Foucault's Discipline and punish Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Foucault's Discipline and punish - Essay Example an organic group of individuals who have supposedly internalized a set of society (or community) acknowledged norms, rules, regulations and values through other disciplinary organizations (Erlandson 21). ‘Body’ occupies a crucial part in Foucault’s social disciplinary theory. Since punishment cannot be non-corporal, the goal of modern punishment system should be to produce ‘docile body’ through continuous regulation and supervision. A ‘docile body’ is supposed to be dominated by an individual’s soul. So, modern penal system must focus on the reform of the individual’s soul. For Foucault, ‘soul’ is an individual’s psychic mechanism which regulates the actions and behaviors of the ‘body’ in response to and in accordance with the demands of the existing political power or the regime of power and knowledge (Foucault, â€Å"Power/Knowledge†, 18). Since ‘body’ is the subject of â€Å"political technology†, modern society is endowed with a penal system which helps the body or the individual to create or reprogrammed a soul which, internalizing the fear of punishment, overpowers a docile body. For Foucault, the internalized prison is much stronger than the one, built of concrete. Foucault’s â€Å"Discipline and Punishment† is, indeed, dedicated to explaining the modern penal system. Referring to the public corporal execution and punishment of the delinquents on the scaffold during ancient and medieval ages, Foucault argues that punishment was not only judicial but also political. Punishment as a political ritual was aimed to let the public body internalize the fear of the King or political authority as the authority of the individual’s body. According to him, the focus of punishment, as a more generalized form ‘Discipline’, shifted from ‘body’ to ‘soul’ during the Reform Movement in Europe. Through social disciplinary institutions, people were supposed to internalize the panoptic presence of power. During the modern age, â€Å"The