The Panopticon
- Can be a metaphor for today's society - making people conform to values through hidden forces.
Michael Foucalt - Madness and Civilisation
(Influential French theorist)
- Looked at madness in the Middle Ages and how it was tolerated in society.
The Great Confinement (late 1600's)
- People who were deemed socially useless were put in a house of correction to curb unemployment and idleness (such as vagabonds, drunks, single pregnant women and the workshy).
- Made to work, to improve moral fibre.
- Subsequently deviance was hidden away and represssed in these correction facilities.
- Used physical punishment to those who didn't comply.
- Asylums were brought about to segregate the mentally ill from the rest of the others, where mental control was used to make them conform, in a way they were treated like children, e.g. rewarded for good behaviour.
New forms of knowledge were developed
In biology, psychiatry and medicine etc. which then legitimised the practices of hospitals, doctors and psychiatrists.
Early Method of Control
The Pillory - similar to the stocks, was used for punishment by public humiliation. The criminal would be held in the device and visibly punished in front of the town/community.
More serious punishment - public torture '...place of execution where you shall be hanged by the neck and being alive cut down, your privy members shall be cut off and your bowels taken out and burned before you...' the quote continued to detail how the head would be severed from the body and the rest of the remains would be disposed of at the King's pleasure.
Disciplinary Society and Disciplinary Power
'Discipline' is a technology - how to control someone's behaviour, conduct and aptitudes and keep surveillance.
Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon (1791)
- Guard to sit in middle and view all prison cells.
- Prisoner constantly being observed - internalises the individual in a conscious state that they are always being watched - self regulate their behaviour.
- Always segregated - no socialisation.
- Not used now - inhumane.
- Almost like a laboratory - allows supervisors to conduct experiments.
Aim:
- Reforms prisoner.
Could be used to help treat patients, help instruct school children, helps confine but also study the insane, helps supervise workers, helps but beggars and idlers to work.
Application to modern society
- Open plan office - workers constantly watched.
- Pubs: open plan.
- Google maps - blacked out windows in car, monitoring society.
- Constant surveillance causes us to change behaviour - anxiety.
- Fundamentally, lecture theatre is panoptic, Richard has the control, can see everyone individually. Not physically held in the theatre but we stay there.
Application to college
- 30+ cameras.
- Tutor files - can only be accessed by personnel.
- Student files.
- I.T. department - can access everyone's computers, look at all files, emails etc. (and even monitor keystrokes!)
[- Tutor clock in cards are also a form of surveillance.]
Relationship between power, knowledge and the body
- 'power relations have an immediate hold upon the body; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it...' Foucault (1975)
- Gym - discipline and gentle punishment.
- Nazi sports event
Foucault and power
- Bottom up model unlike the Marxist top down definition.
- 'Power is not a thing or a capacity people have - it is a relation between different individuals and groups, and only exists when it is being exercised.'
- The exercise of power relies on there being the capacity for power to be resisted.
Facebook
- People perform for institutional gaze - create ideal identities.
- Hard to rebel/resist the gaze - public scrutiny.
- Can create social paranoia even though people willingly enter this.
Bruce Nauman
- Video Corridor Pieces (late 1960s)
- Public behaviour changes in art galleries - talk quietly and walk.
- Not instructed to behave like this, it is just the cultural norm.
- We are told what kind of art is important.
Chris Burden
- Samson (1985)
- Turnstile that when people enter it pushes against the gallery walls- until eventually the walls will crumble under the force.
- Stopped people going in, people don't want to destroy the gallery, as they are institutions that are seen as culturally important.
Key ideas
- Michel Foucault
- Panopticism as a form of discipline.
- Techniques of the bodies.
- Docile bodies.
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