Discipline & Punish Terms Flashcards
Delinquent
In contrast to the “offender” who is identified by a specific offense, the delinquent is a type of person. A delinquent hasn’t just committed a bad crime, but has a bad personality.
Discipline
Training and controlling of the body to make it behave a certain way
Panopticism
A condition of universal surveillance, where everyone is seen or feels like they could be watched at any moment.
Surveillance
Observation of someone or something. Foucault argues that people today feel they are under constant surveillance, or like they could be watched at any moment.
Negative vs. Positive Power
In the context of power, “positive” and “negative” do not mean good and bad. Instead, Foucault talks about power that adds something or takes something away: power that is primarily productive or primarily destructive. What interests him is how power than may seem primarily negative also has positive dimensions. For instance, punishment seems negative: it’s about taking something away from someone in order to repress bad behavior. It’s negative because its aim is to get rid of bad behavior. But punishment is also aimed at producing good behavior. For Foucault, disciplinary society aims to produce good citizens. This is the power of social norms, which produce behaviors in alignment with them.
Laws vs. Norms
For Foucault, the rise of a society of discipline, in which power is everywhere and trains people to act as if they’re always being watched, also marks the rise of social norms. In sovereign societies, rules are often written down in laws: don’t murder, for instance. In a disciplinary society, rules are often greater in number but also less explicit. You’re expected to behave in certain ways as a student in school but not all these ways are spelled out. You learn how to act properly in part by watching others, in part by seeing how your own actions are received by others. What matters here is the role of watching: norms are reinforced because we’re always watching others and imagining ourselves being watched by others, too. This is a kind of power, and it is the power of norms, which ask us to compare our behavior to the proper kind of behavior.
Power and Knowledge
A recurrent theme in Discipline and Punish, and indeed throughout Foucault’s works, is the intersection of power and knowledge. In this book, he is particularly interested in how the rise of a new kind of power, discipline, is tied to new kinds of knowledge. For instance, psychological science studies and classifies people and their “abnormal” behaviors, and this leads to new power relations in which people feel pressured to act “normal.” Foucault is also interested in how the exercise of discipline, or the training of individuals, works by treating the individual as a source of knowledge. The individual is constantly examined and studied in disciplinary society, and it is this condition of feeling constantly observed that also leads people to change their behavior or act in line with how they think society wants them to act.
