Monday 12 November 2012

CoP Seminar (12/11/12) Panopticism

AIM: Discussing panopticism, connections between Lectures 1+2. Psychoanalysis and The Gaze. Task for next week - Panopticism in society, 400 words. Defining one thing in contemporary society, using 5 points from the text.

ALSO: Be thinking of what it is that you want to study and where you want to steer towards for individual tutorials. Think of the essay and publication (in the loosest sense) as being one synchronised body of work, effectively the same thing but investigated in different ways.


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Panopticism

Social control - general idea was about being controlled through mechanisms.

Making people feel like they're always being watched. Visibility. Designed by Jeremy Bentham 1791

Foucalt & Bentham.

Foucalt revisited Bentham's theories in a book called "Discipline & Punish" in 1977. Different eras, Bentham was a philosopher, he was an architect.

Bentham's idea was a building that achieved its purposes perfectly. a philosophical exercise. Bentham's body is preserved at University College London.

Panopticon:
Visibilty, Surveillance, No lateral visibility, axial visibility, everyone can see the centre. Internalisation.

Once the idea of being watched and scrutinised is in your head, it makes the scrutiniser redundant. Process of power is automatic. Light.

Segragated, classified.

Subject - Object
A > B
A < B


Objectify people and make judgements and people do that to us. A process of life, communicative relationship between one person and another person. In Panopticon, it preserves and accentuates one half and denies the other. 

A > B

Links to the gaze theory from earlier lectures, in the panopticon the surveyors can't be seen but you can always be seen. You can never return the gaze. When you can't return the gaze, a process of internalisation starts taking place. If you have no other person to measure your experience against, you have no alternative but to become the object. No one else to talk to, discussing experiences. Presented with only ONE option. You become the person they want you to become. 

Experience of Panopticon is psychological. Most of the effects are 

Foucalt - self regulation - becoming the object that they want you to be.

Bentham never actually saw the building made. Countless panopticon's have been made, fallen out of favour in this country, not made for humane reasons. Most people became a bit crazy, isolated for 24 hours a day. 



Foucalt sees a shift from the physical to the mental, a gradual shift of how people are controlled. Shift from physical control to psychological control. Foucalt uses the Panopticon for an allegory for modern disciplinary techniques. Interested in social control, uses Panopticon as an example for social control.

Think about where these characteristics are present for the task in modern day society. Situations where you have these factors present, behaviour will be regulated and behaviour will be changed. An "ism" is a style, a general principle, '

Panopticism' is Foucalt's word. He's talking about a STYLE of discipline, what he sees as efficient and a perfect form of disciplinary control. Foucalt celebrates the efficiency of this disciplinary system, doesn't full support all factors about it.


People are conforming for institutions. Higher ups. Even in todays society. Lecture was about institutional power.

The ideas of an institution and what the environment demands rather than a person. An institutional gaze. 

Institutions:
Government
Schools & Universities
Workplaces
Businesses
Army
Police
Religion
Prison
Family
Marriage

^ Knowledge of specialists

Hospitals bring about the idea of knowledge of medicine. The doctor then legitimises the practice of hospitals. Same thing happens with police, army, church, families, businesses etc.

CCTV cameras - not the CCTV cameras, the knowledge of the consequences and that you will be caught. In certain people, the CCTV culture does work for people that are willing to internalise that notion, CCTV culture didn't work over the winter period last year when there was attacks on students in daylight in Leeds. The major effect of CCTV of panopticon is it's a reminder that there is a system and there is consequences. For Foucalt one of the most important things is power and relations.

Society and culture tells you something is wrong. What actually is "wrong"?

Offices - As Foucalt says discipline is about making you useful for that institution. You feel the need to work, 'improve yourself'. But you're not doing it for the right reasons.You're not emancipating yourself, that's the purpose of power in the Foucalt sense. Exact opposite of individual emancipation. Docile bodys.

Institution of marriage - disciplinary codes of marriage. Early societies, hunter gatherer societies. Men usually went out to hunt as they were physically stronger. Chopping trees to make homes, those societies were matriarchal, women were responsible for socialisation, child breeding. Men absent all the time. Societies got more and more advanced till everyone got so good at farming, overproducing. Stuff had to be put into storage. Men decide they want the stuff that's valuable to go to my kids. In these societies the only ones who knew their kids were mothers. Man has no idea who's children it is.

Men make women their 'property'. Idea of monogynous relationship. Men invent the idea of marriage as a social practice, so women are bonded, can only have their children so men know who their kids are. But now surrounded by the layer of mysticism, like love. Religious reasons for justification. No such as thing, love was only invented to protect mens power.




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