i wrote this article since i am really interested in Foucault works. one of his popular works is "Discipline and Punish" generally depicting the idea how modern society has been developed...
The term ‘discipline’ is a familiar topic found in Michael Foucault’ work “Discipline and punish” (1995) that, in general, depicts the mechanisms of the operation of power [5] in society from the pre-enlightenment period until the modern age. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish overviews the transformation of the mechanism of the exercise of power in social body, particularly related to juridical aspect— from the pre-enlightenment form of the exercise of power that was identically portrayed by the torturing of the human’s body to the power operated by using ‘particular techniques’ that control and utilize it—the disciplinary techniques which, in short, sometimes described only as ‘discipline’.
In this regards, discipline is a mechanism of power which control individual behavior in social body in order to make it manageable, trained, and hence useful by regulating the spaces, people behaviors and activities, and time (Farrel, 2007). The establishment of discipline is enforced with the aid of a complex system of surveillance. Foucault (1995, p.191) as quoted by Farrel (2005, p.102) more precisely explains his view that discipline is a technology that aims at: “how to keep someone under surveillance, how to control his conduct, his behavior, his aptitude, how to improve his performance, multiply his capacities, how to put him where he is most useful….”
Hence, it is identified that the historical moment of the birth of discipline is the art of both controlling and training human’s body; the political anatomy of the body which also remarks new mechanism of ‘power over the body’— it is no longer tortured and exposed as depicted by the pre-enlightenment form of exercise of power, yet, it is regulated and trained to make it is skillful, while it remains controllable and obedient; in short, docile. In the other words, discipline produces power that increases the forces of the body; it’s utility, and reduce these similar forces in the form of (the individual’s) obedience (Anderberg:2009).
By the regime of capitalism, discipline is the ‘soft technology’ used to create ‘docile-body’ of each member of society that can be used, particularly, to sustain the development of capitalism economy. Foucault on Kumar (2008, p.9) in Volume 10 says that discipline, as the new type of the exercise of power that regulates the behavior of individuals in the social body, is one of the great inventions of bourgeois society, and also a fundamental instrument that sustain the development of industrial capitalism and the type of the society that lives within the system. The idea of demolishing human’s body as the medieval trend of the exercise of power is not longer considered relevant to the new development of social life, particularly within capitalism system. Rather than treating the ‘body’ as the object of torture, it is seen as potential human’s entity that can be used to sustain and to strengthen social forces such as to develop economy, and therefore, the body is needed to be constantly controlled and be made useful by establishing disciplinary technologies, and hence, it can sustain capitalist economy....
to be continued
note: the sources for this article have not yet posted (so be waiting :D)
