Explain and specifically define all of Foucault’s phases of punishment. Providing real world examples discuss whether you agree or disagree that we have entered into a disciplinary society. What role does technology have to play in these phases?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Foucault argues that punishment has moved through three stages since the eighteenth century. The first stage of punishment, according to Foucault, is characterized by corporal practices such as torture, bodily mutilation, and disfigurement. Here, punishment is orchestrated and meted out by a centralized authority, like a king, and is clearly visible among, and given legitimacy by, the general population. The second phase of punishment moves Foucault’s investigation into the nineteenth century and toward the contemporary era. Foucault presents this phase of punishment as marked by a noted decline in the ferocity and publicity of penal force accompanied by the rise of humanistic concerns surrounding the implementation of punishment. This new stage is marked by the introduction of penal practices based on surveillance and discipline. The physical harm as the central focus of punishment is replaced by technologies of observation and discipline aimed at the mind rather than the body. In an era where penal practices are organized by surveillance and discipline, there is no longer a need for a sole, centralized authority around which punishment is legitimized and carried out. Instead, surveillance and discipline become penal techniques integral to a wide range of social institutions—schools, hospitals, military camps, asylums, workplaces, churches, and, most notably, prisons. Foucault contends that such social institutions do not need to rely on external forms of authority, like the state, in order to surveil and discipline their members and thus produce punishment. On the contrary, institutions have come to increasingly develop and incorporate technologies of surveillance and discipline into their own operations as normalized and taken-for-granted operating procedures.