Surveillance Control Panopticism

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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