CTS LECTURE - PANTOPTISISM

INSTITUTIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL POWER

Panopticism: Institutions & Institutional Power 

Richard Miles 2011

The lecture introduces the work of Michel Foucault and particularly his theoretical application of panopticism, techniques of the body and ‘disciplinary society’. Funnily enough ‘institution’ is not defined in the lecture, but take it that institutions can exist on two levels, first, organised bodies which have some kind of collective material physical entity, [e.g., hospitals, government, the police] and secondly, organised practices which are more solidly defined around customs and practices, such as the institution of ‘marriage’, the ‘family’ and so on.

‘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)

Learning Aims:-

UNDERSTAND THE DESIGN MODEL OF THE PANOPTICON

UNDERSTAND FOUCAULT’S CONCEPT OF ‘DISCIPLINARY SOCIETY’.

UNDERSTAND THE FUNCTION OF DISCIPLINARY SOCIETY AS A MEANS OF RENDERING INDIVIDUALS PRODUCTIVE AND USEFUL

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

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)

What Foucault is describing is a transformation in Western societies from a form of power imposed by a ruler / 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

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POWER, KNOWLEDGE AND THE BODY.

Disciplinary Society produces what Foucault calls ‘docile bodies’.

‘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 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)

Foucault’s definition of power is not a top – down model, as in Marxist theory, but is more subtle. Thus,

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. 

For Foucault, ‘Where there is power there is resistance’.

Bibliography

Please see yr 2 bib,

But also, 

Foucault, M.  (1975) ‘Panopticism’ 

from Hall, S. & Evans (1998) Visual Culture a Reader 

Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison London, Penguin

See also web sites on Foucault of which there are plenty

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 work on human beings in such a way that they alter our consciousness and that they internalise our responsibility.