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The theory that relentless surveillance and constant visibility promotes conformity is the foundational principle of panopticism. As perceived by French philosopher Michel Foucault, the panopticon is an icon of permanent visibility, heightening self-awareness throughout society. As a result, the panopticon serves as an unverifiable means of power that cannot be confirmed by society. This power the panopticon possesses is a disciplinary power forcing society to remain on high alert for fear that any inappropriate behavior may result in negative implications to one’s well-being. This fear of consequence ultimately conforms behavior as society anticipates constant observation. In the world today, institutions and government have since assumed …show more content…
the role of Foucault’s panopticon. Intelligence agencies, data-mining corporations, and governing bodies alike serve as surveyors of mankind with the hopes of normalizing behavior and maintaining order in society. While this power is indirect and does not embody any particular action, it results in [forced] subconscious conformity. Since the conception of panopticism, the development of computerized technology has altered the manner with which powerful institutions coerce behavior. In Western world today, Foucault’s theories continue to remain relevant as a subject of scrutiny when describing the relationship between governments and their citizens. Developments in technology have brought with it tools such as CCTV and organizations like the NSA that focus on surveillance of citizens, with the hopes of maintaining national security. Despite operating in democratic nations, Foucault’s “watchdogs” of society often reduce personal freedoms at the hands of national security. In the United States specifically, The PATRIOT Act allows organizations like the NSA and CIA to freely tap into phone calls and personal messages between parties with the hopes of preventing further acts of terror. This piece of legislation is a modern day panopticon in that it allows government institutions access to survey all members of society, and is not seen or heard by society as actions are not publicly disclosed. While The PATRIOT Act is explained to be used only in dire circumstances where homeland security is at stake, the government privately controls this function so the actual application of The PATRIOT Act is not truly known. Based on Foucault’s teachings, surveillance such as The PATRIOT Act can reach a maximum impact when keeping society in line. There will become a point when the information gathered and the methods required to do so will overly inhibit the protective rights of citizens, encroaching upon their civil liberties. Today, The PATRIOT Act has faced a great deal of scrutiny as many question whether the increasing surveillance [as a result of increased technology] is refining surveillance or accelerating the depth to which surveillance occurs. As the ethics and constitutionality of modern-day panopticons are scrutinized and debated, Foucault would first ask if they are serving their purpose. If a panopticon, despite sacrificing personal liberties, reinforces disciplinary power then Foucault would say that it still serves its purpose. In the case of efforts such as CCTV and The PATRIOT ACT, society is on constant alert for fear of being watched and reprimanded. As a result, this conscious awareness that “big brother” is watching conforms societal behavior to that of the pre-established norm, for fear of the consequences that would occur if one were to be caught going against the norm. This sense of being watched 24/7 is where Foucault’s concept of examination comes into play. The examination, as Foucault describes it, is an expression of how time and control can define and classify individuals. This is the direct method of reinforcement of disciplinary power as the examination is the action of reviewing members of society, gathering information in order to discipline by force. Foucault describes the power that comes with surveillance as a “physical instrument other than architecture and geometry, it acts directly on individuals; it gives ‘power of mind over mind’” (Foucault 206). This essentially describes the burden that surveillance plays on behavior, in that constant oversight results in subconscious conformity in order to achieve societal norms for fear that rebellion would result in grave consequence. An example of the effects of examination on society today can be seen simply in the form of a law enforcement officer at a traffic stop. Their purpose is to increase safety on the roads by finding those who are a danger to themselves and others (those who may be driving drunk, have weapons, etc.), with the intent of normalizing a specific driving behavior amongst all people who go through the location. The examination and surveillance is the traffic stop itself, exerted through a disciplinary power, resulting in a normalized behavior (and fear) amongst drivers to abide by all rules and regulations. However, there are many more ways in which behavior is normalized through the use of modern-day panopticons. Foucault’s theory of normalizing judgment further instills a disciplinary power to panoptic institutions.
With the hopes of homogenizing behavior, normalizing judgment utilizes disciplinary power to control citizens. As a panopticon is emplaced in society, Foucault states “in each of its applications, it makes it possible to perfect the exercise of power” (Foucault 206), meaning correct behavior becomes more practiced and understood as society fears the consequences of rebellion. This occurs, as Foucault describes, “in several ways: because it can reduce the number of those who exercise it, while increasing the number of those on whom it is exercised” (Foucault 206). Once the majority of society members have conformed to such behavior, power is transferred from the individual to choose how they act, to the institution that normalized the behavior. Furthermore, as normalized judgment is practiced in society, it becomes more widely …show more content…
accepted. Society forfeits power to panoptic figures as a result of disciplinary power instilled through normalized judgment.
However, that power is maintained by such figures because of an advantage in the power/knowledge relationship. Foucault describes this relationship as being one where power is controlled by those who possess all knowledge. In the case of the panopticon, the guards who oversee the prisoners possess this all-seeing knowledge as they have the ability to track and keep tabs on every action of every prisoner. The heightened self-awareness that results amongst the prisoners is due to the fact that they know and understand they’re always being watched. As they cannot see who is watching them and when they are being watched, they will forever lack the power that comes with such knowledge. Ultimately, this lacking knowledge of when they are being watched is the cause of normalized behavior amongst the prisoners. In many developed societies today, there is a great deal of competition amongst those fighting to create their own panopticons. No longer limited to a secular group, panopticons appear in all forms to monitor political, social, and economic behavior in
society. Foucault predicted the growth of the panopticon, as such a figure in society makes power more economic and effective. As mankind creates habit out of behavior, rising institutions utilize panoptic schemes to gain competitive advantages and control over societies members. However, these schemes vary in form and method of application. Large retailers such as Amazon utilize panoptic schemes by monitoring search engine results and frequently purchased goods. When a product or service is frequently viewed, advertisements and suggested purchase items will begin to reflect the results of prior searches providing knowledge and relative power to panoptic institutions. Ultimately, searched items appear with greater frequency to the consumer, and behavior is altered as economic endeavors begin to reflect the advertisements displayed by such institutions. This is one manner in which modern panopticons have grown in that they now alter economic behavior in addition to social behavior. As society continues to feed into panoptic institutions by supplying information relative to habitual behavior, organizations will utilize such knowledge to exploit and normalize behavior in a manner that is of the most benefit to their institution. Whether it is the threat of audit by the IRS bringing honesty to tax filing, or a speed trap setup by a state policeman as they regulate speed on a dangerous roadway, panoptic institutions take advantage of habitual behavior with the goal of normalizing a behavior they believe to be acceptable. Panopticism is no longer isolated to the prison system that is looking to normalize behavior and rehabilitate prisoners. It has evolved as the transfer of power from citizens to elite institutions through daily interactions that result in normalized behavior. A member of society involved in such institutions (education systems, retail companies, government, hospitals, etc.) will have their actions monitored and recorded, classifying them in order to conform behavior into what is deemed the ‘norm’. Unless one can acquire total independence from society itself, panopticism will continue to codify all personal information made ‘public’, to be later exploited and manipulated by overarching institutions. While panopticism has proven helpful for the economic, political, and social growth of mankind, in the wrong hands exploitation of personal information could result in losses of personal freedoms. That is why the proper maintenance of information made public is so crucial in maintaining one’s personal freedoms of choice.
Perhaps no other event in modern history has left us so perplexed and dumbfounded than the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, an entire population was simply robbed of their existence. In “Our Secret,” Susan Griffin tries to explain what could possibly lead an individual to execute such inhumane acts to a large group of people. She delves into Heinrich Himmler’s life and investigates all the events leading up to him joining the Nazi party. In“Panopticism,” Michel Foucault argues that modern society has been shaped by disciplinary mechanisms deriving from the plague as well as Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a structure with a tower in the middle meant for surveillance. Susan Griffin tries to explain what happened in Germany through Himmler’s childhood while Foucault better explains these events by describing how society as a whole operates.
