Archive: The Faceless Gaze
ON DISCIPLINARY AND CONTROLLING MECHANISMS AND STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE.
In view of – or rather, under the pretense of – the struggle against terrorism, on the one hand, and the fear of increasing crime in everyday life, on the other, Western democracies today are confronted with a variety of forms of supervision and control. The concept of a “disciplinary society”, a term coined by Michel Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison Society, therefore, appears timelier than ever. In his analysis of disciplinary institutions, Foucault invokes Bentham’s “panopticon” – a design for a prison, whereby all prisoners could be observed from a single location. The English jurist, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) known, among other things, for his theory of social ethics, had devised a plan for a penal institution featuring a tower at its centre, from which the overseer’s inspecting gaze could monitor the prison’s concentrically arranged cells at all times, thus subjecting the inmates to the permanent control of an all-encompassing surveillance.
Curated by: Alexandra Schantl, Vienna
