Summary: Foucalt, Discipline & Punish, “Panopticism”
Editor’s Note: For this assignment, I needed to read and summarize the published piece or content listed below, and then provide a response or assessment of the writing.
Foucalt, Michel, Discipline & Punish, “Panopticism,” Pantheon Books, 1978.
Summary
Foucalt discusses the manner in which individuals internalize cultural rules and regulations and then follow those rules because they know other people in society are watching and judging them. Foucalt explains this disciplinary and power structure with an example of the plague and how people—whether they had the plague or not—were treated in order to contain the spread of the disease, stating, “the existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear of the plague gave rise.” He goes on to discuss Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison designed to impose self-surveillance on the prisoners through “visible and unverifiable” power of the prison administrators, claiming “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.” Foucalt believed this system of power must be used in any situation where a particular form of behavior must be imposed. He saw this form of societal discipline where everyone watched each other as a more effective disciplinary method that reached everyone in society, not just those people who happened to get caught by an authority figure.
Response
There are a couple of things that I found fairly impressive about Foucalt’s chapter:
He recognized that people, when given even a modicum of power, would generally be willing to wield it without hesitation—especially when that execution of power was seen by the majority of people in society as a positive addition to the surrounding community and culture. Using Marx’s idea of interpellation and forced ideologies, Foucalt advanced that theory to include a method people in authority could use to enforce hegemony throughout society without requiring an abundance of dedicated manpower or overhead. It would be a modern day city official’s dream: cut costs and have the laws enforced.
He understood the human consciousness enough to see that the average person would not only internalize cultural rules and expectations, but they would also adhere to those ideologies if they knew they would be punished or exiled in some form. Again, using the fear component that was utilized by so many governments and upper ruling classes throughout history, Foucalt recognized that people respond to fear arguably better than they respond to anything else, and he crafted a specific situation that wouldn’t entice the average person to gamble with their life by trying to get away with anything that went outside the authority-imposed ideology.
At the time of this book’s publish, what would now be considered archaic methods of imprisonment and punishment were still being used in certain institutions throughout the world, so this suggested approach was likely received as new and innovative, albeit with some obvious faults. I think this system used in certain high-security prisons today would have disastrous effects. I could see many of the prisoners killing other prisoners, and since those killings may go unnoticed, no one would be punished. The fact that those prisoners are in prison for breaking cultural ideologies indicates that they’re willing to break ideology at any time and not suddenly follow cultural rules in prison—even under the threat of death. As Foucalt mentioned, the Panopticon would provide an excellent laboratory to study and document human behavior. In that regard, it would be interesting to observe people’s behavior and perceptions of their situation—their truths—and apply those perceptions to their behavior to see if patterns exist. Although I think this type of institution would still work today, I don’t think it would work unless the fear of death or extreme punishment was understood by the prisoners/patients/students. It seems like times have changed a bit (perhaps I am mistaken in that statement), and I’m guessing that today, more people would be willing to challenge the Panopticon system and gamble with the punishment. It seems like society has evolved into a situation where people are generally expected to follow the rules, but if certain people break the rules, they get away with it. I think that thought process is becoming more prominent in some peoples’ ideologies and would encourage some individuals to go outside the ideologies imposed by an institution like the Panopticon. If historicists analyzed the writing of a Panopitcon’s inhabitants, I think those types of changing ideologies would be interesting research.