Surveillance Control Panopticism
1
Panopticon: From Greek, Pan +Optikon
Pan : “all” Optikon : “to see”
Literally, “all-seeing”
Jeremy Bentham, 1748–1832. Michel Foucault, 1926–1984.
2
The panopticon is a type of institutional building
designed in the late 18th
century by the English utilitarian
and legal reformer Jeremy Bentham. It’s is a form of
architecture that incorporates mass surveillance into its
design, in order to discipline and control the behavior of
the subjects within that space. While Bentham’s primary
focus was on the prisons, he believed the panoptic
principle was useful to a variety of institutions in which
surveillance, supervision, and “behavior-regulation” was
important. Among these, Bentham identifies the prison,
the asylum, the school, the factory, the market place, and
the hospital. In fact, Bentham’s theories on governance
call for generalizing the panoptic principle throughout the
whole of society. Such schemes of mass surveillance
remind us of an Orwellian police state, as “Big Brother”
watches us at all times. But Bentham did not advocate a
police state. His was a humanitarian project.
Bentham was subscribed to psychological hedonism—
convinced that humans were motivated by nature to act
only in their own self-interests, to promote only their own
happiness. Thus, he advocated for the creation of
institutions and laws that would properly modify human
desire so that society would always behave in a way that
promoted overall happiness. Ethically correct behavior,
according to utilitarians like Bentham, was behavior that
conformed to this “greatest happiness principle,”
otherwise known as the principle of utility. Surveillance
of the public, Bentham argued, was the least painful
method of conforming human behavior to the principle of
utility.
3
The Prison Panopticon
“A circular building: the prisoners in their cells,
occupying the circumference of the building, the
guard in the center inspection station. By blinds and
other devices, the inspector is concealed from the
prisoners’ view: hence the feeling of a sort of
omnipresence. The occupants of the cells isolated
from one another by walls, and subject to scrutiny
both collectively and individually by an observer in
the tower who remains unseen, the whole circuit of
the prison is observable with little or no movement
on behalf of the inspector, for the inspection station
has afforded the most perfect view of every cell: a
new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.”1
The panopticon allows all inmates to be observed by a
single watchman without the inmates ever knowing
whether or not they are actually being observed at any
given moment. While it is impossible for the watchman to
observe all cells at once, the fact that inmates don’t know
when they are being watched motivates them to act as
though they are watched at all times. The feeling that
surveillance is “omnipresent” is constructed intentionally,
to compel the prisoners to police their own behavior.
1 Bentham, Proposal for a New and Less Expensive Mode of
Employing and Reforming Convicts.
Original blueprint of
Bentham’s panopticon,
by Willey Riveley in
1791.
4
Panopticism
An even broader concept to understand, then, is that of
panopticism, developed by the 20th
century philosopher
Michel Foucault. This refers to any system of social
control that employs mass surveillance to discipline the
behavior of those being surveilled, such that they conform
their behavior to the expectations of the authority
surveiling them. As a logic of power, panopticism doesn’t
threaten punishment, but rather relies on the social forces
of shame, anxiety, and above all conformism to
manufacture subjects who internalize the norms, desires,
and set of behaviors established by social authority. These
subjects can be workers, patients, students, consumers,
etc.
Key to the effectiveness of panopticism is the principle of
uncertainty. That is, the panoptic design ensures that the
people being watched never actually know if they are
observed at any given moment; but they know that being
watched is the constant possibility. The psychological
objective of panoptic systems is, therefore, to create
subjects who believe that their only logical option is
permanent conformity (in the face of permanent
surveillance). Each individual becomes their own their
own supervisor, as the external illusion of an “all-seeing
eye” penetrates the internal consciousness of the
surveilled subject, creating an inner reality of self-
policing—the “cop in your head” being more effective
than the cop on the street, when it comes to modifying the
behaviors of people in institutional spaces or even society
as a whole.
5
The Panopticon as a Model of Governance
While Bentham is best known for his contributions to
ethical philosophy—specifically, his theory of
utilitarianism—he was always engaged in ambitious
speculations on the foundations of governance, “the legal
and administrative techniques of political rule.”
