Week 12 - Panopticon, Cyborg - TETRA

Question: Is there a society in machines?

During our discussion, a few keywords came up: Society, power and discipline. The concept of Panopticism is intriguing because it reminds us of self-regulation and feedback that we have been exploring in previous texts. According to Michael Foucault, a Panopticon machine consists of two elements: it can be seen without seeing and this machine sees everything without being seen. In other words, it is an omnipresent supervisor that is “the object of information but not of communication”(Foucault, 200). It regulates the system and makes sure that there are no interruptions in the system. This discussion led to how our society functions nowadays: there’s the government that regulates politics and society while there are the citizens that are being constantly supervised by the higher-ups. Whenever the citizens commit bad acts, they will be punished, thus sent to prison. Therefore, the system does the same thing: the supervisor reacts whenever there’s entropy and regulates the situation in the system.

Concerning cyborgs in this text, I think our society will be very much more integrated with machines, and the possibility for a more genderless reality could become more realized. The cyborg theory is described as a hybrid of machine and organism. A creature of social reality and a creature of fiction. The science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century is discussed by means of cyborg technology being integrated into society and bridging the gaps crafted by higher patriarchal dominance. However, I feel that these two ideas work well together and not at all. The text explains that there is a divide between fiction and lived experience, between science fiction, and social reality. So where do cyborgs factor in? Are they merely a product of patriarchal capitalism, purely created for a military means? Or does cyborg technology play a more social role, creating a more genderless and levelled society? I believe that we have been more frightened of how powerful cyborgs may become, and have not explored possibilities for what a cyborg is, and how could that make an influential impact on us.