Panopticism

In the early 1600s there was a thing known as the Great Confinement, where tons of "houses of correction" were erected to curb unemployment and idleness. It was the birth of the asylum, where someone who wasn't a boon in life was sent to a place where they would be "corrected" to fit back into society. The birth of the forms of science and knowledge like biology, psychiatry, and medicine legitimised the practices of various doctors and psychiatrists. It rationalised the various correction institutions like prison, the asylum and the hospital, and conditioning institutions like the school. Michel Foucalt, a philosopher responsible for Madness & Civilization, and Dicipline & Punish, said that it was these institutions that 'internalized our responsibilities'. He said that

"Discipline is a ‘technology’ [aimed at] ‘how to keep someone under surveillance, how to control his conduct, his behaviour, his aptitudes, how to improve his performance, multiply his capacities, how to put him where he is most useful: that is discipline in my sense’"

(Foucault,1981 in O’Farrrell 2005:102)

The Panopticon was an Architectural Design made by Jeremy Bentham proposed in 1791 to help discipline and condition people into learning a certain way. Its a large circular design with cells going around the outer edge, with the person in power being in the centre of the building. This design made it so that the only person you could see was the person who was either holding you or teaching you. It was supposed to internalize in the individual the conscious state that he is always being watched. It was supposed to make the individual more productive. The idea was that this building design could help reform prisoners, treat patients, instruct schoolchildren, help confine, but also study the insane, supervise workers, and put beggars and idlers to work.

Foucault described that there was a new mode of power called panopticism. It is the idea that the person in power is always watching, a sort of "big brother" mentality to keep the people in check and always working. That way the people would turn into 'docile bodies' who were self monitoring, self correcting, and obedient. He stated that power was a relation between individuals and groups, and only exists when it is exercised.