Foucault shows up everywhere.  I guess that’s what happens when you’re considered one of the greatest thinkers of your time.  Foucault wrote this in response to Jeremy Bentham’s work in the late eighteenth century and his development of a disciplinary device he called the Panopticon.  The basic principles of the Panopticon is that the prisoner is controlled by a fear of constant observation of a “visible” and “verifiable” power.  “It reverses the principal of the dungeon.”  Instead of darkness and secrecy, the panopticon offers light and observation. Without the observation the Panopticon does not work.  In the Panopticon, “visibility is a trap.”   

So prisoners are trapped in this constant state of observation.  This only happens in prisons, schools, and hospitals.  Well in fact it happens in lots of places in today’s society, but that’s not the point.  The point is what does it have to do with ethnography?  In ethnography, the researcher is trying to be the fly on the wall, to be there but not present, to be the participant observing ethnographer, and this is opposite of what Panopticism is all about.  Or is it?  Is ethnography a form of Panopticism?  Is ethnography a form of discipline? 

Well one thing is for sure ethnography is a form of observation and study, and ethnographers would like to be able to study their people and cultures in their natural state.  And Foucault says that “Panopticism also does the work of a naturalist.  It makes it possible to draw up differences: among patients, to observe the symptoms of each individual, without proximity of beds…to map aptitudes, to assess characters, draw up rigorous classifications.” In other words, it allows an observer to fully study their participants. But the problem with this theory for an ethnographer is that the Panopticon takes the individual out of his natural settings thus changing it, or as Walker Percy might argue the thing is lost simply by studying it.  It is no longer its true self it is the thing that is being studied.

But then as Goffman argued in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, no one is ever truly themselves.  They are simply the creation of their interactions with other people.  So that begs the question if we take those interactions away, is the true self revealed and thus more easily studied?  This is in fact some of the science behind Panopticism.  The prisoner or the person being studied is taken away from their interactions and becomes something else.  Is it possible that they become themselves? 

Percy would argue no.  He would argue that “the person is not something one can study and provide for; he is something one struggles for.  But unless he also struggles for himself, unless he knows that there is a struggle, he is going to be just what the planners think he is.”  It is the struggle to be an individual, to be yourself.  “As Kierkegaard said, once a person is seen as a specimen of a race or a species, at that very moment he ceases to be an individual.  Then there are not more individuals but only specimens.”  Simply by saying “I am a person” means I am not an individual. People are social creatures they are defined by their social interactions as Goffman asserted. 

Hopefully, you realized that I was previously just entertaining the thought that Panopticism was ethnography, and that people are their true selves when locked in solitary confinement and under constant observation.  I certainly do not think this is the case because if it were then the Panopticon would not be used for prisons or as a form of punishment.  It would be used as a form of vacation, as a way for people to free their inner self from society and others.  People would offer to be put in the Panopticon.  They may even pay, but this is not the case.  I would contend that there is a part of our selves that is revealed under those conditions, however it is not natural.  Natural is a social setting.  Humans are pack animals, social creatures, take us away from our pack and we change.  That is not the point of ethnography. 

However I am intrigued by one interesting notion that I’ve failed to mention until now.  That was planned because I wish to talk about this idea at further length in class, and this is the notion that ethnography is a form of discipline.  The mechanism of discipline and fear in Panopticism works only under constant observation, and ethnography works best under constant observation.  So, is ethnography a form of discipline? Does it work to strike fear in the heart of its participants?  This is where I’ll leave you.