Assignment 1 Michel Foucault. Discipline & Punish (1975), Panopticism

Ololade T Owolabi

Theory 2

Assignment 1

Spring 2021

Prof Aptekar

What are the parallels between our current pandemic and the plague described?

a strict spatial partitioning, the closing of the town and its outlying districts,

the division of the town into distinct quarters,

everyone is ordered to stay indoors,

small wooden canals are set up between the street and the interior of the houses, thus allowing each person to receive his ration without communicating with the suppliers and other residents; meat, fish, and herbs will be hoisted up into the houses with pulleys and baskets,

Only the intendants, syndics, and guards will move about the streets

and also, between the infected houses, from one corpse to another, the 'crows', who can be left to die,

Inspection functions ceaselessly,

Everyone locked up in his cage,

reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to the magistrates or mayor At the beginning of the 'lock-up', the role of each of the inhabitants present in the town is laid down,

Five or six days after the beginning of the quarantine, the process of purifying the houses one by one is begun.

The syndic to make his daily roll call. This was done as a form of the census in the middle of the year 2020 during the pandemic.

What does “subjection” mean?

A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behavior, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to the application, the patient to the observation of the regulations.

What is the “panopticon”?

The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.

How is visibility a “trap”?

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

Visibility is a trap because as long as there is a source of light an eye of a person is watching this eliminates the ability of a person in a cage to do as they please so in order to survive they have to conform to an acceptable way of living until they are freed.

Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.

How does the panopticon work to “induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power”?

The panopticon works to induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power through the arrangement of the rooms in the building, opposite the central tower, which imposes on the person in the tower axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply lateral invisibility and this invisibility is a guarantee of order. This is because If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences just as an example.

How did the panopticon become “a laboratory of power polyvalent (having or using a lot of different forms or features) in its functions?

The Panopticon became a laboratory of power polyvalent because of the functions it was used for. For example used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behavior, to train or correct individuals.

The Panopticon is a privileged place for experiments on men, and for analyzing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them.

The Panopticon functions as a kind of laboratory of power. Thanks to its mechanisms of observation, it gains in efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men's behavior; knowledge follows the advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised.

The panopticon is polyvalent in its applications because not only does it serve to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centers and channels of power, of the definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons.

What does a panopticon structure mean to the development of a feeling of freedom in an architectural work?

In my opinion, according to the reading, the panopticon being associated with prisons had a negative impact on the idea just because prisons were made to have bars, chains, and heavy locks meanwhile all that was needed was that the separations should be clear and the openings well arranged. Which lead to the heaviness of the old 'houses of security', with their fortress-like architecture to be replaced by the simple, economic geometry of a 'house of certainty' which made the institutions appear so light.

The seeing machine was once a sort of dark room into which individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole.

PAGE SUMMARIES

The summary of this page is a detailed explanation of the measures to be taken when the plague appeared in town. The plague has a lot of similarities to the Covid 19 pandemic currently being experienced in the world of the 21st century. For the level of quarantine to the space that has to exist between two individuals for safekeeping, also to inspections and stay home orders for safekeeping of the people that did not have the plague/ covid19 as at the time.

Due to the plague, the stay home orders which strictly supervised and recorded for safekeeping a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism was discovered as people were threatened to be killed if the rules and regulations put down by the people in power were not obeyed. As they really did not know what the full capabilities of the plague were they had to be strict to minimize the spread due to human contact. Not only did the plague discover the disciplinary mechanism but it also helped lead to the different disciplinary projects that came later. which they were able to do by understanding how separations, Individualizing distribution, Depth of surveillance, and control. Another topic was that of the leper and how that works in relation to the plague and some of the different spoken about were the political dream, like an exiled leper was done to secure a pure community but the plague is to achieve a disciplined society. This lead to the technique of power proper to disciplinary partitioning been used at the beginning of the 19th century by certain organizations like the psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory, the approved school, and, to some extent, the hospital.

