One central tenet of Foucault’s conception of power is that it cannot be located; it is everywhere and therefore also inside us (Foucault, 1997b: 108). Power relations produce the subject or, to be more precise, they instill in the individuals a historically determinedrelation with themselves (Rose, 1999: 243). In fact, any practice of surveillance entails self-surveillance as its historical counterpart and it is this simultaneity that accounts for the acceptance and legitimization of power relations.
The enlargement of the concept of self-surveillance implies associating it with practices of the care of the self. These practices require the stipulation of the part of the individuals that must be cared for and worked upon, a movement which corresponds to the production of an ethical substance (Foucault, 1985). In other words, self-surveillance is also based on the cultural postulation that certain thoughts and actions are dangerous or unwholesome to the constitution of the individual as a subject.
Enlarging the concept of self-surveillance also entails assuming that there is no neat line distinguishing power from care. The crucial point is that individuals usually problematize their thoughts and behaviors through beliefs held as true in their historical context. Hence, those who exercise power attain legitimacy by presenting themselves as helping us in caring for this part of ourselves that threatens our constitution as subjects. After all, they only intend to prevent us from straying away from the ‘correct’ path (Foucault, 1997d). Moreover, as the part of the self that demands care is ‘problematic’, one’s constitution as a subject entails an adversarial relation. Individuals must struggle against themselves in order to act according to ‘truth’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 480-482). Once again, if beliefs depend upon the context in which they are generated, struggling against the ‘problematic’ portion of the self in order to act according to ‘truth’ can be viewed as behaving as a given culture expects one to behave.
Our argumentation begins by highlighting a theoretical difficulty found in the usual reading of Foucault’s description of the Panopticon. The difficulty lies in how to conceive the nature of self-surveillance induced by the panoptic tower. We contend that self-surveillance does not depend only on an “invisible but unverifiable” power (Foucault, 1979: p. 201), but also on normalizing judgment.
The majority of authors that deploys the panopticon as a historical background for new surveillance techniques quotes or rephrases passages in which Foucault defines the major effect of the panoptic tower. One often cited passage refers to the major effect of the Panopticon: “(…) to induce in the inmates a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault, 1979: 201). In another passage, Foucault wrote:
He [sic] 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 (Foucault, 1979: 202).
The Panopticon can be conceived as technology, first, because as an architectural arrangement, it substitutes human surveillance by an opaque but visible tower; and, secondly, because it renders power automatic by promoting self-surveillance.
The decisive question lies in how to conceive this self-surveillance. The nature of the compliance with power rules and values is what is at stake here. We believe that the strange proximity between the Panopticon and the “Big-Brother” is rooted in the understanding of self-surveillance not as care of the self, but as self-monitoring (Lyon, 2001: 114) or, as Norris and Armstrong ingeniously put it, as “habituated anticipatory conformity” (Norris and Armstrong, 1999: 6).
Putting ourselves in the prisoners’ situation may be the best way to shed light on the theoretical problems posed by these readings. What would it mean to comply with power through “anticipatory conformity”? We would certainly try to act according to what power expects from us, but we would only do so because we would be aware of the possibility of being observed. We would act differently if given the opportunity to escape power’s eye. We would resemble “docile bodies”, but our docility would only be apparent, a mask that we carried as long as we thought we were being observed.
To put it differently, we would internalize power’s eye but we would not identify with its values. In reality, instead of an unfolding of ourselves in consciousness and its object, our conduct, we would experience a threefold partition of our interiority. We would distance ourselves from our behaviors and look at them with power’s internalized eyes. However, there would be an additional detachment: a part of ourselves constituted by our consciousness and desire would be sheltered from power’s eyes.
Concretely, we would act considering the possibility of observation and posterior punishment and objectify our conduct accordingly, but we would not believe that by acting thus we would be doing what is best for us. Self-surveillance would be, in fact, experienced as surveillance of an internalized, but identified, other upon us. Although normalizing judgment can be understood as an infra-penalty that partitioned an area that the law had left empty – the vast domain of gestures, attitudes, quotidian activities, tasks, discourses, uses of time, habits, etc. – its real novelty resides in the fact that these micro-penalties are not addressed so much at what one does, but at who one is (Foucault, 1979: 178). Besides constructing the dangerous bridge between fact and value and thus associating knowledge with power, the normalizing judgment also operates the passage from action to being, extracting from individuals’ behavior the identity of each and everyone. The norm is an immanent law – an observed regularity and a proposed regulation (Foucault, 1979: 179). In schools, for instance, the average time spent by students to conclude a task is first observed and later becomes a rule: those who are too slow fail. This failure does not concern only the inobservance of a rule; it also concerns the value of individuals, conferring upon those who have failed an identity that can vary from the bad student to the abnormal.
Douglas’ analysis is insightful. It allows us, for instance, to make sense of a series of social movements directed against the tobacco industry and fast-food companies. The arguments deployed for holding these industries accountable for individual suffering are well known and fit well both Douglas’ analysis and the nexus here proposed between risk and addiction: in order to protect their interests, these industries knowingly put individuals at risk by exploiting frailties in their self-control. Still, there are two major differences between Douglas’ thesis and the arguments here developed. The first is straightforward: risk related to lifestyle is also and principally a means of placing the burden of caring for the future on individuals’ shoulders.
The generalization of the risky self provokes the emergence of a new relation between past and future. Human genetic mapping and life habits make it possible to anticipate, among the countless illnesses/diseases that may affect an individual and among the multiple ways of dying, those that are more probable, as well as the means we may dispose of to avoid their emergence. In presenting itself as anticipation of accidents and turbulences that may abbreviate our journey in this world, this scientifically defined possible determines limitations to be observed in the present. Life now depends on knowing how to behave in the distance between everything that may happen and what is more probable of happening; it depends on the restriction of possibilities – and not upon their invention and posterior realization. The aims of human action have indeed changed since the time in which terms such as progress, revolution, liberation or even cure organized the sense of the future.
