Project: Gaze and control.

Project: Gaze and control.

Power/Knowledge.

At the start of this piece David Green states that reading Foucault can be difficult.  I have come across his writings throughout this course and still find him difficult.  

In this piece we are asked to view power as a positive force that enables man to obtain knowledge rather than a negative influence that controls and stifles man.

The accumulation and spread of sound and true knowledge is dependent on the exercise of positive power.  Power and knowledge go together.

Truth can only be arrived at through discipline and is constraint not the product of free thinking.  Every society has it’s method of testing for the truth and those make such decisions wield power.

Disciplinary Power.

In Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment the change in penal regimes from using physical punishment to change future conduct to an attempt to change the behaviour of prisoners by observation and persuasion .  The change the soul rather that punish the body.  

People who know they are under observation react differently to those ignorant of the fact.  Thus the ‘Panopticon’, as devised by Jeremy Bentham, was a way of observing prisoners with them seeing the observer.  The idea of the unseen observer is now applied as CCTC which is employed widely both inside and out in the street.  

Foucault points out the interdependence of power and knowledge.  He claims that power does reside with with a single body in society but is exercised throughout society by the many.  A knowledge/power relationship is present in all social interactions.  

At this point I lost the will to live.

Photography and Power.

Photography became a powerful tool in the recording of, and categorising of people and was seen as a true representation of what was observed.  It allowed close scrutiny of those being observed and permitted unfair and misguided comparisons to made between the world of the observer and the world of the observed.  By isolating the subject from it’s normal surroundings context is lost and a false image can be manufactured.

According to David Green the power wielded by the photograph invites resistance, but this power is so strong as to render any meaningful resistance futile.  All one can do is find new ways of working with photography in the fields of observing, recording, and reading.