Jurisprudence
" The Panopticon is a priviledged place for experiments on men, and for analysing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained by them. [It] functions as a kind of laboratory of power" .Michele Foucault. Discuss
Bentham's Panopticon1, envisioned as a correctional facility2, was an ingenious architectural scheme. Designed in the shape of a pentagon, the prisoners' cells3, each theatrically "backlit" by a high window, faced an open space dominated by an observation tower4. The tower windows had shades which could be drawn in such a way that the detainees did not know whether they were being watched at a particular time or not. Since the prisoners were constantly subjected to this field of total visibility, they would internalise the prison guard5.
Panopticon - the Greek neologism signified 'all-seeing place' - was all about vision and transparency operating one-way only: in the service of power. The panoptic mechanism's asymmetric system of lighting and wooden blinds ensured that the individual inmate was constantly visible, identifiable, and classifiable to the inspector - who was a kind of secular version of the All Seeing God's-eye. Its power was "visible and unverifiable" - that is, the inmate could not see the inspector, only the looming tower: he would never know when he was actually under surveillance6. This uncertainty, along with the inmate's isolation and loss of privacy, is the means of his compliance and subordination. "He [the inmate] is the object of information, never a subject in communication7". Uncertainty becomes the principle of his own subjection. It assures that: "surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if discontinuous in its action8".
The Panopticon has occasioned much discussion9 over the past two decades. Ignatieff10, Evans11, Melossi and Pavarini12, amongst others contributed to the discussion that has centred on the extent to which Bentham's program for a rational, utilitarian society was motivated by a concern for humanitarian reform or more sinister, disciplinary interests. Almost all commentators agree that the Panopticon constituted or helped to constitute a new form of power in the late eighteenth century, although I would rather question the ethical nature of this power and share Baumgardt's13 view, who dismissed the conception as "not of basic ethical interest,".
Discerning the social apparatus of power is the motivating force behind Foucault's inquiry into the systems of discipline and punishment. Where power is located and how it is distributed are his main concerns. His methodological approach is to look at the genealogy of the Western penal system, and thereby analyse the shift, from the monarchic to the modern era, in the employment of power to society. At the centre of his inquiry are not legal formulas or even abstract social theory, but the body. Thus, Foucault is interested in the effect of power relations on the human body. The body itself, it's symbols of punishments, incarceration, disciplined gestures, all give evidence of the "political anatomy" and how pervasive the instruments, or technology, of power has become in the modern, industrialized age. In my eyes, Foucault's analysis of power, also offers an [undermined by many] insight into the insidious practices of slavery.
He commences Discipline and Punish14 by relaying gruesome eyewitness accounts of the drawing and quartering of the regicide, Damiens. Consonant with the method and strategy he pursues in his other works, Foucault scores an emotional "coup d'état", for most readers, repulsed by the graphic details of the torture, are already patting themselves on the back, counting their blessings that such spectacles have receded into the penumbra of a more enlightened, humane age. This response - a steady progression from revulsion to self-congratulation - is exactly what Foucault intends to elicit. For in order to deflate the presumption of our own civility, to expose the machinations of disciplinary techniques, Foucault must demonstrate how unreflectively we inhabit the reigning episteme. The tactic of these accounts is to show the reader that punishment and discipline and the power that produces them have moved from the highly visible15 to the invisible: the "carceral city" in which we all live with our bodies being regulated through its institutions of power that range from governments to schools.
Foucault stops short of his all encompassing landscape of power at the doorstep of the domestic space, although he mentions that power in the cell of the parent-child relationship would be worth looking at as the basis of power relations. Part of this choice to avoid the domestic space derives from the fact that Foucault is telling the history of political power on, or over, the body and therefore remains in the public sphere. The public nature of torture, dating back to the Inquisition16, is precisely what Foucault sees as power's primary operative function as a means of punishment on the condemned, but more largely, discipline over the people17. Therefore, for the law to be efficacious, for the King to maintain social order, the punishment must be seen.
