Foucault Panopticism

The Powers of Panopticism
Michel Foucault seeks throughout his work, Panopticism, to analyze how contemporary society is differently structured from the society that preceded us. He displays, through Jeremy Bentham’s architectural realization of the Panopticon, a prison for society and those who inhabit it. Also, there is the matter of constant surveillance, discipline and power in society. The Panopticon is not only a building where people are being governed, but also a laboratory-- “The Panopticon is a privileged place for experiments on men” (Foucault 219). A “privileged place” that gives a positive connotation to a residence that is otherwise considered a prison. The power of the Panopticon is derived not from the fact that it is implemented
as an architectural and/or optical (surveillance) system, but it is a vehicle of political theology that has limits on specific or intended purposes. Foucault believes that the Panopticon is the design of how humanity uses power to regulate and govern itself. Furthermore, Foucault discusses multiple methods in tackling the issue of what power can mean for both society and the individual themes that are apparent in Cornelius Eady’s Brutal Imagination.
The architectural model for the Panopticon was created by Jeremy Bentham, who proposed a building whose main purpose would be to allow an observer to view prisoners without having the prisoners being able to tell if they are being watched. At the center of the building is a tower, “pierced with wide windows that open in the inner side of the ring,” so that a person can “observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery” (Foucault 200). There is a semi-transparency that installs sentiments of fear within the prisoners since the prisoner “is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication”. Regardless of there being a presence, the imprisoned individual is under the impression that he is under the interminable “gaze” of his warden; therefore, he will monitor his actions. Foucault believed that “all that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy” (Foucault 219), from where the “victim” can be watched.
This design revolutionized the way prisons worked and proved successful, making it a “marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power” (Foucault 233). However, the Panopticon does not only stop at the penal system. Foucault argues that the Panopticon is not only a prison but more of an mechanism that has spread like a virus and is used in all levels of society: one is always under constant surveillance by someone, which affects everyone’s actions (and reactions).
Whether we realize it or not, this constant state of surveillance shapes our habitual actions, as we can also see in Eady’s poetry collection, Brutal Imaginations.
Foucault argues that Panopticism can be seen anywhere: in hospitals, schools, etc. (Foucault). In one of the most time consuming parts of lives, like online social networking (Facebook), we can see how the Panopticon is implemented: our moves are definitely watched, in this case by our friends, who limit us on what we share and post in our profiles. If we post something illegal- we can get in trouble. We face consequences that five years ago would have been irrelevant. The “watchers” have become the business that we have interest in working for, the schools that we want to apply to, lawyers of the lawsuits that we may be facing. If we post something personal or offensive- a reputation or friendship might be on the line. Panopticism relates to everything. It does not need any special skills or tools to implement: “Any individual, taken at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants” (Foucault 233). No matter what we do, we have culture and norms that always follow us and we cannot escape. We, as citizens, participate in the Panopticon: we govern and are
governed.
One of the terms that Foucault mentions throughout his paper is “periphery”, the outside boundary of the “watcher” within the tower of the Panopticon. I believe he uses borderline fringe as a tool to remind the reader the prime reason behind the infallibility of the Panopticon—you are under habitual surveillance. The sole hierarchal is the guard of the guarded, whether that is a teacher over a single student or a watchman in a reformatory with thousands of prisoners. Foucault, furthermore, gives us an example of the Panopticon in society with the plague in the seventeenth century. The way the government quarantined people in their houses and exacted their actions (e.g. a person had to watch the streets constantly or die), everyone was monitored and controlled by a higher power. The root of the government’s power sprang from chaos from the innumerable and senseless death, since the public lived in fear.
Foucault’s work is not only provocative but it is also familiar to Eady's fictional character in Brutal Imagination. Foucault brings up the dichotomy of authority, which relates to the fictional character. He says that due to the “binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal),” (Foucault 212) that those functioning as the societal norm are automatically given the power to exercise over those that break the social procedures we live by. To fully grasp the situation, we must examine the birth of the culture that determined what was considered “normal”. I believe that the greatest factor is hatred in the form of racism. In this case, a man that had the power stripped from him because he fit a description that was outside the “norm” of the innocent (the leper). He lied outside of the bounds that his arbitrators felt comfortable with. He was black and present; therefore, he was guilty of the murder of Susan Smith’s children. He was a victim of criminalized injustice, the object of society’s discontent. Eady created an escape for the anger that the white population had against any defiance of the law through his poems.
The Panopticon was destined to spread throughout society. It makes power more economic and effective (Foucault). According to Oxford English Dictionary, power is the “ability to act or affect something strongly; physical or mental strength; might; vigour, energy; effectiveness.” This source of “power” that the Panopticon gives affects into a society to develop itself, its economy, its education and its moral values. It makes it possible for the government to control its citizens. Foucault divides the Panopticon into two extremes: The first one, being a more “one-way” society, which resembles a totalitarian or dictatorship government-- “At one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time”. The other extreme, with Panopticism, is the discipline-mechanisms: “A functional mechanism of Discipline: must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come.” (Foucault 223), which resembles more modern, democratic governments. The discipline-blockade closely relates to George Orwell’s “1984”, where everyone and everything is being watched by the authorities and “big brother”, the all seeing eye. The discipline-mechanism, which is a functional mechanism to make power operate more efficiently, can relate to more modern, democratic governments such as ours. A representative or democratic society, such as ours, supports the notion of a universally panoptic society, where everyone is being watched but not necessarily by an authoritative figure. While these two societies are “extremes”, they both fall under the Panoptic eye—both have some sort of surveillance. While the society in “1984” knows they are directly being watched, we also know that we have laws and police that not necessarily look at us but can take our freedom away when we do not follow its rules.
The Panopticon was a metaphor that allowed Foucault to explore the relationship between systems of social control, people in a disciplinary situation, and the power-knowledge concept, since in his view, power and knowledge comes from observing others. The Panopticon is a “mechanism of power” and represents the way in which discipline and punishment work together and, ultimately, affects the way of examining the fluidity of power in society. The Panopticon is a filter that magnifies the concept of power in society by giving each citizen a certain level of “power”, whether real or not. There is no escape from the Panopticon’s surveillance because there is always some kind of presence that is controlling the prisoner of the Panopticon. In fact, “visibility is a trap” (Foucault 214) because it “traps” the individual into believing that they are constantly under the gaze of another. Without Panopticism and its power, we might as well have no government, no hierarchy and no social order.