The first text, by Foucault, talks about different systems of control & discipline, first and foremost: the military. Discipline frameworks then move on to schools, hospitals, law and then finally the family. It is quite simply the description of discipline in our society. The second part, by Gilles Deleuze, helps take the observations defined by Foucault to apply them to our current society by taking into account the new technologies that enable Panoptic surveillance in the industry of power.
The fact that all aspects of life and work are subdivided, makes it so that life, in certain respects, resembles the army. One section cannot perform, even live, without another. How can the infantry be efficient without the artillery to clear a path before it. In the same way the cold cuts factory worker is of almost no use if there is no bread factory to provide him with the wheaty goodness of a two-sided sandwich. This way, it is much easier to observe and discipline. In the "Divide and Conquer" spirit, every section of the army, or of society for that matter, is neatly separated and looked down upon. But is also share a life dependency, which also keeps them in tight formation. Foucault's analogy to the panopticon prison brings up the ideas of sousveillance that have since then evolved in retaliation of the omnipresent surveyor. Watch the watcher. It is ironic that with the coming of technology, surveillance had reached it's highest point, only to suffer retaliation using it's own tools of the camera and the sensors.
Have mechanisms of control and discipline become so intrinsic in ourselves and in our society that we would still live under the rules of discipline without having the framework around us, would we not confine ourselves under those terms if we KNEW the frameworks were gone? Is it not the only way we know how?
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