Lecture Notes - Panopticism

These are the lecture notes for Panopticism on 4/11/10

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

Lecture Notes - Postmodernism

Modern world, Modernity, Modernism-
Progression,
Innovation,
Experimentation,
Progress,
Intellectuality,

Post Modernism -
Pluralism
Ehaustion
Dissillusionment
Almost ironic
Skeptisism

Postmodernism is the reaction to modernism and the realisation of its flaws

Social and economic movement first refferenced in 1917 by Rudolf Pannwitz although not really a post modern world until the late 20th century

The historical era that followed modernism

Lecture Notes - The Document

Photography innovative for human kind.
Ability to physically capture the world theoretically objectively

James Nachtwey
Capturing negatives and injustices to humanity
not necessarily being objective, but trying to express one view and expression.

Objective photography not really objective either because the existance
of the photographer is intervention in the scene.
Not documenting a scene of life but manipulating perspective and choosing
what they want someone to see.

'Neutral' photos do not exist.
"Photography achieves its highest distinction - reflecting the universality of human condition in a never-to-be retrieved fraction of a second"

Even seemingly realistic 100% objective views are what that photographer want to show in light, perspective, position etc

Even something as small as the title of a photograph can completely change the context of it and the way it looks to individuals.

Photographs attempting to be realistic are often constructed to be a fantasy view of the world either conciously or not.

Lewis Hine tried to create much more realisticallystyled photographs with some historical or social value.

Photographers can alter their photographs by changing the way their subjects react to them in what they are wearing and the way in whcih they act onto the subjects, as well as having pre conceptions as to what they want to capture.

The FSA-
Series of photographers working independently but controlled by the government to document the poor farmers that were movied (photography used to make the upper classes donate to the farmers charity)

Images constructed to portray a narrative.

Carl Damman
Cesare Lombroso "Portrait of a melancholy"

Photographs can be used completely subjectively to prove or convince things which are completely false.

Conflict Photography

Robert Capu and Cartier Bresson 1947
MAGNUM GROUP
To document the world and social problems
completely mobile and international

Although these are theoretically neutral, each photographer has their own style, making each photograph stylised
Falling Soldier 1936

Nick Ut 1972
Don McCullin 1968
Banned from Falklands by the british government because of worries about what he might photograph

Robert Haeberle 1969

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William Klein
Made it obvious and clear that the photographer is a role in the end product of the photograph, interacting obviously with the public and his subjects. In a way, this may make them more objective by never attemtping to say that he did not alter the pkicture with his presence.

Critical Realism:
The idea that actual reality says nothing about the subject and so the scene has to in some way be staged or altered for the photograph to have any meaning.

Allan Sekula
Andreas Gursky
Jeff Wall 1992

Gilliam Wearing "Signs that say what you want them to say" 1992-1993

Jeremy Deller "The Battle of Orgreave"
Jon McPhee (Documented at the time)

Documentry photography is irrelevant in modern age of technology with cameras in several digital items that are available to almost allof the general public.

Key Features:

-Humanitarian Perspective
-Tend to portray social and political situations
-They say they are objective though may be subjective
-People form the subject matter and content

Lecture Notes - the Mass Media & Society

Age of print began 1450

Marshall Mcluhan attempted to understand the new digital technology
"Late age of print"

Gutenbergs printing press was the first machine capable of mass producing.
this allowed production of a massive scale
Also allowed knowledge to be spread to a mass market.

Computer Litteracy
Understanding and controlling the new media
Allows self publication over the internet and new ways to consume media

Technology allows empowerment of the reader instead of the writer
More power over media now than ever before

Hypertext allows quick changing and moving through webpages in seconds

Hypermedia allows loads of pictures, text and sounds

Can make the reader become lost among the Hypermedia and miss a lot of important information.
This in turn could lead to completely misunderstanding entire topics or events

"Modern systems of communication and distribution supplied by a relatively small
group of cultural producers, but diverted towards large numbers of consumers"

Theoretically the internet is not a type of mass media at all.

