FYI -- For everyone meeting with me on Thursday...

...I need to have your draft emailed to me 24hrs in advance (by 4pm on Wednesday). If you send it after 4pm, I won't be able to read it in time for our meeting.

Thanks!
--Dr. Hsueh

Reminder For Week 10

Hello – 

In preparation for our paper meetings, please send me a copy of your draft at least 24 hours beforehand. 

If I don’t receive the draft, I won’t necessarily be able to edit it in time for our meeting.

Also, if you do not wish to have a paper meeting (or unable to attend), please simply let me know in advance, so I can plan accordingly.

Many thanks!

--Dr. Hsueh

Final Paper Beer Summit *UPDATES*

Hey everyone,

I emailed you guys, but thought it'd be a good idea to make a blog post so we could all weigh in on where we'd like to go.

So, Beer Summit Spring Quarter 2012 - 464 Final Edition:

Sometime before the final paper is due, and after our meetings with Hsueh are concluded we should all get together to talk about our paper topics, general subjects we covered in class that we want to revisit, and anything else we feel like.

Everyone is invited, but I want to know where you guys would prefer to go. I'll wait about a week to give people enough time to respond with where they'd prefer to meet.

If the group is big enough (fingers crossed) I have no problem calling the place to make a reservation.

Hope to see you guys there!

-Tom


Hey guys, just an update:

So far Tyler, Emily, and Sara are coming to the beer summit.

There's no need to answer right away as we won't be getting together til after meetings, I just wanted to update you all on where we're at.

More Updates:

So, the weekend is super busy for me. I've got a show down south on Saturday, and a Game of Thrones finale on Sunday. (who else is stoked for that? I know I am)

Our papers are due Tuesday...so...Monday? Would everyone be able to make a happy hour outing Monday afternoon? If so, what places would you like to go? Im looking forward to meeting with you guys, it's going to be fun!

STUDENT PAPER MEETINGS WEEK 10

STUDENT PAPER MEETINGS  -- PLEASE EMAIL/SUBMIT DRAFTS TO ME AT LEAST 24 HRS BEFORE OUR SCHEDULED MEETING. THANKS!
We are meeting in my office, Artnzen Hall 405.
Please let me know if for some reason you will not be able to attend the meeting

5/29, Tuesday

10am -- Jeff Cedarbaum

11:30am – Julia Kowalski

12:30pm – Madeline Cavazos

1pm – Gabriel Peterson

2pm – Lauren Raine

2:30pm -- Thomas Smith

5/30, Wednesday

9:30 -- Tyler Adams
10am -- Harry Howell

10:30am – Chris Brown

11am – Jessica Moore

11:30am – Andrew Williams

12:30pm -- Spencer Sunderland

1pm – Amelia Woolley

1:30pm – Andrea Farred

2pm – Julia Canty

2:30pm – Micah Christie

5/31, Thursday

9:30am – Emily Cross

10am – Blair Peterson

10:30am – Steven Gilbert

11:30am – Matt Benson
12pm--Lizzy van Patten

12:30pm – Miles Bludorn

1pm – Sara Rosso

1:30pm – Sara Salz

Week 11—Finals Week

**6/5, Tuesday – FINAL PAPER DUE IN MY OFFICE/MAILBOX by 6pm**

Banksy

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1895625/Banksy-pulls-off-daring-CCTV-protest-in-London.html

The graffiti artist Banksy has pulled off one of his most audacious stunts - an enormous protest against Britain's surveillance society painted just feet from a CCTV camera.

The guerrilla artwork appeared on a wall above a Post Office yard off Oxford Street in central London on Monday morning.

It features a boy in a red jacket painting the slogan "One Nation Under CCTV" in stark white capitals. His actions are filmed by a policeman next to a barking dog.

The secretive artist's achievement is made more impressive by the fact that the piece is several stories high - meaning he had to erect temporary scaffolding before slipping away unnoticed.

Discussion Questions

PLSC 464 Q’s

Sonia Kruks

1.
“Panopticism is not confined to particular institutions, such as the prison or the asylum. On the contrary, Foucault conceives it to be a general "modality of power" in normalizing societies such as ours. Moreover, women are subject to (and subjects of) what Foucault refers to as "the minute disciplines, the panopticisms of every day" (1977a: 223), in a particularly all-encompassing and complex manner that he does not himself explore.” -Sonia Kruks

How do women today experience the panopticon of our society differently than men?

