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It was in his book Discipline and Punishment that Foucault outlines his theory that modern society was a disciplinary society. Here he described the disappearance of punishment as a public and violent spectacle which emphasized the infliction of pain to the body, to the emergence of surveillance of the soul which grew up around the development of the modern prison system. During the years 1760 to 1840, public executions gradually disappeared, and punishment instead became hidden, and concealed. The torture of the body was replaced by the surveillance of the soul (pp. 32 - 47).
The "great reformers" proposed leniency in punishment, but only at the cost of greater intervention (pp. 82 - 103). A more efficient economy and technology of punishment was proposed that would allow for a discreet but calculable exercise of power over the soul. Foucault believes that this form of social control is disciplinary and pervades all elements of life in modern society and that there is no escape from this type of control. Foucault's work deals mostly with "power" which he sees not as a fixed quantity of physical force, but instead as a stream of energy flowing through all aspects of society. Its power harnesses itself in regulating the behavior of individuals, the systems of knowledge, a societies institutions, and every interaction between people and this is why he described modern society as a disciplinary society.
In "Discipline and Punish", he applies this notion of power in tracing the rise of the prison system in France and the rise of other coercive institutions such as monasteries, the army, mental asylums, and other technologies. In his work Foucault exposes how seemingly benign or even reformist institutions such as the modern prison system (versus the stocks, and scaffolds) are technologies that are typical of the modern, painless, friendly, and impersonal coercive tools of the modern world. In fact the success of these technologies stems from their ability to appear unobtrusive and humane. Foucault asks "is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" (Foucault 1977, p 228). First he proposes that these institutions are similar and then he explains the proposed similarity of these diverse institutions on the basis that the internal disciplines of each are founded upon similar techniques. They are similar because each functions to divide the abnormal from the normal, which, having been assessed as different from the norm, become the objects of a range of penalties and interventions designed to remedy such deficiencies.
This idea forms the core of Foucault's work. His studies of the similarities of these disciplinary institutions are the basis of his understanding of the modern disciplinary societies in which all people live. As he sees it, the origin of this dichotomy between normal' and abnormal' and the disciplinary technologies designed to remedy this dichotomy emerged during the social transition that accompanied the shift from pre-capitalist to capitalist society. For Foucault this transition entailed a change in the political concern with the human body. According to Foucault, in pre-capitalist societies, power was exercised by rulers such as absolute monarchs through fear and penalties administered at their own discretion, rather than being laid down in some codified set of rules and principles.
The essential point from a disciplinary point of view is that power was exercised over the bodies of the subjects by torture or even death (Gordon 1980, p 125). The new capitalist society, however, demanded a different political view of the body organized around principles of power designed to manage bodies- to render them docile'- not to destroy them but to make them productive. Foucault argues that this was not only why prisons came to be concerned with reform and rehabilitation and schools focused on intense discipline but also why sexuality became important (implying that it had not been important before) as it provided a means of regulating the conduct of individual bodies so as to ensure the health and efficiency of the population as a whole (Foucault 1979, p. 212). Not only was power used to ensure that bodies would be made useful; it was also used to ensure that there would be no waste. In modern societies no one is allowed to stand outside of society as an outcast, rebel, or outlaw.
This, he explains, was one of the reasons for the shift away from penalties of exclusion, banishment and destruction for law breaking that had been prevalent in pre-capitalist society to penalties of inclusion. This new political economy of the body necessitated new policing strategies that would be more efficient and more certain than the previous arbitrary and inefficient system of punishments. First it took the form of general surveillance. The paradigm for the idea of surveillance was the Panoptic on, Bentham's plan for a prison constructed in the shape of a wheel around the hub of an observing warden, who at any moment might have the prisoner under observation through a nineteenth century version of the closed circuit TV.
Unsure of when authority might in fact be watching, the prisoner would strive always to conform his behavior to its presumed desires. This surveillance is exercised in modern societies in a variety of ways from cameras in every corner of a building to omnipresent statistics and social surveys that are used to affect and shape everyday life. Secondly this new policing strategy took the form of disciplinary training. Foucault discerned this new discipline in almost all 19 th-century institutions, the purpose of which is to produce: "the obedient subject, the individual subjected to habits, rules, orders; an authority that is exercised continually around him and upon him and which he must allow to function automatically in him" (Foucault 1977, p 227).
The purpose of such an exercise of power is to transform those outside the normal into docile bodies, ' who are then able to contribute to the productive patterns of capitalist society. In pre-capitalist societies power was located almost exclusively in the law and took the form of repression. But in Foucault's analysis of modern societies, the law as the site of control and authority fades into the background. Departures from the norm, the reason for intervention and regulation mark the extent of one's deficiency and to what degree and in which institutional domain it is necessary to apply disciplinary training to correct the deficiency. Departures from the norm present opportunities for wider and more systematic interventions than lawbreaking in pre-capitalistic societies ever did. For Foucault, education provides a good example of this.
In the early years of the nineteenth century, education was reorganized around a new curriculum and new mode of internal organization. Education is concerned with more than academic learning. It's broader concern includes moral instruction, classification, division, and hierarchy. Thus for Foucault education resembles in microcosm the principles of normalization that permeates society as a whole.
Again despite his protest that power is not located in persons but operates through them and that all are affected by and exercise this power and despite his pervasive use of the passive voice, which negates the need for specifying whom the active agent is, there is the strong sense that these disciplinary techniques are in the service of some arbitrary values at the behest of some individuals in controlling other individuals. His work is thus reminiscent of conflict analyses of the past, except for his unwillingness to specify who is in control. In the modern disciplinary society, the courts and laws, previously the primary instruments of social control, now become only one more part of the general disciplinary apparatus where all nonconformity becomes its focus. In Foucault's view, this disciplinary society and its various points of intervention, prisons, workhouses, asylums, hospitals, schools, etc.
became the breeding ground for a new breed of overseers- technicians of behavior, ' who use a continuous, universal network of surveillance and intervention. The target of disciplinary power becomes the entire person and power over the very essence of people comes to be exercised by these new "technicians of behavior. " Extending Foucault's analysis Rose proposes a whole new realm of behavior control and a new set of experts to provide the norms for such discipline (Rose 1972). Today there are social workers, educators, probation officers, psychiatrists, occupational therapists, work instructors, financial advisors and self help lines staffed by experts of all kinds. In Foucault's interpretation freedom from the pervasive influence of "power" is impossible. Because his conception of "power" exists not just in individual institutions of society like prisons but instead exists in the structure of society and more importantly in peoples thought systems, escape from social control is impossible. Foucault in the last chapter talks about how even the reforms in the system have been co-opted to further the goals of the state.
Instead of a lessening of social control Foucault sees that the technologies change from the wheels and gallows of the 17 th century to the disciplinary society of the 19 th century to the emerging carrera city of the future. In this carrera city the dispersion of power will be complete. The technologies of control will emanate from all parts of society, "walls, space, institution, rules, and discourse. " And more importantly Foucault sees escape as growing more and more difficult as society moves from a disciplinary society to a society of control. Foucault's work is a critique of the ideals of the Enlightenment, especially scientific rationalism. More importantly, it is a critique of modern society, with an implicit appeal for social change. Foucault's work challenges the authority of present-day judges of normality.
By demonstrating how our current society punishes deviations from the norm, he is, in effect, challenging our own ideas about what is normal and abnormal.
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Research essay sample on Why Foucault Described Modern Society As Disciplinary
