open university dd101 tma04 (2014) michel foucault
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DD101 TMA04 2014 presentation on Michel Foucault in relation to the TMA question: 'Compare and contrast two social science views about the ordering of social life'TRANSCRIPT
DD101 – TMA04 (2014)
TMA Question:Compare and contrast two social science views about the ordering
of social life.
Dr Craig A. Hammond (DD101 Preston Cluster)
Michel Foucault: Social Order as Discipline
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
Knowledge Power& Control
Compare and contrast two social science views about the ordering
of social life.
Michel Foucault: Discipline & Punish (the birth of the
modern prison)
Surveillance• Michel Foucault’s is
concerned with discovering the ‘birth’ and development of the modern prison.
• The ways of thinking associated with this transition
• And the impact on modern society
• Read the following excerpt
Social orthopaedics:Grow/be shaped in ways required by the State …
The Panopticon (prison)
Modern Society: transition towards …
• Surveillance • Discipline
• Normalisation
• Discourse(s) to shape, perpetuate these characteristics – How do ‘discourses’ influence/regulate our lives?
• Foucault argues that one of the main [and most important] points of the modern prison system was that of achieving ‘discipline’ and control over the bodies and minds of the offenders.
• Whilst the ideas of Bentham’s panopticon were never fully implemented – clearly, the means of physical and mental control (and discipline) were.
• Consider the following points taken from Foucault’s book, which explains the impact of the modern prison system developed:
• “What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour.
• • The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it
down and rearranges it. A ‘political anatomy’, which was also a ‘mechanics of power’,
• • it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may
do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, • • with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus
discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, ‘docile’ bodies.” (Foucault. 1991, p, 138)
• What do you think Foucault means by ‘docile’ bodies?
• Education• Language• Control• Surveillance
– These are all part of the State’s Anatomy of Power– Discourse (again)– As prisoners of our own ‘social-space-that-is-totally-regulated’ – – We are held in ‘darkness’, prevented from observing our observers: – This reinforces Foucault's idea of a citizen who "is seen, but he
does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication" (Foucault, 1979).
• Docile Bodies• Carceral Society• Language• Power• Control• Surveillance• Discipline