design context: October 2012

Social control

Interesting infinity on previous lectures

Intuitions and how they have power over us

Prisons, army, police or organised behaviours like the family or marriage

How they frame our behaviour

Correct us and train us – make us more productive

Power, punishment, discipline

Writer and thinker – all his books was to deconstruct the areas of evil

The emergence of madness – wasn’t always a recognizable condition

Emerges the prison

Middle ages – no strict conception of madness

Easy happy go lucky life – tolerated and accepted in society – thought of endearingly – no division between sane and insane

1600’s – new sensibility started to emerge, concerns a new attitude to work and a social value to work – to make people better

Anxeity started to emerge –a bracket of people who were seen as socially useless who were a problem to society

Houses of correction started to appear – the mad, criminals, drunks, the deceased, single mothers – socially unproductive – put to a work station and were physically beaten if they didn’t

Moral reform exercise – make these people better

Started to be seen as a massive mistake for the main reason for inside the house all the varies difference of deviants would corrupt each other eg. criminal classes would corrupt the non criminal

Special institutions for the criminals and the insane

Hospital for sick, prison for criminals, and asylums for the insane – not only house them but correct them

Asylum: Instead of physical violence, more subtle techniques where used – tactically reduced to child – if they behaved correctly they were given rewards, if not they were told off by a head figure like a child

Specialized form of social control – subtly training people to behave

Emergence of a modern form of discipline

Specialized knowledge – people who give reason and purpose to these techniques

Doctors increase in social status

These institutions effect the way we think not through physical means but internalize our responsibility – you take responsibility for your own discipline – ill behave how they want me to

Pre modern societies – not aimed at training or discipline

Discipline had to be visible – had to be to display the ultimate power of the state over you

Reminder not to test it – works on fear – physically harm you

Guy Forks – hung drawn and quartered

New form of discipline – disciplinary society – new power

Around the mental than the physical

It’s a technology – surveillance to control your behaviour, performance, feelings and our social useness

Panopticon – designed by Jeremy Benthams

Proposed as a design for a generic institution – could be hospital, prison or school etc.

On the edge there are cells where individuals would be placed

Prison – each cell is totally open from the front – might have bars – open to the interior and light from the back – each cell there is a individual with a wall each side

Mental effect – proposed as the perfect institution – constantly staring to the middle central observation tower where the supervisor was place eg. Wardens or docters depending on use

Inmates can’t see each other just the constant present of the supervisors in the tower

Opposite effect to the dungeon

Dungeon – hide or lock away the deviant classes in the dark – mass social repression

Panopticom – everything is open and loght

Because your constantly reminded that you are being watched by someone who is expecting you to behave in a certain way therefore you never behave how the supervisor wouldn’t want

No one to share thought, feelings with – physiological torture

Conscious state that we are always being watched

Always controlled – when this takes effect you don’t need a supervisor to watch because people would discipline themselves

Doesn’t need any guards to control it

This building is a analogy to how society controls

Multifunctional building – the isolating structure – specialized allowed to try out experiments

Functions like a lab – can experiment on people

Multifunctional

The notion of an instructional gaze – similar effect of the female gaze – start to behave in a way that you are observed without being forced

Targeted mentally

Permenately visible – start to control yourself

Modern discipline everywhere now

Open plan office – encourages people to share experiences but what actually happens can be constantly seen by the boss – feel awkward and less social because your being watched so always work

Conforming and controlling yourself

The humour of the programme is that the crew in the office always no that theres a camera around

People start to act up to the notions that people should work

Leeds college of Art- by graphics studio

Make his students work hard – watching over them

Everything is photographed and mapped

CCTV cameras – surveillance society

Every action is in some way recorded

Alter & modifiy our behaviour

Lecture to educate and reform children

Each seats there's a barrier between each students, only see the central lecturer

Efficiency of learning

Forces you to behave in a certain way – the process of learning therefore more effective

HR office – records of the staff

Computer network – open files from your desktop

Every website you go on is stored on a database

Monitor key strokes on your monitor to see how hard your working

Mental effect – process

Does have a physical effect on the body – has a hold on our body and train

Docile bodies – no residence to power – self regulated

Eg. Soldier – carries out orders unquestioningly

Cult of health – everywhere you go tells you how much you should or shouldn’t drink, how much vitamins are in something, how/what to eat something – 5 a day

Images of what you body should look like, what your physical attitude should be like

