Mongoose, Foucault

Michel Foucault gives us a completely different take on society than what we have seen from our past theorists; we have spent the past few readings focusing on some different forms of oppression we face through media as well as other forms. Ideology may be repressive to society but only in a mental sense, we see very few instances where ideological forces have led to physical force or constraints; same thing to be said about propaganda – while it may influence and change our lives there is a very low possibility of it physically affecting our lives. Foucault presents us with a completely new concept of restraint – surveillance. The part of his idea of surveillance that I chose to focus on is his description of the ‘panopticon’; this was a building that was intricately designed to keep prisoners, the diseased, or whoever they chose, away from society. The purpose of this building according to him was to: “induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” (98). Basically it induced a state of fear that there was always the possibility of them being watched, judged or surveilled by others and themselves. Foucault described their situation as being “caught up in a power situation of which they themselves are the bearers (98).” The inmate was so afraid of being watched, they did not know if they were or not because they could not see the guards, that they policed themselves in order to stay out of trouble. This reminds me of a very resent day situation in which we do not know if we are being watched so we police ourselves: traffic lights. Because of the new implementation of cameras at street lights we never know if we are going to be caught running a red light, because of this we police ourselves better and tend to stop sooner than we normally would. This creates a more self-policed society much as the panopticon did back in the day of Foucault.