Bentham’s ambition in these mattes was universal in
scope. Dreaming to be the legislator of the world, he
wrote a complete code of laws—a “pannomion”—which
he envisioned being adopted by governments around the
globe.2 And central to Bentham’s pannomion and his
theory of governance was his panopticism. In The
Rationale of Punishment he argues that the panoptic
method of rehabilitation should operate throughout the
social institutions of the entire society, not only its
prisons. All citizens, not merely prisoners, need to be
“adjusted” such that their actions and desires conform to
the principle of utility. That Bentham would draw such a
conclusion makes sense in light of his commitment to
psychological hedonism. The leading political and
ethical question for Bentham was this: if human beings
are naturally motivated to act only in their own best
interest, for their own pleasure, then by what methods
should a society “modify a citizen,” so that they act in
accordance with the principle of utility? The ideal
utilitarian citizen, after all, acts against their own nature
insofar as they act to promote the greatest happiness for
2 He went so far as to write U.S. President James Madison directly,
volunteering to produce a complete legal code for the young country. He wrote to the governors of every single U.S. state with the same offer.
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the greatest number not simply their own pleasure. But if
this ideal “utilitarian-citizen,” which a well-ordered
society requires, does not come to
exists naturally, then what laws,
institutions, and arrangements
should be implemented in order to
bring about such an ideal
citizen? The Panopticon provided
Bentham with a solution to this problem: total
surveillance, or the appearance of it, implemented
throughout the society.
Bentham argued that panoptic surveillance should be
generalized throughout the whole of society’s
architecture, at work in every major institution, and
designed into every inch of public infrastructure. The
panopticon was never intended to be merely one state
institution among others. Rather, Bentham’s prison was a
paradigm institution; it provided a model of governance
that could be generalized across all of society.
Presidio Modelo Prison, off the coast of
Cuba, modeled after Stateville Correctional
Center in Illinois.
The inspection station
has afforded the most
perfect view of every
cell: a new mode of
obtaining power of
mind over mind.
7
Pleasure, Pain, and Self-Policing: How the
Panopticon Penetrates the Mind.
As a utilitarian moral theorist and a psychological
hedonist, Bentham believed that human beings are bound,
by natural laws, to seek out their own advantage and
pleasure and to avoid whatever hindered their individual
advantage or caused them pain.
“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of
two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for
them alone to point what we ought to do, as well as to
determine what we should do.”3
Rather than simply rely on the threat of punishment,
which coerces desirable behavior from the public by
threatening excessive amounts of pain, a panoptic
approach to social-control attempts to manufacture certain
sorts of subjects who generate their own psychological
pain when they fail to conform to the behaviors expected
of them. This is exactly how Bentham’s prison intended
to work: that is, according to a logic of self-supervision or
self-policing.
Panopticism, therefore, can be framed in terms of the
utilitarian “pleasure-pain-principle.” Within a panoptic
space, the surveilled subject is meant to experience a
torment of anxiety that his anti-social or non-conformist
behavior will be witnessed by others. Here, the pain (or
threat of pain) that causes an individual to modify their
3 Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation.
8
behavior is generated from within that individual’s own
psyche. They don’t need to be threatened with pain by the
state or any external other social authorities. The
following example does not represent the specific
architecture of Bentham’s panopticon, but it nonetheless
illustrates the logic of panopticism.
A Panoptic Classroom
Imagine a normal university classroom with the desks
arranged in columns and rows. Students can usually get
away with being on their phone during class if they are a
little sly about it, but if they are caught they get chastised
and kicked out of the classroom. It’s easy to imagine that
plenty of students don’t very much like their class and
who would prefer to be on their phone—and could
probably get away with it—but nonetheless they refrain
from doing so out of fear of being chastised and punished
by having to leave: two causes of pain. Here, the
instructor, an authority figure, is “threatening” students
with painful punishments. And these disciplinary
punishments, causes of pain, are generated from “outside”
of the student. That is, they come from the instructor.
Now imagine that one day the instructor arranges all the
desks, including his own into a circle.
9
The intended effect is that each student is under constant
surveillance—not from a single authority figure (the
instructor), but from the gaze of every other student.
When classrooms are arranged this way, students are
much less likely to be on their phone during class. One
obvious reason is that such classroom “architecture”
makes it difficult to hide that one is texting. However,
there is another important reason, having to do with the
logic of panopticism. Regardless of whether or not the
instructor sees a disobedient student texting, every other
student would. That is, every other student in the circle
would perceive them as fulfilling a particular undesirable
role: “the disobedient student,” the “undesirable student.”
