7 questions on reading

Questions for Foucault (1978), Discipline and Punish, pages 3-31, 195-228:

1. According to Foucault (1978), what are the two ways that punishment changed since the eighteenth century?

2. How are power and knowledge related? (Hint: look for the answer in both chapters).

3. What is Bentham’s Panopticon? What are its effects on prisoners? (Hint: this is about the structure of prisons).

4. How can the panopticon be applied to other contexts (besides prisons)?

5. Interpret the following quote: “The movement from…a schema of exceptional discipline to one of generalized surveillance, rests on a historical transformation: the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society” (Foucault 1978, p. 209)

6. How was the growth of the disciplinary society (which we live in today) linked to the historical development of states and capitalism?

7. What is an example of disciplinary mechanisms (or the panopticon more specifically) in your own life or 21st-century societies? How is it an example?