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The movie, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, is a film that relates to Foucault’s analysis of discipline and punishment. Foucault’s argument is that power works in a disciplinary way in current society. The movie can relate to this because the institution that the movie took place in was ran using Foucault’s disciplinary technique. There are many scenes from the film that give an analysis of Foucault’s argument. Foucault believes that people have the power to punish the docile bodies that they produce.
Foucault argues in “The Carceral” that, “The least act of disobedience is punished and the best way of avoiding serious offences is to punish the most minor offences very severely…” (Foucault 1977: 294). In the movie, they used this technique. The Nurses and other people of authority in the film express this technique is because when the patients would act in a wrongful manner they would forcefully grab them and isolate them from the rest of the patients. Throughout that process there may have been some smacking. Also, in the scene where Cheswick continuously yelled about his cigarettes, it lead to himself, The Chief, and McMurphy to receive the electric shock therapy.
The electric shock therapy is a little harsh. The patients, besides McMurphy of course, didn’t think that the punishments were abusive in any way. Since they punished severely for such minor offences, they made the punishments normalized. Foucault would say that the patients are “docile bodies”. They were made docile by people who were “technicians of behavior”, “engineers of conduct”, and “orthopaedists of individuality”. These people were the nurses, doctors, and supervisors. In “The Carceral”, Foucault describes these people to have the task to, “…p...
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...eded to be punished so they could remain docile. The film gave many scenes that helped to understand Foucault’s arguments that were expressed in Seidman’s reading and in Foucault’s reading, “The Carceral”. Foucault’s argument that power works in a disciplinary way in current society was greatly analyzed in this film because it used a psychiatric ward that had nurses, and other people of authority, who had the power to punish. Having the power to punish and having produced docile bodies are techniques that Foucault would describe as using the, “disciplinary technique”, that is talked about in his, “The Carceral”, chapter of the book, “Discipline and Punish”.
References
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Random House Inc. New York, NY
Seidman, S. (2012). Contested Knowledge Social Theory Today (5th ed.). New York: Wiley.
The author Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado and went to Stanford University. He volunteered to be used for an experiment in the hospital because he would get paid. In the book “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, Kesey brings up the past memories to show how Bromden is trying to be more confident by using those thoughts to make him be himself. He uses Bromden’s hallucinations, Nurse Ratched’s authority, and symbolism to reveal how he’s weak, but he builds up more courage after each memory.
Stanley Milgram selected 40 college participants aged 20-50 to take part in the experiment at Yale University. Milgram says, “The point of the experiment is to see how far a person will proceed in a concrete and measureable situation in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain on a protesting victim” (632). Although the 40 men or women thought that they were in a drawing to see who would be the “teacher” and the “learner,” the drawing was fixed. The learners were a part of Milgram’s study and taken into a room with electrodes attached to their arms. The teachers were to ask questions to the learners and if they answered incorrectly, they were to receive a 15-450 voltage electrical shock. Although the learners were not actually being shocked, the teachers believed t...
The theory of Panopticon by Foucault can be applied in this poem. According to Foucault, there is a cultural shift from the old traditional discipline of inmates to a European disciplinary system (314). In this new disciplinary model, the prisoners always assume that they are under constant watch by the guards and they start policing themselves. Panopticon is the process of inducing inmates to a state of conscious and ...
Foucault starts out the first chapter, The body of the condemned, by contrasting Damiens gruesome public torture with a detailed schedule of a prison that took place just eighty years later. Foucault is bringing the reader’s attention to the distinct change in punishment put in place in less than a century. It gets the reader to start thinking about the differences between how society used to punish people and the way that we do today. Foucault states that earlier in time the right to punish was directly connected to the authority of the King. Crimes committed during this time were not crimes against the public good, but a personal disrespect to the King himself. The public displays of torture and execution were public affirmations of the King’s authority to rule and to punish. It was after many years when the people subjected to torture suddenly became sympathized, especially if the punishment was too excessive for the crime committed.
As all movies are created based on a book, there always seems to be changes and conflicting ideas. However, they still have the same main idea to the story line. The novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey and the movie directed by Miloš Forman deal with the main idea of society's control of natural impulses. The author/director want to prove that this control can be overcome. Although the movie and the book are very different from each other, they still have their similarities.