2. Kruks argues that Beauviour “enables us to reintroduce into his (Foucault) analysis notions of personal agency and moral accountability that remain important for any project of emancipatory politics.’

Why do you think that this urgency and moral accountability is missing from Foucault’s account?

2.5  While Foucault acknowledges that there has been “effective resistance” to panoptic scrutiny he also posits that this panoptic power can penetrate the body without “mediation of the subjects own representations. If power takes hold of the body, this isn’t through its having first to be interiorized in people’s consciousness.” pg 6

Kruks argues that this is a fallacy for and a contradiction.  Do you think that Foucault is resistant to the concept of individual potential for intention and consciousness in response to the influences of the panopticon?


3. “Such passages imply something else: an active, even, one could argue, a quasi-constituting, subject; a conscious subject who "knows" that he is visible; one who "assumes responsibility" for the effects of power on himself, and who is active in playing "both roles," that of scrutinizer and scrutinized. “

What about the panopticon causes men and women to internalize the effects to the point where they self police?

4.. “In such ways, a young woman learns how to develop those practices of self-surveillance and self-discipline that Foucault attributes to the panoptic gaze. But they are not the direct effect of the gaze itself, so much as of the shame with which it forces her to see "herself." ”-Sonia Kruks

How do women lack the ability to reciprocate on men the objectivity they experience?

5.  “On the contrary, Beauvoir points out, the would-be independent woman lives her femininity as a painful contradiction. Brought up (as most girls still are today) to see herself through the male gaze, enjoined to passivity, and to make herself desirable to man,  she is her femininity.” -Sonia Kruks

If women cannot escape the panoptic gazes of men, is there still the possibility for independence and freedom, according to Beauvoir? Foucault?


Foucault-

1. “The modeling of the body produces a knowledge of the individual, the apprenticeship of the techniques induces modes of behavior and the acquisition of skills is inexorably linked with the establishment of power relations; strong, skilled agricultural workers are produced; in this very work, provided it is technically supervise, submissive subjects are produced and a dependable body of knowledge build up about them”  pg. 294


This quote, with its language of ‘knowledge’ and ‘apprenticeship’ makes this transformation into a submissive body appear to be a reliant upon the disposed position of the inmate/body. How is one to reject this submission? Does Foucault believe it is possible to escape this modeling of the body? Do you?


2. Foucault describes: “The essential element of its program was to subject the future cadres to the same apprenticeships and to the same coercions as the inmates themselves they were ‘subjected as pupils to the discipline that, later, as instructors, they would themselves impose.’ They were taught the art of power relations.” Pg. 295

Do you believe that this element still exists in our prison systems? And by extension do you believe that other institutions, which Foucault has likened to the prison system i.e. the punitive school, military, hospital etc. have this same process of indoctrination of its future administrators?

3. “The carceral network does not cast the unassimilable into a confused hell; there is no outside. It takes back with one hand what it seems to exclude with the other. It saves everything, including what it punishes.”  Pg. 301

What does he mean by this and do you recognize elements of modern society in it?

Blair's Comment in Class

One other thing that really stuck with me that I think deserves more attention is Blair's idea about religion being a tool used by people to, more or less, guilt themselves into being good and virtuous. Thoughts?

Moving away from the spectacle?

I am mulling over some paper topics and found an interesting section that was supposed to be part of the reading for the discussion day that I lead. Due to time, we cut that down to the first 30 pages.

Foucault (starting on pg. 43) talks about certain manifestations of truth and why those manifestations of truth were performed in public.
1. "It made the guilty man the herald of his own condemnation."
2. "It took up once again the scene of the confession. It duplicated the forced proclamation of the amende honorable with a spontaneous, public acknowledgement."
3. "It pinned the public torture on to the crime itself; it established from one to the other a series of decipherable relations. It was an exhibition of the corpse of the condemned man at the scene of his crime, or at one of the near-by crossroads."
4. Lastly, the slowness of the process of torture and execution, its sudden dramatic movements, the cries and sufferings of the condemned man serve as an ultimate proof at the end of the judicial ritual. Every death agony expresses a certain truth: but, when it takes place on the scaffold, it does so with more intensity..."

Foucault discusses how we have moved away from the aforementioned system and into the mind of the condemned man but I don't think it's that simple. In many examples we can still see very public manifestations of the truth performed in public. Many high profile cases draw media attention which is in many ways more insidious than an actual public square.

