Panopticism - Lecture notes

Panopticism.

Institutions and Institutional power.

We are produced by the institutions and society we are immersed in.

Micheal Foucault – radical French philosipher – Died of Aids, campaigned for Gay rights etc.

Two works that are mainly cited by Foucault

-Madness & civilisation – Surveys the rise of the asylum and psychiatry and doctors

Discipline & punish: The birth of the prison. – surveys the rise of the prison and moreover the modern prison

Madness and civilisation:

Pre 1600’s, the ‘madness’ were accept into society, left to wander from town to town peacefully, almost endorsed.

Those who weren’t useful for society in the late 1600’s were dismissed and thrown into houses of correction (for the insane, criminal, general poor, single mothers – anyone who couldn’t be put to work) People were put to work in these house at the threat of their peril.

After a while these houses were seen as a grave error, these houses were corrupting people more, insane people turning the sane in.

The birth of the asylum - 1700, there became a division between the sane and insane, people started to become qualified to judge

The asylum gave residents control (although treated like children) to an extent, trained to receive good things for doing good practice.

At this point Fouco realised it was more effective to control people in a mental way rather than pure physical.

This realisation emerged knowledge – biology, psychiatry, medicine, etc. Legitimise the practice of hospitals, doctors, psychiatrists. – Started to internalise our

Criminals, deviants, people who society judged as abnormal were punished usually in a spectular way, humiliated in public areas, throwing food etc. The point of this humiliation was an effort to show people what would happen if they were to not conform within society.

DISCIPLINARY SOCIETY AND DISCIPLINIARTY POWER

There was a shift from physical punishment to mental punishement, Foucault says that discipline is a technology, a technique. Controling our thoughts and behaviours rather than just killing those who didn’t comply.

Panopticon (building) – designed in 1791 by Jeremy Bentham, the building is seen as a metaphor for social control by Foucault (1970)

Bentham thought it could have a multitude of functions from schools, hospitals, asylum but mainly thought about it as a prison. Each of the divides are seen as cells each with a window for prisonors, 1 per room.

A central tower ran through the middle of the building. The panoptican was special for Foucault as each prisonor in any cell can see the central tower but can never see each other, however they also never knew when they were being watched as the tower was never lit. This achieved a strange effect as a result of not knowing when you’re being watched, prisinors would tend to always behave because of the constant scrutiny – The panopticon internalises in the individual the conscious state that he is ALWAYS being watched. Once this idea of constantly being watched sunk in, people wouldn’t try and break out, started controlling themselves as they were constantly worried of being caught out.

Builds an internal disciplinary, perfect for control on a purely psychological level.

These institutions were also used as Asylums, almost turning into labs comparing and contrasting prisonors and patients like lab rats.

•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.

The panopticon is a model of how modern society organises its knowledge, its power, its survailence of bodies and its training of bodies (getting people to train themselves).

This idea of panopticism feeds into contemporary lives once you start to look into the effects and techniques used to achieve social control.

-Open plan offices are panoptic as there is always risk of being seen by the boss – this achieves a high level of work, even by the boss just being thought about being present.

Panopticism is you acting in a way that you think you ‘should’ act because of the social surrounings or at a threat of being caught out. This in turn prompts us to act as more productive and well behaved individuals.

Many different panoptic techniques in operation in our world, clasrooms, bars, CCTV, lecture theatres.

RELATION SHIP PBETWEEN POWER, KNOWLEDGE AND THE BODY.

Panoptisism has a direct relationship between physical and mental control.  The mental control stems into how we physically control ourselves.

Disciplinary Society produces what Foucault calls – docile (wont rebel) bodies (obedient bodies)

•Self moitoring

•Self correcting

•Obendient bodies

Disciplinary Techniques –

People going to the gym, keeping a mental track on how they treat their bodies, staying healthy. Through seeing adverts and ‘the perfect body’ plastered about, controls how people react physically through psychological ideas.

Faucault and Power

•His defenition is NOT a top-down model as it is with Marxism.

•Power is not a thing or capacity people have, it is a REALATION between different individuals and groups, and only exhists 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 ALWAYS RESISTANCE.

KEY points to leave with

•Micheal Foucault

•Panopticism as a form of discipline

•Techniques of the body

•Docile bodies