Aims:
Understand the principles of the panopticon
Undertsand Foucaults concept of a disciplinary society
Consider the idea that disciplinary society is a way of making idividuals 'productive' and 'useful'
Understand Foucaults idea of techniques of the body and docile bodies
1791 - The panopticon. A prison designed by Jeremy Bentham which metaphorically represents heirarchy and a symbol for society.
Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984)
Wrote:
- Madness and Civilisation
- Discipline & Punishment: The Birth of Prison
It was in the 1600's idea's of what madness was started to change, "The Great Confinement", this was where 'Socially unproductive' people locked away in confinement.
(Mental illness, criminals, single pregnant women etc)
There were soon Houses of correction - to curb unemplyment and idleness - People made to work in an attempt to teach them to be 'normal' amoungst society.
These houses also used to keep the socially unproductive from public view. The houses did not work, Instead residents would make each other 'worse', corrupting each other.
The disciplinary society at the time was not just these correction houses but had Pillary & execution - Deviance is publicly shown and punished.
The birth of the asylum
There was an emergence of forms of knowledge - biology, psychiatry, medicine, etc.
Foucault looks at how these can be forms of knowledge are being used to affect human beings in such a way to alter our consciousness.
Panopticism-
Disciplinary Society
and
Disciplinary Power, working to create a better society.
Discipline is a 'technology. 'How to keep someone under surveillance, how to control his conduct, his behaviour. Improve.
Panoptic prisons, circular design first proposed in 1791. Several still exist today, but not in use. Different to typical prisons at the time, where you would be locked away and forgotten about, like a dungeon, the Panopticon is the opposite.
-Panopticons make sure that people are always being watched, the physchological effect being that the prisoners end up Self Regulating themselves, completely aware of their actions.
It was so effective, guards would no longer even need to look, as the fear that they were being watched was enough.
Panopticons no longer exist as prisons - seen as psychological torture.
Panopticism is still used in contemporary society and seen in many things such as-
Open plan offices, boss can see, makes the employed have to work.
Bars/pubs, keep control.
Google maps (seen as panoptic in theory)
It is how modern society organises its knowledge, its power, its surveillance of bodies and its 'training' of bodies.
It is because of this constant surveillance, it 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.
'Power relations have an immediate hold upon it [the body]; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremnies, to emit signs' (Foucault 1975)
Disciplinary society provides a "Docile Body" according to Foucault:
- Obedience
- Easy to control
- Self monitoring and self correcting.
It is how you conform to how people want to see you in society, 'how you should be in society'.
You can see the nazis used this idea of the 'perfect body' to make sure docile bodies were well kept.
Healthy, both physically and mentally, people means they can work and remain productive, remove useless people, keep only those to help the world progress and be perfect society.
"Institutional Gaze" - another description for panopticism in action
Key points
-Michel Foucault
-Panopticism
-Techniques of the body
-Docile bodies
-Recognition that institutions 'work' on us in a variety of ways.
