Foucault: Discipline

Discipline is a critical form of behavioral control. It's an area of knowledge: because knowledge and power are related: experts exercise power and create the discourse. Disciplinary power generates a mechanism of normalization by which people are modified and controlled. The individual conforms to the powers that exist in the: clinic, asylum, military academy, or prison. The application of human sciences is a fundamental part of discipline. The studying of mental patients, prisoners, and sexuality created an ambition to restructure the powers that dominated society at the time. Disciplinary power has three elements: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment and examination.

Incarceration produces new kinds of people. Prison is an exchange of time for your crime and your status is emasculated. The aim is to deprive the individual of freedom and to reform him, to build him back up. The system of surveillance was introduced into prisons in the nineteenth century, based on Jeremy Bentham's panopticism. It is circle shaped with a central guard tower, and the inmates are being watched during every single aspect of their lives. This system allows them to become useful/good workers rather than just seeking retribution for their crimes. Rehabilitation creates new fields of study: psychology, criminology, and genealogy. Human beings are malleable and can be fixed. Discipline creates compliant bodies, Foucault writes, "A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved" (180). Military school is another example making bodies submissive: being stripped down/built back up, drills, timetables, practices, and constant exercise.

The forms of punishment have altered. In the middle Ages crimes were punishable by death, the king had complete control over life and death. They were cruel, public, and gruesome. As time progressed science was employed and people's bad behavior began to be treated scientifically. "A power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanismsÐ'...no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty Ð'...such a power has to qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in murderous splendor" (265). During the Victorian era, sex was prohibited, repressed, and censored: when before sexual freedom was completely acceptable. It became a silenced topic confined only to the home and was a taboo all over except for brothels and mental hospitals. Things changed and sexuality began to be discussed through confession and guidance. Sexuality and desires were analyzed and people were urged to tell everything in great detail. It was transformed into a discourse and elaborated and institutionalized.

Sexuality became more rational, medical, clinical, and it was taken charge of by comprehensive analysis. Foucault writes, "Toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, there emerged a political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex. And not so much in the form of a general theory of sexuality as in the form of analysis, stocktaking, classification, and specification, of quantitative or causal studies" (306). Sex became a science: birth/death rates were studied as well as life expectancy, fertility, health, illness, the age of marriage, consequences of unmarried life, contraception, and understanding sexual relations. Sexual conduct and its effects were then regulated and intervened with.

A norm of sexual behavior was established, thus creating an abundance of deviations. Modern society made it possible for people to have their own sexual identity. Various dissimilar sexualities and perversions were increasingly interviewed and given attention to. It became common, especially in the west, to develop self identity and reveal the truth about one's self. Not only dos it produces knowledge and power but is therapeutic as well. Foucault critiques the repressive hypothesis: sexuality is not repressed, it enters politics, it's dispersed and talked about all the time, and it's a form of dynamic fluid power. It's important to pay attention to the microphysics of power as well, the individual. Subjectivity is exerting power: my feeling of myself, the soul. Before in many cultures same-sex sex took place but it does not make it their identity. Identities get created. Taking an identity back is a form of resistance. Power operates in all of these venues, power creates resistance, it is strategic, spirals, attach and resist.

Bio-power is a type of power that deals with the regulatory control of the species body, especially in a biological aspect. It is exercised over populations to constitute their sexuality and individuality in certain ways that are connected with issues of race, production, and social class. Foucault writes, "In time these new measures would become anchorage points for the different varieties of racism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was essential that the state know what was happening with its citizens' sex, and the use they made if it" (302). With the concept of bio-power a discourse of race struggle seems to appear, "the preoccupation with blood and the lawÐ'...haunted the administration of sexualityÐ'...racism