...In chapter 16 of Playing With Ideas, Michael Foucault speaks highly about discipline and how beneficial it is to discipline students. Foucault says, “Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies” (Foucault, p. 332), discipline creates bodies that are obedient and trained to do what they have been taught to do. One of Foucault’s tactics to discipline students involves organizing them into individual places to be in the classroom. He calls this tactic one of the greatest technical changes within elementary school education. If the students have their own individual place within the classroom, this would make supervising each student easier for the teacher. While having organized classroom arrangements is beneficial,...
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...Table of Contents 1.1 Introduction1 Extract Overview1 Discourse Analysis………………………………………………………………………………………………….2 Alternative Discourse…………………………………………………………………………………………….3 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..4 1.1 Introduction Discourse analysis is both an old and a new discipline. Its origins can be traced back to the study of language, public speech, and literature more than 2000 years ago. (Schiffrin, 2001) Much of the structural analysis of the term can be said to have resulted from books such as the archaeology of knowledge, discipline and punish and the history of sexuality which were written by the famous sociologist Michael Foucault. Foucault defines discourse as ways of constituting knowledge, together with social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations, which inhere in such knowledge, and relations between them. (Quinby, 1999) Putnam and Fairhurst [2001: 79] use the term 'discourse analysis' to refer to 'the study of words and signifiers, including the form or structure of these words, the use of language in context, and the meanings or interpretation of discursive practices'. Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning (this meaning could be in form of language, speech, text etc.). They constitute the ‘nature’ of the body, unconscious and conscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern (Weedon, 1987) 1.2 Extract Overview The extract to be assessed is...
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...Alice Sewah Michael Davros English 101 28 February 2012 Society and Surveillance In today’s society we are under surveillance everywhere we step our feet to. The only place we get privacy is when we are at home, everywhere else there are cameras hidden watching you, without even noticing. At shopping malls, there are hidden cameras. The reason why they exist is simple: to prevent shopliftings, or in some cases, to catch shoplifters. Most customers realize that they are being watched and try to act properly, though there are some who fail to recognize or decide to ignore this fact and take the wrong path. It is not just shopping malls that have surveillance watching over people. Even when you’re driving on the street there is a hidden camera somewhere watching you to make sure you run a red light. Foucault starts Panopticism with a talk on the plague. After the explanatory introduction, Foucault presents an analysis of the prison system created by a famous economist Betham, Panopticon Readers could perceive a different conclusion as to what Panopticism is. According to my point of view Panopticism is the idea that schools are similar to prisons, and it is emphasized as well as stated throughout in the reading multiple times. The text gives a variety of examples to help the readers understand as well as analyze what the author is trying to portray. I concur with most of the ideas displayed in the text. Schools are similar to prisons due to the fact that individuals...
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...nonhierarchical interconnectedness that structures our contemporary world and means of communication. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, on the other hand, argue that the Internet is an exemplar of the rhizome: a nonhierarchical, noncentered network—a democratic network with “an indeterminate and potentially unlimited number of interconnected nodes [that] communicate with no central point of control.”2 Our journey begins with early modernism, and if early modernism had a theme, it was oneness. This focus on oneness or unity, on the whole rather than on individual parts, What is at stake in settling this dispute? Being. And, knowledge and power in that being. More specifically, this paper explores how a theory of social ontology has evolved to theories of social ontologies, how the modernist notion of global understanding of individuals working toward a common (rationalized and objectively knowable) goal became pluralistic postmodern theories embracing the idea of local networks. Furthermore, what this summary journey of theoretical evolution allows for is a consideration of why understandings of a world comprising emergent networks need be of concern to composition instructors and their practical activities in the classroom: networks produce knowledge. 1. Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 30. 2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Postmodernization, or the Informatization of Production,” in Empire...
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...PHUONG In regards to Phuong we only know what Fowler or Pyle choose to tell us. Edward Said tells us in _Orientalism_ how Flaubert depicts an Egyptian courtesan, we know what “HE” says about her but we never get to really know her emotions because he speaks for her and represents her, and I think the same happens to Phuong. What we learn about Vietnamese women in the novel is depicted in images we are told from Fowler: “Lovely flat figures—the white silk trousers—the long tight jackets in pink and mauve patterns”, bicycles at sunset, female gossip, and sexual intercourse. Sex is “received” by women either passively as in the case of Phuong (this is one of the differences I have found between the book and the film) or the other face of sex is with prostitutes (Granger in the House of the Five Hundred Girls). So, the general perception I have got is that the main feminine traits of Vietnamese women are: submissiveness, quietness and obedience. I don’t know if these really correspond with the reality at the time and place. I personally found these ideas rather phallocentric and misogynist. Fowler is a cynical man who doesn’t want to get involved in war and who is not committed formally to his romantic relationship. He treats women as dumb objects. He uses them and likes to be served and pampered by them. In the middle of one of the violent war encounters in which he is immerse, he thinks in Phuong, but not in her as her beloved partner, but rather, he wonders...
