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189 of 203 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars We Are All Inside the Panopticon Now, April
27, 2002
By J.W.K (Nagano, Japan)
This book has been described as Foucault's masterpiece, and for good reason. Through this "genealogy" of history, Foucault
shows us how modern society has become penal and coercive in nature; and perhaps more importantly, that all us now live in
the midst of an abstract, authoritative public "gaze."
Although the book traverses a lot of historical ground, Foucault's discussion culminates in an analysis of Jeremy Bentham's
prison concept. Bentham, the founder of Utilitarianism philosophy, believed that individual rights are subordinate to the
state. In fact, he went so far as to call them "nonsense on stilts." As long as the government protected its people and treated
them decently, he did not believe that the polity could be accused of oppressing its citizen - be they convicts or otherwise.
Thus, Bentham was the first philosopher to give the modern penal system its rational underpinnings. Today, we take it as a
matter of course that those who do not conform to laws are trucked off to prison. But with this book, Foucault attempts to
completely undermine our intuitive sense of what is right, what is coercive, what is rational, and ultimately what is true.
Perhaps better than any other author out there, Foucault shows us the subtle madness of Western institutional logic...
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p.26 the power exercised on the body is conceived not as a property, but
as a strategy, that its effects of domination are attributed not to 'appropriation', but to dispositions,
manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings; that one should decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in tension,
in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess; that one should take as its model a perpetual
battle rather than a contract regulating a transaction or the conquest of a territory. In short this power
is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the 'privilege', acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but
the overall effect of its strategic positions
p.27 Perhaps, too, we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist
only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and
its interests... We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because
it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that
there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose
and constitute at the same time power relations
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