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Thursday 9 June 2011

Safe Walks Foucault

Safe Walks and thought crime...

Panopticism is a theory of social control that is based on surveillance, indicating that there are always people watching your every move.  This theory is depicted in the book 1984 by George Orwell.  1984 is one of Orwell’s best-crafted novels, and it remains one of the most powerful warnings ever issued against the dangers of a totalitarian society.  In this dystopian future of 1984, everyone is in a state of fear because they are afraid that they are always being watched and if one person does something wrong, they are taken away and never seen again.


Minority Report has a similar idea of Foucault’s Panopticism and Orwell’s 1984.



 Foucault says, “If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents” (Foucault 200). 

Foucault Michel.  “Panopticism.”  Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
l975.  Trans. Alan Sheridan, 1977. New York: Vintage Books. 2nd ed.
 1995. pp. 195-228.


http://sites.google.com/site/mattpageaepi/hypertext



The panoptic principle; what he calls panopticism. It is a hierarchical principle that allows the gaze to be directed unilaterally. I like to call it the CIA feeling, even though I think that the CIA is now largely obsolete; it’s the CIA feeling, it’s that they are looking at me, but how do I know when I am looking at them. That’s panopticism and this is not just a feature of prisons; this is what Foucault points out. In fact it’s very… its hilarious.
Many of the same architects that built our prisons in North Carolina and elsewhere also build or what? Our schools! Our hospitals! All of the places in which we want to keep, contain, and control docile bodies, docile social bodies. For this reason Foucault extends as a generalised critique of our society that it is in fact a prison. It is a carceral gulag,



http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/06/eu-regulators-scrutinize-facebooks-facial-recognition-feature.ars



He is trying to point out that we have a society that is an entire carceral body; a social prison within each one of us have certain safe walks and certain excluded walks, and all of them are surveilled and our behaviour is surveilled.

http://rickroderick.org/306-foucault-and-the-disappearance-of-the-human-1993/

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