The theory of Panopticon by Foucault can be applied in this poem. According to Foucault, there is a cultural shift from the old traditional discipline of inmates to a European disciplinary system (314). In this new disciplinary model, the prisoners always assume that they are under constant watch by the guards and they start policing themselves. Panopticon is the process of inducing inmates to a state of conscious and ...
However, there are other critiques that take a different approach on the oppression that exists in the novel. In "Urban Panopticism And Heterotopic Space In Kafka 's Der Process And Orwell 's Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Raj Shah argues that the way in which society in novel is oppressed is not an obvious oppression but one that focuses on constant surveillance. He uses Foucault’s arguments on panopticism to describe this. Shah states, “Foucault neologizes panopticism to describe a form of power relying not on overt repression, but rather upon the continuous surveillance of a population and the consequent strict regulation of the body” (703). He explains it is the constant surveillance that strips individuals of their rights and places them under oppression. He goes on to
The citizens experience a deficiency of identity as a result of the way the government physically controls them. Big Brother monitors every move each individual makes; nothing goes unnoticed. Every face made, the way one’s body reacts to different situations, everything said and everything done, is overseen by the government. If the way one acts is abnormal, it is believed that citizen is rebelling: “The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself…” (Orwell 65). The Party keeps everyone under constant surveillance using telescreens. A telescreen is a device that is both a television and a security camera. Big Brother also exercises physical control by forcing all citizens to watch specific broadcasts, wear specific clothing and perform specific tasks. Citizens are forced to pa...
In “Panopticism” Foucault states, “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, pg. 201). The function of the Panopticon is to keep the prisoners orderly by instilling fear inside of them, this fear forces them to stay in their cells, and to remain compliant. The Panopticon is a building designed for surveillance.
...rdens, however, are intangible and cannot be helped. So often the men wished to be released from their burdens. They dreamed of a “flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun through the vast, silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing” (O’Brien 349). These burdens are almost unbearable, and yet, they appear to have required the perfect balance and posture. That is, essentially, the goal of the panopticon. The power of observation, placed on them by the social structure of society, is so immense that the soldiers are forced to respond by monitoring themselves. For fear of being ashamed or embarrassed, the soldiers over-monitor to the extent that they have given up complete control. The power of their actions at war no longer belongs to them.
Among the books discussed over the duration of the course, the most recurrent theme has been the dominance of power relationships and the construction of institutions driven by power. The framework for these socially ingrained power relationships that has been transformed over time has been laid out by Michel Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish. According to Foucault, power is everywhere, dispersed in institutions and spread through discourses. The state functions on a number of dispositions which are hierarchical, naturalized and are the modes of power for the power elite. The result of this social and economic control is observed in nations and across nations through the beauty myth, the prison system, the creation of informal systems or the overarching cultural hegemony and attempted reform of the non-western world. The key to the success of this has been through the misrecognition of the constructed systems of power which are instated through very fundamental mediums that they are not questioned. These structures of control by the state are adopted and reproduced from the base of the familiar, through arrangements and dispositions that pose themselves as natural, as they are embodied and programmed in the play of language, in common sense, and in all what is socially taken for granted. In this essay I will examine these above mentioned structures of the power and how these models are used to discipline individuals and states.
Michel Foucault's "Panopticism" is based on the architectural concept of the panopticon. Foucault extended this concept to create a new sort of authority and disciplinary principle. His idea was that of the anonymous watchers hold in and has the power to influence the ones being watched. This concept is two fold – it is subject to the person being watched not being able to know when they are being watched and to the rules of society places on individuals on how they should act in a given situation. This idea can be applied to every day life, like how we set up testing rooms for students or when reading literary works such as Dracula by Bram Stoker. In Dracula, there are power differentials caused by a character or characters "seeing" what others do not and caused by societal constructions.
