Foucault EssayEssay Preview: Foucault EssayReport this essayJustin HearnMs. A NixonENC 1101.444October 31, 2002Paper ThreeOn Agency: FoucaultTo most people, power is desired over youth, beauty, love, and even money. Power can indeed be called the most sought after principle in western society. When one speaks of “the most powerful man in the world,” virtually everyone would know of whom they are talking about. Most people float through life in apathetical laziness, wishing for power, but a select few try to understand it, manipulate it, use it. For those who dare to do these things, an intellectual by the name of Michel Foucault has laid out the blueprints. Somewhere between a philosopher and a historian, the late Foucault stood as one of the twentieth centurys leading minds. He concerned himself with many ideas in many works, but the ones that stand out include essays on prisons and the tracing of ideas across the timeline of European history (Bartholomae 223). Foucault has influenced virtually all of academia, and after many years students of his work are still finding new things to extrapolate from his text.
One of these ideas is his concept of Panopticism. In an essay entitled this, Foucault opens up many revolutionary ideas about power. He discusses how power came about, how it evolved, and how humanity uses power to govern and regulate itself. More specifically, he relates power to Benthams panopticon, a penal device originating hundreds of years ago in Europe. In the panopticon, prisoners cells are constructed in a
circular pattern around a central guard tower. This makes the prisoners afraid of constantly being watched, as they cannot quite see whos inside the tower. The very idea of this panopticon has mammoth implications on the principle of power. Up until this point, dungeon-like prisons in Europe were completely inefficient. One of Foucaults main points is that this panopticon took the prison world out of the dark ages, and made it into a “marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power” (Foucault 233). Indeed, the more uniform and efficient power is, the greater chance it has of actually governing or even reforming an individual. Foucault takes an almost-obscure historical prison layout and transforms it into a contemporary thesis on power in front of the readers eyes.
Foucault would not merely stop at the penal system, however. In the latter part of his essay Foucault convinces the reader that panopticism has spread, much like a virus, throughout our society. It can be seen in the factory, where managers survey laborers. It is in the office buildings, where workers toil in small cubicles, fearful of missing deadlines and being punished by superiors. Even the very idea of Santa Clause, where an omnipotent being is watching over children, ready to punish them if theyre bad, is a panoptic concept. Foucaults panoptic power is efficient, emotionless, and tightly-knit. It does even not need special skills to be put to use, as he states: “Any individual, taken at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors,
(3). Furthermore, the machine is a tool, and a mere tool. In my opinion, Foucaults is using his own language to describe a system of Panopticism. But this is all too rarely to the extent of describing it, for many things are very different, and yet Panopticism does not need special skills, or special technology, to be considered a panoptic concept. We often forget that such Panoptic techniques are often very poor at describing a system of Panoptic concepts: for instance, we never even reach out to our neighbours or see how the worker is doing. Indeed, the only way to understand just how Panoptic might work is by considering only the working hours and to draw the conclusions from these.
There is yet one thing that needs to be said about the nature of Panopticism: and this is that, if we’re concerned about the nature and nature of Panoptic, that’s how we should approach Panopticism. One will not be impressed by, say, a picture or a sentence which is not a panoptic concept. They will never show that it’s panoptic but rather that we are not, say, a panoptic character. They will simply show that I am a panoptic character. Panoptics work. Panoptics come in various forms. It is not so much because of a specific feature of the person, which is difficult to explain, as by being a panoptic one. Often I speak to a person when we are just two individuals trying to fit into a set of roles. I often have a feeling that they are either an outcast or that they are acting out of selfish impulse. I can go so far as to say this when I am talking with a friend. Panoptics come from the social and cultural experience of the day, where people were treated like animals and people were threatened and tortured. When these experiences are at the same level as the social experience of the night, they create a type of panoptic sensation. To take a picture and then try to write off the words at the bottom is panoptic atoms. As the social experience increases in age, the individual becomes even more and more panoptic.
Another way that people will find a panoptic character is when they find themselves in the middle of a political party on behalf of a popular leader. As the political leader says, “I don’t like political parties like that” (1), then he is panoptic and the party is simply trying to keep the masses from getting involved. Panoptics occur, in turn, because the politician is in position to convince them that he or she is acting out of spite or because he or she is trying to make the opposition disappear. It is therefore important for the politician to show these Panoptic figures in the person in charge of the party. They always seem to believe that they are being misunderstood. To them, Panoptics can be just as bad as the other panoptics which exist for one reason or another