Table of Contents
What is the concept of the panopticon?
The panopticon is a disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells. From the tower, a guard can see every cell and inmate but the inmates can’t see into the tower. Prisoners will never know whether or not they are being watched.
What is Foucault’s panopticon theory?
Foucault’s theory states that knowledge is power. The Panopticon was a metaphor that allowed Foucault to explore the relationship between 1.) Suitable behaviour is achieved not through total surveillance, but by panoptic discipline and inducing a population to conform by the internalization of this reality.
What are the main points of the feminist theory?
Feminist theory often focuses on analyzing gender inequality. Themes often explored in feminist theory include discrimination, objectification (especially sexual objectification), oppression, patriarchy, stereotyping, art history and contemporary art, and aesthetics.
What are the four principles of the panopticon?
The player, assisted by Bentham himself, acts as governor of the prison and has to balance economies of the social benefits of Bentham’s vision-happiness, rehabilitation, work-against the functions of discipline, punishment, and surveillance, while also ensuring that their panopticon is orderly and profitable.
What are the roles of Panopticon?
As a work of architecture, the panopticon allows a watchman to observe occupants without the occupants knowing whether or not they are being watched. As a metaphor, the panopticon was commandeered in the latter half of the 20th century as a way to trace the surveillance tendencies of disciplinarian societies.
By making our actions and shares visible to a crowd, social media exposes us to a kind of virtual Panopticon. The crowd honours the identity that we create by sharing this content. Sharing online is not solely a matter of self-affirmation and self-creation.
What are three characteristics of the Panopticon that are important in Foucault’s analysis of discipline?
Other increasingly profound processes operated: one) the functional inversion of disciplines; two) the swarming of disciplinary mechanisms; mechanisms begin to circulate openly in society, and are broken down into flexible methods of control; three) the state control of discipline, as in the formation of a central …
What does Foucault argue is the major effect of the Panopticon?
This permanent visibility became a way to exercise power and in so doing induce “in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility.” Foucault writes: Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable.
What are the three main principles of feminist theory?
Feminist theory has developed in three waves. The first wave focused on suffrage and political rights. The second focused on social inequality between the genders. The current, third wave emphasizes the concepts of globalization, postcolonialism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism.
How did Jeremy Bentham contribute to society?
Jeremy Bentham is important for being one of the founders of modern utilitarianism, a main current of philosophical ethics since the late 18th century, for his defense of psychological and ethical hedonism, and for his far-reaching proposals for the reform of Parliament, the legal code, the judiciary, and the prison …
Who originally theorized the concept of the Panopticon?
Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher and social theorist in the mid-1700s, invented a social control mechanism that would become a comprehensive symbol for modern authority and discipline in the western world: a prison system called the Panopticon.