The recent case of Casey Anthony is an excellent example of this to me of justice being served in public. Whether that woman was found guilty or innocent there would be people demanding her head despite the our legal system being built upon a foundation of presumed innocence.

I am not making the case that we have not moved into a time where the mens rea and mental health of the accused are subjects of interest when determining why someone committed a crime; to do so would be impossible. What we have today is a hybrid combining the modern with the spectacle.

More Cameras/Less Crime?

If we are being constantly watched, our actions in public, on the internet, what we watch, enjoy, and participate in, are our actions different from how we would truly act? We've been discussing the fact that with surveillance comes compliance. With the chance for sticking out and being labeled as a non-conformist or law breaker ever increasing in the current age of burgeoning constant surveillance.

My question is, at what point do we surpass the state of knowing we are being watched, and revert back to how we would normally act without constant surveillance? No doubt the change would occur, but there is no telling when. Today, the generation after us already willingly gives up information about themselves to the public without a care as to who sees it. We see this all the time on Facebook: people giving away personal life details about their whereabouts, grades in schools, personal political and religious beliefs, and anything else one would care to take the time to type. It is in this example that I fear we have already surpassed an important threshold that we lost sight of in the fervor of new technology and innovative social media.

We have become consumed by the capabilities of electronic media to the point that we are actively surveilling ourselves. Constantly revealing personal information just because we can, and as a result, those in control have a plethora of surveillance tools at their disposal.

It makes me wonder if different forms of surveillance actually does have any long-lasting impact on society. At a point when it was new, we saw resistance, but now it has become an engrained attribute of our society that is encouraged. I wonder if things will only progress from here, a society continually evolving to accept giving more and more personal information away.

The Internet: The Next Frontier for Government Control

The internet is a prime example of several of the things we've been talking about in class in regards to Foucault, but specifically, in terms of government control and intervention.

It is the nature of government to seek to control, or to moderate the existence of anything that lacks a form of authority or oversight.  Thats what its there to do, for better or worse. However, a concerning trend has emerged in terms of internet regulation and surveillance that allows us to explore the Foucaultian conceptions of power and force.

We are being faced with several regulation bills that will not only make free information much more hard to access, but will also allow government agencies to monitor all of your browsing history. This plays into the idea of our "new" system of correctional punishment.

By creating an extra form of control, an extra law that punishes those for arbitrary actions on a neutral ground such as the internet, it exposes the true nature of governmental control that is so prevalent in society today.

With these laws, we find ourselves constantly worrying about whether the information we're viewing online is "safe" to see, or if something we're saying on the internet will cause us to be monitored for the rest of our online lives. It kills the notion of true anonymity on the internet, and replaces it with the same reality that exists in our physical lives. You're either "us", or "them", and generally speaking, to be "them" is to be an outlier, an undesirable, and one worthy of "correction".

Panopticism

I found the idea of the panopticon very interesting. I also found the discussion we had about it very fascinating as well. Observation becomes a mechanism that coerces. What Foucault is exploring here is that one can be coerced or forced to do something by merely being constantly watched-and the panopticon is perfect model for doing so. In the class discussion, the question was brought up- how does observation affect an individual? Firstly, when one is being watched or feels that he or she is being watched, the individual become very self-conscious. I would certainly agree  with this  assertions. When in private or when one thinks they are unseen, we do many things that we wouldn't dare do in front of others. When this privacy is suddenly interrupted, we become very self-conscious as someone has caught us in act we only do when we think we are alone. Someone in class brought up the example of singing while driving. I think this an excellent example. Singing in the car is something we all do, however, it is generally an act we do when we think no one is watching. When another car drives by or pulls up next to you, one suddenly stop and become very embarrassed and self-conscious. 

 Secondly, as Foucault explains, when one is constantly watched, his or her behavior alters. I would definitely agree with this. This certainly ties into the idea of being self-conscious when we are being observed; however, it is more than just that. Someone in class brought up example of police authorities surveilling drivers. I would argue that the fear of repercussion most certainly affects the way people drive. The chance of there being a police officer hidden on the side of the road is an incentive for driver's to follow the rules of the road. We abide by the speed limit, halt at stop signs and proceed when we have the right of way as we are afraid of what might happen if a police officer catches us disobeying these laws. Many would not abide by these laws if there were no repercussions or the chance that someone of authority could catch us in the act; this therefore alters our driving habit.

