Foucault, Michel

Foucault situates surveillance in power. He developed Bentham's idea of the panopticon which he said applied to prisons, factories, hospitals, the military and schools. He mostly focuses on the 18th and 19th century rather than his contemporary technologies (607). Bauman and Lyon (2013) comment that we are in a post-panopticon society because there is no longer a fixed site of panopoticon, and surveillance is liquid (p. 11).

Foucault said, "He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection" (qtd. in Bauman and Lyon, 2013, p. 53).

Foucault highlighted five expressions of power which were used to control people: 1) sovereign power associated with those in control; 2) disciplinary power associated with institutions like schools and factories; 3) pastoral power which is associated with Christian pastorate but secularized by the state; 4) biopower which refers to govern life forces; and 5) technologies of the self which is where people act upon themselves (Nadesan, 2008, p.8).

Staples (2000) stated that Foucault believed that penal reformers of the 18th century tried to make punishment rationally organized and proportional to the crime committed. For them, deterrence, rather than retribution was the purpose , and they sent criminals for both body and soul refromation at asylums. This was to break the offender of his bad habits and rehabilitate the deviant to society. Punishment would be a success when the criminal was "rehabilitated." Foucault questioned whether this "rehabilitation" was "progress" or more "humane." Staples illustrates this by asking, is pain the only measure of benevolence? Would one rather want five lashes or five years in prison? (p. 16). Somewhere along the line, reformers started to think that a criminal could offer more than his body as punishment; he should be morally reformed from the inside out (p. 17).

References:

Bauman, Z. & Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid surveillance. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage.

Haggerty, K.D., & Ericson, R. (2000). The Surveillant assemblage. British Journal of Sociology, 51(4), 605-622.

Nadesan, M.H. (2008). Governmentality, biopower, and everyday life. Florence, KY: Routledge.

Staples, W. G. (2000). Everyday surveillance: Vigilance and visibility in postmodern life. 2^nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.