The National CollegePossible Worlds
The Medium of Television as a Form of Disciplinary Technology: A Study of Big Brother
Sinead McGeeney
Channel Four chose ten contestants, from forty thousand applicants, to share a specially equipped house where their every move was under the surveillance of remotely controlled cameras. There were twenty-six of these cameras placed around the house and garden, including the toilet and shower. Integrated into the interior were five cameras operated twenty-four hours a day behind two-way mirrors. To ensure constant visibility of the residents, the production crew installed camera holes in cabinets, under the beds and at the bottom of the garden. Each contestant had a personal microphone that was switched on at all times, while there were another thirty microphones around the house. The occurrences within the house were broadcast for half and hour every weeknight. The programme Big Brother was a phenomenal success, drawing an audience of up to five million. This was Channel Four's biggest audience since 1995. On entering the house, as shown in the first episode, the ten contestants were greeted with a voice-over announcement: 'Big Brother would like to remind you that there are cameras everywhere and you can't hide things from Big Brother.'
In this essay, I will be using Michel Foucault's theory of disciplinary control as argued in Discipline and Punish, which is a theory based on a form of control of the body, in order to describe television within a context of social control. I am particularly interested in the Big Brother programme as regards this form of manipulation.
Foucault examines the prison institution as an apparatus designed to transform the subject into a 'normal' person in society. He dissects the various mechanisms within the technology of people that were used in the prisons, believing that they are being applied to our society as a whole, in order to control the masses. In his book Discipline and Punish, Foucault investigates the prison beyond its immediate function of punishing crime. During medieval times, before the invention of prisons, public torture was used as a way of punishing crime. The body was the main target in demonstrating this control over the subject. However, because of the excessive force of sovereign power shown in public ritual, this form of punishment displayed its own limits: 'A body effaced, reduced to dust and thrown to the winds, a body destroyed piece by piece by the infinite power of the sovereign constituted not only the ideal, but the real limit of punishment,' (Foucault, 1977, p.50). Due to the humanist reform of the Enlightenment, public torture was replaced with a more hidden form of punishment, which practised a different form of control over people. Prisons were built to imprison 'criminals' and transform their behaviour. The mind became the target of control of the subject. A technology of disciplines was created around making the subject a mute body to be 'corrected'. This correction of the prisoner went beyond the crime. The prisoner was examined in minute detail. The institution wanted to invent the 'individual' and to make the subject serve society in a more 'productive' way. Foucault describes the way people are organised in this disciplinary technology that functions for 'power's' sake only. Like the prisoners within these prisons, Foucault believed that we have also been caught up in these behaviour modifying devices created to manipulate masses of people. His theory would claim that this system of power functions throughout our daily lives. Foucault analyses the technology of controlling people separately from the institution. It is possible to extend Foucault's argument to any area of our modernity, where people are being controlled.
Foucault examines the Panoptican Laboratory as an example of how this disciplinary technology works. The Panoptican was a building designed for constant peripheral surveillance of many people at once. The restraining dynamic of this system was based on the hierarchical surveillance gaze. The supervisor had permanent, continuous observation of all the prisoners. This surveillance gaze proved to be a powerful form of control over the inmates. Each inmate was aware of being watched and because of that, he took responsibility for the surveillance gaze by becoming self conscious of his own behaviour. This system of power worked by the supervisor having autonomous observation while the prisoners, who could not see the supervisor, bore much of the power upon themselves through this 'fictitious relation' (Foucault 1998, p.204). The prisoner becomes 'the principle of his own subjection' (ibid.). The hierarchical gaze and the inner subjective gaze are important keys to power relations within our society.