Foucault and Force

Foucault's conception of force compared to Arendt's is more comprehensive and subversive. He explores the idea that force can be a manipulative factor that shapes society. An example of this is the modern prison systems we see today in comparison to the old violent punishment.

The old style of corporal punishment didn't force or coerce people to change, but simply removed those from society that broke the rules. The new system has opened a doorway to a new style of punishment referred to as the correctional system.

Instituting a correctional system of punishments presents the idea that people should not only be shaped to think and act a certain way within society, but if they don't, they will be removed, "corrected", and returned into society. This creates a new system of conformity that once punished non-compliance with death, and now subverts it with shaming, peer-pressure, and society construction.

This new form of power is one of coercive, subversive, and manipulative intent, one that undermines the old form of how society establishes, practices, and traditionalizes norms. It creates an air of forced conformity with no escape. You either keep your head down and follow the pre-ordained path chosen for you, or you spend some time behind bars, then are re-released into society. If you're lucky, you'll learn from your mistakes - you'll learn that to be apart of society, you have to follow the rules or forever be stuck in the system of continual remediation. There is no permanent withdrawal for those that can't bring themselves to conform. In the pre-correctional system of punishment you were either apart of society, or you were imprisoned for life, cast out from society, or worse, killed. Now, there is nothing outside of society. Our culture is a meta-society that spans every stretch of land we inhabit. Today in most western cultures if you become apart of the criminal justice system, you're stuck forever - the only reprieve comes in the form of conformity or death.

Thoughts on panopticism

Foucault’s writing on the panopticon has been the most thought provoking thing for me that we have read this quarter. When you consider what conditions our actions in society, it is obvious that it is the feeling of being watched that determines how we act. Whether you simply don’t shoplift or you dance when you are on camera at a sporting event, being watched by others is the basis for how we are conditioned or disciplined to act amongst each other. Something I cannot help but think about when I consider this topic is the ways in which this had made our society more productive. It is amazing to think that one camera placed in a strategic location in a public place can do the same job that used to require a large police or governmental force to be posted at all hours. And once you know that you are being watched, you start to feel like you could always be being watched and so, even in the privacy of your own home, you are much more reluctant to do something that might seem strange or illegal. When this becomes fully internalized in people, it is amazing at what it does for the economy. Not having to allocate as many resources towards punishing subjects allows for growth in so many other areas. Although I certainly feel like video surveillance and now internet surveillance limit our freedom and in a sense truly dominate our lives, I cannot help but sit back in awe of the way in which panopticism is able to rule over people in such an efficient fashion. I think that throughout my lifetime, it will be a hotly contested issue of whether the benefits of these new invasive types of surveillance can fit in with the ideals articulated by the constitution.

Foucault's Panopticon

I most appreciate the art of discipline, as it is wholly more powerful to have subjects disciplined in advance in order to avoid misbehavior than to have to hand out punishments all the time in my opinion. The problem of discipline is that it's practically impossible to have a governing force keep watch and correct any ill behavior at all times. For instance, historically a King can not watch over all his subjects even if he has an impressive martial force they too can not see all. That is why the King resorts to producing fear inducing public punishments, so that people may see what punishment awaits them if they act out. However, in our day and age such brutality is not publicly condoned therefore the keep so many people in line another method must be deployed. In this case, preemptive discipline. Most people do wrong because they do not believe themselves to be seen, and in turn punished. However if you can induce a state in the subject where they believe they are always being watched, they will less likely act out. It reminds me of the slogan, 'big brother is always watching'. 

In the book Foucault goes into a very direct example of the feeling of surveillance, specifically the Panopticon.

This photo is an example of such a structure. As you can see there is a heightened sense of observation given the central guard tower that can look out towards any of the inmates cells. This removed from the inmates a sense of secrecy or privacy and in most cases would diminish unsavory activity due to the sense of observance. 

In current times this feeling of observance is carried through the placement of cameras, internet monitoring, police patrols, and many other ways. So such direct methods aren't necessary because in so many other ways people are disciplined to believe that their actions will be watched over, and if they act inappropriately someone will know.

