Panopticons, Prisons, and Penal Colonies: How Foucault Can Explain Kafka Anonymous College

It is a cynical statement, but it is frighteningly valid: contemporary liberal societies are little more than disciplinary dystopias. Many different phenomena reveal this, especially when understood through the framework of Michel Foucault’s notion of society as explicated in Discipline and Punish(Foucault). This work can be used as a lens through which to read “In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka, as well as to understand the chilling resonance of Stanley Milgram’s infamous experiments. Ultimately, and tragically, we are all only prisoners engaging in machinations for the benefit of invisible, often corporate, overlords.

Stanley Milgram gained infamy when he published in 1963 a study of “obedience” in which he directed subjects of his experiments to administer progressively stronger shocks to people in another room (Milgram). Milgram was interested in “destructive obedience” (Milgram) as it related to the horrifyingly recent reign of the Nazis, and therefore, he directed his subjects to administer progressively stronger electric shocks at the behest of supervisors, who were confederates to the experiment. Milgram found that some people would administer even deadly shocks when the actors screamed in pain, but others refused to...