Thursday 25 October 2012

Lecture 3 // Panopticism

Panopticism - institutions and institutional power.

Social Control and the way society effects our actions and emotions.

Panopticon is a building

Discipline

The Great Confinement (late 1609), there was no name for madness, people were accepted as happy fools, they were allowed to live with us, there was no separation.  A new sensibility emerged towards work and an anxiety began to emerge about people being useless to society/ a problem.  Houses of Correction started to get built, a bit like workhouses or prisons.  The mad, criminals, drunkards, diseased, single mothers, vagabondz, and they were put to work or they were beaten.  An exercise used as a moral reform to make the people better.

The houses of Correction, people began to think was a mistake because they all started to corrupt each other.  Specialist institutions replaced them - asylums, prisons and hospitals.  These worked in a different way to correct people, instead of physical abuse to get them to work they used minor tactics.  They were treated like children, if they behaved they were praised.  Subtly training people to behave - modifying attitudes and personalities.

New forms of specialist knowledge emerges at this time, biology, psychiatry, medicine - legitimise the practices of hospitals, doctors, psychiatrists.  In these institutions you take responsibility for your actions.  Punishment shows power of the state - a reminder to everyone not to do anything wrong.

New form of discipline 









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