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October 31, 2007
David Wood in the Introduction to Surveillance and Society's issue on Foucault and Surveillance says that for Surveillance Studies, Foucault is a foundational thinker and his work on the
development of the modern subject, in particular Discipline and Punish), remains a touchstone for this nascent transdisciplinary field. Wood adds:
This work gave us Foucault’s interpretation of Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’, an Eighteenth Century design for an ideal reformatory, which will not be dwelt upon here as it has been considered many times before and is present to varying degrees in most of the pieces in this issue. For Foucault the Panopticon represented a key spatial figure in the modern project and also a key dispositif3 in the creation of modern subjectivity, in other words in the remaking of people (and society) in the image of modernity. Panopticism, the social trajectory represented by the figure of the Panopticon, the drive to selfmonitoring through the belief that one is under constant scrutiny, thus becomes both a driving force and a key symbol of the modernist project.
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"New Authoritarianism" by Henry Giroux in the context of "Abu-Gharib and After" is an interesting read- but it tends to become a bit polemical as an a hackneyed exercise in chest-beating for all-American ills-without a philosophical perspective and an equally viable-peace alternative!! For example- how would a Gandhian alternative which necessitates practicing truth and non-violence in government policies of all sorts work in the context of the so-called "axis of evil".