The instructor has arranged the class such that the
collective gaze of all students operates as a surveillance
mechanism capable of ensuring conformism.
Of course, the situation is a little different in middle and
high school, which are different kinds of educational
institutions with a different set of established social
norms. It’s comical to fulfill the role of the “disobedient
student” in high school, as being the class clown is often a
source of pleasure to oneself and to others. However,
being perceived by one’s college peers as “disobedient” is
far more abnormal; it’s therefore more painful to be
disciplined by a professor than by high school teacher.
This isn’t because professors are “meaner” or more
authoritarian than high school teachers—the opposite
tends to be the case—but because in a college classroom,
disobedient behavior designates or “outs” a student as
being too immature for college, as though the student is
10
not psychologically capable of fulfilling the role of a
college student.
In the panoptically arranged classroom, the instructor
makes use of the collective gaze of all students as a sort of
mechanism of surveillance; the potentially shaming gaze
of his peers penetrates the student’s mind, encouraging
his conformity to the instructor’s (or the institution’s)
expectations of correct behavior. Non-conformity means
inner pain. The feeling of shame, and the desire to avoid
the emotional pain it causes, is generated from within the
student’s own psyche; the inner pain has a different origin
than the pain that comes from the instructor’s
punishment—an external source of pain—as they kick
you out of class. There are, of course, plenty of other
reasons that instructors arrange desks in a circle (class
participation, etc). But this arrangement also functions as
technique for controlling student behavior.
While there are plenty of methods for encouraging
conformism, panoptic surveillance is quite efficient, in
that it as it doesn’t require the “whip”—i.e., the threat of
external punishment—in order to render people obedient
to authority. Panopticism attempts, rather, to manufacture
an obedient subject over time: one who has internalized
expected forms of behavior, because they have been
adapted to certain social roles; one who doesn’t need to be
“whipped” into conformity, because they have learned to
desire it; and one discourages non-conformity in others,
because they have joined their peers in a culture of
collective surveillance.
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Panopticism:
An Expression of Utilitarian Logic
The panopticon is a perfect expression of Bentham’s
utilitarian logic. From the standpoint of governance, the
principle of utility demands that legislators take as their
ultimate goal the construction of a society that is perfectly
arranged for the happiness of all its members—a sort of
“heaven on earth,” or at least its secular equivalent. The
purpose of government for the utilitarians, therefore, is
not to “step out of the way” and let citizens simply pursue
their own natural desires. Rather, a utilitarian government,
in its purest form, would consist in the hyper-rational
engineering of the forms of life; and this includes the
engineering of acceptable desires and behaviors. In it is
dystopian form, a utilitarian society is Huxley’s A Brave
New World not Orwell’s 1984.
Consider it like this. Just as the prison panopticon was
designed to “rehabilitate” criminals, adjusting them into
socially productive members of society, Bentham argues
that other dominant social institutions (political, legal,
economic) should be at work on the whole of the
citizenry, engineering, as it were, a similar sort of socially
useful citizen. This is the ideal citizen who has adapted to
a number of different social institutions, internalizing
along the way the utilitarian logic of the state: desiring
and behaving in ways that conform to the greatest
happiness principle.
12
Utilitarian, Institutional Conditioning
Morals reformed, health preserved, industry
invigorated, instruction diffused, public burdens
lightened—all by a simple idea in architecture!4
Here, modern social institutions are understood to do
more than just arrange society by providing this or that
needed service; they “arrange” the very identities, lives,
and desires of the citizens who, from birth to death,
engage with those institutions on a daily basis. From
hospitals to schools, from work places to shopping
centers, our engagement with institutions create for us
certain social roles: as “student,” as “employee,” as
“consumer,” as “citizen.” And with each social role, we
are adapted to a certain form of life, with certain accepted
desires, and a strong impulse to conform to the behaviors
of peers who have also been adapted to those roles.
The utilitarian premise is that with the right institutional
conditioning, healthy, happy, and socially useful citizens
can be grinded out of the social-political mill. In other
words, a purely utilitarian government sees human life as
so much raw material out of which can be manufactured
the ideal (and above all) happy citizen: a citizen who is
useful in causing an increase in society’s well-being, who
has adopted as her own the desire to promote the
happiness of “the many” above her own. For Bentham,
efficient institutions will rely on (among other things)
mechanisms of mass surveillance.
