Seminar 1... Lecture Discussion and Task Preparation

Discussion

- Panopticism - metaphor.
- Docile bodies - state of conscioussness, easily controlled, take instruction, obedient, not lazy - incredibly productive e.g. Education, Soldiers (trained and disciplined - effect on body, unthinkingly takes orders).
- Surveillance (Studies born from Foucault - D.Lyon)
- Self regulation - training/instructing the self.
- Power - only exists when exercised 'a relationship not a capacity.' One only has power over someone else when that person willingly enters the relationship - there is a possibility to challenge or rebel.
- The Gaze - institution - the Panopticon creates a situation where the Panopticon is personified - with rules and regulations.
(Institution - work places, school - personal situations can be seen as a institution such as families and marriage, as more often than not, a hierarchy exists.)
- Disciplining - shift from something that's physically exercised to a more subtle, mental form of control - like a technology no one to control it - automatic...
...leading to a disciplinarian society.
- Ideas of what is normal.

The Task

- Take 5 quotes from the text and relate to a 'contemporary panopticon'.

*Ideas of contemporary panopticons... School (register as surveillance)... Hospital (docile bodies)

Example: Hospital
Supporting Quotes: '...strict spacial partitioning...' Hospital wards.
'...each street is placed under the authority of a syndic...' Patients under nurse and doctor.
'...everything that may be observed during the course of the visits - deaths illnesses, complaints, irregularities...' Health visits.
'document bears 'the name, age, sex of everyone notwithstanding his conditions' Patient file.

Feedback

- Also makes individuals self-regulate behaviour, especially visitors.
- Not perfect Foucauldian example; MRSA there is a risk of contagion.

Other examples: Facebook, Mobile phones, Media sensationalisation of terrorism - controls behaviour, self regulation, Trains - space, only see carriage, black hemisphere as a camera, 'they' can see you, without being seen themselves, and CCTV stickers - self regulation.