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...Comparison and Contrast between the Disciplined and Controlled Societies Sociology Theorizing Introduction According to Deleuze disciplinary societies existed in the 18th and the 19th centuries. He explains that these societies were located by Foucault. Deleuze explained that the disciplinary societies were much evidenced in the 20th century which according to him was the time when the practice reached its peak. According to him in this system the individuals were operating enclosed environments. Such environments were having the laws to be followed closely by the people. These enclosed environments included the family, the school, the barracks, and the factory and the hospital that people would visit from time to time. Still another enclosed environment was the prison which was seen as an analogical model of laborers who were treated as prisoners. He uses the exclamations of the heroine of Rossellini’s Europa ’51 whom at the sight of some laborers was reported to have thought that she was seeing convicts. Analyzing such environments enclosure in the context of a factory Foucault explained that the major goals of a factory is to concentrate, distribute in space, order in time, compose a force of production within the dimensions of both space and time to ensure grater effect than that of the sum of its component forces. Comparison and Contrast of the Disciplined Society with Controlled Society In discipline societies an individual passes through different enclosures...
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...society? Discuss through the ideas of Michel Foucault. This essay will examine French social theorist Michel Foucault’s (1926-1984), concept of Panopticism. It will give an example of the way it can be observed, through contemporary society. Firstly, it will cover a general aspect of Foucault’s work, regarding his historical method and his understanding of madness, power, knowledge and the body. It will discuss the idea of the Panopticon and how it shaped the idea of discipline and power. Furthermore, it will examine one element of Foucault’s theory, and how it could be applied in contemporary society, through the subject of security in public places. Foucault’s 1964 work Madness and Civilisation, studied the evolution of madness from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, showing the evolving change of how madness was perceived over time in society. During the time of the Renaissance, Foucault found that people who were ‘mad’ were seen as liberated (Foucault 1967). However, the classical age in the seventeenth century created ‘enormous houses of confinement’ which reduced madness to silence (Foucault 1967:35). The mid seventeenth century saw madness associated with confinement. These institutions housed people who were poor, unemployed, prisoners and insane. In 1656, the ‘Hôpital Général’ was founded in Paris and could be seen from the start, that it was not a ‘medical establishment’, but rather a sort of ‘semi-judicial structure’ (Foucault 1967:37). It had absolute power and control...
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...We are living in a time where the sketched epistemes of political rationality for which ‘life’ is the organizing object of politics (i.e., biopolitics) is being challenged. During the 1970s and beginning of 1980s theorists such as Foucault argued that the sovereign right to kill was increasingly displaced by the administrative compulsion to make live. That is, instead of ending violence or killing especially in the context of Europe and North America lethal conflict was redistributed through out the population turning politics into war by other means such as the withdrawal of the state from the household (i.e., oikos) and national life and hence with a more focus on biopolitics. In the Global South though theorists like Mbembe challenge Foucauldian biopolitics to argue that outside Europe and North America this governing of life (zoe) took a different form: necropolitics resulting from the histories of power relations such as slavery and colonization. Yet, theorists in the Global North such as Foucault insisted that the 1970s the life of power mutated increasing the neoliberal turn in government leaving our times and more concretely “the future as yet unthought.” This class begins with Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and Mbembe’s idea of necropolitics and asks: what are the stakes in thinking and practicing power today through the locus of biopolitics and/or necropolitics? What are the stakes in reading these tensions with respect to yesterday—and to tomorrow for the art...
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...The essay that we read is the part of the book by Michel Foucault “Discipline & Punish” (1975), Panopticism. So, actually who is Michel Foucault and what is he known for? “He was a French philosopher and historian, associated with the structuralist and post-structuralist movements. Foucault was born in October 15, 1926, and to a big regret has died in 25th of June 1984. The book “Discipline & Punish” was published in France in 1975, and translated to English in 1977 by Alan Sheridan. “(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). The part of the essay that we read was “Panopticism” in III section DISCIPLINE 3. To begin with, let me summarize this part of the essay. What is “Panopticon” and how it works? The structure of “Panopticon” should be used...
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...Michel Foucault, the French postmodernist, has been hugely influential in shaping understandings of power, leading away from the analysis of actors who use power as an instrument of coercion, and even away from the discreet structures in which those actors operate, toward the idea that ‘power is everywhere’, diffused and embodied in discourse, knowledge and ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault 1991; Rabinow 1991). Power for Foucault is what makes us what we are, operating on a quite different level from other theories: ‘His work marks a radical departure from previous modes of conceiving power and cannot be easily integrated with previous ideas, as power is diffuse rather than concentrated, embodied and enacted rather than possessed, discursive rather than purely coercive, and constitutes agents rather than being deployed by them’ (Gaventa 2003: 1) Foucault challenges the idea that power is wielded by people or groups by way of ‘episodic’ or ‘sovereign’ acts of domination or coercion, seeing it instead as dispersed and pervasive. ‘Power is everywhere’ and ‘comes from everywhere’ so in this sense is neither an agency nor a structure (Foucault 1998: 63). Instead it is a kind of ‘metapower’ or ‘regime of truth’ that pervades society, and which is in constant flux and negotiation. Foucault uses the term ‘power/knowledge’ to signify that power is constituted through accepted forms of knowledge, scientific understanding and ‘truth’: ‘Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by...
