Postpanoptikum
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The Postpanoptikum (made-up word from the Latin post “after”, from the Greek pân “everything” and from the Greek optiké “customer of the visible” with roughly the meaning “era after the all-visibility”) is a sociological figure for recording power relations and also presents pedagogy with new reflective tasks .
It is based on the theory of the thinker Michel Foucault on panoptism and was designed by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman . In a social context, the Postpanoptikum describes the productivity of power in all areas of life in today's postmodernity .
In contrast to the panopticon of modernity, the post-panopticon exercises power without being tied to fixed territories and immovable buildings or arrangements (e.g. cells, surveillance tower, control personnel on site). The Postpanoptikum describes the fact that using postmodern communication technology ( ICT ) or electronic signals, monitoring can take place regardless of location, space and time. In a metaphorical sense, what the watchtower in the middle of the Panopticon used to accomplish, the unhindered view of the control staff into the cells of all prisoners, is taken over in postmodernism by electronic signals. An example of this is the electronic ankle cuff . So today there are “invisible” forms of surveillance in prisons, but not only there. The differences between the organizational principle of the “Panoptikum” and the “Postpanoptikum” symbolize the current processes of transformation from modern to postmodern power.
Transferred to life in society as a whole, there are currently situations in which people are constantly monitored electronically in everyday life. These include, for example, surveillance cameras in public places, GSM tracking , electronic online searches or large-scale eavesdropping .
Due to the productivity of the post-panoptikum, new variants of surveillance and control arise in the post-modern era, which also leads to other power constellations. However, the term “ productivity ” not only means “ efficiency ”, but above all that power in the Foucaultian sense is also something positive. New orders, techniques and social challenges arise which, from a sociological point of view, above all set new processes of inclusion and exclusion in motion. Power in this sense is highly productive, not least because it always creates resistance .
The sinister idea of the novel 1984 by George Orwell was an appeal of resistance to the total surveillance, the "post-panoptic" at times have lost none of its relevance. The Postpanoptikum is a principle of order and part of the sociological discourse of power.
literature
- Zygmunt Bauman: Liquid Modernity . Polity Press, Cambridge 2000 ISBN 074562409X (German translation: refugee modernity . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-518-12447-1 )
- Michel Foucault: Monitoring and Punishing . Frankfurt am Main 1977. ISBN 3-518-38771-5 (French edition: Surveiller et punir - la naissance de la prison . Paris 1975).
- George Orwell: 1984 . Ullstein Taschenbuchverlag, 2002, ISBN 3-548-23410-0