When I read Foucault’s piece on the
Panopticon, my mind jumped to the way Ideology works in our society. While
ideology does work in the way the Panopticon was proposed (The observer being
the ruling class as Marx would put it and we the prisoners), the metaphor can
be extended and become something else where we wouldn’t even have to be within
the panoptic building but we would still impose rules on ourselves.
On page 98 Foucault says “Hence the
major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and
permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power…in short,
the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves
the bearers.” In even shorter, the prisoner becomes their own guard. Going back
to the ideology metaphor, we then inforce the ideologies of the ruling class in
ourselves becoming our own keepers. Furthermore, because we inhabit the same
society, it is safe to assume other people become their own guards and enforce
the ruling class ideologies themselves. That being said, while ideology is
Panopticon-esque we aren’t actually in the building, we are free to interact
and converse with one another. This is where the self-appointed guard aspect
comes into play.
Since we live outside of the wall
of a Panopticon but carry our ideology with us, and as such are our own guards,
we live in this ‘ideological’ society that even if we don’t want to follow it
there are those who will chastise us for doing so. It’s kind of like an
inverted Panopticon, instead of one person observing many, it is the many observing
the one and enforcing the ideals acting as the guard for any individual who
steps out of line at any given moment. I first heard of this idea in a reading
by Eric Dunning where he cites John Fiske who says:
Sport…is
an ‘inverted panopticon’ where fans whose behaviour is ‘monitored and totally
known’ at work become monitors of the players who, through their ‘total
visibility’, become ‘epistemological bobo doll(s) upon which the fans can punch
away their frustration’ (Dunning 2001)
I don’t know the
greater implications of this all yet, but I just think there’s an interesting
connection between the two theories, even though Foucault says that this theory shouldn't be applied to anything in particular.
(Dunning: http://samples.sainsburysebooks.co.uk/9781134870141_sample_899095.pdf)
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