4 Bentham, The Panopticon Writings.
13
A Political, Hedonic Calculus
For the utilitarian, political legislators should be ethical
experts. For Bentham, this means being a sort of “expert
accountant.” The work of a utilitarian legislator is to
calculate the sources of all possible pleasures and pains in
a society and then through the creation of laws and
institutions, promote in the consciousness of the public
only those behaviors and desires that tend to encourage
social stability and the overall well-being of society
(which of course gets measured in terms of total pleasure
over total pain). Again, Bentham’s vision for society,
even though it encourages mass surveillance, isn’t a
police state, with tyrants at the helm, and prisons rotting
with freedom-loving, government-hating revolutionaries.
Rather, Bentham is envisioning a well-managed,
democratic society, in which “hedonic accountants”—
these sort of institutional bureaucrats—create socially
useful legislation and socially useful institutions that
together promote the collective interest of society.
In the utilitarian utopia, ideal citizens are smoothly
manufactured by social institutions, which have
conditioned them out of their anti-social and selfish
motivations which nature had ingrained into them. These
institutionalized citizens are healthy and happy, having
internalized a set of desires and behaviors that promote
the interests of their fellows above themselves.
Intentionally designed by the state, each individual reaps
the social benefits provided by their fellows.
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Individual Will vs. General Will
What we discover in the logic of the utilitarian is an
assumption about human nature that was common to the
moral philosophers of Britain and America. This stands in
stark contrast with theories of human nature that tended to
dominate among the moral philosophers of continental
Europe.5 The basis of the latter theories is that human
beings have a natural desire to act in the interest of
society. This is often referred to as the “general will.”
Proponents of the general will argue that it’s as strong a
motivator of human action as is our individual will, which
motivate us to act only out of self-interest.
Contrary to utilitarian theory, proponents of the general
will often argue that the general will is what is actually
dominant in human beings, and that modern economic
and political institutions tend to encourage the dominance
of the selfish, individual will. If the general will was not
as equally strong—or stronger—than the individual will,
then society would require a policeman on every corner.
General will theorists argue that only in ethically
impoverished societies is such coercion necessary.
Contrary to the proponents of the general will, however,
Bentham and the utilitarians argue that the individual,
self-interested will is always the stronger of the two,
which is why human beings require—if not a policeman
stationed on every corner—a policeman stationed in
every mind.
5 Moral philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau.
15
Panopticon and the Birth of the Prison
Common sense tells us that prisons are socially necessary,
that they’ve always been around and that they will always
be around. However, a brief look at history shows that
this is simply not the case. While it’s certainly true that
jails have been in use for millennia across the world, the
function of a jail differs from the function of a
penitentiary. The function of jail is to incarcerate (detain
and confine) a person before trial and punishment; thus
incarceration was rarely used as the method of state
punishment itself (prior to the 19th
century.6) The function
of the penitentiary, however, is to make the confinement
the punishment itself. The state’s use of incarceration as
the punishment—and not simply the method for confining
criminals (or other “undesirables”) before trial—can be
traced back to a set of state reforms that originated
throughout Europe in the early 1800s. In fact, Jeremy
Bentham, who was writing at this time, was one of the
first, and without a doubt the most influential, legal
thinker to articulate a theory of modern incarceration as a
method of both punishment and rehabilitation. If Socrates
can be called the father of philosophy, Bentham is surely
the “father” of the prison.
In the 19th
century the modern prison arrives onto the
world’s stage. Its emergence functioned as a solution to a
particular set of social conundrums, the most pressing of
which had to do with the fact that the ongoing revolution
6 Ancient Rome is an exception to this; Romans were the first to use
prisons as a form of punishment, rather than simply for detention.
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in the American colonies in the late 1700s made it
impossible for England to simply offshore its “criminals”7
to the New World as indentured servants. After all, the
method of simply transplanting convicts to the New
World and Australia had been the dominant form of
punishment employed by the colonizing (and soon-to-be-
industrializing) nations of Europe for over two centuries.
In fact, one-fourth of the British immigrants to the
colonies were convicts.8
In Bentham’s time, or at least a generation before,
proposing the use of long-term confinement as a form of
punishment was revolutionary—if for no other reason
than because of the perception that it would place an
unnecessary, economic burden onto the state.
