Introduction
Michel Foucault was a renowned philosopher, sociologist, and historian of the French origin, born on 15th September 1926 and lived for 58 years.
In the current modern society, governments have implemented systems that perform surveillance of their locals. The reason for this as they explain is that it is a very important task necessary to enhance their security and to protect them from ill motive individuals like terrorists and criminals.
This activity has not come without criticism. Many have argued that it is a violation of their right to privacy. Some have gone ahead to argue that it is illegal since it has been used by governments to violate social and political freedoms leading to a country’s transformation into an Electronic Police State. This is a state whereby the government uses all the resources at its disposal to crush any effort by other political movements to sell different ideologies that do no march up to theirs (Krieken 2001).
Many countries all around the world are now adapting this trend with others adding more and more surveillance cameras to their urban and even rural areas. In America for example, the civil liberties unions have raised an alarm warning that the country is fast moving to a dark age where the citizen’s every move, transaction and communication is being recorded and stored. The sad thing about this is that this record is usually available any time to the judicial arm of governance to be examined used against the citizens.
Body
The surveillance study is a multidisciplinary field that has coated a lot of controversy. It draws from sociology, psychology, political science, criminology, law, information science and technology studies. It is a study that emerged as a result of a fusion between the mainstream liberal sociological approach of rule of 1973 and Giddens of 1985. It was later fused or rather combined with Foucault’s ‘Discipline and punish’ of 1977 and its study of Bentham’s Panopticon. Many theories and stories have tried to explain this study even though they have not completely provided a satisfactory understanding. The only story that has managed to provide a clear understanding to this study is the transformation from Foucault’s panopticism to a surveillance society (Crampton & Elden 2007).
Foucault has tried to narrow it from a complex theory to a simple story. The relevance of this story to surveillance society as supported by ‘Discipline and Punish’ is what I am going to discuss in this paper.
In the book Foucault makes his aims known from the beginning to the end. He tries to enable his readers to have an open understanding of the developments concerned with the surveillance society free of moral judgments. This is because Foucault looks at each and every one of us including him under the arms of government and its authority that involves the principles that we regard as the objective truth or facts, and concludes that there is rarely a free subject. He goes ahead to mention that this technology is as a result of the process of civilization and so the best we can do is to scrutinize and evaluate its background and composition to see how best it can influence our lives (Crampton & Elden 2007).
This book talks of a sovereign monarchical power with its lethal impacts on bodies that has been changed dramatically by individuals and at the same time all the human beings collectively. These rational reforms by human beings have in hand changed how people view justice and where the body is placed in this area of study.
The first part of the book talks about physical punishment or torture and the act of public prosecution as power that did not think twice on its decision to act directly on human bodies. A part from this, it was also a power that was praised, embraced gladly by its visible manifestations.
The second part of the book looks at the revolution surrounding the new understanding of criminality and how its consequences and penalty were humanized in the eighteenth century. This began with an attempt to objectively design or come up with a punishment or a penalty that can be justly matched with the offence of an individual through signing on the body. This was a movement from the visible spectacle of public prosecution and torture to a lesson for all that was approved by all.
Unfortunately with time, these fair mechanisms for punishment were quickly replaced by detention law and the death penalty. This was whereby; a law was implemented whereby, for every crime or offence of an importance of any kind, an offender was detained and denied his rights except only for those that called for the death penalty (Foucault 1980-1992).
The third part of the book brings to our attention some new elements e.g. the soldier and the military. It also introduces a new study concerning the mechanical science of the body. These two new introductions were instrumental in explaining the concept that shows the body as an instrument that can be trained through a series of disciplined repetitive practices. Foucault argues that ‘in the course of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the discipline became general formulas of domination’ (2003, p.137). For any thing to be manageable it had to be intelligible and for it to be productive it had to be manageable. This explains why concepts have to be placed in a format that defines productive ordering to maximize on its importance and usefulness.
To train human beings in a social progressive order, two different mechanisms can be put in place that could both achieve the same results. The first mechanism is by applying a hierarchical observation approach that has been seen and exemplified in a military camp. The second method has been exemplified in institutions such as schools, whereby judgments are normalized. Here we realize that hierarchical observation that is effected by vision is insufficient and therefore, as Foucault puts it, “a micro penalty of time” has to be put into action in law gaps. These can be corrective through both the means of punishment and reward.
At this point therefore, keenly we can see Bentham through Foucault or through reading Foucault’s Surveillance studies e.g. Himmelfarb seems to imply that Bentham brought to the fore the concept of disciplinary gaze, and that its general documentation was basically what Foucault did (1965).
