increasingly resemple our example of the child practising under the eye of the parental video camera in which we become the agents of social surveillance and social discipline.
Key texts
Foucault,Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (1977)
Originally published in french as surveiller et punir(1975),Discipline and punish is astudy of the emergence of modern penal systems. Foucault argues that the penal reformers who established imprisonment at the rational form of punishment were concerned that power should operate more effectively and economically on the subject than in prior regimes. Central to this account is the linking of discipline-a technical mode of controlling the body and its movements to systems of hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement and examination to compose disciplinary power, which Foucault argues is a ubiquitous feature of modern society.
Whatever the merits of Foucault's substantive diagnosis of the power structure of modern society-and in his final works, he focuses more on issues concerning the government of self, which he had neglected in Discipline and punish-it will already be apparent,from this brief overview, that foucault widens the remit of the analysis of power very considerably. one important respect in which he does so is to shift the analysis of power from an agency-centred approach to encompass the role of social structures, that is,those norms that arise out of the interactions of agents without being the intenal product of those interactios and which,then,govern (but do not determine) those interactions. I have already acknowledged this in the piano-playing example by pointing to one possible regime of goverment being comprised of social norms concerning the attributes expected of a young woman or man, but it is time to say a little more.
social structures are normative orders that arise as unplanned products of the interactions of a plurality of human beings and govern their interactions, but are also reproduced,or transformed,through the ways in which those interactions conform to,or depart from,the norms that regulate them. According to foucault's view of power,the analyst must address the importance of such sociol strutures in subject formation and the role of subjects in transforming social structures, as well as the role of various agencies and institutions that seek to maintain or transform speccific social structures. foucault takes up this task by providing genealogies of specific normative order-for example,those focused on madness, punishment, and sexuality-in order to perfrom three tasks. The first is simply to demonstrate that there is nothing natural, necessary, or obligatory about these normative orders by recounting the contingent historical processes through which they emerge and are established. The second is to show that they facilitate forms of domination (where domination is conceived as forms of government that those subject to them are unable to transform) because insofar as they are seen as natural, necessary, or obligatory, they are not perceived as forms of domination. The third is to incite experiments with other ways of governing in these domains that aim to minimize domination. The normative core of foucault's analysis of power is expressed thus:
a system of constraint become truly intolerable when the individuals who are affected by it don't have the means of modifying it.this can happen when such a system becomes