Discussion Questions

PLSC 464 Q’s

Sonia Kruks

1.
“Panopticism is not confined to particular institutions, such as the prison or the asylum. On the contrary, Foucault conceives it to be a general "modality of power" in normalizing societies such as ours. Moreover, women are subject to (and subjects of) what Foucault refers to as "the minute disciplines, the panopticisms of every day" (1977a: 223), in a particularly all-encompassing and complex manner that he does not himself explore.” -Sonia Kruks

How do women today experience the panopticon of our society differently than men?

2. Kruks argues that Beauviour “enables us to reintroduce into his (Foucault) analysis notions of personal agency and moral accountability that remain important for any project of emancipatory politics.’

Why do you think that this urgency and moral accountability is missing from Foucault’s account?

2.5  While Foucault acknowledges that there has been “effective resistance” to panoptic scrutiny he also posits that this panoptic power can penetrate the body without “mediation of the subjects own representations. If power takes hold of the body, this isn’t through its having first to be interiorized in people’s consciousness.” pg 6

Kruks argues that this is a fallacy for and a contradiction.  Do you think that Foucault is resistant to the concept of individual potential for intention and consciousness in response to the influences of the panopticon?


3. “Such passages imply something else: an active, even, one could argue, a quasi-constituting, subject; a conscious subject who "knows" that he is visible; one who "assumes responsibility" for the effects of power on himself, and who is active in playing "both roles," that of scrutinizer and scrutinized. “

What about the panopticon causes men and women to internalize the effects to the point where they self police?

4.. “In such ways, a young woman learns how to develop those practices of self-surveillance and self-discipline that Foucault attributes to the panoptic gaze. But they are not the direct effect of the gaze itself, so much as of the shame with which it forces her to see "herself." ”-Sonia Kruks

How do women lack the ability to reciprocate on men the objectivity they experience?

5.  “On the contrary, Beauvoir points out, the would-be independent woman lives her femininity as a painful contradiction. Brought up (as most girls still are today) to see herself through the male gaze, enjoined to passivity, and to make herself desirable to man,  she is her femininity.” -Sonia Kruks

If women cannot escape the panoptic gazes of men, is there still the possibility for independence and freedom, according to Beauvoir? Foucault?


Foucault-

1. “The modeling of the body produces a knowledge of the individual, the apprenticeship of the techniques induces modes of behavior and the acquisition of skills is inexorably linked with the establishment of power relations; strong, skilled agricultural workers are produced; in this very work, provided it is technically supervise, submissive subjects are produced and a dependable body of knowledge build up about them”  pg. 294


This quote, with its language of ‘knowledge’ and ‘apprenticeship’ makes this transformation into a submissive body appear to be a reliant upon the disposed position of the inmate/body. How is one to reject this submission? Does Foucault believe it is possible to escape this modeling of the body? Do you?


2. Foucault describes: “The essential element of its program was to subject the future cadres to the same apprenticeships and to the same coercions as the inmates themselves they were ‘subjected as pupils to the discipline that, later, as instructors, they would themselves impose.’ They were taught the art of power relations.” Pg. 295

Do you believe that this element still exists in our prison systems? And by extension do you believe that other institutions, which Foucault has likened to the prison system i.e. the punitive school, military, hospital etc. have this same process of indoctrination of its future administrators?

3. “The carceral network does not cast the unassimilable into a confused hell; there is no outside. It takes back with one hand what it seems to exclude with the other. It saves everything, including what it punishes.”  Pg. 301

What does he mean by this and do you recognize elements of modern society in it?