Category:Panopticon

A prolific historian of ideas, Foucault began with a view of structures as normative systems of classification (knowledge) which produced new forms and thereby shifted over time to create new normative structures. People are never merely restricted by power, but become the subjects of power, which allows them to act in particular ways even as it restricts others.

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon:  to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power…. The inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.