Key Arguments

• The Panopticon reverses the traditional function of the dungeon; it preserves enclosure but eliminates darkness, using full lighting to capture the subject.
• It ensures the inmate is always visible to the central supervisor but cannot see the supervisor or other inmates.
• This lateral invisibility prevents collective action, plots, contagion, or distraction, replacing the chaotic crowd with a manageable collection of separated individuals.

Source Quotes

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. We know the principle on which it was based: 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 two 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.

Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap. To begin with, this made it possible – as a negative effect – to avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to be found in places of confinement, those painted by Goya or described by Howard.

Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. The arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility.

If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents. The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. From the point of view of the guardian, it is replaced by a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised; from the point of view of the inmates,

Key Concepts

• Bentham’s Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition
• Visibility is a trap.
• He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.
• The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities.

Context

Foucault introducing Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon as the ultimate physical and architectural embodiment of the disciplinary mechanisms he has been describing.