#panoptican

Microsoft Teams as a Panoptican Dystopia. 

What would Dan Graham and Jeremy Bentham have thought of virtual meetings?

I was reading an article on the bbc entitled ‘why zoom video chats are so exhausting?’ the article likened a zoom meeting to an anthropomorphised tv, saying:

‘Big group calls can feel particularly performative, Petriglieri warns. People like watching television because you can allow your mind to wander – but a large video call “is like you're watching television and television is watching you”. Large group chats can also feel depersonalising, he adds, because your power as an individual is diminished”

The article reminded me of the work of Dan Graham and his use of the cameras and tv in his artwork. His work was made at a time when tvs and screens were becoming progressively more familiar and available. It could be suggested that the work was a comment on the increasingly panoptican nature of society.  The relevance of the phrase 

‘power as an individual is diminished’

seems to me a reference to the totalitarium Panoptican prison system put forward by Jeremy Bentham. “

The panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched”.

Through surveillance prisoners/society can be controlled and docile. 

My experience of our tutor group meeting for uni, reminded me of a Bentham approach (ironic as being a UCL meeting) . The performative nature of presenting when you cannot see the reactions of your audience, and the not knowing whether you are being observed while engaging in the meeting. The silence of the viewers gaze and the lack of control of your response reminded me of the work of Dan Graham where he plays with the act of looking, switching the gaze of the viewer and the performer/artist constantly.  Dan Grahams work uses one way mirror as a reference to surveillance. We are increasingly living in a world that our lives are being observed. We are the performers. 

Of the telescreens in the landmark surveillance narrative Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), George Orwell said: "there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment ... you had to live ... in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised” Microsoft teams means that you never know when it is your image displayed to the group. 

Imagine if the microsoft teams approach was taken on in the future of education.... We truly are entering into a society with an increasingly Orwellian nature to its landscape. 

Plan 

Introduction - why i am choosing to look at female artists, innate relationship a woman has with her reflection - why more prevalent in woman not men. John Berger

Introduction to my work - Like a Terrible Fish - female relationship with her mirror image - self-portraits - oil paint, installation mirror work : how do they work together. 

Explain sow from Ellen Wilkinson

Identity politics: Erikson role confusion - the age of adolescent as being one related to identity and the response to your identity by the others around you.  Lacanian mirror stage- ongoing. 

Artists that use the mirror to explore identity - Lee Bul, Tracey Emin, Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick

Utopian future - selfies, changing the nature of the gaze. How social media has become a mirror of identity to the asolescence.

Social Media as a mirror and a panopticon, art in schools must be working alongside and not against. 

Seeing the selfie as a self portrait, and encouraging students to push that further. 

Experiential learning as key to this process - Kolbes learning cycle, looking at own identity, Sonia Boyce

Should it be used?

How can we use it?

Surveillance is also increasingly associated with enhancing the pedagogic efficiencies of schools and classrooms. In 2013, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested more than $1.4 million in the development of “engagement pedometers”—biometric bracelets that can monitor electrical changes in a student’s nervous system as an indication of increased levels of interest and excitement during lessons. This and other modes of self-generation of data by individuals has led to talk of the “sentient school” where amassed forms of personalized surveillance data can be used to direct teaching and learning on a real-time responsive basis (Lupton 2014). 

 http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/83311/1/Nemorin-Post%20pan-optic%20pedagogies.pdf

Does the compulsive use of instagram by artists, who constantly share updated works/work in progress reflect a panoptican perspective? 

We must constantly be seen to be working, even if the work we are putting out there goes into a echo chamber. 

POSITIVES Keeps the artist productive, artists are monitoring each other almost tutoring each other in their work- removes the need for institutional study. 

In one of our CP lectures we learnt of the power thatbuildings have on us in the world. However Foucault argued that a building could be built to liberate the people within it, but one will only be liberated if they interact with it. What Foucault was trying to say was that buildings may have a purpose to influence society; however one will only be influenced by it if they allow themselves to be influenced, and if they fully interact with the building the way it was intended to. A really interesting example of this was The Panoptican, which is a cleverly designed prison in which the watch tower is in the centre of a 360o room with cells spread around it. It is said that you feel like you’re being watched from the tower even if no one’s looking, because you know that you are always on view (like big brother!). Jeremy Bentham suggested that we’re actually being controlled by ourselves rather than society. We will behave in a way in society because of how we perceive external forces and the environments around us. This is why different people behave in different way in social situations, because they perceive situations completely differently.

