PANOPTICISM ESSAY FROM WAYS OF READING BOOK
Panopticism Essay Have you ever thought about what it would be like to have absolute power and control? A philosopher and historian by the name of Michel Foucault offered a theory on how to achieve this in his essay entitled “Panopticism”. In this essay, he talks about the means that panopticism uses to control the thoughts and action of people. He describes panopticism as “a marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogenous effects of power.” This is basically how panopticism is used to manipulate and control the people in our society today. ... In Foucault’s essay, he talks about how panopticism would be used to see if school children would learn different things depending on if they were told and showed enough times that it were the truth. ... The power structure of panopticism can be related to almost any type of situation, in which, there is a group who wants another group to do something. ... In school the teacher watches over the students and the students know that if they are caught by the teacher doing something bad then they will get punished, by getting detention during recess or after school or being suspended or expelled from school, therefore making the student believe that he should not do anything bad. ... ” If you think about what he is saying, it relates to both Bordo and Foucault’s essay. ... This relates to the panopticism idea of telling the people something is true so many times that they end up believing it, just like how we have been told so many times that our government defends our freedom, but actually does not let us be as free as we think. The main basis of why panopticism works is because people rarely know it is taking place. The in-class movie we watched entitled The Matrix showed us how panopticism is used without the people knowing it was happening.