RE: illness and moral culpability

From: Nate (schmolze@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sat Mar 11 2000 - 06:40:54 PST


renee,

Here is a little snip that may be found useful as far as the gaze.

Excerpts from interview with Michel Foucault, "The Eye of Power"
http://burn.ucsd.edu/~nicolef/imprint/53-foucault.html
Foucault: "It was while I was studying the origins of clinical medicine. I
had been planning a study of hospital architecture in the second half of the
eighteenth century, when the great movement for the reform of medical
institutions was getting under way. I wanted to find out how the medical
gaze was institutionalised, how it was effectively inscribed in social
space, how the new form of the hospital was at once the effect and the
support of a new type of gaze. In examining the series of different
architectural projects which followed the second fire at the Hotel-Dieu in
1772, I noticed how the whole problem of visibility of bodies, individuals
and things, under a system of centralised observation, was one of their most
constant directing principles. In the case of the hospitals this general
problem involves a further difficulty: it was necessary to avoid undue
contact, contagion, physical proximity and overcrowding, while at the same
time ensuring ventilation and circulation of air, at once dividing space up
and keeping it open, ensuring a surveillance which would be both global and
individualising while at the same time carefully separating the individuals
under observation. For some time I thought all these problems were specific
to eighteenth-century medicine and its beliefs.

"Then while studying the problems of the penal system, I noticed that all
the great projects for re-organising the prisons (which date, incidently,
from a slightly later period, the first half of the nineteenth century) take
up this same theme, but accompanied this time by the almost invariable
reference to Bentham. There was scarcely a text or a proposal about the
prisons which didn't mention Bentham's 'device' - the 'Panopticon'

"The principle was this. A perimeter building in the form of a ring. At the
center of this, a tower, pierced by large windows opening on to the inner
face of the ring. The outer building is divided into cells each of which
traverses the whole thickness of the building. These cells have two windows,
one opening on to the inside, facing the windows of the central tower, the
other, outer one allowing daylight to pass through the whole cell. All that
is then needed is to put an overseer in the tower and place in each of the
cells a lunatic, a patient, a convict, or a schoolboy. The back lighting
enables one to pick out from the central tower the little captive
silhouettes in the ring of cells. In short, the principle of the dungeon is
reversed; daylight and the overseer's gaze capture the inmate more
effectively than darkness, which afforded after all a sort of protection."

"... We are talking about two things here: the gaze and interiorisation. And
isn't it basically the problem of the cost of power? In reality power is
only exercised at a cost. Obviously, there is an economic cost, and Bentham
talks about this. How many overseers will the Panopticon need? How much will
the machine then cost to run? But there is also a specifically political
cost. If you are too violent, you risk provoking revolts...In contrast to
that you have the system of surveillance, which on the contrary involves
very little expense. There is no need for arms, physical violence, material
constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual
under its weight will end by interiorisation to the point that he is his own
overseer, each individual thus exercizing this surveillance over, and
against, himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for
what turns out to be minimal cost."



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