Question

what does Foucault mean when he says "visibility is a trap"

how does it relate to todays enhanced society of control and surveillance?

Answer 1

One of the reactions to the ongoing stupendous jury non-arraignment in the demise of Michael Brown was a call to outfit cops with cameras, the thought being that by one way or another this "third eye" will enable us to "see" reality in a progressively target way. In the event that solitary we had a camera, we would realize better what occurred between Officer Darren Wilson and Michael Brown on that road. Witness accounts made by the human eye are not dependable, so we need a machine eye that is by its very nature unbiased and objective.

The talks of equity become not about frameworks and organizations of intensity, yet discussions about vision, regardless of whether it is legitimate to film the police, regardless of whether it is an infringement of our privileges to have the police film us. In the event that we can simply police the police, watch the watchers, maybe the asymmetry of intensity would be adjusted or invalidated, and equity will by one way or another become genuine.

In his celebrated work Discipline and Punish (whose title is all the more actually interpreted as "Observation and Punishment"), thinker Michel Foucault composes:

The panoptic instrument orchestrates spatial solidarities that cause it conceivable to see continually to and to perceive right away. So, it switches the standard of the prison… — to encase, to deny of light and to stow away—it protects the first and disposes of the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a chief catch superior to murkiness… Visibility is a snare.

This is from a notable segment titled "Panopticism" where Foucault utilizes seventeenth Century thinker Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon" as an approach to comprehend present day control, a power dependent on observation, discontinuity, and the board of bodies (biopower). A focal pinnacle where the onlooker could see yet not be seen, the Panopticon was Bentham's model of the ideal jail, one that applied outright order on the imprisoned through a totalizing vision and complete data. It was the "flawlessness" of discipline, or, in other words, the flawlessness of overseeing and controlling bodies, not through the severity of open torment, however through the brain research and productivity of reconnaissance.

The look is alert all over the place... Everybody secured up his enclosure, everybody at his window, offering an explanation in his possession and giving himself when solicited—it is the incredible audit of the living and the dead… like such a significant number of confines, such a significant number of little theaters, wherein every on-screen character is separated from everyone else, splendidly individualized and continually noticeable.