Lecture 1 - Panopticism - Surveillance and society

The Panopticon was designed in 1791.
Michel foucalt (1926-1984) wrote 'Madness and civilisation' and 'Discipline'

The great confinement (late 1600)
'House of correction' to curb unemployment and ideleness, sinlge pregnent women, drunkards etc.
- way of improving thir moral fiber.
- Hid away devience, repression.
- Began to be seen as an error. Everyone corrupting eachother inside, the mad corrupting the sane.
- Asylum for the mad. People were mentally controlled rather than physically controlled.

The emergence of forms of knowledge - biology, mdeicine etc. Legitimise the practice of hospitals, doctors and psychiatrists etc.
- The Pillory - Criminals are visably shown as devient and humiliated.

Discipilinary society and disciplinary power

Discipline is a 'technology' to reform people and make them responsible for themselves = Panoptisism.

- Panoptic prisions in Cuba and London. Guard is sat in the middle with a view of all prisioners as the building is round. Opposite to dungons.

The panopticon internalises in the indervidual the conscious state that he is ALWAYS being watched.
- Self regulation
- Psycological torture?

-Allows scrutiny
- Allows supervisers to experement on subjects
- Aims to make them productive
- Reforms prisoners
- Helps treat patients

Panopticism is the mode of power that controles society.

Panopticism is everywhere - New pubs and bars, google maps/streets, offices.
Survailence cameras everywhere. Always being watched.
Being constantly recorded and monertered makes us constantly react.

Relationship between power, knowledge and the body.

(foucault)
Power relations have an immediate hold upon the body, they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks.

Disciplinary society produces what Foucault calls 'Docile bodies'.
- Self monitoring
- Self-correcting
- OBEDIENT bodies

Panoptic gym.
Regulated health to stay able to work and not become useless to society.
TV = docile meconism - Being controlled, not going out and doing things for ourselves - passive.

Foucault and power

- His deffinition is NOT a top-down model as with Marxism
- Power is not a thing or capacity people have - it's a relation between different individuals and groups and only exists when it is being excercised.
- The excercise of power relies on there being the capacity for power to be RESISTED.
- 'Where there is power there is resistance'.

Facebook is performing for an institutional and panoptic gaze.