What's Panopticism? Exploring Digital Cultures
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The document discusses the concept of panopticism, originally presented by Jeremy Bentham and later expanded by Michel Foucault, focusing on how visibility and surveillance create power dynamics in society. It explores the implications of control, discipline, and knowledge in various institutions, illustrating how individuals are shaped by these mechanisms in a biopolitical context. Additionally, it touches on the evolution of digital cultures and the asymmetry of information in decentralized networks, highlighting the transition from disciplinary societies to societies of control.
![Panopticism as power
• Embodied power relationships... “political
anatomy” ... individual is fabricated
“[...] the body is reduced as a political force at the
least cost and maximezed as a useful force” p. 368
• Exercised continuously
“[...] these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all
those systems of micro-power that are essentially
non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the
discipline”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/presentationpanopticism-110329195003-phpapp01/85/What-s-Panopticism-Exploring-Digital-Cultures-6-320.jpg)
![Deleuze’s Postscript on the societies of
control
[...] In the societies of control, on the other hand, what
is important is no longer either a signature or a
number, but a code: the code is a password, while on
the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by
watchwords (as much from the point of view of
integration as from that of resistance). The numerical
language of control is made of codes that mark access
to information, or reject it. We no longer find
ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair.
Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses,
samples, data, markets, or "banks."](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/presentationpanopticism-110329195003-phpapp01/85/What-s-Panopticism-Exploring-Digital-Cultures-13-320.jpg)
What's Panopticism? Exploring Digital Cultures
- 1. Panopticism ARIN6903 Exploring Digital Cultures Nicola Giusto
- 2. Panopticon was first developed as an architecture work by J. Bentham (1748 - 1832)
- 3. Bentham’s building • Prisoners are constantly visible BUT they do not see. “visibility is a trap” • Prisoners are objects of information NEVER subjects of communication. “collection of separated individualities” • Control is unverifiable! No one see inside tower • Efficiency, Economy, Simplicity, Automation
- 4. M. Foucault (1926 - 1984) • The birth of the clinic, 1963 • Discourse on language, 1970 • Discipline & Punish: the birth of the prison, 1975 • Lectures at Collège De France: Security, Territory, Population, 1977 - 78, & The birth of biopolitics, 1978 - 1979
- 5. Overall Foucaultian thought • Knowledge is Power. Information empowers action, action provokes new information (circular process) • Technology changes the model of power / knowledge • Active role of observation. Objectivation produces, evokes its own object • Contra Structuralist theory, analysis has to be related to a defined historical context
- 6. Panopticism as power • Embodied power relationships... “political anatomy” ... individual is fabricated “[...] the body is reduced as a political force at the least cost and maximezed as a useful force” p. 368 • Exercised continuously “[...] these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the discipline”
- 7. Panopticism as knowledge • Increase the utility of the penalty “the codified power to punish turns into a disciplinary power to observe” p. 369 • Formation of “biographical” knowledge “the legal punishment bears upon act; the punitive technique on a life” p. 371
- 8. Panopticism as disciplinary society or ‘social laboratory’ Surveillance & Control in order to organise moltiplicities thru: • “continuos registration and perpetual assessment and classification” • “define tactics of distribution, reciprocal adjustment of bodies, gestures and rhythms, differentiation of capacities, reciprocal coordination in relation to apparatus or tasks”
- 9. Institutions object produced knowledge produced prison prisoner punishment psychopathology, asylum madman experimental psychiatry hospital patient medical treatment sociology of production, factory worker human resource management school student education army soldier performance, trainings family ... ...
- 10. To summarise
- 11. Control Discipline Society of Sovereignty XX XVIII - XIX (G. Deleuze) procedure, norm, Ceremonial, Mechanism number, signature, codes, protocols ritual, spectacle examination King, leader, Bodies and Who dividuals hangman relationships Light power: Corporal force, access to information Kind of power separation, inscription, power of death or exclusion subjection Institution, vast closed Networks - Space environment, fixed Striated vs Rhizomic structure spaces Manifest, public, Visibility Invisible, material Invisible, intangible catharsis
- 12. What’s up today?
- 13. Deleuze’s Postscript on the societies of control [...] In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks."
- 16. Internet and decentralised networks Asymmetry of informations: Server / Clients, Hub / nodes, Google, Facebook, Flickr, Apple, AT&T, Bing / End User Moglen, E. (2010), Freedom in the Cloud, Talk at New York ISOC meeting. : http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1338
- 17. Internet and decentralised networks Asymmetry of informations: Server / Clients, Hub / nodes, Google, Facebook, Flickr, Apple, AT&T, Bing / End User Moglen, E. (2010), Freedom in the Cloud, Talk at New York ISOC meeting. : http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1338
- 18. Mapping - make the social graph visible • map of security cameras in Venice Anoption project • participated cartography Biopolitics map Venice 2007 • create & share data maps Targetmap
- 19. Thanks