Foucault once stated, “Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests” (301). By this, he means that our society is full of constant supervision that is not easily seen nor displayed. In his essay, Panopticism, Foucault goes into detail about the different disciplinary societies and how surveillance has become a big part of our lives today. He explains how the disciplinary mechanisms have dramatically changed in comparison to the middle ages. Foucault analyzes in particular the Panopticon, which was a blueprint of a disciplinary institution. The idea of this institution was for inmates to be seen but not to see. As Foucault put it, “he is the object of information, never a subject in communication”(287). The Panopticon became an evolutionary method for enforcing discipline. Today there are different ways of watching people with constant surveillance and complete control without anyone knowing similar to the idea of the Panopticon.
In Foucault’s analysis, the concept of Panopticon is developed based on the manipulation of knowledge and power as two coexisting events. He believes that knowledge is obtained through the process of observation and examination in a system of panopticon. This knowledge is then used to regulate the behaviors and conduct of others, creating an imbalance in power and authority. Not only can knowledge create power, power can also be used to define knowledge where the authority can create “truth”. This unbalance of knowledge and power then marks a loss of power for the ends being watched, resulting in an unconditional acceptance of regulations and normalization.
Introduction Individuals often yield to conformity when they are forced to discard their individual freedom in order to benefit the larger group. Despite the fact that it is important to obey the authority, obeying the authority can sometimes be hazardous, especially when morals and autonomous thought are suppressed to an extent that the other person is harmed. Obedience usually involves doing what a rule or a person tells you to, but negative consequences can result from displaying obedience to authority; for example, the people who obeyed the orders of Adolph Hitler ended up killing innocent people during the Holocaust. In the same way, Stanley Milgram noted in his article ‘Perils of Obedience’ of how individuals obeyed authority and neglected their conscience, reflecting how this can be destructive in real life experiences. On the contrary, Diana Baumrind pointed out in her article ‘Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience’ that the experiments were not valid, hence useless.
Michel Foucault’s essay, “Panopticism”, links to the idea of “policing yourself” or many call it panopticon. The panopticon is a prison which is shaped like a circle with a watchtower in the middle. The main purpose of the panopticon was to monitor a large group of prisoners with only few guards in the key spot. From that key spot, whatever the prisoners do they can be monitored, and they would be constantly watched from the key spot inside the tower. The arrangement of panopticon is done in excellent manner that the tower’s wide windows, which opened to the outside and kept every cell in 360-degree view. The cells were designed so it makes impossible for the prisoners to glances towards the center. In short, none of the prisoners were able to see into the tower. The arrangement of cells guaranteed that the prisoner would be under constant surveillance. This is the beauty of the panopticon that anyone can glance at the cells from the tower but no prisoners can see the tower. The prisoners may feel like someone is watching, and know the he or she is powerless to escape its watch, but the same time, the guard in the tower may not be looking at the prisoners. Just because the prisoners think that someone is watching them, they will behave properly.
In Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, he examines the role of the panopticon in the prison system in the eighteenth century. The panopticon was a method to maintain power and to ensure good conduct amongst prisoners. The panopticon is described as a central tower where one in power can oversee the surrounding area. Surrounding the center tower are cells containing prisoners. The inmates aren’t able to communicate with one another. Also, the prisoners are unable to distinguish whether it is a guard on duty watching their every move. The architectural design of the panopticon gives guards or those in power the upper hand. As a result of the prisoners being unable to determine whether someone ...
They are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always also the elements of its articulation” (Foucault, “Two Lectures” 34). Power may take various forms, all of which are employed and exercised by individualsand unto individuals in the institutions of society. In all institutions, there is political and judicial power, as certain individuals claim the right to give orders, establish rules, and so forth as well as the right to punish and award. For example, in school, the professor not only teaches, but also dictates, evaluates, as well as punishes and rewards.
“Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse compartments may be realized.” (Foucault)