Gender and History (Theory and History) by Susan Kingsley Kent

Author:Susan Kingsley Kent [Kent, Susan Kingsley]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2011-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

Discipline and subjectivity

We are ‘disciplined’ and made ‘normal,’ Foucault argued,8 through various techniques, among the most important of which involves surveillance, or the use of the ‘gaze’ to make visible, control, and manage large numbers of people. The ‘gaze’ is capable of bringing into view a large population – of prisoners, patients, or students, for instance. It does this through the collecting of massive quantities of information and the assembling of that information in categories that produce knowledge. Think, for example, of the US census. It creates knowledge about large categories of people: who and how many live where? Of what race? Of what income? Of what citizenship? This kind of surveillance unifies and organizes a random mass of data.

At the same time, the gaze also divides and individualizes. It creates specific, precise, detailed, and intimate information about a specific person. ‘Experts’ such as physicians or psychiatrists extract from patients the most minute details of their lives, turning people into ‘cases’ about whom these experts amass a great deal of knowledge. The proliferating records that result produce the expertise and power that normatize the individual and make correction possible. So we are simultaneously subjects to both a very specific understanding of our individual selves and a universal knowledge that will be used to ‘discipline’ us, to bring us into a state of ‘normal.’

It is not simply the case that these discourses and techniques, institutions, and pieces of knowledge force us into social conformity, discipline us. They do, but it is equally true that we are made – and, to some extent, make ourselves – in relation to the broad gaze of a collection of institutions (think of them all: credit-reporting bureaus, banks, phone records, all the data that we give up every time we use the internet). To help think about the ways that surveillance, knowledge, and discourse expand beyond institutions and come to permeate the entirety of social life, Foucault used a concrete example, which he turned into a metaphor for the ways that power and subjectivity work in the modern world. The example was a prison, imagined by Jeremy Bentham (an eighteenth-century social theorist) in 1785, called the ‘panopticon,’ an architectural device designed to render large numbers of people visible from a single, central viewpoint and then providing organizational plans that categorize them.

Think of inmates of a prison whose cells ring the walls of the building, observable from a tower in the middle of the space. The warden or guard can observe all of the prisoners while remaining virtually invisible to them. Or think of hospital wards organized according to the diseases presented by patients, or a classroom arranged according to the age and/or ability of the students. Think of workers manufacturing goods on a factory floor under the surveillance of managers who can look down upon them from second-floor observation points where their offices are located.

Because the inmates of the prison cannot see into the central tower, they don’t know when they are being watched. But the

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