Panopticon

Before 20th century Spain was powerful country, well known colonizer but during 1900 it had lost all its possessions like Cuba, the Philippines which caused lots of social tensions. Monarchists were conservative and didn’t want to reform Spain. Therefore schism brought among society: conservative and republic who hoped to reform this poor society. There were a number of areas where it was felt reform were needed like: agriculture, the church, and the army. In 1936 an election was took place .all…

One of the most infamous architectural models of control still remains the panopticon. Developed as a new system of penal reform by 18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the panopticon was spatially based on the idea of a centralized point (tower) from which the prison guard could observe every prison cell and every inmate at all times, without being seen. This intrusion of privacy…

In Visible Man, Singer introduces a “panopticon.” In the past, philosopher Jeremy Bentham created the idea of a building that could essentially spy on different members of society. However, Singer claims that although the building never actually existed, society itself has created their own “panopticon”. Singer states “what’s more, we have helped construct this new Panopticon, voluntarily giving up troves of personal information” (Singer 31). Our primary…

Death is something all humans have in common. Everyone dies, some sooner than others, some naturally, some by accident, and others have their lives taken from them. Death is a subject that permeates Bryan Stevenson’s memoir ¬Just Mercy completely. In the book, Stevenson recounts his early days as a lawyer in the southern United States. He becomes intrigued with the cases that involve death sentences and makes it his goal to fight for those who are wrongly accused and sentenced to death. He meets…

This is also an issue for boys, body performance in particular is crucial to their ability to maintain a hegemonic masculine identity (Mac an Ghaill 1996). Similarly, dis- identification with other male students becomes the norm otherwise their masculine identities can be questioned and may be called a ‘poof’. Hyams (2000) demonstrates the highly gendered character of school cultures in her study of young Latina women in Los Angeles, she demonstrates the integral relationship between their…

Critique of the real relates nicely to the Uncanny, as it is again relevant to the idea of things not always being as they seem. Jean Baudrillard coined this term to explain a disappearance of the real, where multiple images end up obscuring the truth. He describes a “world of hallucinations”, where images, reality, and surface appearance all morph into one. A complete collapse between distinctions of what is true and false, and real and imaginary arises. Three clear visual examples of this in A…

Introduction “People make choices, but they cannot choose the choices available to them. Nor can they be sure what chain of events will follow from their choices, including choices made by others.”- Marcus Felson (Pearson Criminal Justice) In life we all have choices, which have both positive and negative consequences depending on the choice we made. It all started in the eighteenth century when people used to think that crime came upon because of spiritual reasons. In that century, a movement…

This derives from the concept of a panopticon from Jeremy Bentham, which is a circular prison with a guard tower in the middle to watch prisoners at all times without the prisoners knowing whether they are being watched in that moment or not. Shah asserts that the concept of panopticism in…

Privacy is a state that provides a barrier from the world outside and puts an individual in control of the information they want to present to the masses. However, one question that has lingered since the conventional times and that is “what we want to keep private and what we want to make public” (Singer, pg 59.); where should be the line drawn. This debate is discussed by Peter Singer in Visible Man Ethics in a world without secrets. One of the points he makes is that privatization is a…

Much like the panopticon where “the major effect [is] to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 201), Stevenson's London is a city where there is little to no relief from societal surveillance…