Asymmetric Gaze and the Digital Panopticon | Seul Lee

In his book, Seeing Like a State, Scott (1998) [1] questions why states have always been rankled by wanderers (e.g. nomads, gypsies, homeless people, and serfs). His answer to this question is the legibility and simplification of society. Specifically, such people are often seen as failures in a state’s attempt to make a legible society that can be managed through simplifying the classic state functions (e.g. taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion) (Scott, 1998) [1]. Making a society legible and simple was an essential way for statecraft, a so-called “art of governing”, that ensure a comprehensive but detailed view of a nation and its people, and this tool has often been used to refashion society and its people (Scott, 1998) [1].  

The way a state uses “a standard grid”, whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored, seems very similar to both Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” (1798) [2] and Foucault’s disciplinary power. First, in Bentham’s Panopticon, knowledge is made from the asymmetric gaze, and as Foucault (1977) [3] said, knowledge always links to power. Foucault (1980) [4] mentions that, in order to exercise power, knowledge is needed. In other words, the use of knowledge engenders power. This power relation that is gained from the asymmetric gaze is well represented in the Panopticon. The Panopticon is a prison that is designed to allow all prisoners to be watched by a single inspector from the center of the prison (Bentham, 2008) [5]. The asymmetric gaze between prisoners and inspectors shows how this imbalanced visual surveillance causes the prisoners to be uncertain whether they are being watched or not. As a method of surveillance, this uncertainty can be used to control prisoners by training them to discipline themselves.

Secondly, how does discipline operate as a means of surveillance and control over individuals? Foucault (1979) [6] argues that modern people became both an object and a subject of knowledge, by putting themselves into the metrics of ‘scientific-disciplinary mechanisms’, a moral/legal/psychological/medical/sexual being carefully fabricated. Individuals are incited to follow a specific standard set forth by a form of authority. According to social discipline, individuals are subordinates to the system that is strategically deployed to make their activities legible. This system allows an authority to control people with ease and comfortably handle administrative work by standardizing and generalizing peoples’ behavioral patterns. Individuals always perform under possible surveillance, and are evaluated (measured).

That is where the Foucault idea of normalizing power comes in (Gijsbers, 2017) [7]. This power is exercised routinely, eventually allowing individuals to voluntarily join the social systems to make themselves useful and live as ordinary and normal citizens (Gijsbers, 2017) [7]. This raises questions such as how normalcy is defined and who falls into this category. Who will decide whether an individual is normal or abnormal? What we believe as the norm is often determined by an authority with power. According to Rose (1998) [8], individuals are unconsciously incited to define themselves as if we are selves and selves of a particular type in politics, in work, in domestic arrangements, in consumption and marketing, in the arts and media, in medicine and health, in “lifestyle,” and in all of the diverse forms and applications of psychological technologies. Of course, being a subject in a system means to be subjected to the system that is subordinated in certain power.

However, according to Foucault (1998) [9], power is not wielded by people or groups by way of 'episodic' or 'sovereign' acts of domination or coercion. Instead, it is dispersed and pervasive, and exercised in a variety of institutions (e.g. prisons, schools, hospitals, or militaries). Today, there are a number of digital panopticons that are designed to surreptitiously make individuals visible to the watchmen in the center of the systems. The algorithms for Facebook and Airbnb are invisible to us, but are visible to them. After all, this is about how power and knowledge function to control individuals in the interests of values that are desirable for certain power. Thus, the important thing is being aware of embedded power in knowledge and systems, and asking in what relationship we live with the technologies that watch us (Bossewich and Sinnreich, 2014) [10].

In particular, as a researcher in Library and Information Studies, our fields are susceptible to the power generated from knowledge. But, at the same time, it can be an important place to make a balance and distribute better knowledge to let individuals know about inherent power networks. Adler (2012) [11] specified the concept of disciplining knowledge to The Library of Congress, a federal institution that occupies a critical space where diverse discourses are collected, arranged, and disseminated to Congress and the public. She (2012) [11] points out the fact that certain discourses are actively reproduced while others are put to silence by casting light on the implications of the relationship libraries carry with power and knowledge. According to her (2012) [11], library classifications are in the business of producing and reproducing disciplinary norms within the academy, as well as social deviance more generally in society. Halberstam (2011) [12] mentions that the situating of knowledge on library shelves is a form of disciplining. As Foucault (1997) [13] advised, we need to examine discursive practices that affect knowledge and power production. By examining the limitations of past disciplined approaches, it is necessary to design a system that benefits more individuals. 

References

[1] Scott, James C. (1998). Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

[2] Bentham, J. (1798). Proposal for a New and Less Expensive mode of Employing and Reforming Convicts. London, quoted in Evans, R. (1982). The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[3] Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punishment. London: Tavistock.

[4] Foucault, M. (1980). Truth and Power. In C. Gordon (Eds.) Power/knowledge, selected interviews and writings 1972-1977. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

[5] Bentham, J. (2008). Panopticon, or, the Inspection-House. England: Dodo Press

[6] Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. England: Penguin.

[7] Gijsbers, V. (2017, October 19). Chapter 2.5: Michel Foucault, power [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keLnKbmrW5g

[8] Rose, N. (1998). Inventing our selves: Psychology, power, and personhood. New York: Cambridge University Press.

[9] Foucault, M. (1998). The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin.

[10] Bossewitch, J., & Sinnreich, A. (2012). The end of forgetting: Strategic agency beyond the panopticon. New Media & Society, vol. 15, no. 2. doi:10.1177/1461444812451565.

[11] Adler, Melissa A. (2012). Disciplining Knowledge at the Library of Congress. KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION, vol. 39, no. 5. doi:10.5771/0943-7444-2012-5-370.

[12] Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Durham and N.C.: Duke University Press.

[13] Foucault, M. (1997). Essential works of Foucault. In R. Paul (Eds.) Ethics: subjectivity and truth, 1954-1984. England: Penguin.

[14] McMullan, T. (2015). What Does the Panopticon Mean in the Age of Digital Surveillance?. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/23/panopticon-digital-surveillance-jeremy-bentham.