As I continue with this paper, having an objective look at Foucault’s book ‘Discipline and punish’, and with the background information I am therefore going to concentrate on the Foucault’s arguments concerning the development of surveillance.
The new economy of discipline as seen in our world today looks at more than just the generalized surveillance and control that focuses on databases and individuals but also focuses on the body.
Current studies have tried to focus on the body even within the technological perspective. These studies have drawn our attention closer to the ways in which most technological advancements are nowadays more concerned with the bodily traces and movements or biometrics that require new advanced methods of examination.
One of the major approaches of surveillance studies is one that concentrates around visual and mass media. This tries to explain a world of consciousness where everyone tries to avoid being caught by the arms of law on the offensive side. This is a system that consciously keeps reminding the citizens of a particular nation of the fact that they are always being watched by machineries that belong to their governments. Some people argue that with time simulation and surveillance have been linked and that advancing far beyond simulation and anticipator surveillance is a clear indication that there is little (if not no) need for panopticon. Some people though, believe that simulation is limited since, even though it can boost social order and promote an environment of self-policing, it does not have the capacity to hold persons accountable for acts committed (Hunt 1999).
It is therefore important at this point bring to our attention, the informational and technological development of surveillance and simulation through a detailed look at some four key development areas: the network, the strength and capacity of computers, the move to the visualization and simulation techniques and the advancements moving towards georeferencing systems.e.g. the GIS and the virtual or rather intelligent systems. The idea behind all these is to close completely the gap between the virtual and the real control.
It is important to note that Foucault’s later work that was centered on govern- mentality offered simulating avenues. Stenson on the other hand introduces the realist govern mentality that is centered on a deeper understanding of bio-politics and the sovereign control struggle. This concept is usually complemented by the understanding of the capitalism changes that took place in the 1970s and the neo-liberal liberation combined with the idea of risk society.
The concept of risk society offers a platform for the renewed interest in self-surveillance. Foucault and earlier concepts of docility and disciplinary society, for a long time had received too much attention at the expense of some later pieces of work like “The Care of the Self” that was written in 1990 that provide more interesting insight on matters concerned with self-actualization and reflexive subjects (Wickham 1994).
Ignatieff (1989) follows and introduces the growing popularity of surveillance medicine. This was the medicine that succeeded the hospital medicine that had replaced the bedside medicine. The surveillance medicine transforms everybody to a point where they are viewed as medical subjects and at the same time enhances the patient’s ability or responsibility to be able to look after himself/herself. The self-surveillance is all about an individual’s ability to judge and condemn his or her own actions, deeds, intentions, desires and pleasures guided by principles that are acceptable and all inclusive.
It is important to mention that there are four major theoretical elements that guide the surveillance practice. The first one involves the abstraction or representation of surveillance elements in a technological perspective. The second element involves interpreting data modules and the relevant subjects within each surveillance domain in a social manner where you are able to give a direct meaning. The third element on its part involves manipulation at the actor-network level and finally the intermediation element that sustains the relationship at the actor-network level (Crampton & Elden 2007).
Conclusion
In the present world it is important to be aware of the fact that surveillance has gone even further than Foucault in showing how information gathered about a particular individual can be organized and manipulated to change the real truth behind it so as to manage and authoritatively control the chances of this individual living (Latour 1993).
Foucault’s law shows surveillance as a model used for social ordering. Anything that is to be considered as socially moral must always have a powerful element that can be exposed to scrutiny.
As humans we always remain at the forefront of everything, but just as Foucault reminds us, we as human beings are at the same time also always the sum of things and therefore our priority should always be, to take seriously into account the Foucault’s genealogical strategy for anticipated future subjectivity.
Reference list
Crampton, J. & Elden, S., 2007. Space, knowledge and power: Faucault and Geography. Portsmouth: Ashgate publishing limited.
Foucault, M., 2003. Society must be defended: lectures at the college de France, 1975 1976, Translated by D. Mercy. New York: Picador.
Foucault, M., 1980-1992. Power/Knowledge (lecture 2): Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Brighton: Harvester.
Himmelfarb, G., 1965. The haunted house of Jeremy Bentham. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hunt, A., 1999. Governing morals: A social history of moral regulation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ignatieff, M., 1989. A just measure of pain: The penitentiary in the industrial revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Krieken, R., 2001. Legal Informalism, Power and Liberal Governance, 10 (1) Social & Legal Studies 5.
Latour, B., 1993. We have never been modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Wickham, G., 1994. Foucault and Law, B&T Chapter 13: Journal of sociology Australia:penguin.