One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a movie that portrays a life story of a criminal named McMurphy who is sent to a mental institution because he believes that he himself is insane. While McMurphy is in the mental ward, he encounters other patients and changes their perception of the “real” world. Before McMurphy came to the mental ward, it was a place filled with strict rules and orders that patients had to follow; these rules were created by the head nurse, Nurse Ratched. However, once McMurphy was in the ward, everything, including the atmosphere, changed. He was the first patient to disobey Nurse Ratched. Unlike other patients who continuously obeyed Nurse Ratched, McMurphy and another patient named Charlie Cheswick decided to rebel
Therefore, even if the facts show that these employees where somehow providing professionally approved care, i.e. physically restraining her during an out of control incident, the patient’s perception that she was being physically and sexually assaulted remains to be the outcome. Therefore, according to the consequential theory of ethics, this behavior would not be considered ethical. Therefore, an alternative action, or one that is not perceived to be threatening and harmful, must be executed.
With the authority figure pressuring the participants to keep going with the shocks, they felt the participants felt they had to obey. Milgram found, “Many subjects will obey the experimenter no matter how vehement the pleading of the person being shocked, no matter how painful the shocks seem to be, and no matter how much the victim pleads to be let out.” (Pg. 4-5). Binding factors lock the subject into the situation and lead normal individuals to become agents. In addition a variety of inhibitions against disobeying authority come into play and successfully keep the person in his place. (pg. 7) The experiments led to a little bit of moral conflict within the participants as understood, “Subjects were frequently in an agitated state. Sometimes, verbal protest was at a minimum…” (pg.21) Milgram’s experiments showed that many simply handled their guilt by using defense mechanisms, such as transferring the responsibility to the experiment leader, or getting absorbed in the technical side of the experiment. An example would be The Professor whom taught Old Testament liturgy whom, even though refused to give the 420 volts, didn’t disobey but merely shifted to take orders from someone else. This is corroborated when Milgram states “voices of morality were raised against the action in question but the typical response of the common man was to obey orders,” (pg.
own actions against each other have consequences negative to the other patients on the ward.
Kappel, Lawrence. Readings on One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2000. Print.
Hart, Harold H. (ed.), Punishment: For & Against; New York: Hart Publishing Company, Inc., 1971
He persuades the audience by using verbal irony and statistics. When he first mentions prison, he uses verbal irony towards the subject to express his true attitude towards imprisonment by saying that locking people in cages is more humane than punishing them physically (197). This statement is ironic because he actually believes that imprisonment is a worse punishment than corporal punishment but says that it is more humane to ridicule the opposing argument. This irony serves its purpose of telling the audience that prison is
...s the prisoners as well as the administration. During his period the rich were able to buy there way into particular incentives such as day passes and visitors. With that type of control some prisoners can gain more power than the guards that oversee them. Lastly, violence is a universal means to gain power. In the case of the white crime in the movie, violence was a means to gain control over a slowly retreating “American” society. Violence with the prison is a mean to impress a level of control over those subjected to its scope. Physically and mentally violence is a means to subdue the prisoner. Foucault explains that although modern guard violence is physical it is a means to control the soul of a man. Life with in prisons is a struggle of balancing the powerful with the powerless. Without one there would be no other and the intricate prison set up would suffer.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest written by Ken Kesey in 1962. This novel is based on the experience Ken Kesey had during his time working in a mental institution as an orderly. Ken Kesey’s novel is a powerful critique of early 1960’s American society. The three main techniques that Kesey uses to create the Tragic form. In this novel Kesey has used the three main technique to create an inevitable conflict and outcomes that is similar to tragedy. The three main literary techniques that Ken Kesey uses are narrative structure, foreshadowing and symbolism. In this essay I will explore how Kesey uses these three techniques to form the Tragic form and shows how McMurphy gets lobotomized in the end but still wins the war against the Big Nurse.
In doing so, Foucault famously compares contemporary society to a prison- “prison is not so unlike what happens every day.” Ultimately, Foucault attempts to exemplify