An explanation of what the panopticon is and what the effects are were explained in detail with examples provided. The topic of the Panoptic mechanism, the use of light, and the arrangement of the spaces in the architectural sense also serve as an important aspect.

I found some of the topics discussed on this page to be very interesting as in the topic of power which the principle states that power should be visible and unverifiable. 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 any one moment, but he must be sure that he may always be so. I think that this was a well-thought plan that enabled the panopticon to run as it is supposed to because a slight change in the program has the ability to diminish the results. It also talks about the internal arrangement and what a real subjection is. As time went on the panopticon system of buildings evolved and the institution was built to look less and less like a jail.

On page five the advantages of the panopticon were explained. Also how the panopticon has been used as a laboratory and as a machine to carry out experiments but also incorporates how power plays an important role in the functions and all the polyvalent applications.

In summary, practice makes perfect this is what was done in the case of exercise of power through practice the best method is discovered but there would always be other external factors like noise that can impact the outcome. Power over the mind is also another thing people do; anything a person has to do or try to achieve always passes through the mind also but the panoptic schema makes any apparatus of power more intense no matter what organization uses it as long as it is been properly understood first. Understanding the panoptic scheme is not only practiced by the people in the institutions but also the public are made to test it out for themselves to fully understand what is going on and to see the evidence of no risk-taking in carrying it out.

The panoptic schema was created to spread among not just big organizations but also the community. The panopticon has a role of amplification which it carries out by intersecting itself into the economy and things of the economy like politics and Power to strengthen the social forces - to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply. There was also the topic of disciplinary mechanism and how this was made to function was done in two ways one was the disciple blockade created to stop negative functions while the other was the discipline mechanism that increased the exercise of power and how they affect people.

Page eight provided detailed explanations on the extension of the disciplinary institutions created and the effects they had. The first topic was the functional inversion of the disciplines which were expected to neutralize dangers, to fix useless or disturbed population but got switched to playing more positive roles like making sure there is discipline among the military which in turn increased the skills of the individuals and also their capacity for resistance among other things but most importantly the disciplines function increasingly as techniques for making useful individuals. Another topic was the swarming of disciplinary mechanisms this was practiced have people in institutions like Christian schools live their buildings and go into the public and function in a role of external surveillance. In which their aims were religious (conversion and moralization), economic (aid and encouragement to work), or political (the struggle against discontent or agitation).

The third topic was the state-control of the mechanisms of discipline which was taken over by the organization of centralized policy and in order to be exercised, 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.

P10

Discipline is known to be the correction of wrong to right by using different techniques but according to Michel Foucault 'Discipline' may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a 'physics' or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology but I understand it to be associated with any institutions that work with people for the sole purpose of reinforcing or reorganizing their internal mechanisms of power on the people so as not to lose control of them. But in other, for discipline to be effective surveillance must play an important role. Architectural ingenuity lead to the panoptic principle and changed the way people think and behave.

P11

Becoming a disciplinary society because it deals with different sectors of economic, juridico political, and scientific parts. Society has to find a way to be cost-effective, to bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity, to link this economic growth of power with the output of the institutions. The discipline had to solve a number of problems for which the old economy of power was not sufficiently equipped.

P12

The disciplinary pyramid works mainly with the division of labor which comes with coordination, separation, and supervision of tasks. The discipline is known to be a counter-law which makes it able to operate on the underside of the law, machinery that is both immense and minute, which supports, reinforces, multiplies the asymmetry of power and undermines the limits that are traced around the law.

P13

Various techniques and disciplines are important but as the world grows and evolves most of these techniques risk being forgotten and abandoned even though they were known to be once the very foundation of society. They also hold the knowledge for unbalancing power relations. Another invention of a technique was the Judicial investigation invented in the middle ages which have a role in the formation of knowledge.

P14

As time went by they realized that the mechanisms of discipline were not perfect and to rectify it they came up with a plan that was supposed to, for example, correct the rigors of the school with educational psychology. But that was just misleading information as to their techniques merely refer individuals from one disciplinary authority to another, and they reproduce, in a concentrated or formalized form, the schema of power-knowledge proper to each discipline.