In the early 19th century, however, there begins a radical shift in this thought. With the usurpation of the King upon the French Revolution and circulation of Enlightenment thinking founded on democratic ideals and humanitarian aims of social progress, the spectacle of the tortured body was deemed horrific and unfitting for a humane and just society18. Foucault questions how within a relatively short period of time such a radical shift in thought towards punishment and the theatricals of torture could have occurred, even given the historical context of Enlightenment and political democratisation. In fact, he seems suspicious of the progress oriented Enlightenment philosophy as evidenced by his analysis of the replacement of the tortured body by the disciplined body.
In a much-debated chapter titled "Panopticism", Foucault observed that control no longer requires physical domination over the body, but can be achieved through isolation and the constant possibility of observation. Increasingly, what the law lays hold of is not the body but the "juridical subject." Consequently, the rack, pillory, and thumbscrew - mere instruments of bodily torture - are replaced19. In their stead, various therapeutic techniques are applied which discipline "in depth" - in the "heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations." 20 How does one gain entry to this interior realm? Insidiously, via the subject herself. Through ...
This is a preview of the whole essay
In a much-debated chapter titled "Panopticism", Foucault observed that control no longer requires physical domination over the body, but can be achieved through isolation and the constant possibility of observation. Increasingly, what the law lays hold of is not the body but the "juridical subject." Consequently, the rack, pillory, and thumbscrew - mere instruments of bodily torture - are replaced19. In their stead, various therapeutic techniques are applied which discipline "in depth" - in the "heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations." 20 How does one gain entry to this interior realm? Insidiously, via the subject herself. Through panoptic technologies argues Foucault, individuals are conditioned to internalise discipline, to police themselves. Modern technologies of power which produce self-regulating subjects are more efficient, but yet no less dominating, than the cruder technologies of direct bodily intervention which preceded them. He argues that these modern techniques leave incisions at least as deep, and their effects are more total, going to the core of being rather than the surface of skin. The social aim of punishment is no longer retribution or mere deterrence but to reform or "normalize": "to supervise the individual, to neutralize his dangerous state of mind, to alter his criminal tendencies, and to continue even when this change has been achieved21".
At this point in time22, our disciplinary practices - both our social goals and the actual objects upon which force is brought to bear - are transforming. He conceptualises the social transition that accompanied the shift from pre-capitalist to capitalist society: what this entailed was a complete reversal in the political economy of the body, an argument which he substantiates by examining and comparing how and by whom was power exercised on the body in these respective historical epochs. In pre-capitalist societies, power is seen as being exercised by rulers such as the aristocracy and absolute monarchs rather than as laid down by some codified set of rules and principles23. The new order of capitalist society demanded that power was not to be used to take life or to destroy bodies but instead to manage them - to render them "docile", to make them productive, to make them useful: it would also be used to ensure that there would be no wastage. As capital grew, the human body became more valued as a commodity24. Violators of the laws are still punished, but the techniques of punishment are humane25. From now on, no-one would be allowed to stand outside of society as outcasts, rebels, outlaws and so on. It represented a politics of heredity and life in that the new ruling class - the bourgeoisie - came to stake their claim to power by reference not to ancient lineage but to how much wealth they possessed. Equally, life had to be managed in such a way that it could be used to reproduce this wealth: but forced and free labour is it not the equivalent of slavery? to borrow Foucault's own words "is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?"26
Foucault associates to "traditional domination," and "rational-legal domination," as laid down by Max Weber27 by elaborating into how personal relations between a ruler and his subjects28 are replaced by an order governed impartially according to codified rules, regulations, and norms29. To ask which form of domination is worse entails also making a judgment about the opposite question: "which form of domination is better?" From better, it is a small slip to best, and from best, it is only a slight nudge to Truth. Once such a normative proclamation has been made, a theorist will naturally tend to become a propagandist for his or her favoured system of domination. In fact, more often than not, the theorist will forget that the issue of domination had ever been a question in the first place, so satisfied he will be with his moral certainties, and will then turn to the more practical problem of how to best institutionalise his pet system of authority. However, Foucault felt no compulsion to create a social theory that would "explain" or "interpret" the history of the West in terms of "power." He was not a social theorist. He was not a historian of ideas.