Here, I am considering this technology of surveillance in relation to television. When watching television, we are receiving an imaginary expansive view. The viewer has the illusion of being able to be a voyeur in relation to another world. As in the Big Brother programme, we are told that we have a privileged viewer's position. The television spectator's position with the suspicion of the 'powers' behind the construction of these images needs to be discussed. It is possible to consider the television spectator's position in relation to the that of the supervisor within the Panoptican's tower. In doing so, it is useful to employ arguments provided by Anne Friedberg (Friedberg 1998), who treats the differences and seeming similarities of both these positions as being tied up in social relations. The illusion of the television view is particularly significant in terms of Big Brother. Since everything appears to be laid out in the open, it seems we are in a hierarchical position, when really the spectator is drawn into this voyeurism under false pretences.
As regards the panoptic technology of surveillance and the level of control and domination it attained, this technology had its limits. The domain of the private or the inner thoughts of the subject were out of 'power's' reach. Foucault explains how the panoptic technology developed into a technology of the individual. Through the objectification of the subject, using various controlling methods, the individual was formed. However, Foucault's theory implies that this technology demands that the private be out in the open, as the Panoptican proved: visibility is power. The 'powers' also want to see the invisible. Therefore, in order to gain more knowledge of the individual, it is necessary for the subject to speak. According to Foucault, the technology of surveillance developed into a Confessional Technology. Confessional Technology can be seen as the surveillance gaze turned inward. Confessional Technology consists of a particular discourse, prompting the revelation of a person's inner feelings. To Foucault, this discourse is an invention to spread domination by moving into the personal and private areas of the subject and putting what was previously invisible on display. The subject moves from the objectifying gaze of the Panoptican technology to being trained to observe himself subjectively.
I will be examining the Big Brother programme in relation to three gazes: the hierarchical surveillance gaze, the subject's inward gaze and the viewer's internalised gaze. firstly, I am questioning the relevance of the structure of the programme and its basic content. I am looking suspiciously at the competitive element of the programme and considering its 'popularity contest' element within the same parameters as the Panoptican's 'judgement game'. The structure may be that of a 'gameshow', however, I am considering the programme to be a microcosm of our own fate. Big Brother prepares a way for homogeneity by including the viewer in the surveillance and judgement of those who do not mechanically produce in the 'machine's' favour.
Foucault describes this hierarchical surveillance and judgement of 'corrective training', and believes it is crucial to the productivity of a social body. The question to be asked is whom does this 'productivity' serve?
Secondly, Big Brother's main promotion seems to be to bring the private into the public domain. Besides the contestants being under constant surveillance, we witness the self-surveillance of each contestant through their self-examination of their thoughts and feelings in order to come to terms with the 'unusual experiment'. This brings us back to the subject's inward gaze that Foucault talks about in the technologies of the Panoptican and within our 'confessional age'. Throughout the programme, we discover more and more secrets about each contestant who is only too willing to confess. The programme deliberately facilitated this 'confessional technology' with a purpose-built room called the 'confessional room'. It was a soundproof room where contestants talked about themselves to millions of viewers. This confessing of the individual is a significant development of the disciplinary surveillance used within previous technologies of control.
Thirdly, while the audience is presented in Big Brother with a 'surveillance view', the medium of television provides the perfect mirror for the identification of audience with the images shown to them. This creates a dialogue of inner subjectivity within the viewer, which, according to Foucault, is another form of the dominating surveillance gaze. This leads us to the conclusion that television is another form of 'power'. It masks itself, but does so in a way that convinces the viewer of its 'omnipotent voyeurism'.
If we accept television as a mirror for our ego identification and as a significant 'normalising' tool of modernity, then perhaps by examining the programme, we can discover in which way we are being 'organised' in our society. What are the messages we are supposed to be receiving?
Bibliography
FOUCAULT, Michel in Hubert L. Dreyfus & Paul Rabinow (eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton: John Spiers, 1986.
FOUCAULT, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin, 1991.
FRIEDBERG, Anne, 'The Mobilized and Virtual Gaze in Modernity', in Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), Visual Culture Reader, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 253-278.
MULVEY, Laura, 'Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema', Visual and Other Pleasures, Basingstoke: Blackwell, 1988, pp. 14-26.
FOUCAULT, Michel in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, London: Penguin, 1984.
