INI303H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Jeremy Bentham, Michel Foucault, Biopolitics
Document Summary
First to write a book like treatises on the philosophy of cinema. Both prominent french activist thinkers, teaching and protesting. What is power and how is it related to media. Do we live in a control society. Stages in the evolution of power king/sovereign. Premodern sovereign: by power to let live and make die. 17th century: emergence of dispersed complexified regimes; most power operated through biopolitics. Biopolitics: administration of bodies and calculated management of life at the level fo populations. Jeremy bentham: transition from sovereign power to new ways of controlling populations (without the exertion of physical force) Panopticon (designed by bentham) led to mode of distribution of power, even if guards weren"t there, prisoners would police themselves for they felt they were being watched all the time. Foucault: diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form. Disciplinary enclosures are analogical, prisons are central model.
