Foucault’s panoptic appeared in a French philosopher’s thesis on power, control and domination. A panoptic is a building where a guard post is placed that covers the entire site, which means that anyone who looks can observe everything that those inside do. the guardian is not visible to others.
Foucault’s panoptic theory works on a similar concept, but from a more symbolic and abstract point of view. In its view, in society it operates a mechanism similar to that of the original panoptic, which essentially corresponds to the facilities of a prison.
- However.
- The mechanisms of monitoring and control in society are much more sophisticated and imperceptible.
- There are observation points for everything we do.
- But they go unnoticed or are accepted without further resistance.
This is what Foucault’s panoptic theory proposes: we are constantly monitored and controlled.
“Any education system is a political way of maintaining or changing the adequacy of discourse, with the knowledge and powers it entails” – Michel Foucault-
For Foucault, the evolution of history has led us to build a disciplinary society, that is, a society that evolves around mandates and obedience, the factor that makes it possible is surveillance, which corresponds exactly to foucault’s panoptic.
In a disciplinary society we try to standardize people’s behavior, to achieve this a series of rewards and punishments are implemented, those who comply with the standard are rewarded and those who defstrate are punished.
If all individuals have a mind more or less equal, it is easier to exercise control over them. At the same time, the way to control them is to standardize your mind.
An example is national teaching tests in many countries, apply to all students, and are given a grade, as this score is acquired or privileges are lost.
This measure unifies everyone and determines a place in the system, it is also a way to track learning, without demonstrating that it is an appropriate way to measure knowledge.
Foucault’s panoptic theory states that the instances they monitor are invisible to those monitored, it is an abstract and imprecise power, applied by many agents.
Take, for example, a company. An employee may never personally see the owner, but the owner has control over him through a series of procedures: sometimes immediate bosses, sometimes on-site cameras, etc.
The employee is visible to the owner because he controls his time and movements, but the opposite is not true.
One of the highlights of Foucault is precisely this mastery of time and movement, which he practices in school, at work and in various institutions and spaces.
People have to go through some spaces and not others, they should sit or stand up. They must also adjust their time according to what the different powers indicate.
Many may think that this is perfectly normal and should be a social order, yet this obsession with control and discipline did not exist at any point in history, or in all societies.
Foucault argued that there had come a time when corporal punishment was not necessary to force people to act the way their backs wanted. Today’s society has normalized everything. He has determined good and evil, in many cases in a totally arbitrary way.
This ends up invading even the most intimate aspects of a person, including sexuality.
The symbolic message is so powerful that it is transmitted to all by the main institutions (school, state, media, etc. ) that the same people under control collaborate in the exercise of power. Do they do it, and “self-nsorship. ” They’re afraid of a sanction, an exclusion.
Foucault has seen no impressive technological advances in surveillance. The subject surpassed his fears. Computing allows constant monitoring of each of us.
We know that and it makes us feel a vague fear. There is a great desire not to be different from others, to uniformize. Thus, the great power seems increasingly consolidated.