the Panopticon IS Re: [ssf] some MORE thoughts by Michel Foucault

[k9]

@mparo wrote:

> The Panopticon, terrible weapon of mass mental destruction.

Guess so ... but I've not read any statistics ?  :)

I suspect the writer uses the design of the Panopticon ( the panoptic 
schema ) as a general metaphor within and throughout the social body.

For example, and to expand upon the 'principle that power should be 
visible and unverifiable', which Foucault decides Bentham has 'laid 
down' in his panoptic schema, the writer continues:

  "Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall 
outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: 
the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any moment; 
but he must be sure that he may always be so."

Tall towers / Unreal Cities / Falling towers / Unreal

>> "Psychiatry is another example. The power of the psychiatrist was
>> institutionalised by the law of 1838 which, by making the psychiatrist a
>> person who had to be consulted before anybody could be imprisoned, gave
>> psychiatric knowledge a certain degree of Power."

< snip from *The 12 Monkeys* >

Dr Owen Fletcher:  Kathryn / You are a rational person / You're a 
trained Psychiatrist / You know the difference between what's real and 
what's not /

Dr Kathryn Railly: And what we say is the truth is what everyone excepts 
... right Owen ? / I mean Psychiatry ... it's the latest religion / We 
decide who's right or wrong / We decide who's crazy or not ?/ Well ... 
I'm in trouble here / I'm losing my faith /

</snip>

--
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
thinking of a key, each confirms a prison


> Michel Foucault analyzed in depth the nature of prisons and
> imprisonment, the concepts of locking up the poor and insane.
> 
> And again in Power and the Norm, he refers to the relevance of
> "reporting to" (your hierarchical superiors):
> 
> ........
> "3. A knowledge of Inquisition: the arrest of an individual was always
> accompanied by a report on his behaviour.
> 
> In the 19th century, these techniques were revived according to two
> major principles:
> a. henceforth every agent of power became a means of developing
> knowledge; every agent of power had to send back to those from whom his
> power had been delegated, specific knowledge corresponding to the power
> he exercised. That is to say, any given order had to be matched by a
> report on the way that order had been carried out, the conditions which
> made its execution possible or impossible, the effects of the order and
> the possible corrections to be made. The chief constables, the attorney
> generals, were tied to this obligation of the report.
> 
> "b. The Report as a form of the relations between Power and Knowledge.
> (If the report had existed before this, it was only as a periodic thing,
> as a custom. The systematising, the institutionalising of this report
> made by every agent of Power to his superior, is a phenomenon which has
> been as important in the history of the relations between Power and
> Knowledge as the invention of double-entry book-keeping was to the
> mediaeval economy, or the invention of feedback is for modern
> technology). Linked to the Report, a series of specific instruments was
> introduced for the purposes of abstraction and generalisation, for
> making estimates, statistical work, etc. Statistics became a State
> science, giving rise to something like Sociology. (Philosophical
> critiques of abstraction have often been produced, as has the history of
> the experimental method. It is time a history of the administrative
> extraction of Knowledge was drawn up).
> 
> (......)
> "Psychiatry is another example. The power of the psychiatrist was
> institutionalised by the law of 1838 which, by making the psychiatrist a
> person who had to be consulted before anybody could be imprisoned, gave
> psychiatric knowledge a certain degree of Power."