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 Mass Media - Negatives:

-Superficial, Un critical, almost pointless in many ways because of lack of content
-Popularity measures success rather than actual content or interesting information
-Audience is disempowered and almost fooled into thinking that they have power and that they are included in the content
-Encourages conformity in social issues (class, race, sex)
-Also encourages apathy in the sense that viewers sit and watch in vain
-Power is held by a small group of people who can really do whatever they want
-Bland and standardised

"Religion is the opium of the masses"

Positives:

-Not all media is low quality or bland
-Media does discuss injustice and negative social issues
-Creativity is a feature
-Transmission of highly classed art material can reach a broad audience
-Achieves a high democratic potential

Art in the age of Mass Media:

Basically a book about the effects of delivering high class art to a broad audience and making it public

Is art autonomous?
Jackson Pollock - Abstract Expressionism

Repetition of imagery can desensitise the public

Mass Media claims the stles of some higher art and introduces them to the public

In many cases, art and media stand together

Lecture Notes - Advertising, Publicity and the Media

Times square in New York - full of advertising, like many other places

1990s - 11,000 new TV adverts per year
25 million print adverts per year

Advertising inescapable - affect our concious and subconious mind

Karl Marx - born 1818 died 1883
wrote the communist manifesto in 1848
wrote Das Kapital in 1867

Marxism - critique of consumer culture, commodity culture

We construct identity through products and consumerism
The idea that you shouldnt be defined as a person by what you own but by who you are
Lives are run buy products and advertising
Stuart Ewan calls it the "consumer self"

Symbolic association plays a key part in products and their meanings

Perpetuating false needs -
Aesthetic Innovation
Planned Obsolesence (Products today are built to eventually break so that new ones have to be bought)
Novelty (new, different, exciting)

Commodity Fetishism:
Products use advertising and campaigns to hide their history

Reification:
Products are given human associations
(e.g. Cool, sexy, romantic)
Creates a human-like close attatchment to products

Herbert Marcuse wrote "The One Dimensional Man" in 1964

Positives:

Advertising produces money and makes society richer
The money can often be used for ethical things and lots of things aside from advertising

Negatives:

Teaches people tht they are inadequate
can advertise to children who are more likely to be affected
Makes people want things that they cant afford

Lecture Notes - Graphic Design - A Medium for the Masses

Communication through images
Still frames or animated stories

William Addison Dwiggings
1890s
British graphic design very traditional
European graphic design much more modernist in style and forward thinking

Bauhaus one of the first places to teach graphic design principles
Swiss graphic design important and influential

Hitler forced traditional art
above modernist graphic design styles of art

Communist propaganda much more modern
Design in the UK and US seemed to become much more contemporary after 1945

Design starts becoming corporate
It starts becoming about mnaking money instead of communication

Quickly became a large divide between those who advertise
and those who use graphic design in an educated or philosophical way/
Intellectually/ Morally concious raising

graphic design quickly takes a 'Punk'
anti establishment movement during the 70's and onwards.

Adbusters founded in 1989 as large non-profit
anti consumer based organisation

Lecture Notes - Modernity/ Modernism and the Mass Media

1700 - 1960 - modernist movement
Modern = to improve, make better / newer and better

William Hunt - Modern in painting style but not ideology

1889 L'exposition
Eiffel tower - Modern/ Steel
Industrial/ Modern aesthetic

Urbanisation - the switch from country to city.
Factory work, working shifts, new communication links
Telephone/ Telegraph
Invention of railways
Standardising time (date)

Trottoir Roulant - moving walkway in paris

Enlightenment - late 18th Century
Scientific/ Philosophical ideas progress
Religion dropped for science
Secularisation
The city - Product not place

Haussmanisation
Napoleon comissioned to redesign Paris city making long straight narrow roads for
modernity and easily policed streets
Social Control
Uncontrollable people kicked out

Worry about life being too fast in 1890
society of alienisation - class difference
Fashion important in class division

Modern shift style work developed further, life becomes controlled by work

Degas 1876 L'Absinthe
Compositionally very modern, very photographic.

Invention of photography becomes important to modernism

Modernist Design:
Anti Historicism (Not to look back, embrace the new)
Times new roman - not modernist, historicist
Truth to materials - No subtlety

Form Follows Function - functionality omes before the look and feel/ aesthetic comes from function

Technology advances
Internationalism - Modernism is an international language
Design to relate to the world

Bauhaus - Representation of Modernity in art. Concrete - modern technology

Post Modernism - to understand that modernism doesn' work to the extreme

Kaiserpanorama 1883
Modern technology - Technological beginnings

Lumiere Brothers

Modernism is a product of a subjective response to modernity

New York-
Modern City, Built in blocks/ grid based
scientific, mathematical.