Focult essays

Focult essays 1. Explain Foucaults concept of the Panopticon. The panopticon, as designed by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century, was an idea that was supposed to enable a prison guard to hold all his inmates in a jail under surveillance simultaneously, while disabling the inmates from seeing one another. According to Foucault, a systems such as this one would be necessary because it was becoming more of a norm to imprison criminals, irregardless of their individual crimes, whereas these were previously punishable by a display in the form of a public spectacle. The panopticon provided a model for using discipline in prisons. Disciplining activities formed the foundation to all answers of criticisms of the prison. The reasoning behind using the panopticon is that prisons discipline people. Discipline remakes individuals, and criminals need to be remade in order to go back into socieity. Observaition and punishment for breaking any one fo the many rules starts this reformation process. Sturcture is part of discipline, therefore, all parts of days and nights can be carefully structured. Repetitive and monotonous work would engrain proper work habits into an individual. They would be given privilages, culminating in parole, in order to prove themselves adequately disciplined to function in society. A "prison success" would be a person who is docile and does as ordered without question. 3. Explain Foucaults idea of confession and its connection to sexuality. Penetrating examinations of patients, and pressure on the patient to "confess" all the details become the way that some disciplines operate on people. The examiner and the examinee move around each other in the form of a "game." There is pleasure in prying out secrets, while there is also pleasure in withholding secrets. And the sites of power in these cases have sexual tension built in the following relationships: shrink and patient, teacher and student, parent and child, priest and...