Reminders

Week 9—Disciplinary Power

Monday, 5.21, Posting--for those who want to make-up missed posts

5/22, Tuesday

--Bartky discussion, cont'd

--Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 293-308

--http://phaidon.philo.at/~iaf/Labyrinth/Kruks.html

--International Day Against Video Surveillance http://www.notbored.org/IDAVS.html

PRESENTATION SIGN UP

1.___Julia Kowalski________________

2._______Miles Bludorn____________

3.___________________

5/24, Thursday

– rough draft due

--peer reviews

FYI -- World Issues Forum: "Is Internet a vector of freedom or an instrument of repression? Lessons from the Arab Spring, China, Mexico, the USA"

Shirley Osterhaus Sent: Friday, May 18, 2012 7:25 AM To: ; Attachments: 5-23.pdf‎ (238 KB‎)[Open as Web Page]

We are delighted to have Delphine Halgand, Washington DC Director of Reporters without Border, as our final speaker for the Spring World Issues Forum.  Please help spread the word on this important topic: “Is internet a vector of freedom or an instrument of repression? Lessons from the Arab Spring, China, Mexico, the USA.” Wednesday, May 23, Noon-1:20pm, Fairhaven College Auditorium                                      7:00-9:00 AW 210 (Sponsored by AS Social Issues Resource Center) The fight for online freedom of expression is more essential than ever. The Arab Spring has clearly shown that the Internet is a vehicle for freedom. In countries where the traditional media are controlled by the government, the only independent news and information are to be found on the Internet, which has become a forum for discussion and a refuge for those who want to express their views freely. However, governments are realizing this and are trying to control the Internet and stepping up surveillance of Internet users. Netizens are being targeted by government reprisals. More than 120 of them are currently detained for expressing their views freely online, mainly in China, Iran and Vietnam. (Co-sponsors:  Fairhaven College and Reporters without Borders) Delphine Hagland, Washington DC Director, Reporters Without Borders. In Washington, DC since December 2011, Delphine  runs the US activities for the organization and advocates for journalists, bloggers and media rights worldwide. Previously, she worked for two years as a Press attaché in charge of the outreach at the French Embassy in Washington DC. Since graduating from Sciences Po Paris with a M.A. in Journalism, Delphine has been working as an economic journalist for various French media, focusing mainly on international politics and macroeconomic issues.   Reporters Without Borders was created in 1985 to defend journalists and media rights worldwide. It is a non-profit organization based in Paris, with more than 150 correspondents on the ground and a dozen offices abroad, including in Washington D.C.

CompStat and the Panoptic Society

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/armed-with-data-fighting-more-than-crime/ May 2, 2012, 7:00 am

Armed With Data, Fighting More Than Crime

By TINA ROSENBERG

 

Government accountability systems don’t usually become global superstars, but CompStat did.  The ideas in CompStat were first developed by Jack Maple, when he was a lieutenant in the New York City Transit Police, as a way to track subway crime and more intelligently deploy transit cops.  In 1994, when William Bratton, the chief of the transit police, became chief of the New York City Police Department, he brought Maple with him as a deputy. They then applied CompStat principles throughout the city’s entire crime fighting operation.
The CompStat era coincided with a staggering decline in crime.  Between 1990 and 2011, homicide in New York City declined by 80 percent, robbery by 83 percent, burglary by 86 percent and car theft by 94 percent.  During that period crime fell everywhere in the United States, but it fell twice as much and for twice as long in New York City.
How much of this was due to CompStat is still hotly debated. One of the most careful criminologists, Franklin Zimring, gives New York City’s changes in policing (which are not limited to CompStat) credit for a significant share of the crime drop.
CompStat has now become almost as much a part of policing as the blue uniform.  A survey last year by the Police Executive Research Forum, a think tank for city police departments, found that 79 percent of medium to large police departments surveyed use some form of the CompStat model.
What is only starting to catch on, though, is the idea that CompStat isn’t just for policing.   In Baltimore, which pioneered the application of CompStat to other government business, mayors for the last decade have used a CompStat-style system to run the whole city.  CitiStat has greatly improved how the city does the meat-and-potatoes of government: picking up trash, filling potholes.   But it goes much further.  “We now Stat homelessness, we Stat domestic violence,” Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Baltimore’s mayor, said in an interview.  “We’re finding more ways to use it — monitoring day-to-day progress, monitoring the pace at which we improve and push it along. We’re doing a citywide analysis of how to use CitiStat to drill down into problems that have been in existence for years.”   Baltimore has been trying for years to put in a new computerized system for emergency dispatch of ambulances and firefighters. “We’re creating a Stat process — pull all the people into the same room with independent analysts and figure out how to get rid of roadblocks,” she said.
Robert Behn, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, counts at least 19 United States cities, a couple of counties and two states — Maryland and Washington — that use CompStat for activities other than police work.  Some federal agencies are also adapting the model.
CompStat is popularly seen as a high-tech way of sticking pins in a map.   It is much more than that.  It starts with collecting data, analyzing it and presenting it in visual form — whether with pins on a map, bar graphs or other charts... cont'd

