"Just as the ability to read and write and freely communicate gives power to citizens that protects them from the powers of the state, the ability to surveil, to invade the citizens' privacy, gives the state the power to confuse, coerce and control citizens. Uneducated populations cannot rule themselves, but tyrannies can control even educated populations, given sophisticated means of surveillance" - Foucault (Discipline and Punish)
The awareness that a panoptic mechanism is at work in all aspects of society was only birthed in the advent of Foucault's 'Discipline and Punish'. Here, Foucault takes Bentham's original panoptic design of prison cells (pan, meaning "prisoners", and opticon, "to observe"), wherein prisoners are observed with or without their knowledge, and applies it to the state.
Foucault asserts that the reason the panoptic model is so effective, is because "visibility is a trap"[Discipline and Punish]. Accordingly, he points out that one of the essential characteristics of a panopticon is that it creates in the individual a sense that an observer's eye is forever present, watching one's actions and behaviour.
Foucault goes on to say that this idea of a "controlling system of power"[Discipline and Punish] is effectively adapted in the modern day, affecting many aspects of our everyday lives. In a panoptic setting, each of us are ultimately instilled with the powerful notion that we are being monitored by controlling institutions of power; whether we be in government properties such as the city hall, public settings such as streets and shops, or even within the family home.
This is exactly that makes panopticism such a useful mechanism of power- we are all but subjects to observation, at times to the point of breaching personal privacy. Buildings such as banks, supermarkets and airports take advantage of panopticism in their design and maintenance. Many public parks across the country are littered with CCTV cameras; an example of a technology that brings the gaze of a superior into the daily lives of the populace.
The moral responses to panopticism are vast. For me, the two most important questions are:
1. Ultimately, does the concept work? How can we measure the success of applied panopticism?
2. Britain's panoptic society; is it used to prevent and address issues of crime and national security, or rather as a form of intelligence and control over the general populace?
Panopticism's most valuable function is that it suppresses the idea of doing a malevolent act, even before it gets the chance to be actualised. In other words, an all-seeing state puts its citizens in a situation of vulnerability, one in which the feeling of fear precedes the feeling of safety.
Ashley Pishdar (N0208574)
Thanks Ashley. All to the good! There are a number of concepts things that your work raises.
ReplyDelete1. Certainly, a timely reminder that
Britain is one of the most watched cultures in the world having, as far as I know, more CCTV cameras than anywhere else. So in a sense of a palpable philosophy of everyday life it is something that we can all relate to. Yet strangely there is also a sense that we do not at all realize this. We operate by forgetting them. The invisibility of visibility if you like, nowhere better to hide than out in the open!
2. Here’s another paradox in relation to your question of whether it works. The question of measurement: I think on a Foucauldian basis the whole process of measurement would be precisely part of the contemporary human problem. Measurement, self-auditing, regimes of control precisely are an indicator of the success of panopticism. The more strategies of measurement the more panopticism is in operation.
3. Your second question, I would say that 1. Neither of these two domains are absolutely exclusive i.e. police and the military are devoted to Britains’ national security both inside and outside its sovereign territory. So if Britain is a panoptic society it would seem that both these arms, police and the military, are part of the a singular system. The fact that we differentiate them, granted all their respective differences and functions, testifies to the notion that in our minds the state is fractured.