panopticism lecture

Panopticism

INSTITUTIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL POWER

‘Literature, art and their respective producers do not exist independently of a complex institutional framework which authorises, enables, empowers and legitimises them. This framework must be incorporated into any analysis that pretends to provide a thorough understanding of cultural goods and practices.’

Randal Johnson in Walker & Chaplin (1999)

Contextual & Theoretical Studies 2011

Lecture aims

•  UNDERSTAND THE PRINCIPLES OF THE PANOPTICON

•  UNDERSTAND MICHEL FOUCAULT’S CONCEPT OF ‘DISCIPLINARY SOCIETY’

•  CONSIDER THE IDEA THAT DISCIPLINARY SOCIETY IS A WAY OF MAKING INDIVIDUALS ‘PRODUCTIVE’ AND ‘USEFUL’

•  UNDERSTAND FOUCAULT’S IDEA OF TECHNIQUES OF THE BODY AND ‘DOCILE’ BODIES

T h e P a n o p t i c o n

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) •  Madness & Civilisation •  Discipline & Punish: The

Birth of the Prison

•  THE GREAT CONFINEMENT (late 1600s)

•  ‘Houses of correction’ to curb unemployment and idleness

the birth of the asylum

•  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.

“That you be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution where you shall be hanged by the neck and being alive cut down, your privy members shall be cut off and your bowels taken out and burned before you, your head severed from your body and your body divided into four quarters to be disposed of at the King’s pleasure.”

DISCIPLINARY SOCIETY AND

DISCIPLINARY POWER Discipline is a ‘technology’ [aimed at] ‘how to keep someone under surveillance, how to control his conduct, his behaviour, his aptitudes, how to improve his performance, multiply his capacities, how to put him where he is most useful: that is discipline in my sense’ (Foucault,1981 in O’Farrrell 2005:102)

“Panopticism”

•  Jeremy Bentham’s Design The Panopticon

Proposed 1791

Presidio Modelo, Cuba

Millbank Prison (London; on the site of Tate Britain)

1867 Map of Millbank

Variations / wings/corridors

insitutional ‘gaze’

the Panopticon internalises in the individual the conscious state that he is always being watched

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)

• Allows scrutiny

• Allows supervisor to experiment on subjects

• Aims to make them productive

• Reforms prisoners • Helps treat patients • Helps instruct schoolchildren • Helps confine, but also study the insane • Helps supervise workers • Helps put beggars and idlers to work.

•  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.

Pentonville Prison

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POWER, KNOWLEDGE AND THE BODY.

‘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 ceremonies, to emit signs’ (Foucault 1975)

• Disciplinary Society produces what Foucault calls:- ‘docile bodies’.

•  Self monitoring •  Self-correcting •  Obedient bodies

Disciplinary Techniques “That the techniques of discipline and ‘gentle punishment’ have crossed the threshold from work to play shows how pervasive they have become within modern western societies” (Danaher, Schirato & Webb 2000)

Nazi Sports event-

Cult of health

Nazi degenerate Art Exhibition 1937

Foucault 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’

Vito Acconci ‘Following piece’ (1969)

Vito Acconci

‘Seedbed’ (1972)

Chris Burden Samson (1985)

Key things to go away with today

•  Michel Foucault •  Panopticism as a form of discipline •  Techniques of the body •  Docile Bodies