lecture one

PANOPTICISM

surveillance and society

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

• madness and civilisation
• Disaplin and punish: the birth of the prison
• the Great confinement
• house of correction to curb unemployment and ideness

the birth of the assilem

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

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

Panopticism

Disciplinary society

and

Disciplinary power

Jeremy Benthams designed the panopticon proposed in 1791

PANOPTICISM

‘Hence the major 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)

•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 “PANOPTICISM”

•The ‘panopticon’ is a model of how modern society organises its knowledge, its power, its surveillance of bodies and its ‘training’ of bodies.

Foucoult 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’

Key things to remember

•Michel Foucault

•Panopticism as a form of discipline

•Techniques of the body

•Docile Bodies