Foucault sets out to explore the changes in the way we punish,30 and he outlines the move to discipline the body by more discreet methods and suggests that its insidiousness lies precisely in its discreteness31. The penitentiary system reflected the power over society and so as the penal practices became hidden from public view and condemned bodies were put into isolated cells and observed by prison guards, so too the individual in society was observed in each of his/her compartmentalised, or individualised, "cells" of modern life32. Therefore, Foucault suggests we are all living in the "carceral city" because none of us can escape from the deep matrices of power relations that constitute our experience in daily life. We are seen without seeing our controllers - information is available on us without any communication. "Without any physical instrument other than architecture and geometry, [the Panopticon] acts directly on individuals; it gives 'power of mind over mind'33". Today, the "all-seeing" comes in the form of literal observation through cameras in public spaces and electronic monitoring of workers, but it also has a more figurative element in the data monitoring of credit agencies and insurance companies.
Unfortunately, Foucault, has very often been, if not totally misunderstood, at least partly betrayed. Most of the comments, reactions, and other criticisms he received focus on his conceptions of power and discipline34. Nevertheless, these themes, although important in Foucauldian thought, are not the key objective of his work. His analysis of power is useful as a genealogy that gives insight into the mechanisms of modern life that govern one's body. But as a theory of power, it seems too all encompassing, too panoptic, to be useful as a way of changing unjust power structures35. I think we have grown so used to taking social science texts as literal statements of `the truth', which tell us `what ought' or `what ought not to be' that the deliberate ambiguity and imprecise epistemological status of Foucauldian work can be very discouraging. Foucault's project inciting nothing - was a genealogy that locates and analyses power. What we do with this analysis, this knowledge, was not Foucault's concern, either because he himself was acting out of resistance to Enlightenment progression, i.e. social change for the better, or because he is simply not a social theorist but an interdisciplinary thinker of social matrices. Therefore, I object in any attempt to use Foucault's works to better analyse organizations, because that constitutes improper use of material principally designed to better analyse "how human beings are made subjects".
Foucault made us aware that whatever our functionally defined "roles" in society, we are constantly negotiating questions of authority and the control of the definitions of reality: he says it is better to look at the little pieces rather than the big picture36. Ironically, epidemiological controls would provide the blueprint of what Foucault called: "the utopia of the perfectly governed city." At this juncture, I would like to leave the reader to ponder on whether the following 1949 fictional conception would had ever delighted Foucault's imagination... or is it just my troubled mind...?
"The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinised."
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU
Orwell George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1954
BIBLIOGRAPHY
-Baumgardt, David, "Bentham and the ethics of today", New York, Octagon Books, 1966. Reprint of the 1952 ed.
-Bentham, Jeremy. 1968- 1996. The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham. ed. T.L.S. Sprigge, Ian R. Christie, A.T. Milne, J.R. Dinwiddy and S.R. Conway. London and Oxford, Clarendon Press.
-David Macey. The Lives of Michel Foucault. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.
-Davidson, Arnold I. "Archaeology, Genealogy, Ethics," in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed.
-Eribon, Didier. Michel Foucault. Trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991.
-Evans, R. 1982. The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750-1840. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
-Flynn, Thomas "Foucault as Parrhesiast: His Last Course at the Collège de France," in The Final Foucault, ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge, Mass: 1988).
-Foucault M , Questions of method: an interview with Michel Foucault , Ideology and consciousness 8 , 1981
-Foucault M, 1979 History of Sexuality Vol I: An Introduction, London: Allen Lane
-Foucault, M "What Is Enlightenment?" in Rabinow Paul Ethics: Subjectivity & Truth Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984 by Michel Foucault - Robert J. Hurley (Translator)
-Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan 1977 (Reprinted in Penguin Books, 1991).
-Foucault, M. "Truth, Power, Self: An Interview," in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with M. ed. Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: UMass Press, 1988).
-Foucault, M. 1975 I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother..., New York: Random House.
-Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and other Writings, New York, Pantheon Books.
-Foucault, M. 1985 History of Sexuality Vol II: The Use of Pleasure, London: Allen Lane.
-Gutting, Gary (1994), 'Michel Foucault: A user's manual', in Gutting, Gary, ed., A Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
-Habermas, Jürgen The Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1987).
-Ignatieff, M. 1978. A Just Measure of Pain: the Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850. New York, Harmondswoth.
-Madness and Civilization: History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965).
-Melossi, D. and Pavarini, M. 1981. The Prison and the Factory : Origins of the Penitentiary System. London, Macmillan.
-Miller, James The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993).
-Orwell George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1954
-Poster, M. 1984 Foucault, Marxism and History, London: Polity Press.
-Pypin, A.N. 1917. 'Russkie Otnosheniya Bentama.' (Bentham's Russian Connections.) -Ocherki Literatury i Obshchestvennosti pri Aleksandr I. Petrograd.
-Semple, Janet 1992. 'Foucault and Bentham: A Defence of Panopticism.' Utilitas.
-Semple, Janet 1993. Bentham's Prison. A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
-Smart, B. 1983 Foucault, Marxism and Critique, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
-Weber, M. 1970 From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, London: Allen and Urwin.
-Weber, M. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley, University of California Press.
The project was theorized in the mid-1780s
2 Bentham's central goal was control through both isolation and the possibility of constant surveillance. The principal was that a prisoner will constrain his own behaviour with the knowledge that some guard may be observing every action, regardless whether anyone is watching at a given moment.
3 Non-communicating cellular enclosures, in which confined inmates would be held in isolation, invisible to each other.
4 The lodge, which housed the omniscient inspector.
5 Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan 1977 (Reprinted in Penguin Books, 1991), pp.200-203.
6 Bentham found this Utilitarian ideal of oppressive self-regulation to be appealing in many other social settings, including schools, hospitals, and poor houses, although he achieved only limited success in promoting the idea during his lifetime.
7 in Foucault words.
8 Ibid, 2 above
9 Primarily, the Panopticon has been studied only as Jeremy Bentham's penitentiary, and hence as a project which failed: whilst Bentham spent some twenty years attempting to build the establishment in London, he was finally forced to abandon the scheme in 1809 under pressure from the British government. The project's first incarnation, designed by Samuel Bentham, Jeremy's brother, took place on an estate in White Russia during the autumn of 1786. When the Panopticon is examined in relation to the Russian context in which it was designed, its association with the disciplinary mechanisms of social control in the nineteenth century, and its incompatibility with the forms of power exercised by the ancien regimes, could become problematic. The Panopticon was intimately connected with the system of absolutism in Russia. Consequently, some tend to view the Panopticon more as a philosophical exercise or idealized invention of Jeremy Bentham than as a practicable project with its own development and history. By ignoring this history, there has also been a tendency to equate the Panopticon with Bentham's mature utilitarian philosophy and the radical anti-monarchy, democratic standpoint he took up towards the end of his life.
0 Ignatieff, M. 1978. A Just Measure of Pain: the Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850. New York, Harmondswoth. Both Ignatieff and Foucault contrast the ancien and modern regimes of Europe through forms of power specific to each. Ignatieff differentiates between an old paternalist regime, characterized by a weak state and reliance on physical terror to maintain order, and a new regime consisting of a strong state, controlling society through discipline of the mind rather than the body. The Panopticon, for Ignatieff, is emblematic of the new order as "the most haunting symbol of the disciplinary enthusiasms of the age." Likewise, Foucault views the Panopticon as a 'cage, cruelle et savante', an idealized microcosm of nineteenth century society, where discipline has become institutionalised in schools, hospitals, prisons and asylums, operating through the internalised subjection imbued through surveillance. He posits a radical discontinuity between this 'disciplinary society' and the ancien regime, where power is articulated through theatrical displays of sovereign authority, exemplified in the spectacular politics of the public execution. The major problem of government was sovereignty and the organization of sovereignty vis a vis the subjects of sovereignty. According to Foucault, these two forms of 'sovereign' and 'disciplinary' power are "absolutely incompatible.". Foucault saw the "state" as co-extensive with "society." Thus, he draws our attention to our own very modern condition, locked within: "a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power".
