The document discusses the concept of panopticism, originally presented by Jeremy Bentham and later expanded by Michel Foucault, focusing on how visibility and surveillance create power dynamics in society. It explores the implications of control, discipline, and knowledge in various institutions, illustrating how individuals are shaped by these mechanisms in a biopolitical context. Additionally, it touches on the evolution of digital cultures and the asymmetry of information in decentralized networks, highlighting the transition from disciplinary societies to societies of control.

1. Panopticism
ARIN6903 Exploring Digital Cultures
Nicola Giusto

2. Panopticon was first developed as an architecture
work by J. Bentham (1748 - 1832)

3. Bentham’s building
• Prisoners are constantly visible BUT they do not
see. “visibility is a trap”
• Prisoners are objects of information NEVER subjects
of communication. “collection of separated
individualities”
• Control is unverifiable! No one see inside tower
• Efficiency, Economy, Simplicity, Automation

4. M. Foucault (1926 - 1984)
• The birth of the clinic, 1963
• Discourse on language, 1970
• Discipline & Punish: the birth of the prison, 1975
• Lectures at Collège De France: Security, Territory,
Population, 1977 - 78, & The birth of biopolitics,
1978 - 1979

5. Overall Foucaultian thought
• Knowledge is Power. Information empowers
action, action provokes new information (circular
process)
• Technology changes the model of power /
knowledge
• Active role of observation. Objectivation
produces, evokes its own object
• Contra Structuralist theory, analysis has to be
related to a defined historical context

6. Panopticism as power
• Embodied power relationships... “political
anatomy” ... individual is fabricated
“[...] the body is reduced as a political force at the
least cost and maximezed as a useful force” p. 368
• Exercised continuously
“[...] these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all
those systems of micro-power that are essentially
non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the
discipline”

7. Panopticism as knowledge
• Increase the utility of the penalty
“the codified power to punish turns into a
disciplinary power to observe” p. 369
• Formation of “biographical” knowledge
“the legal punishment bears upon act; the punitive
technique on a life” p. 371

8. Panopticism as disciplinary society or
‘social laboratory’
Surveillance & Control in order to organise
moltiplicities thru:
• “continuos registration and perpetual assessment
and classification”
• “define tactics of distribution, reciprocal adjustment
of bodies, gestures and rhythms, differentiation of
capacities, reciprocal coordination in relation to
apparatus or tasks”

9. Institutions
object produced knowledge produced
prison prisoner punishment
psychopathology,
asylum madman experimental psychiatry
hospital patient medical treatment
sociology of production,
factory worker human resource management
school student education
army soldier performance, trainings
family ... ...

10. To summarise

11. Control
Discipline
Society of Sovereignty XX
XVIII - XIX
(G. Deleuze)
procedure, norm,
Ceremonial,
Mechanism number, signature, codes, protocols
ritual, spectacle
examination
King, leader, Bodies and
Who dividuals
hangman relationships
Light power:
Corporal force, access to information
Kind of power separation, inscription,
power of death or exclusion
subjection
Institution, vast closed Networks -
Space environment, fixed Striated vs Rhizomic
structure spaces
Manifest, public,
Visibility Invisible, material Invisible, intangible
catharsis

12. What’s up today?

13. Deleuze’s Postscript on the societies of
control
[...] In the societies of control, on the other hand, what
is important is no longer either a signature or a
number, but a code: the code is a password, while on
the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by
watchwords (as much from the point of view of
integration as from that of resistance). The numerical
language of control is made of codes that mark access
to information, or reject it. We no longer find
ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair.
Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses,
samples, data, markets, or "banks."

16. Internet and decentralised networks
Asymmetry of informations: Server / Clients, Hub / nodes, Google, Facebook, Flickr,
Apple, AT&T, Bing / End User
Moglen, E. (2010), Freedom in the Cloud, Talk at New York ISOC meeting. : http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1338

17. Internet and decentralised networks
Asymmetry of informations: Server / Clients, Hub / nodes, Google, Facebook, Flickr,
Apple, AT&T, Bing / End User
Moglen, E. (2010), Freedom in the Cloud, Talk at New York ISOC meeting. : http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1338

18. Mapping - make the social graph visible
• map of security cameras in Venice
Anoption project
• participated cartography
Biopolitics map Venice 2007
• create & share data maps
Targetmap

19. Thanks