Discipline And Punish Foucault Summary

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

subjugated knowledge, in which Truth is relative and not anchored in reality because it lacks a lower case T truth. Dissimilar to Modernism, where there is only one truth and it still exists even if you don’t know that it is there. Similar to the idea of the cave, skewed perceptions of reality doesn’t mean that it is not true.
Foucault believes that there is a reality that happens to the body that is real (i.e.

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

them.
As for not only me but society as a whole, surveillance and discipline are highly influential. The discipline and surveillance within the online world, I feel has created a greater awareness and knowledge on how to operate and understand the worldwide web more cohesively. It opened knowledge on ideas such as identity theft and cyberbullying which is monitored online through various means. So in a way, not only does control in these aspects create power but it influences and supports the growth of knowledge. Which is much needed in the world of online cyber-abuse.
We are taught from an early age to follow the rules, or you will get in trouble and punished. We are socially constructed to view deviance as bad, but in reality we are just deviating way from the way that society attempts to regulate people’s thoughts and behaviors. Social deviance is the recognized violation of standards of conduct or expectations of a group or society which in short is legally defined as breaking the law or crime. It is not so much the act itself, but the reactions to the act that make something deviant. I feel that the threat of punishment is so high that you feel that you must comply and obey the rules or be segregated from society.
Yet this is disproportionate between genders, it is a known fact that the criminality of females if far different from that of male criminality. I kept coming back to this idea that has been around in women’s history for decades, this concept of “good women, bad women”. It is within this framework that the idea of “double deviant” becomes relevant. “Double deviant” argues that female offenders are often punished for crime they committed but are also penalized for their deviance from gender expectations and norms.