Panopticism COP

Lecture 3 - 25/10/2012

Panopticism - Richard Mills

'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 practises.' - Randal Johnson in Walker & Chaplin (1999)

aim:
-to understand the principles of the panopticon
-understand Michael Foucault's concept of 'Disciplinart society'
-consider the idea that disciplinary society is a way of making individuals productive and useful.
-understand Foucault's idea of techniques of the body and docile bodies.

Michael Foucault (1926 - 1984)
-madness and civilisation
-discipline and punish: the birth of the prison

The emergence of forms of knowledge - biology  psychiatry, medicine etc legitimise the practices of hospitals, doctors, psychiatrists.

Foucault aims to show how these orms of knowledge and institutions like the prison, asylum, hospital and schools, now affect human beings in such a way that they alter our consciousness and that they internalise our responsibility

Disciplinary society and disciplinary power

'Panopticism'

Panopticism named after Jeremy Bentham’s building called The Panopticon, proposed in1791 – designed as a multifunctional building eg hospital, prison, work house, asylum etc.

The Tate Modern was originally a Panopticon prison

Has an effect, that is completely opposite from a dungeon – where your hidden, locked away in the dark alone, where your forgotten about. Whereas the panopticon is very open. Because your constantly reminded that your being watched, there’s no point in miss behaving because you’ll be spotted.

The panopticon internal………

Panopticism – hence the manjor effect of the panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power (Foucault, 1975) (a machine for the automatic functioning of power)

Allows scrutiny

Allows supervisor to experiment on subjects

Aims to make them productive

Reforms prisoners

Helps treat patients

Helps instruct schoolchildren

Helps confine but also study the insane

Helps supervise workers

Helps put beggars and idlers to work

The link between this lecture and the gaze and the media, woman now act in a certain way in the gaze of men. Prisoners, workers in the panopticon act in the way of the industry.

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 panapticism.

The panopticon is a model of how modern society organizes its knowledge, its power, its surveillance of bodies and it’s training

Can spot this system of panopticism in everyday life, there’s a form of panoptic power in everything.

Eg. open plan work space, changes the behavior of the workers. It’s about visibility and being scrutinized. Once you notice that you start to discipline yourself and changing your behavior.

In a pub, you start to behave consciously or sub consciously in a responsible way if it’s an open plan. A place away from scrutiny where you can relax more, like in a shelter.

The IT staff can go onto peoples accounts from their computers in the college. They can check history of websites, documents, even key strokes per minute!

Relationship between power, knowledge and the body

‘power relations have an immiediate 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)

Disciplinary society produces what Foucault calls: -‘docile bodies’

Self monitoring

Self correcting

Obedient bodies

Disciplinary techniques

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

-no coincidence that theres usually a big, visable window at the gym. Makes the person working out want to show off their health and physic

Foucault and power

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

Facebook is an area where your under constant scrutinity

Things to take away

Michel Foucault

Panopticism as a form of discipline

Techniques of the body

Docile bodies