1791 - Panopticon is a building metaphorically representing heirarchy
Michel Faucault (author)
- Madness and Civilisation
- Discipline & Punishment: The Birth of Prison
1600s + ideas about madness start to change.
"The Great Confinement"
'Socially unproductive' people locked away in confinement.
(Mental illness, criminals, single pregnant women etc)
Houses of correction - People made to work in an attempt to teach them to be normal
Houses also used to hide away the sociallu unproductive from public view.
Instead of making them 'better', the residents would make each other 'worse'.
Faucault aims to show that forms of specialist knowledge give people a higher, greater status, allowing them to be in control of others.
Pillary & execution - Deviance is publicly shown and punished.
Disciplinary Society and Disciplinary Power:
Discipline is a technology.
Keep someone under surveillance to control their behaviour and try to improve them.
Jeremy Benthams - Panopticon
lots of Panopticon based prisons have been created in the past.
Panopticon is the opposite of a dungeon.
-People get locked away out of sight in a dungeon
-Panopticons make sure that people are always being watched
Makes people believe they are always being watched. Eventually no one needs to watch them at all.
Prisoners self regulate their behaviour.
Panopticons no longer built - seen as psychological torture.
Self Regulating behaviour to become what the individual believes the greater 'invisible' power would want.
Panopticism is still used in contemporary society.
Open plan offices, bars/pubs.
Google maps is a large scale panoptic sysetm in theory.
Because surveillance is so wide spread we feel constantly watched by an invisible power.
This forces us to self regulate behaviour which keeps the world under easy control.
Relationship between power, knowledge and the body:
Panoptic power/ surveillance physically affects the body not just mentally.
Disciplinary society provides a "Docile Body" according to Faucault:
- Obedience
- Easy to control
- Self monitoring and self correcting.
Gyms show panoptic control, showing off to the public that exercise is good.
Nazis used the 'perfect body' ideal to make sure docile bodies were well kept.
Healthy people means they can work and remain productive.
Eradicates unproductive people.
The exercise of power relies on there being the capacity for power to be resisted.
"Institutional Gaze" - another description for panopticism in action