Definition:

1. An area where everything is visible.

2. A prison so constructed that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times, without being seen.

Originally proposed by Jeremy Bentham in 1791. Aims: • Understanding the principles of the Panoptison • Concept of “Discipilanary Society”- Michel Foucault

The idea that discipilanary society is a way of making individuals ‘productive’ and ‘useful’- “Docile Bodies” • The Panopticon bulding – 1790 designed by Jeremy Bentham 1600 – The Great Confinement In the 1600s ‘mad’ men were tolerated by the society, they were weird, stupid and funny but a part of the society. However soon they became a threat because they were seen as a ‘useless’ citizens. They weren’t giving something back to the society therefore these people got treated very differently than the norms. Soon hospital was built for these ‘useless’ people to reform them, they were made to work on a manual labour- if they didn’t then they would be beaten by the warden with a stick.

Contrastingly these institutions didn’t work as all these ‘useless’ people were negetivley influencing each other so the matter was getting worse. Therefore the government built separate insittuions for these ‘useless’ people catergorizing them. • Criminals were thrown in the prison. • Reform school for orphans. • Mental people in an asylum The main goal was to reform specific abnormalities- taking control over specific ‘problems’ and trying to make these people useful to the society.

In this time modern hospital made doctors very powerful because they were almost seen as gods who could treat people and make them well as well as psychologists. They had the unquestionable authority- therefore people just submitted to their authority, people started to control themselves within an institutional reform. In those days punishments were as visible as they could be as if it was a warning to those people who were outside the norm. Showing the outcome in front of everyone was creating authority that these punishers were more powerful than the normal people as they had the power to treat these useless people. Discipline was aimed at how to keep someone under control, his behavior, to multiply capacities, how to put him where he is most useful.

A contemporary example of a Panoptic power structure could be the soon to be implemented National I.D. cards under Labour government. These cards collect the information and photo identities of every British citizen in the country. This is Panoptic in the sense that the Government would take control of these records of us and be able to survey and update these records. The idea that these records exist could force people to inhibit their behaviour accordingly, a process that Foucault refers to as "a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates be caught up in a power situation of which they themselves are the bearers." This I.D. card scheme would also have this impact, creating a nation of 'docile bodies' from which, the Government can develop it's economy and production.

Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, a building with a tower at the centre from which it is possible to see each cell in which a prisoner or schoolboy is incarcerated. Visibility is a trap. Each individual is seen but cannot communicate with the warders or other prisoners. The crowd is abolished. The panopticon induces a sense of permanent visibility that ensures the functioning of power. Bentham decreed that power should be visible yet unverifiable. The prisoner can always see the tower but never knows from where he is being observed. Panopticon is a conscious state that one is always being observed therefore the resistant behavious gets nullified by self mental control which reforms prisoners, allows scrunity and aims to make them productive .

However when this building was designed the aims of the building was rather different than the way Michel Foucault used it. The role of Panopticon was amplification; although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective, it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces - to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply. In many ways, this is the heart of the book.

For Foucault, the panopticon represents the way in which discipline and punishment work in modern society. It is a diagram of power in action because by looking at a plan of the panopticon, one realizes how the processes of observation and examination operate.

The Panopticon is a model of how modern society organises its knowledge, its power, its survelliance of bodies and its ‘training’ of bodies. This is how society mentally reforms us. For example in todays society offices are the space of anxiety because every action is visible and makes the employee aware that they are being watched!

“And beneath the lapses of memory, the illusions, and the lies that would have us believe that there is a ternary order, a pyramid of subordinations, beneath the lies that would have us believe that the social body is governed by either natural necessities or functional demands, we must rediscover the war that is still going on, war with all its accidents and incidents. Why do we have to rediscover war? Well, because this ancient war is a [ . . . ] permanent war. We really do have to become experts on battles, because the war has not ended, because preparations are still being made for the decisive battles, and because we have to win the decisive battle. In other words, the enemies who face us still pose a threat to us, and it is not some reconciliation or pacification that will allow us to bring the war to an end. It will end only to the extent that we really are the victors.”