7 These were landless peasant farmers who were labeled “criminals”
under vagrancy laws; their crime was being poor in a changing world that had stripped them of their farmland. See Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. 8 Ekirch, A. Roger. “Bound for the Chesapeake: Convicts, Crime, &
Colonial Virginia,” In Virginia Cavalcade, 3(Winter 1988): 100-13.
Indentured servants flooding into the New World from Europe
17
The Prison Replaces Indentured Servitude, Public
Torture and Capital Punishment
How did the building of expensive prisons serve the
interests of the state? And why should the state house and
feed “criminals”—indefinitely—under lock and key,
when it had always been easier to just kill them off or
send them to the New World?
Even though the new institution of incarceration was
going to radically undermine some of the state’s most
fundamental social and political arrangements, the
emergence of new systems of state punishment was
simply unavoidable. This was in part due to a growing
refusal among the people of Europe to accept the state’s
continued use of public execution and torture during in
the 18th
century. Along with indentured servitude and
forced labor in penal colonies, capital punishment and
corporal punishment9 had been the state’s dominant
methods for dealing with crime. Yet, by the early 1800s,
all of these punishment institutions were close to obsolete
or, as was the case with capital punishment, radically
unpopular. For instance, the penal code in England in the
18th
and early 19th
century—known as the “Bloody
Code”10
—imposed the death penalty for the pettiest of
crimes, becoming a constant source of fear and outrage
among the citizens. In fact, English jurors were actually
9 Capital punishment refers state executions of criminals. Corporal
punishment is punishment intended to cause severe bodily pain, such as whipping, mutilation, and torture. 10
The “bloody code” resulted in dramatic increases in death penalties, for crimes consider minor or petty toady.
18
refusing to convict defendants for trivial crimes, even
when they were clearly guilty, because they did not want
to sentence someone to death for committing a minor
offense. As a result, by the middle of the 1800s, state
authorities all over Europe were forced by public pressure
to abandon its reliance on capital punishment.
Unable to rely on either indentured servitude—off-
shoring convicts to the New World—or cruel and
unpopular legislation like the Bloody Laws (capital
punishment and public torture), the state was beginning to
introduce new forms of punishment and social control.
This is the relevant historical context in which Jeremy
Bentham developed his groundbreaking theories on the
use of long-term confinement to both deter crime and
rehabilitate criminals. Bentham’s theories on the socially
beneficial use of incarceration had great appeal for the
reform-minded politicians of his time, legislators who
were scrambling to introduce new, less cruel and more
efficient methods of crime deterrence and social control.11
Bentham’s ideas on prison, punishment, and governance
quickly became the most influential in Europe. And by
the end of the 19th
century, incarceration became the
dominant mechanism of social control in the West,
replacing the death sentence, public torture, and
11
For another analysis of the concept of “crime,” see Why We Oppose Surveillance Downtown, or ACAB, uploaded to the class website.
19
indentured servitude as the dominant means of state
punishment.
What’s essential for us to recognize, then, is that
Bentham’s panopticon wasn’t intended merely to
“redesign” existing prisons, as though they had always
been around but were just in need of reform. Rather,
Bentham’s panopticon provided the original logic that
would govern the institution of incarceration;
consequently, his theories on punishment and re-
habilitation fueled the spread of prison construction
throughout industrializing nations. More broadly, by the
end of the 1800s, Bentham’s theories on the panopticon
had equipped the modern state with a utilitarian
justification for using institutional power and
infrastructure to modify the behavior of individuals. His
ideas on panopticism, therefore, have shaped how
governments have come to employ and experiment with
power over the last two centuries. In many ways—for
better or for worse—all of us are living in a world that
owes its existence to the imagination of Jeremy Bentham.
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Crime Deterrence
With the publication of The Rationale of Punishment in
1830, Bentham explains his motivations for the
panopticon. He argues that overall social happiness
requires safety and stability; and safety and stability
require that societies be protected from crime. However,
Bentham concludes that the existing mechanism for
punishing and deterring crime—threatening citizens with
excessive pain if they broke the laws—was in need of dire
reform. He recognized that the English legal system was
terribly cruel (and hopelessly complex). For Bentham,
reforming the English legal system required replacing the
Bloody Code with a utilitarian-inspired penal code,12
a
code that would assign the proper punishments: that is,
punishments that were precisely calculated13
to inflict an
amount of pain that just outweighed the pleasures one
would gain from committing a particular crime. This
utilitarian code, Bentham theorized, would deter crime,
but only by assigning the minimal amount of pain
necessary for deterrence—and no more.
