Foucaultian Analysis

What if you could insert your significant other into a situation full of sexual and emotional temptations and then watch how they behaved? What if you could do all this, and never have them know that you had a watchful eye on the whole scene? What if you could televise it? Modern man may have found ways to sail through the air, send messages across the globe in the blink or an eye, or send rovers to examine the terrain of far-off Mars, but we also invented the reality show, and it does not get any better than the X-Effect. The X-Effect is a show, created by MTV, in which exes who find themselves both enjoying new relationships, are thrown together for a steamy weekend. They are separated from their new boyfriends or girlfriends and forced to spend a whole weekend in a room together, talking about why their relationship failed. All the while their current loves are shipped off to another room in the hotel where they get to watch and listen to everything going on between the pair of exes.
At first glance this show does not seem to have much in common with bigger ideas behind Foucault's Discipline and Punish but in actuality there is a lot of subtext underneath that relates a silly reality show to larger concepts. Foucault discusses the idea of the Panopticon, or rather a prison that is self-disciplining. This means the prison is designed so that all the prisoners have the sense of being observed at all times, and theoretically this is going to cause the prisoners to modify their behavior to be appropriate. None of the prisoners can see each other, so there is no chance of them influencing one another. The only influence to be felt should be the effects of big brother, or rather big guarder, since the prisoners constantly feel that they are being watched. Whether they are or are not is insignificant, because the illusion is their to cause them to modify their behavior.
Foucault's argument that one's awareness of being watched will cause a modification in behavior, is not necessarily challenged with the X-Effect, but it is certainly thrown into conversation. The participants on the show are often caught by their current better-halves, and confronted with all that their lovers have seen them doing or saying to the ex-lovers. Once it has been established that everything they have done has been witnessed, we see the participants over-flooded with intense emotions of guilt and very apologetic for all they had done. Foucault would say that it is society as a whole that projects these feelings of guilt onto it's subjects and causes us to punish ourselves, so that we do not need to go through the disciplinary cycle. This is a post-modernist idea because it introduces moral relativism. Just because we discipline ourselves for doing something when we are caught, does not mean that we really regret the things we've done or that there is any sort of moral standard in a society for how we feel we should behave. We feel badly because we are told to feel badly. The participants on the X-Effect only suffer the first pangs of guilt when they are confronted with anger for the things they were witnessed doing.