Days 1-7
I was reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish for two weeks, and particular episodes attracted my attention and stimulated my thinking. Overall, the book describes the role of power in society and analyzes the social and theoretical mechanisms that have influenced changes in Western penitentiary systems. Part three, chapter three “Panopticism,” has specifically drawn my attention (Foucault, 1998). Foucault says that the city government developed a unique and highly effective system of control over citizens during the plague.
The author believes that such a system deserves to be admired as it allows for overcoming the chaos of the spread of the disease and the panic due to a large number of deaths among people who know each other. Next, the author presents an architectural embodiment of the concept of perfect control in the form of a prison tower called “Bentham’s panopticon”. According to Foucault, this architectural form could be applied to the supervision of prisoners, madmen, and schoolchildren.
Days 8-14
During the second week, I discovered how Foucault understands torture. In part one, the author analyzes the transition from brutal public torture in the middle of the 17th century to the nature of imprisonment characteristic of the beginning of the 19th century. The author draws parallels between the evolution of torture, technological advances, and broader changes in the social worldview. Foucault does not consider changes in torture to be a humanization of the penitentiary system but sees in this process only a desire for a more sophisticated subjugation of society.
Part three is devoted to discipline, in the sense of punishment for crimes. Foucault emphasizes that although the norms of the law were formulated as egalitarian, they were enforced by a system that “was not inherently egalitarian” (Foucault, 1975, p. 222). The author emphasizes that the creation of a “legal” system of punishments served as a mask for the entrenchment of elite political circles in the governing systems. The new discipline only helped to control society more effectively in the spheres of economics, politics, and military affairs through the activities of relevant organizations.
References
Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and punish. Web.
Foucault, M. (1998). Discipline and punish: Panopticism.