One of the revolutionary ideas put forward by Foucault is the various measures of surveillance, to ensure discipline in a society. Such a consented voyeurism always has a panopticon structure. Foucault talks about the age old prison, and how such surveillance structures are employed in other institutions from mental asylums to public schools to ensure discipline. The 184 idea of a big brother watching has gained prominence today with the internet, satellites giving rise to a virtual panopticon today.

1. The Role of Panopticon
in Panopticism
Paper 1: Theorizing Literature
Unit 2: Power
Michel Foucault. “Panopticism”.
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
Rinu Krishna K
MPhil 2014-15
21-Nov-14 Institute of English

2. Paul Michel Foucault
(15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984)
A French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist
and literary critic. Through his impressive career Foucault became
known for his many demonstrative arguments that power depends
not on material relations or authority but instead primarily on
discursive networks. This new perspective as applied to old
questions such as madness, social discipline, body-image, truth,
normative sexuality etc. were instrumental in designing the post-modern
intellectual landscape we are still in nowadays.
Today he is accepted as having been the most influential social
theorist of the second half of the twentieth century.
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English

3. Foucault's Discipline and Punish
 Foucault published Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison in
1975, offering a history of the penal system in Western Europe. In it he
seeks to analyze punishment in its social context, and to examine how
changing power relations affected punishment. He begins by analyzing the
situation before the eighteenth century, when public execution and
corporal punishment were key systems, and torture was part of most
criminal investigations. He further discusses the evolution of the
disciplinary power and states that it has three elements: hierarchical
observation, normalizing judgment and examination.
 In it’s central chapter, Panopticism, he builds on Bentham's
conceptualization of the panopticon as he elaborates upon the function
of disciplinary mechanisms in such a prison and illustrates the function of
discipline as an apparatus of power. He further analyzes the network of
power that is spread throughout society, which is controlled by the rules of
strategy alone and that any call for its abolition fail to recognize the depth
at which it is embedded in modern society. Thus he develops Panopticon
as a metaphor for modern "disciplinary" societies and their pervasive
inclination to observe and normalise.
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English

4. Foucault's Discipline and Punish
“… the existence of a whole set of
techniques and institutions for
measuring, supervising and
correcting the abnormal brings into
play the disciplinary mechanisms to
which the fear of the plague gave
rise. All the mechanisms of power
which, even today, are disposed
around the abnormal individual, to
brand him and to alter him, are
composed of those two forms from
which they distantly derive.
Bentham’s Panopticon is the
architectural figure of this
composition.”
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English

5. Bentham’s (1748-1842) Panopticon
 The Panopticon is a type of institutional building
designed by the English philosopher and social
theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century.
 The concept of the design is to allow a single
watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates
of an institution without the inmates being able to
tell whether or not they are being watched.
 The design consists of a circular structure with an
“inspection house” at its centre, from which the
manager or staff of the institution are able to watch
the inmates, who are stationed around the
perimeter. Bentham conceived the basic plan as
being equally applicable to hospitals, schools,
sanatoriums, daycares, and asylums, but he devoted
most of his efforts to developing a design for a
Panopticon prison, and it is his prison which is most
widely understood by the term.
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English

6. The Panopticon “Visibility is a trap”
“At the periphery, an annular building; at
the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with
wide windows that open onto the inner side
of the ring; the peripheric building is divided
into cells, each of which extends the whole
width of the building; they have windows,
one on the inside, corresponding to the
windows of the tower, the other on the
outside, allows the light to cross the cell from
one end to the other.”
Reverses the principle of a dungeon.
Axial visibility & Lateral invisibility – a
guarantee of order
Permanent visibility that assures the
automatic functioning of power.
Power is visible & unverifiable.

7. Panopticon “mechanism of power
reduced to its ideal form”
 It automatizes & disindividualizes power.
 It does not matter who exercises the
power.
 Produces homogeneous effects of power.
 Economic geometry of a ‘house of
certainty’.
 Does the work of a ‘naturalist’.
 Laboratory of power.
 A cruel ingenious cage.
 Polyvalent in its applications
 It gives power of mind over mind.
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English

8. Panopticon “democratically controlled”
 May be subjected to irregular and
constant inspections.
 Democratically controlled
 Accessible to ‘the great tribunal
committee of the world’.
 May be supervised by society as a
whole.
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English

9. The Role of the Panopticon
 To strengthen the social forces.
 A new ‘political anatomy’ whose object and
end are not the relations of sovereignty but the
relations of discipline.
 To spread effective education.
 Exerts a moral influence over behavior.
 As centres of observation disseminated
throughout society.
 State-control over the mechanisms of
discipline.
 Instrument of permanent, exhaustive,
omnipresent surveillance…hierarchized network.
 the formation of a disciplinary society in the
movement from enclosed disciplines to an
infinitely extendible "panopticism“
 We are in a panoptic machine – the individual
is carefully fabricated in it.

10. Formation of a Disciplinary Society
 Triple objectives of the disciplines – to increase
the docility and the utility of all the elements of
the system.
 Using the multiplicity itself as an instrument of
discipline.
 The panoptic modality of power..continued to
work on the juridical structures of the society..the
‘enlightenment’ which discovered the liberties,
also invented the disciplines.
 Discipline is a ‘counter-law’.
 The infinitely minute web of panoptic
techniques.
 The schema of power-knowledge in each
discipline.
 The ideal point of penalty today would be an
indefinite discipline.
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English

11. 21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English

12. Panopticon Today
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English

13. Panopticon Today
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English

14. Panopticon Today
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English

15. 21-Nov-14

16. Thank you
21-Nov-14 Rinu Krishna K MPhil 2014-15 Institute of English