Literature, art and their respective producers do not exist independently of a complex institutional framework which authorises, enables, empowers and legitimises them. This framework must be incorporated into any analysis that pretends to provide a thorough understanding of cultural goods and practices.’ Randal Johnson in Walker & Chaplin (1999)
The Panopticon - Jeremy Bentham (1971)
Foucault says that forms of knowledge such as biology, medicine and psychiatry, legitimise the use of hospitals school and prisons.
These institutions effect us by internalising our responsibility.
Punishments and technology such as execution, the stocks, torture and prison were / are used as forms of discipline to prevent people from breaking the rules instated by the wealthy and powerful in our society.
Discipline is a ‘technology’ [aimed at] ‘how to keep someone under surveillance, how to control his conduct, his behaviour, his aptitudes, how to improve his performance, multiply his capacities, how to put him where he is most useful: that is discipline in my sense’ (Foucault,1981 in O’Farrrell 2005:102)
The panopticon is also a metaphor for the way power is beggining to exist in modern society, it intills the feeling of being watched in everyone.
I will use the panopticon to describe this power structure from now on.
The model of the panopticon is being used in modern society today.
In Cuba there is the Presidio Modelo, In england Millbank prison resembles this model.
Not only that but modern offices and schools often resemble the panopticon, they seek to make people feel like they are being watched. Libraries and museums often look like it. The act of keeping files on individuals is a method embodied by the panopticon.CCTV is a very good example. As is FACEBOOK.
The panopticon allows scrutiny, allows the supervisor to experiment on their subjects and aims to make them more productive.
It seeks to reform prisoners, treat patients, instruct school children, confine but also study the insane, supervise workers, and put beggers and idlers to work.
What Foucault is describing is a transformation in Western societies from a form of power imposed by a ‘ruler’ or ‘sovereign’ to……….. A NEW MODE OF POWER CALLED “PANOPTICISM”
The ‘panopticon’ is a model of how modern society organises its knowledge, its power, its surveillance of bodies and its ‘training’ of bodies.
‘power relations have an immediate hold upon it [the body]; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’ (Foucault 1975)
Foucault argues that this sort of society produces 'docile bodies.'
We are self monitering, self correcting, obediant bodies.
“That the techniques of discipline and ‘gentle punishment’ have crossed the threshold from work to play shows how pervasive they have become within modern western societies” (Danaher, Schirato & Webb 2000)
His definition is not a top-down model as with Marxism
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
‘Where there is power there is resistance’
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