Power & Freedom Michel Foucault Panopticism (Political Science 506)

Disciplines Individuating Name & define individuals for treatment Normal Interlocking, the network of disciplines works together to create an edifice of power through omnipresent surveillance, the “panopticon” Martial discipline Psychology Biology Penal philosophy Medicine & health Sexuality Sociology Ethics Etc. etc. etc.

Architecture “Architectures” of power The space in which people live & interact Power more present in these architectures than in individuals While individuals may occupy particular nodes within these networks of power, the power resides in the architecture Literal and metaphorical Networks What are the beliefs and behaviors encouraged by a particular structure?

Panopticism Plague towns Panopticon Freeze life into immobility, tremendous enforcement cost Panopticon Allows for dynamic progress & experimentation, once constructed power continuously present but ideally never need be exercised, extraordinarily low cost. A massively plastic & adaptable organization of power By allowing public examination of the panopticon, remains democratic: a power of no one over all Surveillance, not spectacle. All-seeing but unseen. “the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power” (217) The individual is constituted w/in this architecture “a power that insidiously objectifies those on whom it is applied; to form a body of knowledge about those individuals, rather than to deploy the ostentatious signs of sovereignty” (220)

The Disciplined Society The functional inversion of the disciplines Example: free schools founded on negative justification (combat godlessness, idleness, gangs of beggars), but move to positive justification (prepare child for job market, develop the mind) The swarming of the disciplinary mechanisms Disciplinary mechanisms emerge into society Example: schools supervise children’s families State control of mechanisms of discipline Police, interested in everything, omnipresent surveillance Police are disciplinary mechanism that fills the gaps between other mechanisms

The Disciplined Society Disciplines as “infra-law” (222) System of omnipresent but uncertain surveillance “systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical” Example: female sexual morality, health, violence, surveillance Treated as very foundation of society, without which it will collapse “a series of mechanisms for unbalancing power relations definitively and everywhere; hence the persistence in regarding them as the humble, but concrete form of every morality, whereas they are a set of physico-political techniques.” (223) “The formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process” (224) Names and power How could this system of power be resisted?