(This
summary runs the length of Foucault's chapter on "Panopticism", if
you want the short simple way try Foucault's panopticism explained)
"Panopticism"
is a chapter in Michel's Foucault's book "Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of the Prison" (1975). The book examines developments in Western penal
systems and the formulation of contemporary prisons. Foucault's main argument
in "Discipline and Punish" is that measures that presumably serve to
"rehabilitate" offenders and thus society are in actual fact power
mechanism of discipline which is not unique to prisons and can be found to be
employed by other institutions like armies, schools, factories and so on.
Foucault
claims in " Discipline and Punish" that modern prisons are in fact
paradigmatic of a wider social process that changes to way power is wielded.
According to Foucault the need to oversee a growing number of people in
production systems of growing complexity has led to the development of
elaborate systems of power, a new range of control tactics and new forms of knowledge
and knowledge production. Discipline
for Foucault is "a technology
of power" aimed at turning the human multitude into something manageable
and controllable. Discipline produces docile and obedient bodies in a manner
which is useful for the needs of large scale systems of modern production. But
when Foucault says "production" he does not mean only economics (this
is a difference between Foucault and Marxism) but also the production all forms of power such a knowledge
(see Foucault on power
and knowledge). In "Discipline and Punish" Foucault shows how
discipline works together with discourse to produce the modern individual who
is apparently unique and independent but is in fact controlled. The chapter
"Panopticism" in Foucault's book deals with exactly that.
Our
summary will break down Panopticism into 4 parts :
The
first part of the summary will cover Foucault's notion of discipline. The
second part of our summary of Panopticism will connect discipline with the production of individuals. The third part of the summary will connect discipline and Panopticism
to what Foucault calls the "human sciences". Finally, the last part
of the summary will be a discussion of what Foucault calls "disciplinary society".
More on and by Foucault:
Foucault - "Of Other Spaces" - summary
More on and by Foucault:
Foucault - "Of Other Spaces" - summary
Recommended books by and on Foucault: