Foucault sharply contrasts the disciplinary prison system with the initial transformative ideal.

y becoming a prisoner, the offender relinquishes not only his or her right to freedom, but also to privacy, as stated above. Observation is used to assess the individual with all the influences that contributed to the crime. According to Foucault however, this system is defective, as it merely functions to objectify along with its individualizing function. Observation then becomes a power relation rather than a rehabilitative function. Prisoners learn only apprehension towards the observing party, rather than strategies for living a more functional life within society, or indeed the "self-correcting" thoughts and reading intended by judges.

As rehabilitative institutions, prisons therefore leave much to be desired during Foucault's time. He makes several suggestions towards improvement, the first of which is that the central function of a prison is to be the transformation of behavior. This occurs by means of…...

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Bibliography

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Tr. By Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.

Foucault and Freud Summaries
Michel Foucault's a History of Sexuality

In writing this critique of the modern era, Foucault challenges the conventional wisdom that the many forms of knowledge gained by humans during the 18th and 19th centuries have given people more freedom. Instead, Foucault points out that new forms of domination that have emerged during the supposedly more progressive times.

Modernization has brought about new forms of knowledge, which positivist theorists viewed as neutral and Marxist theorists viewed as potentially emancipatory. Foucault, however, believed that knowledge itself cannot be disassociated from the regimes of power. While competing theories thus viewed power as repressive and anchored in social structures and the ruling class, Foucault believed that power is dispersed, operating through hegemony of norms, political systems and ideas regarding the body and the soul.

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault focuses on how the dispersed nature of power operates to produce and reproduce prevailed…...

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References

Freud, Sigmund. Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis; a course of twenty-eight lectures delivered at the University of Vienna. Translated by Joan Riviere. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1936.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, vol 1. New York, Pantheon Books, 1978.

Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization (mentioned on page 5 of 11, "the reading list")
Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization is a complex work with so many different themes that it requires strenuous and concentrated reading to understand and retain Foucault's argument. The material then needs a review in order to reflect and critically engage with the reading. This kind of book is no light reading nor can it be done within a few hours. It needs a pen in hand or a luminescent marker to wade through the lines. The reader, too, needs to know that best results demand that he absorb this book in small bites in order to read, reflect, and reread before continuing with other sectors of the book. Foucault, too, can disturb people with his revolutionary insights, but for those who are philosophically attuned and who are post-modernist by inclination and by cognitive tendency, Foucault's book…...

As such, it is interesting to note that the role of the individual helps to shape the role of the government of collective individuals, which ideally function in a co-existence that expresses a level of dependence upon one another.
Further examination of that relationship elucidates in what regards the individual can actually influence the overall conception of government used in the traditional sense to rule the forms of actions of a particular nation-state or city. The additional responsibility placed upon a single subject in the form of "self-care," should ideally lead to a reduction of governmental programs (such as welfare or municipal and state systems of security) that regulate or augment such processes for individuals. On a basic level, however, Foucalt has determined that the roles in which people play throughout their lives are largely determined by a number of key influential factors, two of the foremost of which are…...

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Works Cited

Foucalt, Michael. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New York: The New Press. 1998. Print.

Panoptism
Michel Foucault used the term Panoptism (all-seeing) to describe the methods of control and surveillance used by industrial society to discipline and control the lower classes, whether in factories, schools, hospitals, mental institutions or other bureaucratic institutions. In these, everyone is under constant observation and surveillance, being analyzed, evaluated and regulated, and the most extreme versions of this system would be found in police states like Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union. He began his chapter of Panopticism with a description of a 17th Century town under quarantine for the plague. This was not yet the full-fledged machine of control that would emerge in the 19th and 20th Centuries but only a hint of things to come. Of course, the quarantine was only a temporary measure while the system of Panopticon is permanent, and the methods of control and surveillance were still primitive and crude in a preindustrial society. Nor…...

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WORKS CITED

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, 1995.

Power and Facebook (Michel Foucault)
Throughout the course of his literary career, French philosopher Michael Foucault provided and considered several definitions for the term power, most of which were posited in view of the broader social implications of the word. Of particular note to this assignment is his conception of disciplinary power, which was engendered as a scion of traditional sovereign power, that in which its "form is the law of transgression and punishment…confronted by a power that is law…is he who obeys (History of Sexuality Volume 1, part 4, chapter 1, p.85)." Whereas sovereign power is generally employed as a negative effect of power in which individuals are restrained by litigation to keep from traversing society's laws and norms, disciplinary power is a more beneficial application of power which attempts to make people useful through a subtler means of curtailing their rights (Discipline and Punish, part 1, chapter 1, p.…...

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References

Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison. New york: Vintage Books.

Bentham, J.. (1995) Panopticon. In Miran Bozovic (ed.), The Panopticon Writings, London: Verso.

Smart, Barry (1994). Michel Foucault. New York: Routledge.

Paul Patton (1998) maintains, "in this manner, the ways in which certain human capacities become identified and finalized within particular forms of subjectivity the ways in which power creates subjects may also become systems of domination (71).
Foucault contends that discourses on sex positioned at the end of the 18th century were not designed nor used in such a way to regulate or repress the people. Instead, these conversations, dialogues or conventions were designed by the emerging bourgeoisie as a strategy for self-affirmation. Through discourses on sexual relationships and sexuality, these groups slowly established itself as a class distinguished from the "ignorant masses and decadent aristocracy" (1980: 121).

It seems to me that the deployment of sexuality was not established as a principle of limitation of the pleasures to others by what have traditionally been called the 'ruling classes'. Rather it appears to me that they first tried it on themselves……...

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Works Cited

Flynn, T. (2003) Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, volume 2: A post-structuralist

Mapping of history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality, Penguin Books

Foucault, M. (1980) The History of Sexuality Vol 1: An Introduction. New York:

This is important to note because it demonstrates how Foucault is seemingly predicting now more-common method of discussing ideologies and their tactics in positively biological terms.
Secondly, recognizing that the discourses surrounding sex that developed and in some cases were deployed over the course of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries helps one to understand why "what is said about sex must not be analyzed simply as the surface of projection of these power mechanisms," because it is the actual discursive deployment themselves which embody the power mechanisms under discussion (Foucault 100). These discourses cannot help but to legitimize and reiterate the reigning power structure. The discourses of morality, science, and criticism utilized by the "family organization" in order to constrain and control an individual's sexuality simultaneously serve to define and support the family organization in the first place. This is a crucial contribution to the study of rhetoric and…...

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Works Cited

Eribon, Didier. "Michel Foucault's Histories of Sexuality." 7.1 (2001): 31-86.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1. New York: Vintage

Books, 1978.

Leps, Marie-Christine. "Critical Productions of Discourse: Angenot, Bakhtin, Foucault." Yale

e., underlying meaning, in terms of power relationships) of a human discourse or discourses [a text may be a poem, song, mission statement, law or other spoken, read, sung, written, or reported language entity conveyed and/or absorbed as written and/or read; sung and/or spoken; quoted and/or paraphrased, etc.] may be interpreted distinctly by separate individuals, nations, religious groups, political parties etc., in ways reflecting various power/knowledge relationships. About science/power (meaning either science as power or science in relationship to power) relationships in particular (abortion law, internationally and comparatively, fits that category, because abortion is, first a procedure only made possible by science; and science, as embodied by exclusively-educated and trained medical clinicians in particular, is the abstract entity that makes possible abortion in general); a doctor, based on the doctor's medical knowledge, possesses power to accept or reject a patient for an abortion for scientific reasons (e.g., length of pregnancy;…...

Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucault stated "We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it excludes, it represses, it censors, it abstracts, it masks, it conceals. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production." The objective of this study is to answer as to what Foucault means by that and how it relates to the rest of the book and how it might relate to Freud's 'Civilization and it's Discontents" Finally, this study will provide a reaction to the quote either in agreement or disagreement.

The claims of Foucault in the statement of " We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it excludes, it represses, it censors, it abstracts, it…...

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Bibliography

McWhorter, L. (1994) Self-Overcoming in Foucault's Discipline and Punish. UR Scholarship Repository. Philosophy Faculty Publications. Retrieved from:  http://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1014&context=philosophy-faculty-publications

The panopticon centralizes the space of the observer while simultaneously mystifying the act of observation, such that the threat may be ever-present even if an actual prison guard is not. In the same way, Foucault's conception of the societal panopticon imposes its standards on the individual, who must conform to the standards of society due to a fear of the possibility of discovery and punishment. According to Foucault, "the Panopticon is a privileged place for experiments on men, and for analyzing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them" (Foucault 204). The space the narrator finds himself in at the beginning of The Unnamable functions in this same way, except that in this case the object of the panopticon's gaze has not undergone the process of subjectification prior to finding itself there.
The narrator simply exists upon the reading of the novel, and is subsequently unable to…...

