the ways in which we can express power. However, this doesn’t say that we are all equal, but that some people are better at navigating the tangles better than others. Post-modernist believe that truth is always dynamic, that one person’s truth is no more “true” than the next guys. Post-Modernism is based more on …show more content…

being watched), but he can’t understand the subjugated experiences they have. For Foucault, the idea of control shifts power unequally to the observer. In his work, Discipline and Punish, he focuses on punishment in social context and uses that to examine how power relations change which effects punishment outcomes. He brings up an interesting point between discipline and punishment. In his words, punishment is about shame/pain or locking people up (whipping people) and discipline is about regulating the body to ensure it continues to fulfill what society needs it to do. He also discusses the idea of surveillance like the panopticon. A panopticon is a type of prison which has a tall tower in the center and all of the prisoner’s cells surround it. It gives the impression that prisoners are always being watched so they must behave. In this instance the prison is one part in a discourse that defines and creates criminals and then punishes

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