Surveillance & Foucault
- Created by: rebeccamellors
- Created on: 14-02-17 09:17
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- Surveillance - Foucault
- Surveillance = monitoring of public behaviour for the purposes of population or crime control
- Foucault's (1979) Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison opens with striking contrast between 2 different forms of punishment
- Sovereign Power
- Typical of period before 19th century, when the monarch had power over people & their bodies
- Control was asserted by inflicting disfiguring, visible punishment on the body
- Punishment was brutal, emotional spectacle
- Disciplinary Power
- Dominant from 19th century
- New system of discipline seeks to govern not just the body but the mind or 'soul'
- Does so through surveillance
- Sovereign Power
- The Panopticon
- Foucault illustrates disciplinary power through the panopticon
- Was a design for a prison where the prisoners are visible to the guards but the guards aren't visible to the prisoners
- Therefore prisoners don't know if they are being watched but they know they might be
- Prisoners have to behave at all times as if they were being watched
- Surveillance becomes self-surveillance
- Discipline becomes self-discipline
- The Dispersal of Discipline
- Foucault argues disciplinary power has now dispersed throughout society, penetrating every institution to reach every individual
- Therefore the form of surveillance in the Panopticon is now a model of how power operates in society as a whole
- Criticisms
- Accused of wrongly assuming that expressive (emotional) aspects of punishment disappear in modern society
- He exaggerates extent of control
- Goffman (1982) shows how some inmates are able to resist controls
- Overestimates the power of surveillance to change behaviour
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