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The Panopticon: Foucault's Theory of Power and Surveillance

Explore Michel Foucault's influential concept of the Panopticon, analyzing its role in disciplining society through surveillance technology and power structures. Discover how the Panopticon shapes institutions like prisons, schools, and hospitals, impacting social control and individual behavior.

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The Panopticon: Foucault's Theory of Power and Surveillance

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  1. Michel Foucault • Born October 1926, provincial family, Father---Surgeon • 1946 École Normale Supérieure Got degree in psychology, in addition to a degree in philosophy acute depression

  2. Agrégation 1950 failed; 1951 succeeded 1952 took up a position at the University of Lille, taught psychology • from 1950 to 1953 French Communist Party inducted by Althusser 1954, University out of France • Post-1968: as activist

  3. 1970, Collège de France, France's most prestigious academic body, as Professor of the History of Systems of Thought • 25 June, 1984 Aids-Related illness Gilles Deleuze, obituary, The Use of Pleasure, “The curiosity for knowledge”

  4. Madness and Civilization [1961] • Birth of the Clinic [1963] • The Order of Things [1966] • The Archaeology of Knowledge [1969] • The Order of Discourse [1971] • Discipline and Punish [1975] • The History of Sexuality • Vol. I: An Introduction [1976] • Vol. II: The Use of Pleasure [1984] • Vol. III: The Care of the Self [1984]

  5. Discipline & Punish (1975) • III. DISCIPLINE3. Panopticism • Panoptic Panopticon

  6. Plaguethe end of the 17th century • A strict spatial partitioning • Inspection • Permanent registration • Purifying • Being observed

  7. The leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion • the great Confinement • the nineteenth century in the psychiatric asylum救济院, the penitentiary宗教裁判所, the reformatory感化院, the approved school工读学校and, to some extent, the hospital. • a double mode that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); that of coercive assignment of differential distribution

  8. Bentham's Panopticon • the architectural figure of this composition • Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. • Visibility is a trap.

  9. an axial visibility • a lateral invisibility • 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.

  10. An important mechanism • A real subjection • Menagerie at Versailles • Panopticon was also a laboratory

  11. The plague-stricken town, the panoptic establishment - the differences are important. • It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work.

  12. It makes it possible to perfect the exercise of power • It's a case of 'it's easy once you've thought of it' in the political sphere. • anyone may come and exercise in the central tower the functions of surveillance

  13. The panoptic schema without disappearing spread throughout the social body

  14. How is power to be strengthened intensificator of power multiplicator of production

  15. two images of discipline • At one extreme, the discipline-blockade • At the other extreme, with panopticism • the Benthamite physics of power

  16. extension of the disciplinary • 1. The functional inversion of the disciplines. • 2. The swarming of disciplinary mechanisms. • 3. The state-control of the mechanisms of discipline.

  17. this power had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisible.

  18. 'Discipline' may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus • it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise. • comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a 'physics' or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology.

  19. the formation of a disciplinary society from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social 'quarantine' to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of 'panopticism'

  20. Julius //a whole type of society emerges • Antiquity had been a civilization of spectacle • The modern age poses the opposite problem

  21. We are much less Greeks than we believe. • Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance • We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine

  22. The formation of the disciplinary • 1. the disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities • 2. the panoptic modality of power - is not under the immediate dependence or a direct extension of the great juridico-political structures of a society • 3. the formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process

  23. Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons ?

  24. George Orwell, 1948 1984 • Montesquieu， De l‘ Esprit des Lois 1748 • Jean jacques Rousseau Du Contrat Social 1762

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