SURVEILLANCE AND VISIBILITY REGIMES IN FOUCAULT

Abstract

The transition from the 18th to the 19th century implied profound changes in at least two instances of power: first, and this is the main theme of Foucault's works that deal with this period, we had the change in the paradigms of punishment and penalization of crime. It moved from a penal economy of torture to a penal economy of imprisonment. However, we also had another change. More silent, less known and investigated, left implied by Foucault, sometimes being analyzed directly, but mainly surreptitiously. It is the change in the paradigms of visibility. Thus, we move from a spectacular visibility in the torture to a vigilant visibility in the panopticon. We could say that this is a change in the visible practices of power. However, there is more to be said about this topic, and this is what we propose in this work.