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B3 W1: Gender and Social Inclusion - Panopticism

Foucault, M. (1977). ‘Panopticon’, in: idem, Discipline and punish : The birth of the prison (1st American ed. ed.). New York: Pantheon Books. Part III, chapter 3.

The plague "called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and ramification of power." p.198

"Generally speaking, all the authorities exercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in an individual way, etc.)" p.199

"The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately." p.200

"Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap." p.200

"He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication." p.200

"Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so." p.201

"the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones." p.203

In each of the applications of the Panopticon, be it school, workhouse, prison, "it makes it possible to perfect the exercise of power." p.206 This is because you can have as few people as possible exercising power over the largest amount of people.

The Panopticon "is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through these power relations." p.207

"There is no risk, therefore, that the increase of power created by the panoptic machine may degenerate into tyranny; the disciplinary mechanism will be democratically controlled, since it will be constantly accessible" to the public and the rest of the world p.207

The aim of the Panopticon is "to strengthen the social forces - to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality, to increase and multiply." p.208

Discipline-blockade - "the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time." p.209

Discipline-mechanism - "a function mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come." p.209

Discipline was once used to control the disorderly, the infirm and the sick. Now it is used in a positive way to control everyone top down.

Discipline led to the rising of the poor and uneducated from the gutter, "their emergence from a marginal position on the confines of society, and detachment from the forms of exclusion or expiation, confinement or retreat." p.211

The education system collects information on the children but also on the parents. Smaller, local hospitals monitor the local population for any changes to health. Religious groups have "long played this role of 'disciplining' the population." p.212 The religious charities went around Parisian parishes and tried to eradicate the "places of ill-repute" p.212

The police force are given total control in order to reign over every minute issue in social life, "this power had to be given the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisible." p.214

"Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies." p.217

218 - refer to the snoopers charter (how does this relate)

"discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wondering about the country in unpredictable ways; it establishes calculated distributions." p.219

"the disciplines are the ensemble of minute technical inventions that made it possible to increase the useful size of multiplicities by decreasing the inconveniences of the power which, in order to make them useful, must control them." p.220

"although, in a formal way, the representative régime makes it possible, directly or indirectly, with or without relays, for the will of all to form the fundamental authority or sovereignty, the disciplines provide, at the base, a guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies." p.222

"In appearance, the disciplines constitute nothing more than an infra-law. They seem to extend the general forms defined by law to the infinitesimal level of individual lives; or they appear as methods of training that enable individuals to become integrated into these general demands." However, "The disciplines should be regarded as a sort of counter-law. They have the precise role of introducing insuperable asymmetries and excluding reciprocities." p.222

The hospital, school, workshop, "became, thanks to [the disciplines], apparatuses such as that any mechanism of objectification could be used in them as an instrument of subjection, and any growth of power could give rise in them to possible branches of knowledge" p.224

"Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" p. 228

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