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Works Cited

Armstrong, Charles. "Echo: Reading The Unnamable Through Kant and Kristeva." Nordic

Journal of English Studies. 1.1 173-197. Print.

Balinisteanu, Tudor. "Meaning and Significance in Beckett's The Unnamable ." Applied

Semiotics 13. (2003): n. pag. Web. 30 May 2011.

Many are also embedded in politics, indicating the power links between business and government. This is a primary example of Foucault's strategies of power: the way government and business and intimately tied with few checks or balances between them.
The techniques of power are more overt. These relate to what we can or cannot do as law-abiding citizens. For example, drug laws in the United States are notoriously strident. The possession of small amounts of marijuana are punishable by imprisonment. hereas Americans have the liberty to drink themselves to death or eat fried foods until their arteries burst, they do not have the freedom to smoke. Prohibition of drugs is an example of how power techniques (in this case laws) are used to control the behavior of the public. In fact, the drug laws are a perfect example of how power strategies and the penal system work hand in hand.…...

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Work Cited

Foucault, Michel. "Strategies of Power." Chapter 6.

Foucault and Davis
The idea of the panopticon came from English philosopher and thinker Jeremy Bentham, after he helped to design a building in which one supervisor could observe all of the workers within. Eventually, Bentham's panopticon was converted into prison design, as people realized the benefits of a building which contains a point from where all of the prisoners inside could be watched by a single guard. While the architectural theory of the panopticon failed to catch on during Bentham's lifetime, many philosophers have since examined the idea from a variety of angles, discussing ideas like social control and authoritarianism. One of those philosophers was the Frenchman Michel Foucault, who wrote a book called Discipline and Punish in 1975 which contained many references to the panopticon as becoming the model for social structures. According to Foucault's view, the panopticon as imagined by Bentham has become more than just a…...

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References

Davis, M. (1992). Fortress Los Angeles: the militarization of urban space. Variations on a theme park, 154-180.

Foucault, M. (1984). The foucault reader. Random House LLC.

Foucault's Birth of the Clinic
Initially, in order to provide a stable framework on this study, we would try to clearly define, identify and learn both the visible and literary meaning on the work of Michel Foucault's work, The Birth of the Clinic. We will intend to scrutinize each of the underlying detail of this literary masterpiece and retrieve its modern influences in the field of medical and health studies.

In the modern era of rational thinking and ideas, the concept of which Michel Foucault is trying to convey in his literary work, The Birth of the Clinic is the postmodern influence of medical attribute to the social and political structure of our society. The concept of which Foucault considers as a myth of which he notes:

"...the first task of the doctor is ... political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government." Man will be totally…...

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References

Shawver, L. (1998). Notes on reading the Birth of the Clinic. Retrieved 10/03/05 from the World Wide Web:  http://www.california.com/~rathbone/foucbc.htm 

SHU, United Kingdom (2005), Birth of the Clinic, commentary (2000)

Retrieved 10/02/05 from World Wide Web:

 http://www.shu.ac.uk/schools/hcs/learning/soct/bofc1.htm

Gaze and the Culturally Determined Body
Michel Foucault first developed his theory of the panopticon as a means of describing the ways in which a society may dominate the thought processes and behavior of the individual by "convincing" that individual to implicitly engage in their own surveillance, in the same way that a literal, brick-and-mortar panopticon relies on the self-regulation of prisoner behavior due to the fear of possible surveillance and punishment. In formulating this theory, Foucault uncovered important details regarding the way in the body is created, regulated, and sometimes even decimated by societal standards, something which Susan Bordo expands upon in her essay "Beauty (re)Discovers the Male Body." Bordo analyzes the way in which bodies (and in this case, male bodies) and the meanings gained from them are culturally determined, to the extent that the human body as it is commonly considered has almost nothing to do with biology,…...

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Works Cited

Bordo, Susan. The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private. New York, NY: Farrar,

Straus, & Giroux, 1999. Print.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1977. Print.

The first thing you need to do when writing an argumentative essay is research your topic.  For a topic like sexual assault, we would suggest using a resource like RAINN, a nationwide resource with sexual assault data and information for sexual assault survivors.   For an argumentative essay about sexual assault, you may also want to read some resources that argue against criminalization of sexual assault.  Those resources can be more difficult to locate, as they are likely to lead you to sketchier areas of research.  However, the scholar Michel Foucault was a critic of modern rape laws,....