Foucault, Jobu

Cool article and favorite excerpt:

In contrast to those who believe that Western societies have participated in an irregular but forceful March of Progress, Foucault's work is a warning against such optimism. Instead, it calls on readers to look carefully so they can see the subtle ways power is deployed to manipulate others. In his book on the history of sexuality (volume 1), for example, Foucault rewrites the historical account, the standard version of which goes something like this: People used to be hung up and repressed about sex (we called such attitudes "Victorian"). But today we are "sexually liberated." Supposedly no one cares today whether others are gay or straight, sexually conservative or promiscuous, or what their preferences are. It's the age of "no fault" divorce and "live and let live." Foucault saw the issue differently. While there was no denying that legal prohibitions on controversial sexual conduct had been loosened and liberalized (most jurisdictions don't throw someone into prison for being gay anymore), Foucault emphasized how such legal trends tell only part of the story. His work traces the nuanced, often covert ways our culture continues to enforce sexual norms by the use of education, childrearing, and immersion in language traditions that stigmatize people different from the norm. Or consider an example more closely relevant to this year's educational reform topic, which concerns Foucault's analysis of the prison system. Foucault found himself interested in a never-realized proposal for prison construction envisioned by the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Bentham called his proposed prison the Panopticon. The idea arose from his opposition to prisons that simply warehoused convicts, insufficiently rehabilitating them. This was the height of negligence, in his view, since most crime was caused by something controllable: the fact that criminals were inadequately exposed to norms which shame most people into leading lawabiding lives. Thus, people who know they are being watched, and are therefore always conscious of the social consequences of their actions, were thought less likely to violate norms designed to sustain broader community. The Panopticon was a design intended to place prisoners under constant surveillance, to thereby shame them into lives of rectitude. All the cells faced into an interior courtyard occupied by guards. Day and night every single activity of the prisoner would be in full and public view. At least the design was intended to make prisoners think so.
The Panopticon, for Foucault, teaches us something important about contemporary culture, more than just the history of prison reform. Foucault saw modern society as placing all of us under surveillance. In (this) age of security cameras, hightech miniaturized equipment, interactive television, digital cameras, and the World Wide Web, we are increasingly acculturated to think we are always being watched, if only by anonymous security guards. Foucault was interested in how our resulting self-concepts cause us to interact differently with others, how the knowledge that we are always watched causes us to discipline our own behaviors, wholly outside of official legal prohibition.

This is what I watched tonight, what a good movie

Jobu help the Blue Jays