Embed Size (px)
DESCRIPTION
One of the revolutionary ideas put forward by Foucault is the various measures of surveillance, to ensure discipline in a society. Such a consented voyeurism always has a panopticon structure. Foucault talks about the age old prison, and how such surveillance structures are employed in other institutions from mental asylums to public schools to ensure discipline. The 184 idea of a big brother watching has gained prominence today with the internet, satellites giving rise to a virtual panopticon today.
Citation preview
The Role of Panopticon
in Panopticism
Paper 1: Theorizing LiteratureUnit 2: Power
Michel Foucault. “Panopticism”. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
Rinu Krishna KMPhil 2014-15
Institute of English21-Nov-14
Paul Michel Foucault
(15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984)
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English
A French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist
and literary critic. Through his impressive career Foucault became
known for his many demonstrative arguments that power depends
not on material relations or authority but instead primarily on
discursive networks. This new perspective as applied to old
questions such as madness, social discipline, body-image, truth,
normative sexuality etc. were instrumental in designing the post-
modern intellectual landscape we are still in nowadays.
Today he is accepted as having been the most influential social
theorist of the second half of the twentieth century.
Foucault's Discipline and Punish
Foucault published Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison in 1975, offering a history of the penal system in Western Europe. In it he seeks to analyze punishment in its social context, and to examine how changing power relations affected punishment. He begins by analyzing the situation before the eighteenth century, when public execution and corporal punishment were key systems, and torture was part of most criminal investigations. He further discusses the evolution of the disciplinary power and states that it has three elements: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment and examination.
In it’s central chapter, Panopticism, he builds on Bentham's
conceptualization of the panopticon as he elaborates upon the function
of disciplinary mechanisms in such a prison and illustrates the function of discipline as an apparatus of power. He further analyzes the network of power that is spread throughout society, which is controlled by the rules of strategy alone and that any call for its abolition fail to recognize the depth at which it is embedded in modern society. Thus he develops Panopticon as a metaphor for modern "disciplinary" societies and their pervasive inclination to observe and normalise.
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English
Foucault's Discipline and Punish
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English
“… the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear of the plague gave rise. All the mechanisms of power which, even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter him, are composed of those two forms from which they distantly derive.
Bentham’s Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition.”
Bentham’s (1748-1842) Panopticon
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English
The Panopticon is a type of institutional buildingdesigned by the English philosopher and socialtheorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century.
The concept of the design is to allow a singlewatchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmatesof an institution without the inmates being able totell whether or not they are being watched.
The design consists of a circular structure with an“inspection house” at its centre, from which themanager or staff of the institution are able to watchthe inmates, who are stationed around theperimeter. Bentham conceived the basic plan asbeing equally applicable to hospitals, schools,sanatoriums, daycares, and asylums, but he devotedmost of his efforts to developing a design for aPanopticon prison, and it is his prison which is mostwidely understood by the term.
The Panopticon “Visibility is a trap”
“At the periphery, an annular building; atthe centre, a tower; this tower is pierced withwide windows that open onto the inner sideof the ring; the peripheric building is dividedinto cells, each of which extends the wholewidth of the building; they have windows,one on the inside, corresponding to thewindows of the tower, the other on theoutside, allows the light to cross the cell fromone end to the other.”
Reverses the principle of a dungeon.
Axial visibility & Lateral invisibility – a
guarantee of order
Permanent visibility that assures the
automatic functioning of power.
Power is visible & unverifiable.
Panopticon “mechanism of power
reduced to its ideal form”
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English
It automatizes & disindividualizes power.
It does not matter who exercises the power.
Produces homogeneous effects of power.
Economic geometry of a ‘house of certainty’.
Does the work of a ‘naturalist’.
Laboratory of power.
A cruel ingenious cage.
Polyvalent in its applications
It gives power of mind over mind.
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English
May be subjected to irregular and constant inspections.
Democratically controlled
Accessible to ‘the great tribunal committee of the world’.
May be supervised by society as a whole.
Panopticon “democratically controlled”
The Role of the Panopticon
To strengthen the social forces.
A new ‘political anatomy’ whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline.
To spread effective education.
Exerts a moral influence over behavior.
As centres of observation disseminated throughout society.
State-control over the mechanisms of discipline.
Instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance…hierarchized network.
the formation of a disciplinary society in the movement from enclosed disciplines to an infinitely extendible "panopticism“
We are in a panoptic machine – the individual is carefully fabricated in it.
Formation of a Disciplinary Society
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English
Triple objectives of the disciplines – to increase the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system.
Using the multiplicity itself as an instrument of discipline.
The panoptic modality of power..continued to work on the juridical structures of the society..the ‘enlightenment’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
Discipline is a ‘counter-law’.
The infinitely minute web of panoptic techniques.
The schema of power-knowledge in each discipline.
The ideal point of penalty today would be an indefinite discipline.
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English
Panopticon Today
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English
Panopticon Today
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English
Panopticon Today
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English
21-Nov-14
Thank you
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English
