Michel Foucault On 'Disciplinary Society,' Part 2

Here, Foucault argues that the prison is one facet in the overall 'rationality' structuring disciplinary society - questions raised regard methods used to coerce persons to behave in certain, predictable ways and the best means to achieve this end ...

Foucault offers this observation near the conclusion of DP:

"The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the 'social-worker'-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements" (p. 304)."

The images:

1. Plan for a Penitentiary, 1840 - prisoner kneeling before an observation tower
2. Interior of the Statesville Penitentiary, Joliet, IL
3. Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, PA
4. Texas Death Row prisoner, 1994

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• Michel+Foucault
• Discipline+and+Punish
• French+Philosophy
• Postmodernism
• Panopticon
• Prison