Biopolitics and the Architecture of Surveillance: Foucault’s Genealogy of Power from Carceral Institutions to Pandemic Regulation

According to Foucault, we have seen that in criminal justice, prisons transform punitive procedures into penal techniques; in the carceral archipelago, these techniques are transferred from the penitentiary to the social body, with several important results. In Michel Foucault’s view, discipline is a mechanism for meticulous control over the body. Through discipline, the body is trained to proficiency, and is continually tested and corrected until its skills become automatic. In addition to improving skills, discipline can increase the body’s efficiency and effectiveness, while also minimizing the impact of coercion on the body.

Discipline becomes a means of power to control individuals, ultimately producing obedient and useful individuals. The body becomes the primary target of discipline, where the body is trained and made skilled and useful through the mechanisms of power that operate throughout the training process. Through practice, the body is subjected to regular movements, punctuality, and attitudes. Discipline must be distinguished from the obedience of a slave who acts at the will of his master, or monastic discipline that acts at the will of “the superior.” Discipline is more aimed at developing individual mastery over his own body, because in Foucault’s research on prisons, he found that the process of effective subjectification is through the mechanism of discipline.

In discipline, the body is not harmed but rather touched upon its interiority or soul. Discipline should be a model of “new punishment,” where punishment no longer touches the physical body, but rather the inner space of a person in the cultivation of the soul, imagination, and consciousness or the expression of reason. For Foucault, physical punishment for wrongdoing becomes as evil, if not more evil, than the offense itself. In fact, effective power increasingly requires no physical presence; the actuality of its implementation is increasingly unnecessary, but its effects are felt, and this idea lies at the heart of discipline.

Selengkapnya baca melalui link : 

https://ansharaminullah.medium.com/biopolitics-and-the-architecture-of-surveillance-foucaults-genealogy-of-power-from-carceral-4d376e9309d1