Why Foucault Described Modern Society as Disciplinary
Why Foucault Described Modern Society as Disciplinary
It was in his book Discipline and Punishment that Foucault outlines his theory that modern society was a disciplinary society. Here he described the disappearance of punishment as a public and violent spectacle which emphasized the infliction of pain to the body, to the emergence of surveillance of the soul which grew up around the development of the modern prison system.
During the years 1760 to 1840, public executions gradually disappeared, and punishment instead became hidden, and concealed. The torture of the body was replaced by the surveillance of the soul (pp.32-47). The "great reformers" proposed leniency in punishment, but only at the cost of greater intervention (pp. 82-103). A more efficient economy and technology of punishment was proposed that would allow for a discreet but calculable exercise of power over the soul.
Foucault believes that this form of social control is disciplinary and pervades all elements of life in modern society and that there is no escape from this type of control. Foucault's work deals mostly with "power" which he sees not as a fixed quantity of physical force, but instead as a stream of energy flowing through all aspects of society. Its power harnesses itself in regulating the behavior of individuals, the systems of knowledge, a societies institutions, and every interaction between people and this is why he described modern society as a disciplinary society.
In "Discipline and Punish", he applies this notion of power in tracing the rise of the prison system in France and the rise of other coercive institutions such as monasteries, the army, mental asylums, and other technologies. In his work Foucault exposes how seemingly benign or even reformist institutions such as the modern prison system (versus the stocks, and scaffolds) are technologies that are typical of the modern, painless, friendly, and impersonal coercive tools of the modern world. In fact the success of these technologies stems from their ability to appear unobtrusive and humane.
Foucault asks "is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" (Foucault 1977, p228). First he proposes that these institutions are similar and then he explains the proposed similarity of these diverse institutions on the basis that the internal disciplines of each are founded upon similar techniques. They are similar because each functions to divide the abnormal from the normal, which,...