Key Arguments

• Antiquity relied on public life, festivals, and the architecture of temples and theatres to render a small number of objects accessible to a multitude.
• The modern age uses architecture to procure an instantaneous view of a great multitude for a single individual or a small number of supervisors.
• Instead of amputating or repressing the individual, modern surveillance carefully fabricates the individual through a technique of forces and bodies.

Source Quotes

In appearance, it is merely the solution of a technical problem; but, through it, a whole type of society emerges. Antiquity had been a civilization of spectacle. ‘To render accessible to a multitude of men the inspection of a small number of objects’: this was the problem to which the architecture of temples, theatres and circuses responded.

In these rituals in which blood flowed, society found new vigour and formed for a moment a single great body. The modern age poses the opposite problem: ‘To procure for a small number, or even for a single individual, the instantaneous view of a great multitude.’ In a society in which the principal elements are no longer the community and public life, but, on the one hand, private individuals and, on the other, the state, relations can be regulated only in a form that is the exact reverse of the spectacle: ‘It was to the modern age, to the ever-growing influence of the state, to its ever more profound intervention in all the details and all the relations of social life, that was reserved the task of increasing and perfecting its guarantees, by using and directing towards that great aim the building and distribution of buildings intended to observe a great multitude of men at the same time.’

Julius saw as a fulfilled historical process that which Bentham had described as a technical programme. Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies. We are much less Greeks than we believe.

We are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism. The importance, in historical mythology, of the Napoleonic character probably derives from the fact that it is at the point of junction of the monarchical, ritual exercise of sovereignty and the hierarchical, permanent exercise of indefinite discipline.

Key Concepts

• Antiquity had been a civilization of spectacle.
• The modern age poses the opposite problem: ‘To procure for a small number, or even for a single individual, the instantaneous view of a great multitude.’
• Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance
• We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power
• it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.

Context

Foucault contrasting the ancient Greek model of public spectacle with the modern panoptic model of hidden, pervasive surveillance.