“A visibilidade é uma armadilha”: vigilância e práticas do visível em Michel Foucault.

Abstract

The present work intends to investigate how, from the 19th century onwards, with the advent of industrial society and disciplinary power, a type of specific visibility that Foucault will call, in Discipline and Punish, panopticon, which has as its primary function the surveillance of the individualized bodies of subjects in their various effective spaces (prison, school, factory, etc.). Such visibility is constituted as a practice of the visible, that is, a technique by which power is exercised, such as penal practices or practices of knowledge, which varies historically according to the observed time: thus, in the old regime there was a practice of the visible consistent with the sovereign power, that is, a spectacular, ceremonial and ostensive visibility. On the other hand, panoptic surveillance is essentially linked to disciplinary power and the form with discipline organizes, distributes and separates bodies in industrial society that is established with the rise of the bourgeoisie as a ruling class, and its need to transform bodies into forces docilized productive processes. Our work is therefore part of this statement that the practices of the visible, as well as other forms of political technologies, have their specificity and irreducibility, but also their connections and complementarities with the regime of power in vogue in their period, which leads us to to study the visibility of each period described by Foucault, demonstrating that there is not only the panopticon as a form of the visible, but also other forms of visibility. Our problem is, therefore, the following: how and why did panoptic surveillance establish itself as hegemonic in disciplinary society?