Page 81 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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Revolt of the viewer? The elusive audience

In his seminal study of the birth of the prison, Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault
(1979) has carefully analysed the importance of the examination as a social procedure for
the exercise of disciplinary power. The examination

establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates
them and judges them…. In it are combined the ceremony of power and
the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment
of truth. At the heart of the procedures of discipline, it manifests the
subjection of those who are perceived as objects and the objectification of
those who are subjected.
(Foucault 1979:184)

The examination, so widely practised in social institutions such as the school, the
hospital, the military, works through ‘the fixing, at once ritual and “scientific”, of
individual differences, as the pinning down of each individual in his own particularity’
(ibid.: 192). Those under examination get subjected to a sort of compulsory visibility,
they become individuals to be looked at, observed, described in detail, monitored from
day to day. Knowledge about them is accumulated through small and seemingly innocent
techniques such as notation, registration, the constitution of files and dossiers, and the
arrangement of facts in columns and tables; and the vast, meticulous, documentary
apparatus thus acquired, constituting a comparative system in which it is possible to
classify individuals, to form categories, to determine averages, and so on, becomes an
essential component in the exercise of disciplinary power over whole groups of people—
a power that uses the establishment of precise individual differences as a basis for the
construction of taxonomic divisions.
Jeremy Bentham’s plan for the Panopticon (1791) is, according to Foucault (1979),
paradigmatic for the technological scheme by which this linkage of disciplinary power
and knowledge is practised. The clever architectural design of the Panopticon makes
efficient surveillance of prisoners possible: it consists of a large courtyard with a tower in
the centre and a set of buildings, divided into levels and cells, on the periphery. Each cell
has a window that faces the tower, from which the supervisor can observe the inmates in
the cells without himself being seen. The cells are like ‘small theatres in which each actor
is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible’ (ibid.: 200). In such a spatial
structure disciplinary control over the behaviour of those confined in the cells becomes
possible because they are stuck in the position of objects subjected to the permanent
examining gaze of the surveillant: their every move will be observed, noted, and
registered. For Foucault, the Panopticon is the metaphor for a technological device whose
function is to increase social control. Even if the Panopticon itself, in its pure form, was