OUDF501: Panopticism

Institutions and Institutional POWER.

Aims 

• Understand the principles of panopticism
• Understand Michel Foucault's concept of disciplinary society
• Consider the idea that disciplinary society is away of making individuals 'productive and useful' 
• Understand Foucault's idea of techniques of the body and docile bodies.

Michael Foucault (1926 - 1984)
The great confinement (late 1600s)
'House of correction' to curb unemployment and idleness - this is where the social groups were put to work, if they refused they would be beat with a huge stick. 

Foucault's aim was to internalise people's responsibilities in asylums, prisons, hospitals, schools etc

Disciplinary society and disciplinary power.

Panopticism named after Jeremy Bentham’s building called The Panopticon. The Tate modern building in London was originally a Panopticon 

"The individuality that discipline constructs (for the bodies it controls) has four characteristics, namely it makes individuality which is:

• Cellular—determining the spatial distribution of the bodies
• Organic—ensuring that the activities required of the bodies are "natural" for them
• Genetic—controlling the evolution over time of the activities of the bodies
• Combinatory—allowing for the combination of the force of many bodies into a single massive force" - Foucault, Michel (1975). Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, New York: Random House.

Most panopticons were asylums or prisons they were circular buildings 

A panopticon is the opposite of a dungeon, they display they're prisoners as opposed to dungeons in which they are kept secluded, dungeons repress they're prisoners as a form of punishment. 

Panopticism: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power (Foucault, 1975) (a machine for the automatic functioning of power)

Panopticons allowed scrutiny,
allowed supervisors to experiment on subjects and
aimed to make them much more 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

There are plenty examples of modern Panopticism in today's society.

Open offices instead of traditional cubicals , the worker is aware that they're being watched/scrutinised by the boss, so they disciplin themselves into working harder.

Pubs - you feel the scrutiny from the bouncers and the bar staff so therefore you behave.

Other examples are

Google maps

CCTVs 

Swipe cards for clocking in

Registers

Health (gym, eating right, etc)

Below are some notes I took down during the lecture.