Certainly, then, Bentham agreed that the logic of
deterrence should be central to systems of state
punishment: deterrence is a very useful method for
achieving social control, as it promises to punish the
delinquent with an amount of pain that is greater than any
12
In criminal law, the penal code identifies all prosecutable criminal offenses and assigns minimum and maximum punishments for those offenses. 13
An instance of Bentham applying his hedonic calculus to legislation.
21
pleasure he might gain from committing the crime. Yet,
Bentham recognized that capital punishment and public
executions created excessive, unnecessary, and socially
unproductive pain—not to mention, they nourished in
both the public and the state a love of cruelly.14
For a
utilitarian, this was intolerable: attempting to deter crime
by promising an excessive amount of pain in retaliation—
utterly disproportionate to the social pain which would
result from crime—does not at all conform to the
principle of utility.
Bentham recognized that the existing legal system along
with the dominant forms of punishment it assigned, were
primitive and inconsistent. The use of torture by the state
in effort to extract confessions was rampant, and a wide
range of cruel punishments such as whipping, mutilation,
and public executions was commonplace. In Bentham’s
words, there had emerged a “punishment creep”: what he
meant was that the punishments being assigned to
offenses had over time slowly increased in severity, such
that the death penalty in England was being imposed for
more than two hundred offenses. The result was a legal
system that was actually encouraging brutality; for
example, if both rape and homicide were to be punished
with death, then a rapist would be much more likely to
kill the victim (a witness) in order to reduce the risk of
being arrested.
14
This can be seen from the fact that public tortures often functioned as spectacles of public entertainment.
22
Rehabilitating the Criminal
Penitence: Latin paenitere , “to cause or feel regret,
shame, and guilt”
Penitentiary: Latin penitentiaria, “a place for penitents
to dwell upon their sins and repent”
While Bentham did agree with the logic of deterrence—
and wanted to improve the utility of England’s existing
mechanisms of deterrence—the truly distinguishing mark
of his punishment theories was the emphasis on the logic
of rehabilitation. For Bentham, rehabilitation meant
“behavior adjustment” achieved through surveillance and
conformity: i.e., panopticism. The aim of the panopticon
was humanitarian. By designing a prison whose function
was to rehabilitate a criminal as much as it was designed
to inflict a calculated amount of useful pain onto them,
Bentham aimed to curb the superfluous brutality of the
state’s existing punishment mechanism by making it
accord with his “greatest happiness principle.”
Remember that for utilitarian, the calculation of society’s
overall happiness cannot devalue the amount of pleasure
or pain experienced by anyone; this includes inmates. In
other words, when it comes to promoting overall
happiness in a society, the pleasure or pain an inmate is
forced to suffer is no less worthy of consideration than
anyone one else’s pleasure or pain. In order to create no
more pain for prisoners than what was socially useful,
Bentham’s panopticon would keep prisoners clean and
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healthy, make their labor productive, correct their social
behavior, and render them useful and profitable to
society—“a mill for grinding rogues honest” he once
called his panopticon.
Most of us take for granted the notion that one important
purpose of a prison (whether it achieves this purpose or
not) is to “correct” or “rehabilitate” the criminal. But we
must remember that in
Bentham’s time, suggesting
that the state confine certain
members of the public in
order “adjust and correct their
soul” was a unique and
revolutionary proposal.
Moreover, arguing that
prisoners should be deprived
only of liberty, not of health
or life, Bentham stressed that
allowing the public to
observe the warden (and his
staff) was just as important as
the observation of the
inmates. In order to prevent abuses of the prisoners,
members of the public and parliament were to be
guaranteed free access to the prison, making it
accountable to the “great open committee: the tribunal of
the world.”15
15
Bentham, The Rationale of Punishment.
The psychological objective
of panoptic systems is to
create subjects who believe
that their only logical option
is to conform, precisely
because at every moment
their behavior might be
observed. Each individual
within the panopticized
space is thus “adjusted,” as
it were, such that they
become their own
“overseer,” their own
supervisor. The external
illusion of an “all-seeing
eye” would penetrate the
internal consciousness of a
person, creating an inner
reality of self-policing.
