Foucault and Davis Essay

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Foucault and Davis

The idea of the panopticon came from English philosopher and thinker Jeremy Bentham, after he helped to design a building in which one supervisor could observe all of the workers within. Eventually, Bentham's panopticon was converted into prison design, as people realized the benefits of a building which contains a point from where all of the prisoners inside could be watched by a single guard. While the architectural theory of the panopticon failed to catch on during Bentham's lifetime, many philosophers have since examined the idea from a variety of angles, discussing ideas like social control and authoritarianism. One of those philosophers was the Frenchman Michel Foucault, who wrote a book called Discipline and Punish in 1975 which contained many references to the panopticon as becoming the model for social structures.

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According to Foucault's view, the panopticon as imagined by Bentham has become more than just a physical building, and is now the model for how cities are planned and major institutions are formed. Foucault talks about the idea of "panopticism," which he describes as "the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social 'quarantine,' to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of 'panopticism'" (1984). Simply put, Foucault believes that the panopticon's original idea of ensuring that people obey a central authority has been transferred to the way society is made up today. When one thinks about the sheer number of surveillance cameras and other tools used to promote the government's presence, it is hard to say that Foucault's ideas….....

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