Western philosophy has a focus on Descartes.
"I think therefore I am"
We are individual free thinkers.
The idea of panopticism contradicts this.
The Panopticism was designed by Jeremy Betham in 1891.
Foucault began writing about it in the 1970s.
The Panopticon
- individuals are totally individualised and seperated. it is a purely mental experience.
- it is a constant reminder that someone may be watching
- you are constantly visible
- your supervisors are invisible to you but the central tower is there
- it is the INSTITUTIONAL GAZE, a constant reminder by a SYMBOL
Under the gaze of the panopticon people;
- are self regulatory
- act in a way that they think they should act in within the institution
the values of the institution are coded into us by ideas that are shown to us in various
institutions through the process of growing up in society, the macro-dynamic, it is self
perpetuating knowledge
- experience a shift in social discipline from exclusion to conditioning
As a laboratory it allows constant research
As a prison it is mental torture. People go mad from "paranoia."
Foucault - "Power is a relationship that two people enter into. It is a process of communication."
People allow themselves to be controlled.
A group of people interacting and communicating for a society.
Institutions emerge.
The duality of "madness" and "sanity"
Professionals are instated to diagnose people on the values of the institutions.
This DISCIPLINARY SOCIETY creates DOCILE BODIES.
Docile Body
- utterly conforms
- does not challenge
- works really hard
- SELF REGULATORY
- SELF DISCIPLINARY
"Surveillance is based on a system of PERMANENT REGISTRATION"
"The registration is constantly CENTRALIZED."
Your knowledge of yourself moves away from you into the system. (facebook, public records, doctors records, criminal records, credit history, birth certificates, etc etc)
"The plague is met by disorder"
The society put mechanisms in place when they were under threat that gave rise to a political dream.
Out of crisis came a system of total control.
"The plague gave rise to disciplinary projects"
The plague is a metaphor for social wrongness.
"the great confinement on the one hand; the correct training on the other. The leper and his separation; the plague and its segmentations. The first is marked, the second analyzed and distributed"
"The first is that of pure community, the second that of a disciplined society."
"The town immobilized by the functioning of an extensize power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies - this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city."
It is the pentration of regulation in every aspect of every day life.
"individualize the excluded, but use procedures of individualization to mark exclusion - this is what was operated regularly by DISCIPLINARY POWER from the beginning of the nineteenth century in the psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory, the approved school and to some extent, the hospital.
Generally speaking, all the authorities excercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of BINARY DIVISION and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal;abnormal); and that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how a CONSTANT SURVEILLANCE is to be excersized over him in an INDIVIDUAL way, etc.). On the one hand, the lepers are treated as plague victims; the tactics of individualizing disciplines are imposed on the excluded; and, on the other hand, the universality of disciplinary controls makes it possible to brand the 'leper' and to bring into play against him the dualistic mechanisms of exclusion. The constant division between the normal and abnormal, to which every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, by applying the BINARY BRANDING and exile of the leper to quite different objects."
"By the effect of the backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphary. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible."
"Visibility is a trap."
"He is seen but does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication."
"this invisibility is a guarantee of order"
"Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of concious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tent to render its actual excersize unnecessary."
it eliminates the ability to return the gaze so you become the object. you act like the object.
"it automizes and disindividualizes power."
"a real subjection is born mechanically from a ficticious relation."
as a laboratory it serves to "train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones. To teach different techniques simultaneously to the workers, to decide wich is the best. To try out pedagogical experiments - and in particular to take up once again the well debated problem of secluded education, by using orphans. One would see what would happen when, in their sixteenth of eighteenth year, they were presented with other boys or girls; one could verify whether, as Helvetius thought, anyone could learn anything; one would follow the 'genealogy of every observable idea'; one could bring up different children according to different systems of though, making certain children beleive that two and two do not make four or that the moon is a cheese, then put them together when they are twenty or twenty five years old; one would then have discussions that would be worth a great deal more than the sermons or lectures on which so much money is spent; one would have at least an opportunity of making discoveries in the domain of metaphysics. The Panopticon is a privilaged place for experiments on men, and for analysing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them. "
"the ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without liit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniancy of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination"
"A Scanner Darky" by Phillip K Dick is ab observation of Panopticism in a futuristic, distopian society.
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