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U.S. Prisons
Taking one good look at the conditions of prisons in the
United States, we can be sure that Bentham would be
appalled. The American prison is a massively
overcrowded, massively underfunded warehouse with
horrendous living conditions; they do very little to
“rehabilitate,” educate, or treat the mental illness of their
inmates. They are hidden away from society, receive little
to no public scrutiny. The American prison is hardly
suited to “rehabilitate” anyone16
and studies show that
they achieve even less success when it comes to deterring
crime.17
Taking one good look at the conditions of prisons in the
United States, we can be sure that Bentham would be
appalled. The American prison is a massively
overcrowded and massively underfunded warehouse, with
horrendous the living conditions; they do very little to
“rehabilitate,” educate, or treat the mental illness of their
inmates and they are hidden away from society, receive
little to no public scrutiny. The American prison is hardly
suited to “rehabilitate” anyone18
and studies show that
they achieve even less success when it comes to deterring
crime.19
16
https://eji.org/mass-incarceration/prison-conditions 17
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180514-do-long-prison-sentences-deter-crime 18
https://eji.org/mass-incarceration/prison-conditions 19
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180514-do-long-prison-sentences-deter-crime
25
Technological Surveillance20
We find the panoptic principle active in modern day
forms of surveillance, such as closed circuit television
(CCTV) cameras. Although modern surveillance
technologically is far superior to methods of surveillance
in Bentham's time, the objective remains largely
unchanged: to deter people from offending through the
constant threat of surveillance and the repercussions of
being caught on camera.
The architecture of modern shopping malls can be
understood as panoptic. The shopping mall is a large open
space with plenty of light, and is designed in such a way
to promote excellent visibility. Usually there are no small
walkways. Floors are constructed on a gallery design, so
that anyone can view those below without having to
change floors. Exposed elevators are often encased in
glass—a prime example of the panoptic eye, as incidents
in elevators would otherwise remain undetected for some
time due to the lack of visibility. Consumer panopticism
is also part of the modern shopping mall design, although
the consumers may not be reflectively conscious of their
participation in the scheme. Consumer panopticism is the
way in which shoppers surveil and police one another.
Not only are the cameras and security staff watching you,
the shoppers also follow suit. This reaction is one that has
become internalized as an intrinsic part of our society.
20
From “An Analysis of Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault and Their Present Day Relevance” By Louise Warriar, Andrew Roberts and Jennifer Lewis.
26
Foucault, Surveillance and Control
Despite the fact that no panopticon prison was built
during his lifetime (and virtually none since), Bentham’s
panopticism has prompted considerable discussion and
debate. Whereas Bentham himself regarded the
panopticon as a rational, enlightened, and therefore just,
solution to societal problems, his utilitarian ideas have
been repeatedly criticized by others for their reductive,
mechanistic, and inhumane approach to human lives.
Bentham’s panopticon has been invoked most famously
by French philosopher Michel Foucault, in his Discipline
and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. The notoriety of the
panoptic design today stems from Foucault's famous
analysis of it as a metaphor for modern “disciplinary”
societies and their pervasive inclination to observe and
normalize certain behaviors. Foucault seeks throughout
his work to make sense of how our contemporary society
is structured differently from the society that preceded us.
He has been particularly influential precisely because he
tends to overturn accepted wisdom, illustrating the
dangers inherent in those Enlightenment reforms that
were designed to correct the barbarity of previous ages:
the elimination of dungeons, the modernization of
medicine, the creation of the public university, etc.
As Foucault illustrates, each process of institutional
modernization entails disturbing effects with regard to the
power of the individual and the control wielded by the
government. Indeed, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault
paints a picture of contemporary society that sometimes
27
resembles Orwell's 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.
Foucault explores the ways that governmental
organization claims more and more control over more and
more private aspects of our lives. In particular, Foucault
explores the transition from what he terms a “culture of
spectacle” to a “carceral culture.” Whereas in a culture of
spectacle, punishment was effected on the body in public
displays of torture, dismemberment, and obliteration, in
carceral culture punishment and discipline become
internalized and directed to the manufacturing and, when
necessary, rehabilitation of social subjects.
