Foucault’s Panopticism: Discussion On Power And Knowledge

• Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. (Foucault, 1978)
  

I like Foucault’s metaphor of Panopticon when he talked about the issue of social doctrines and surveillance. Each person, no matter he is a student, prisoner, patient, employee, is participate in the

Foucault said in his Discipline and Punishment that power and knowledge attain a level at which the formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process. Power rested in knowledge in forms of standard answers, formulas, etc. people are willing to learn new skills, methods of calculation, or a foreign language, which make people feel that they have power because they are literate, but at the same time make people controlled by even stricter power of social norms. Knowledge advances the exercise of power: increasing people’s abilities to describe or discourse; therefore, we are living under the descriptions fabricated by knowledge—we are watched, gazed and analyzed.

We can prove that in a following example. We see people who have sex with people in his own sex as a kind of unnatural behavior in the middle age, since we have no term to describe the behavior then and they are under lighter discipline of the society. Now we say they are homosexuals, exploring what they think to analyze meticulously about their acts and motivations. They are totally visible, not in the dark corner like before. The process is similar to Panopticon, which reverse two of the functions of the dungeon—to deprive of light and to hide. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness. The progress of knowledge shed the light on many unsure places, while we create a lot of new professional terms to describe a person which make us expose more to the surveillance of disciplinary modern power, the visible but unverifiable one.