Adapting the figure of the Panopticon from Jeremy Bentham, Foucault sought to explain the regulatory force of power inherent in specific architectural compositions. The Panopticon designates an architectural vision of a prison, a circular building with an observation tower in the middle. The principle of this architectural vision is to render the subject, whether “a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy” (Foucault, 1977: 200), to a state of permanent visibility. As Foucault explains: “All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower” in order to create the impression that someone might be watching (1977: 200). More than actually placing a prison guard in the tower, the purpose of the architectural design is to create a space in which one can never be certain whether one is being watched or not. As Foucault elaborates:
Hence the major efect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its efects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. (1977: 201)
The uncertainty associated with the possibility of always being watched inevitably leads the subject to adjust his or her behavior accordingly, to behave as if they are indeed permanently observed. Surveillance, thus, signifies a state of permanent visibility. The novelty of Foucault’s notion of visibility, constructed by the specificities of the historically contingent architectural apparatus, lies precisely in highlighting the technical organization of power. As Foucault points out, the Panopticon is not a dream building: “it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form […] it is in fact a figure of political technology” (Foucault, 1977: 205). Power “has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up” (Foucault, 1977: 202). By highlighting the diagrammatic function of panoptic surveillance, Foucault provides a forceful analytical framework for understanding diferent modalities of visibility and the mechanisms by which it is being arranged.
Life at the Top
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