Jeremy Bentham's nineteenth-century prison reforms
provide Foucault with a model for the social
transformations of the nineteenth century. Bentham saw
his prison reform as a blueprint for how society should
function: to maintain order in a democratic and capitalist
society, the populace needs to believe that any person
could be surveilled at any time. Such a structure would
ensure, over time, that people would soon internalize the
panoptic surveillance and police themselves. This system
of control has, arguably, been aided in our own culture by
new technological advancements that allow federal
agencies to track our movement and behavior (through the
internet, telephones, cell phones, social security numbers,
the census, ATMs, credit cards, and the ever increasing
number of surveillance cameras in urban spaces).
By “carceral culture,” then, Foucault refers to a culture in
which the panoptic model of surveillance has been
diffused as a principle of social organization, affecting a
28
number of institutions that couldn’t be more different:
from universities campuses to urban planning; from
hospitals to shopping malls; from airports to factory
floors. Some of the effects of this new model of
organization include:
1. The internalization of rules and regulations
As we naturalize rules, society could become less willing
to contest unjust laws. Of course, Foucault has Nazi
Germany in mind when he thinks about conformity, but
studies of American society (Philip Zimbardo, Stanley
Milgram) have suggested that Americans are, in fact, just
as willing to follow authorities even when it means doing
violence to innocent subjects.
2. Rehabilitation rather than cruel and unusual punishment
This reform was implemented because of nineteenth-
century outcries over the inhumane treatment of prisoners
and the insane. Foucault, however, questions the
subsequent emphasis on “the normal,” which entails the
enforcement of the status quo on ever more private
aspects of our lives (for example, sexuality). As he puts it,
“The judges of normality are present everywhere.”21
3. Information society
All of this surveillance and information-gathering leads,
of course, to huge challenges for the organization and
retrieval of data. Perhaps the very move of society into
this new mode of social organization made the invention
21
Discipline and Punish.
29
of the computer inevitable since it allows us to organize
ever more vast amounts of data.
4. Bureaucracy
A new white-collar labor force is necessary to set up the
procedures for information retrieval and storage. This
form of organization encourages a separation from real
people since it turns individuals into statistics and
paperwork. A classic example is Adolf Eichmann.
5. Efficiency
Value is placed on the most efficient means of organizing
data and individuals to effect the mass production and
dissemination of more goods and more information, even
if comes at the expense of exploitation in working
conditions or injustice.
Ultimately, Foucault refers to the panopticon as a
“laboratory of power” in which behavior could be
modified, and he viewed the panopticon—that “cruel,
ingenious cage”—as a symbol of the disciplinary “society
of surveillance.” This means that the panopticon operates
as a power mechanism of social control, if not also a tool
of oppression (though Bentham had no such intentions).
Foucault characterizes Bentham’s panopticon as the ideal
architectural representation of how modern power truly
functions: a power that disciplines and manufactures
precisely the sort of subjects necessary for the health of
the state and its institutions. Panopticism achieves this by
creating within people a consciousness of permanent
visibility. This is a form of power where no bars, no
30
chains, and no heavy locks are necessary for domination
or control. Instead of actual surveillance, the mere threat
of surveillance is what disciplines society into behaving
according to rules and norms. Furthermore, the spectator
of the panopticon changes in Foucault's account: it’s no
longer simply an agent of state authority that observes the
public; in a disciplinary society, fellow people surveil
each other. Their gaze reinforces the normative codes of
the society. Panopticism is a power which is employed
around the “abnormal” individual—functioning to brand
him and to alter him. If Foucault is correct in his analysis
that modern power is an expression of Bentham’s
panopticon, then it is worth saying again: all of us are
living in a world that owes its existence to the imagination
of Jeremy Bentham.
31
Thus, instead of coercing desirable behavior from society by threatening
its members with an excess amount of pain (terrifying them into
conformism), panoptic approach to self-control seeks to manufacture
certain sorts of subjects who generate their own psychological pain when
they refuse to conform to the behaviors expected of them.
Panopticism, therefore, can be framed in terms of the utilitarian
“pleasure-pain-principle”: within a panoptic space, the subject under
surveillance, suffers a torment of anxiety that his anti-social or non-
conformist behavior will be witnessed by others. Here, the pain (or threat
of pain) that causes an individual to modify their behavior is generated
from within that individual’s own psyche. They don’t need to be threatened
with pain by the state or any external other social authorities
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