Not fairly a family phrase (past academia, anyway), “panopticon” nonetheless turns up in information tales with shocking frequency—right here and right here, for instance, and right here and right here. The Greek roots in its identify level to one thing “all seeing,” and in occasional journalistic utilization it virtually at all times features as a synonym for what’s extra routinely known as “the surveillance society”: the close to ubiquity of video cameras in public (and infrequently personal) house, mixed with our each click on and keystroke on-line being tracked, saved, analyzed and aggregated by Huge Information.
Initially, although, the panopticon was what the British political thinker Jeremy Bentham proposed as a brand new mannequin of jail structure on the finish of the 18th century. The design was ingenious. It additionally embodied a paranoid’s nightmare. And in some unspecified time in the future, it got here to look regular.
Image a cylindrical constructing, every flooring consisting of a hoop of cells, with a watchtower of kinds on the middle. From right here, jail employees have an unobstructed view of all of the cells, which at night time are backlit with lamps. On the similar time, inmates are prevented from seeing who’s within the tower or what they’re watching, due to a system of one-way screens.
Prisoners may by no means make sure whether or not or not their actions had been underneath statement. The fixed potential for publicity to the authorities’ unblinking gaze would presumably reinforce the prisoner’s conscience— or set up one, if want be.
The panoptic enclosure was additionally to be a workhouse. Moreover constructing good character, labor would earn prisoners a small revenue (to be managed of their greatest curiosity by the authorities), whereas producing income to cowl the expense of meals and housing. Bentham anticipated the enterprise to show a revenue.
He had comparable plans for making productive residents out of the indigent. The panoptic poorhouse would, in his phrase, “grind rogues sincere.” The schooling of schoolchildren would possibly go higher if performed alongside panoptic traces; likewise with take care of the insane. Bentham’s philanthropic ambitions had been nothing if not grand, albeit considerably ruthless.
The aim of building excellent surveillance typically ran up towards the technological limitations of Bentham’s period. (I discover it exhausting to image how the screens would work, as an example.) However he was dogged in selling the concept, which did elicit curiosity from numerous quarters. Parts of the panopticon had been integrated into penitentiaries throughout Bentham’s lifetime—for one, Japanese State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, opened in 1829—however by no means to his full satisfaction. He was consistently tinkering with the blueprints, to make the design extra complete and self-contained. He labored out an acceptable plumbing system. He considered every thing, or tried.
Solely within the late twentieth century did the panopticon elicit dialogue outdoors the ranks of penologists and Bentham students. Even the specialists tended to neglect this aspect of his work, because the American historian Gertrude Himmelfarb complained in a guide from 1968. “Not solely historians and biographers,” she wrote, “however even authorized and penal commentators appear to be unfamiliar with among the most vital options of Bentham’s plan.” They tended to go it by with just a few phrases of admiration or disdain.
The leap into wider circulation got here within the wake of Michel Foucault’s Self-discipline and Punish: The Delivery of the Jail (1975). Moreover acknowledging the panopticon’s significance within the historical past of jail design, Foucault handled it as prototypical of a brand new social dynamic: the emergence of establishments and disciplines searching for to build up data about (and train energy over) giant populations. Panopticism sought to manipulate a inhabitants as easily, productively and effectively as attainable, with the smallest possible cadre of managers.
This was, in impact, the technocratic underside of Bentham’s utilitarianism, which outlined an optimum social association as one creating the best happiness for the best variety of individuals. Bentham utilized cost-benefit evaluation to social establishments and human conduct to find out how they might be reshaped alongside extra rational traces.
To Foucault, the panopticon supplied greater than an effort at social reform, nevertheless grandiose. Its intention, he writes, “is to strengthen the social forces—to extend manufacturing, to develop the financial system, unfold schooling, elevate the extent of public morality; to extend and multiply.”
If Bentham’s innovation is adaptable to quite a lot of makes use of, that’s as a result of it guarantees to impose order on group conduct by reprogramming the person.
From a technocrat’s perspective, probably the most dysfunctional a part of society is the uncooked materials from which it’s constructed. The panopticon is a instrument for fashioning people appropriate for contemporary use.
The prisoner, beggar or scholar dropped into the panopticon is, Foucault writes, “securely confined to a cell from which he’s seen from the entrance by the supervisor; however the aspect partitions forestall him from coming into contact together with his companions.” Lots of if not hundreds of individuals encompass him in all instructions. The inhabitants is a crowd (one thing worrisome to anybody with authority, particularly with the French Revolution nonetheless vividly in thoughts), however incapable of performing as one.
As if to remind himself of his personal humanitarian intentions, Bentham proposes that folks from the surface world be allowed to go to the statement deck of the panopticon. Foucault explains, with dry irony, that this can preclude any hazard “that the rise of energy created by the panoptic machine might degenerate into tyranny …” For the panopticon could be underneath democratic management, of a form.
“Any member of society,” Foucault notes, had “the correct to come back and see together with his personal eyes how the colleges, hospitals, factories, prisons operate.” Moreover guaranteeing a level of public accountability, their very presence would contribute to the panopticon’s operations. Guests wouldn’t meet the prisoners (or college students, and many others.) however observe them from the management and surveillance middle. They might carry that many extra eyes to the duty of watching the cells for unhealthy conduct.
As indicated on the starting of this piece, nonscholarly references to the panopticon within the twenty first century sometimes seem as commentary on the norms of life on-line. This undoubtedly follows from Self-discipline and Punish being on the syllabus, in quite a lot of fields, for 2 or three generations now.
Bentham was assured that his work could be appreciated in centuries to come back, however he would most likely be perplexed by this repurposing of his thought. He designed the panopticon to “grind rogues sincere” by way of nameless and steady surveillance, which the digital panopticon workout routines as properly—however with out a deterrent impact, to place it mildly.
Bentham’s effort to impose inhibition on unwilling topics appears to have been hacked; the panoptic know-how of the current is programmed to generate exhibitionism and voyeurism. A few a long time in the past, the arrival of every new piece of digital know-how was hailed as a instrument for self-fashioning, self-optimization or another emancipatory ambition. For all its limitations, the analogy to Bentham’s panopticon suits in a single respect: Escape is tough even to think about.