1 Evans, R. 1982. The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750-1840. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
2 Melossi, D. and Pavarini, M. 1981. The Prison and the Factory : Origins of the Penitentiary System. London, Macmillan.
3Baumgardt, David, "Bentham and the ethics of today", New York, Octagon Books, 1966. Reprint of the 1952 ed, p.364.
4 Originally published in France as Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Editions Gaillimard, 1975).
5 the King's executioners and the scaffold-the stage of torture
6 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan 1977 (Reprinted in Penguin Books, 1991), p.39.
7 "And, from the point of view of the law that imposes it, public torture and execution must be spectacular, it must be seen by all as its triumph" M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan 1977 (Reprinted in Penguin Books, 1991), p.34.
8 "By 1830-48, public executions, preceded by torture, had almost entirely disappeared" M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan 1977 (Reprinted in Penguin Books, 1991), p.14.
9 We are now far away from the country of tortures, dotted with wheels, gibbets, gallows, pillories; we are far, too, from that dream of the reformers less than fifty years before: the city of punishments in which a thousand small theaters would have provided an endless multicoloured representation of justice in which the punishments, meticulously produced on decorative scaffolds, would have constituted the permanent festival of the penal code. The carceral city, with its imaginary 'geo-politics', is governed by quite different principles. - Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. (p 307).
20 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan 1977 (Reprinted in Penguin Books, 1991), p.16.
21 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan 1977 (Reprinted in Penguin Books, 1991), p.18.
22 Since the late eighteenth century that is
23 At the same time, this small group of rulers could justify their power and privileges by reference to their royal blood, ancient lineage and famous ancestry: in this type of society, the more one stood out from `the norm', the more one's fame and power - or, conversely, one's infamy and notoriety. Symbolically, this constituted a politics of blood and death: the `blue-blood' of the aristocracy and their right of death over the rest of the population.
24 Moreover, this was why sexuality became so important from this time: it provided a means of regulating the conduct of individual bodies and of ensuring the health and efficiency of the population as a whole. - Foucault M, 1979 History of Sexuality Vol I: An Introduction, London: Allen Lane
25 This is the facile enlightenment view, which Foucault spends all of Discipline & Punish debunking.
26 Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan 1977 (Reprinted in Penguin Books, 1991), p.228
27 Weber, M. (1978). Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley, University of California Press. Weber regarded traditional domination to be legitimate as long as it rested "on an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority under them." Similarly, rational-legal authority is legitimate as long as it rests "on a belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands27." From the Weberian "value-neutral" perspective, when these conditions are met, both are regarded as equally legitimate, but there remains the temptation to declare which one is less legitimate.
28 "Personal domination"
29 "Impersonal domination"
30 Michel Foucault, "Truth, Power, Self: An Interview," in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: UMass Press, 1988), 14.
31 or now hidden power of discipline.
32Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan 1977 (Reprinted in Penguin jBooks, 1991), p.308. In modern society, he later states [Foucault M, 1979 History of Sexuality Vol I: An Introduction, London: Allen Lane], our spaces are organized "like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible
33 Foucault M, 1979 History of Sexuality Vol I: An Introduction, London: Allen Lane
34 Janet Semple , for example, has reacted strongly to Foucault's notorious view that the Panopticon constituted a "diabolical piece of machinery" for social control in the nineteenth century(Foucault (1980) p.158). She suggests that Foucault's "claustrophobic distrust of the world" ((1993) p.322) has led him to depreciate the sincerity of Bentham's intentions. She prefers to see the Panopticon as the product of "a realistic, kindly man looking for ways to ameliorate the lot of the poor (Semple (1993) p.314-315)."
35 As he explains: "I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyse the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects." Foucault M , Questions of method: an interview with Michel Foucault , Ideology and consciousness 8 , 1981 p.208
36 i.e., look at one prison instead of society as a whole
