I most appreciate the art of discipline, as it is wholly more powerful to have subjects disciplined in advance in order to avoid misbehavior than to have to hand out punishments all the time in my opinion. The problem of discipline is that it's practically impossible to have a governing force keep watch and correct any ill behavior at all times. For instance, historically a King can not watch over all his subjects even if he has an impressive martial force they too can not see all. That is why the King resorts to producing fear inducing public punishments, so that people may see what punishment awaits them if they act out. However, in our day and age such brutality is not publicly condoned therefore the keep so many people in line another method must be deployed. In this case, preemptive discipline. Most people do wrong because they do not believe themselves to be seen, and in turn punished. However if you can induce a state in the subject where they believe they are always being watched, they will less likely act out. It reminds me of the slogan, 'big brother is always watching'.
In the book Foucault goes into a very direct example of the feeling of surveillance, specifically the Panopticon.
This photo is an example of such a structure. As you can see there is a heightened sense of observation given the central guard tower that can look out towards any of the inmates cells. This removed from the inmates a sense of secrecy or privacy and in most cases would diminish unsavory activity due to the sense of observance.
In current times this feeling of observance is carried through the placement of cameras, internet monitoring, police patrols, and many other ways. So such direct methods aren't necessary because in so many other ways people are disciplined to believe that their actions will be watched over, and if they act inappropriately someone will know.
No comments:
Post a Comment