Focault’s notion of the idea of power within a “penitentiary panopticon,” the structure of surveillance, whether it is active or not, produces conforming behavior. However, upon observing several examples of buildings that fit the description and purpose, the buildings themselves do not produce the behavior, but the human behavior that gives not only the architecture itself meaning, but its purpose and use. It is the response taken as a result of the surveillance that produces such behavior. For example, if everyone but Bob wears clothing from the brand “Abercrombie and Fitch” and is conscious of that fact, he may respond by wearing “Abercrombie and Fitch” as well, but only after acknowledging that he cares about the opinions of others or of being like others. Thus, one must also care about the repercussions of being observed and care to take action based on those observations before any behavior is induced.
It is also logical that such observations can create the “docile bodies which dominate our society through use of ideological texts.” Even looking around at USC’s school body, many people share similar thoughts, ideas, attitudes, and attire. Thus, they respond to and are members of a common culture, that of USC and in a larger context, the U.S, at least in some ways.
Address refers to way image constructs certain responses, whereas reception is about the ways in which actual viewers respond. When I think of “address,” I think of movies, which typically have a response in mind, whether that be fear, excitement, warmth, or humor, and so on. Such addresses are like dominant/hegemonic readings of sorts, in which there are oftentimes common responses, such as statements, feelings, or statements resulting from feeling, and so on. Though in general society is populated with diverse, unique beings, these addresses reach out to an audience in a common way through similarities at the core of most people’s beings. Reception, on the other hand, can vary widely. For example, a friend thought that the brother who fed his sister corpses in Resident Evil (1 or 2, I forget) was an example of family love. I, on the other hand, thought the scene and everything in it gruesome and disgusting. Thus, his reception was completely different from mine and was more subjective, similar to a punctum reading, which draws upon a person’s personal experiences and personality.
When Lacan says “human beings imagine they're individual even when their identities have been constructed within social structures of Western capitalism,” I think about how this statement may be applicable to a certain class of people, though not at all applicable to everyone under the category of Western capitalism. An easy counterexample would be the large number of races living in America, sometimes touted as the mother of capitalism. These races include Europeans, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, to name a few. Within those general categories lie various ethnicities, such as German, African-American, Puerto-Rican, and Japanese. Thus, these inherently different identities, though possibly in part constructed by Western capitalism, leave enough room for individual difference and uniqueness.
Jeffries’ notion of being punished in attempt to know more about female subject, but is also vulnerable and trapped in the process is genius. If this statement is true, nearly all guys should be punished all the time, for both seeing and looking. On the subject of mental imprisonment, Orientalism perpetuates the idea that Westerners to be prisoners of Easterners and Middle-Easterners, who have been thought of as exotic and barbaric.
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