Bratsky, Beauvoir and Foucault

On page 98, Bratsky notes that women have disciplined themselves in relation to their appearances. I thought it was rather interesting to think about how this notion of Foucault's discipline in relation to women ties fairly neatly into Beauvoir's conception of the second sex. Although it is not a perfect fit, Beauvoir's 'situations' seem to also coincide with Foucault's notion of discipline. I have this all mapped out in my head, but I was wondering if anyone could perhaps help me bring it along a little bit... potential paper idea? I think so as well.

Model Prison

So, we never got to my discussion question about whether or not a model prison could exist. At first glance, this seems like somewhat of a ridiculous idea. Foucault mentions in the reading that prison revolts were happening and it didn't seem to matter if it was a model prison or something less than that. This would seem to suggest that the revolts were not about the conditions of the prison but about the forces being exerted upon them. This brought me to the question of whether or not a "model prison" exists.

No matter what, prison is about depriving someone of something. The ultimate goal could be rehabilitation but the method by which this is accomplished is the deprivation of life or liberty. So, thinking through this as I go here, I am not even sure what it would mean to be a "model prison"? Does that simply mean that the purpose of the prison is rehabilitation as opposed to punishment or retribution?

Question 5: Model Prisons

This was one of our discussion questions we never got to, but it was basically asking if we thought there could be 'model' prisons.  I would have to say there can't be model or perfect prisons and corrective facilities.  To me, there are just simply too many opinions, feelings and norms that people expect from these.  Norms might not be quite the right word, but I mean that people expect these places to conduct themselves a certain way. and may believe that they aren't doing their jobs when these places aren't actually like what they thought.  Another thing that crossed my mind is just human nature in general.  These people. for whatever reason. couldn't fit into our societies or didn't mesh well etc.  But what exactly does essentially sticking them into another society with other people that didn't fit in do?  Besides keeping them out of ours that is.  Obviously the goal is to 'correct' them somehow but I think that there are also many opinions on exactly what that means, and even more on the ways to go about doing it.

Bartky and Dieting

I thought it was really interesting that Bartky compared the need or pressure that women feel to diet with discipline. As she says on page 96 "Dieting is one discipline imposed upon a body subject to the "tyranny of slenderness". Although there may be some men that diet, the majority of the population that go on diets are women. Or maybe women are just more vocal about their need to go on a diet. Does the amount of women who diet show that dieting is something that women have been conditioned to do in order to feel they belong in society? They have obviously felt some pressure at some point to change their outward appearance. And dieting is their way of disciplining their body (i.e. by eating certain foods, eating smaller amounts, etc...) even if it is not what their body wants. They have to control their body because they have been subjected to society's norms.

This article brought something very common to my attention in a different light. While I think a lot of women (and men) diet to get healthier and possibly to feel better about themselves it is interesting to think about underlying themes that may cause dieting as well.

After reading the article about the human costs for workers in China I started to reflect on this in the context of our readings. It seems to me that many of the changes in how we view bodies as well as in how we structure society may have been sparked by changes in economics. The shift towards capitalist markets and partially toward Marxism and its ideas of people being the primary means of production (labor) seem to be directly related to the changes talked about by Foucault. As these economic changes have happened society has started to view the physical body as something that should not be disregarded, but should be used. Rehabilitation as a concept tries to make a person fit in, I think in order to make them "useful" again. This focus on the body and its possible uses coincides with the rise of economic systems that are focused on "progress" and "productivity". Whether you view it as progress or not, enhanced productivity and the ability to make more and better things are viewed as progress by many in the world.

When we look at observation it is the same way. Factories and the military observed their workers/soldiers in order to make sure they were doing their work. This is all the pursuit of progress. In the factory it is to keep profits high, a system is made where the body is put into use for all the time it is there. It is observed and it is controlled, not allowed to leave and watched so that it must work at all times.

This is of course just hypothesis, but it does seem as if the rise of capitalism, mercantilism, and marxism coincide neatly with the changes that Foucault is pointing out.