Foucault State Power

The United State is 3.8 million square miles wide and has over 324 million people inside of its boarders, but shares the same federal government. The few people in the three branches of the federal government make laws for this vast and diverse population, and the people of the country do little to demand better representation. This is because the American citizens have been conditioned to be docile bodies, where the governing state “[increases] the forces of the body (in terms of economic utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience)” (Foucault 138). This is not specific to the American public, but rather a phenomenon occurring throughout the world. State power and discipline is used and abused to control the people it governs and has since the seventeenth century. Foucault’s definition of a discipline is not one of violence, but rather passive ways of regulating people so they are unaware that they are being controlled. As societies become more advanced and cities grow, they become more and more disciplined; more rules are imposed upon the people that they would not have otherwise. A farmer who is self-sufficient takes a break when he chooses and is not held to any sort of time table, but the mechanics of the modern office are …show more content…
Time as a method of discipline has been implemented for centuries, specifically with the church and later leaking into other discourses. In schools, the students would kneel, pray, salute, and sit down all at the signal of a bell as if they were machines (Foucault 150). This monitoring of time in the work force deters workers from distractions by keeping them on a set schedule where they are anticipating the next assigned task (Foucault