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...Enlightenment of Society Examining the enlightenment, it can be seen that it was a force for change in the way that societies thought about equality toward individuals. As the ideas of justice, deterrence, and individual rights evolved during the Enlightenment, so did the application of capital punishment. It became a tool to help reform individuals instead of punishing them, and capital executions became a private practice. It also evolved from being an arbitrary punishment against minorities, to a consistent and steady punishment for anyone who broke the law, eventually morphing into the punishment system of today. As history has progressed, a complete difference has been seen in regards to the rights of the minorities and the poor in the courts of law. The stark difference in the courts opinion toward minorities can be seen if you compare the way that they were tried during the colonization of Mexico with the way that they were treated in English society after the Enlightenment. As Martinez talks about in her essay, blacks were heavily discriminated against. This social tension carried over into the High Courts of Spanish society, which caused them to be extremely biased against the blacks. The courts bias can be easily observed in the Translated Documents from New Spain, in which the courts, under the façade of a trial, punish a group of blacks simply to make an example of them. The effect of the deterrence was undermined by the fact that these punishments...
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...Ethical Dilemma Essay Tiffany Christiansen Baker College Ethical Dilemma Essay Like many professionals, a code of ethics must be followed. When a sociologist chooses to do research, they must follow the ethics of sociology. These ethics are clearly outlined in the American Sociological Association: Code of Ethics. Some of these ethics include honesty and truth. They forbid a sociologist from providing false results as well as condemn plagiarism. Ethics of Sociology also require that anonymity be upheld of those who provide information (Henslin, 2014). When looking at Principle E: Social Responsibility under the General Principles of the American Sociological Association: Code of Ethics, it states that “Sociologists are aware of their professional and scientific responsibility to the communities and societies in which they live and work. They apply and make public their knowledge in order to contribute to the public good. When undertaking research, they strive to advance the science of sociology and to serve the public good” (Code of ethics and policies and procedures of the ASA Committee on Professional Ethics, 1999, p 6). Therefore, Robert’s responsibility should be that he makes contact with the police and quite possibly even the homeowners of the house in which is intended to be burglarized, beings it is contributing to the public good. Robert could still protect the anonymity of the professional burglar by only divulging information that could help to prevent the burglary...
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...Providing an answer to the question “What is an organisation?” could appear like a very demanding task. In fact, not only might different people have different views on what the term suggests, but, also, the concept is in itself quite broad. The evolution of this phenomenon is quite complex. An “organization”, meant as a union between different individuals who join their strengths in order to achieve a common goal, is a concept, which has been present since the beginning of time. Nevertheless, the way in which we interpret this term has undergone a big evolution in recent times. If we ask a researcher, he would most certainly tell us that organizations are a very specific subject and are defined in a very unique way. So, exactly, what is an organization? If we look it up in the dictionary the answer we will more or less find is the following: “a group of people that work together in a structured way for a shared purpose.” (Cambridge Dictionary, online). And this is also what the common belief seems to think. Nevertheless, researchers have analyzed the subject with more in depth observations and have situated this phenomenon in specific historical times. One historical background in particular has been taken into consideration while studying these structures: Capitalism. Capitalist organizations were at the base of the 19th and 20th centuries and researchers from the Frankfurt School, also know as the Institute for Social Research, took time in analyzing them. The major...
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...Michel Foucault's view on power is an odd one. When most think of power, they usually entertain ideas of strength, wealth, government, dominance over others, as well as a multitude of other things. Foucault, however, does not look at power in a traditional sense. To him, it is not a structure nor an institution. Oddly enough, he also sees power as something that can not be “acquired, seized or shared.” (94) Foucault sees power as an omnipotent source. It exists everywhere and is all encompassing and accessible to all. It is not wielded by a group or any single person. He ties his meaning of power to the discourse of sexuality and how it serves as a medium through which this power is utilized. The piece starts off by delving into the characteristics...
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...Do the institutions that deal with people with social and personal problems always act in the interests of those they serve? Discuss through the ideas of Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault. Introduction This essay will concentrate on the works of Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault. Erving Goffman is seen as the sociologist of the micro level and Foucault at the macro level. What this essay will aim to do is to distinguish the works of both these sociologists and identify the concepts that both try to portray. When speaking in relation to the works of Erving Goffman, one must speak about his studies of the self and the identity that one creates in society. He speaks of how people are actors and that performances are what the people see and thus creating the self identity of one self. Performance is the key area which Goffman speaks about in his writings. From here, the essay will establish how institutions have an effect on certain societies and what happens to identity once someone enters into an institution and the meaning of total institution and will incorporate the work of Foucault. Michel Foucault looks at the long term history of madness, asylums and prisons. The essay will elaborate on Foucault by discussing what he says in relation to where and why such institutions came about, thus the effects that they have on an individual. Erving Goffman Identity “I shall consider the way in which the individual in ordinary works situations presents himself and his activity...
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