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Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault

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Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault
DISCIPLINE
DISCIPLINE AD PUNISH- MICHEAL FOUCAULT
The chapter on discipline begins with the seventeenth century image of the soldier. A soldier bore certain natural signs of strength and courage and marks of his pride and honor. These were characteristics which were already inherent in a soldier.
By the late eighteenth century, a soldier became someone or rather something that can be made, like a required machine which can be constructed.
The Classical Age discovered the body as a target and object of power. Attention was paid to the body which is then manipulated, shaped, and trained, which responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces.
Reference is made to the great book ‘Man-the-machine’ and the two registers it was simultaneously written on: anatomico-metaphysical and technico-political. The former dealt with works of physicians and philosophers and the latter with regulations through calculations and empirical studies of the army, school, and hospital, for the control or correction of the human body. These registers were quite distinct as much as one dealt with the question of submission and use, whereas the other with functioning and explanation: in short, differentiating between the useful body and the intelligible body.
The notion of ‘docility’ as linking the analyzable body to the manipulable body is introduced as one of the central themes in Le Mettries ‘L’ Homme Machine’ which defines docility as a body which may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved.
The interest of the eighteenth century in this notion of docility can be found in many new techniques which the notion brought in. The first was the scale of control: the body was no longer treated en masse or wholesale, like an indissociable unity, but working it in retail, or individually exercising a subtle coercion over the active body. There was also the object of control: the signifying elements shifted from the language and behavior of the body to their economy, efficiency

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