Strengthening the Social Forces: Foucault’s Panopticon

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In Foucault’s writing of Panopticon, he defines Panopticon as a mechanism of power used in regulating the society and the community which people are living in . Foucault discusses how rules, policies and laws are applied towards the society and how existence of hierarchy in the society has assigned individuals to play each of their own roles. Power is a natural constructed element embedded into the society. Moreover, Panopticon serves as a homogenous mixture between the process of the power and power schema, in addition , anyone from the outside world has the accessible passage towards this integrated disciplined model. The mechanisms or forces behind Panopticon is that “it aims to strengthen the social forces,” such as raising the whole human community into a better civilized community.

Power in its distinctive character is such a confusing concept that no word can really describe its heritage or puzzling underlying theme. Though, I agree with what Foucault said on “it arranges things in such a way that exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact, “(Foucault 221 ) that power is something that is precise in its value and the plasticity of its nature allows anyone to come in charge in exercising power. For instance, a communist revolutionary Mao Zhe Dong who led China to achieve its independence from Japanese military was formally a traditional farmer who just received a primary education. This may has to do with President Mao’s intuitive on the function of power on its disciplinary level. This means that a person does not need to be born in ...

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...ture on how theories tried to influence over humans life. The observation allows us to see what kind of conditions or situations argued by the philosophical thinkers are not concord with the nature of the Man Kind . Overall, this is a conflict between nature versus nurture theory . This can be particularly traced back to Confucius’s saying on “To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must cultivate our personal life; and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our hearts right.” Humans can never allow such conventional teachings to govern over their lives because they accepted the fact that all of them are born with innate selfishness and they are not as kind-hearted as monks or nuns to take everything in life as fate created by God.

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