The enlargement of the concept of self-surveillance implies associating it with practices of the care of the self. These practices require the stipulation of the part of the individuals that must be cared for and worked upon, a movement which corresponds to the production of an ethical substance (Foucault, 1985). In other words, self-surveillance is also based on the cultural postulation that certain thoughts and actions are dangerous or unwholesome to the constitution of the individual as a subject.
Enlarging the concept of self-surveillance also entails assuming that there is no neat line distinguishing power from care. The crucial point is that individuals usually problematize their thoughts and behaviors through beliefs held as true in their historical context. Hence, those who exercise power attain legitimacy by presenting themselves as helping us in caring for this part of ourselves that threatens our constitution as subjects. After all, they only intend to prevent us from straying away from the ‘correct’ path (Foucault, 1997d). Moreover, as the part of the self that demands care is ‘problematic’, one’s constitution as a subject entails an adversarial relation. Individuals must struggle against themselves in order to act according to ‘truth’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 480-482). Once again, if beliefs depend upon the context in which they are generated, struggling against the ‘problematic’ portion of the self in order to act according to ‘truth’ can be viewed as behaving as a given culture expects one to behave.
Our argumentation begins by highlighting a theoretical difficulty found in the usual reading of Foucault’s description of the Panopticon. The difficulty lies in how to conceive the nature of self-surveillance induced by the panoptic tower. We contend that self-surveillance does not depend only on an “invisible but unverifiable” power (Foucault, 1979: p. 201), but also on normalizing judgment.
The majority of authors that deploys the panopticon as a historical background for new surveillance techniques quotes or rephrases passages in which Foucault defines the major effect of the panoptic tower. One often cited passage refers to the major effect of the Panopticon: “(…) to induce in the inmates a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault, 1979: 201). In another passage, Foucault wrote:
He [sic] 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 (Foucault, 1979: 202).
The Panopticon can be conceived as technology, first, because as an architectural arrangement, it substitutes human surveillance by an opaque but visible tower; and, secondly, because it renders power automatic by promoting self-surveillance.
The decisive question lies in how to conceive this self-surveillance. The nature of the compliance with power rules and values is what is at stake here. We believe that the strange proximity between the Panopticon and the “Big-Brother” is rooted in the understanding of self-surveillance not as care of the self, but as self-monitoring (Lyon, 2001: 114) or, as Norris and Armstrong ingeniously put it, as “habituated anticipatory conformity” (Norris and Armstrong, 1999: 6).
Putting ourselves in the prisoners’ situation may be the best way to shed light on the theoretical problems posed by these readings. What would it mean to comply with power through “anticipatory conformity”? We would certainly try to act according to what power expects from us, but we would only do so because we would be aware of the possibility of being observed. We would act differently if given the opportunity to escape power’s eye. We would resemble “docile bodies”, but our docility would only be apparent, a mask that we carried as long as we thought we were being observed.
To put it differently, we would internalize power’s eye but we would not identify with its values. In reality, instead of an unfolding of ourselves in consciousness and its object, our conduct, we would experience a threefold partition of our interiority. We would distance ourselves from our behaviors and look at them with power’s internalized eyes. However, there would be an additional detachment: a part of ourselves constituted by our consciousness and desire would be sheltered from power’s eyes.
Concretely, we would act considering the possibility of observation and posterior punishment and objectify our conduct accordingly, but we would not believe that by acting thus we would be doing what is best for us. Self-surveillance would be, in fact, experienced as surveillance of an internalized, but identified, other upon us. Although normalizing judgment can be understood as an infra-penalty that partitioned an area that the law had left empty – the vast domain of gestures, attitudes, quotidian activities, tasks, discourses, uses of time, habits, etc. – its real novelty resides in the fact that these micro-penalties are not addressed so much at what one does, but at who one is (Foucault, 1979: 178). Besides constructing the dangerous bridge between fact and value and thus associating knowledge with power, the normalizing judgment also operates the passage from action to being, extracting from individuals’ behavior the identity of each and everyone. The norm is an immanent law – an observed regularity and a proposed regulation (Foucault, 1979: 179). In schools, for instance, the average time spent by students to conclude a task is first observed and later becomes a rule: those who are too slow fail. This failure does not concern only the inobservance of a rule; it also concerns the value of individuals, conferring upon those who have failed an identity that can vary from the bad student to the abnormal.
Douglas’ analysis is insightful. It allows us, for instance, to make sense of a series of social movements directed against the tobacco industry and fast-food companies. The arguments deployed for holding these industries accountable for individual suffering are well known and fit well both Douglas’ analysis and the nexus here proposed between risk and addiction: in order to protect their interests, these industries knowingly put individuals at risk by exploiting frailties in their self-control. Still, there are two major differences between Douglas’ thesis and the arguments here developed. The first is straightforward: risk related to lifestyle is also and principally a means of placing the burden of caring for the future on individuals’ shoulders.
The generalization of the risky self provokes the emergence of a new relation between past and future. Human genetic mapping and life habits make it possible to anticipate, among the countless illnesses/diseases that may affect an individual and among the multiple ways of dying, those that are more probable, as well as the means we may dispose of to avoid their emergence. In presenting itself as anticipation of accidents and turbulences that may abbreviate our journey in this world, this scientifically defined possible determines limitations to be observed in the present. Life now depends on knowing how to behave in the distance between everything that may happen and what is more probable of happening; it depends on the restriction of possibilities – and not upon their invention and posterior realization. The aims of human action have indeed changed since the time in which terms such as progress, revolution, liberation or even cure organized the sense of the future.
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