foucault and the panopticon

8/7/2019 Foucault and the Panopticon

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Aesthetics and Visual Culture

Photography

Foucault and the Panopticon



With fine arts people struggled toachieve the illusion of reality. With

photography the illusion is

guaranteed by the process.



What is the relationship between

photography and reality?



Photography began to open up a

visual world as never before.



If the photograph merely reports

an event, can it be art?



T

he photograph can only bebeautiful if it captures a beautiful

thing.



Culture according to Foucault aims

at the creation of ³docile bodies´.



Docile Bodies could work on the

new production lines in factories,adapt to the social environment of

the new cities and create new

behaviors suitable for life in publicspaces.



Foucault¶s view is that culture is a

mechanism of repression. Culture

is a system of discipline based on

surveillance.



How we build determines the type

of society we live in.



Foucault suggests that a "carceral continuum" runs throughmodern society, from the maximum security prison, through

secure accommodation, probation, social workers, police,

and teachers, to our everyday working and domestic lives.

All are connected by the (witting or unwitting) supervision

(surveillance, application of norms of acceptable behaviour)

of some humans by others.



The emergence of prison as the form of punishment for

every crime grew out of the development of discipline in the

18th and 19th centuries, according to Foucault



Discipline, he suggests, developed a new economy and politics for

bodies. Modern institutions required that bodies must be individuated

according to their tasks, as well as for training, observation, and

control. Therefore, he argues, discipline created a whole new form of

individuality for bodies, which enabled them to perform their duty within

the new forms of economic, political, and military organizations

emerging in the modern age and continuing to today.

The individuality which discipline constructs for the bodies which it

controls has four characteristics, namely it makes individuality which is:

cellular - determining the spatial distribution of the bodiesorganic - ensuring that the activities required of the bodies are "natural"

for them

genetic - controlling the evolution over time of the activities of the

bodies

combinatory - allowing for the combination of the force of many bodies

into a single massive force



Do we live in a culture of

surveillance and control or in asociety where we have actual

freedom?



What does it mean to dwell, rather

than merely exist by serving theexisting order.



The point to show that we are

enslaved by the societies that

promise us freedom.



What kind of society will we build?

Who does our technology serve?

Can we build (tekt) from the source(arche) so that our societies are

just?

foucault and the panopticon

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