James D. Dyer

Dr. Kim DeVries

English 5870

Spring 2009

“It programmes, at the level of an elementary and easily transferable mechanism, the basic functioning of a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms.”

 

I would say that it is evident that we are all trapped in panopticonism. Most people don’t even notice, not even most educators, those who are, next to prison guards and police forces maybe, the largest group of people involved in constructing and perpetuating the universal nature of the panopticon. We have already seen the way in which education is usually simply packaged experience, passed on arbitrarily by a system designed to produce “good citizens” not independent thinkers through the implications of Percy’s “Loss of the Creature,” and Foucault has come upon a good metaphor for the way this actually functions in the world, in the classroom, at the mall, and on deserted crossroads in the middle of nowhere at three am.

 

Think about it, if you are driving down north Geer for instance, at three in the morning, somewhere between Turlock and Riverbank, and you come to a crossroad with a stop sign. You will almost certainly stop, look both ways, and then continue on your way, even though you can see the road clearly for hundreds of yards ahead, and to the right, and to the left. I do. I don’t do it because I am worried about getting into an accident, there is no one there. I do it because I am unconsciously aware that there might be a cop with his lights off behind that shed over there, or a radar equipped traffic plane overhead., but more than that, I have been conditioned by the nature of discipline and control in a panoptical society to stop at stop signs.

 

“It programmes,” or, to use the American spelling, a panoptical society programs its citizens to behave in an orderly way, without them really noticing the programming. It is an extremely subtle and effective method of brainwashing. As teachers, particularly in the K-12 system, but also in college, we are the agents of that programming, students are always under observation, and they know that if they do something against the rules, they might be penalized. They will not always be penalized, but any infraction might be penalized, which has been shown in psychological and penal research to be even more effective in governing behavior over time. You never know when you are being watched, so you behave as if you are always being watched.

 

A guy named Powers (I think that is his name, I can’t find the book right this minute) wrote an essay that essentially says that the networks and television have made the panoptical society a nearly universal situation worldwide, the “global society”, the interconnections between nations and corporations, cheap cameras and memory spread this phenomena into even extremely isolated regions.

So the society of the future will be even more self regulated by the discipline of the panopticon than it has been for the past two hundred years. I agree with him. This is not necessarily a bad thing for society, maybe not so good for individuals, but inevitable nonetheless.

 

As teachers, we should be aware of this function of what we do, and ethnographers it is especially important to note the methods of control and discipline used in different situations so that they can be articulated in our observations. Understanding how control is exercised in the larger sense makes it easier to recognise the implications of the classroom dynamic.

 

For instance, I am acutely conscience of the fact that my students have all been through twelve (or more) years of the panopticon we call the K-12 system here in the US, some of them have gone to school in other countries for part of that time, but they tend to be even more conditioned to obedience to authority figures than my native born American students. That means that I want to break that conditioning where I can, they will do what I want, or they would not be in college, so I can afford to have them do things, and read things, that make them aware of the unconsciousness of their obedience to the dictates of the social structure, and challenge them to question authority. That might be a bad idea with first graders, but the college student is already conditioned—programmed—and the needs of a free society dictate that the people going into positions of dominance in said society should at least be aware of their biases, and the reasons for them, so that they can mitigate against those biases influence on their behavior and the exercise of power.