Act up to it – feel guilty if we don’t

Start to conform

Gyms – big window, open plan, very visible – perfect citizen

Ideal cult of the perfect body – master race

Instructions on tv and billboards

Sitting taking instructions

Power is not something you have over someone else

Power is about relationship between people

Willingly being the controlled in the lecture

Possibility for resistance

1984 – constant panopticism

Facebook – social media – your aware that everything you put on is observed/documented

Shape an identity of yourself – adapted because the environment is under crutenncy

Following Piece is one of his early works. The underlying idea was to select a person from the passers-by who were by chance walking by and to follow the person until he or she disappeared into a private place where Acconci could not enter. The act of following could last a few minutes, if the person then got into a car, or four or five hours, if the person went to a cinema or restaurant. Acconci carried out this performance everyday for a month. And he typed up an account of each 'pursuit', sending it each time to a different member of the art community.Two experiences here were crucial. During the act of following, Acconci submitted his subjective will to the movements of the person followed. And he thus penetrated a private sphere even though he moved in the public domain. Acconci demonstrated that the urban public space is defined by the random encounters between people that take place within it. At the same time, he presents us the city street as a space where civil protection potentially breaks down.This performance is of special significance as here Acconci for the first time deferred from himself defining what course the performance would take. Instead, he accorded an important role to the participation of outsiders. »I made my art by using other people.« In Following Piece, the concept of the participation of persons who did not specifically agree to participate relied on persons who did not even know that they were being used.The actual piece of art unraveled without any one noticing. All the more important was that each piece was presented to a broader audience in the form of the typewritten records and the photographs. These form a constitutive part of the artwork.

Handout:

Panopticism: Institutions & Institutional Power Richard Miles 2012
The lecture introduces the work of Michel Foucault and particularly his theoretical application of panopticism, techniques of the body and „disciplinary society‟. Funnily enough ‘institution’ is not defined in the lecture, but take it that institutions can exist on two levels, first, organised bodies which have some kind of collective material physical entity, [e.g., hospitals, government, the police] and secondly, organised practices which are more solidly defined around customs and practices, such as the institution of ‘marriage’, the ‘family’ and so on.
„Literature, art and their respective producers do not exist independently of a complex institutional framework which authorises, enables, empowers and legitimises them. This framework must be incorporated into any analysis that pretends to provide a thorough understanding of cultural goods and practices.’
Randal Johnson in Walker & Chaplin (1999)
Learning Aims:-

UNDERSTAND THE DESIGN MODEL OF THE PANOPTICON
UNDERSTAND FOUCAULT’S CONCEPT OF ‘DISCIPLINARY SOCIETY’.
UNDERSTAND THE FUNCTION OF DISCIPLINARY SOCIETY AS A MEANS OF
RENDERING INDIVIDUALS PRODUCTIVE AND USEFUL
UNDERSTAND FOUCAULT’S CONCEPT OF TECHNIQUES OF THE BODY AND
‘DOCILE’ BODIES
PANOPTICISM
‘Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.’ (Foucault, 1975)

• What Foucault is describing is a transformation in Western societies from a form of power imposed by a ruler / sovereign to A NEW MODE OF POWER CALLED PANOPTICISM

The emergence of forms of knowledge – biology, psychiatry, medicine, etc., legitimise the practices of hospitals, doctors, psychiatrists.
Foucault aims to show how these forms of knowledge and rationalising institutions like the prison, the asylum, the hospital, the school, now work on human beings in such a way that they alter our consciousness and that they internalise our responsibility.

• The panopticon is a model of how modern society organises its knowledge, its power, its surveillance of bodies and its ‘training’ of bodies
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POWER, KNOWLEDGE AND THE BODY.

Disciplinary Society produces what Foucault calls „docile bodies‟.

‘power relations have an immediate hold upon it [the body]; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’ (Foucault 1975)
Disciplinary Techniques
“That the techniques of discipline and „gentle punishment‟ have crossed the threshold from work to play shows how pervasive they have become within modern western societies” (Danaher, Schirato & Webb 2000)

Foucault’s definition of power is not a top – down model, as in Marxist theory, but is more subtle. Thus,
power is not a thing or a capacity people have –
it is a relation between different individuals and groups, and only exists when it is being exercised –

The exercise of power relies on there being the capacity for power to be resisted.
For Foucault, ‘Where there is power there is resistance’.

Bibliography
Please see yr 2 bib,
But also,
Foucault, M. (1975) ‘Panopticism’
from Hall, S. & Evans (1998) Visual Culture a Reader
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison London, Penguin
See also web sites on Foucault of which there are plenty

Tuesday 30 October 2012

Design Production - Typography Anatomy

Thursday 25 October 2012

Design Production: Colour for Design

Context of Practice: Lecture 3 - Panopticism