Foucault on Panopticism and Progress

Technological advances may be taken as a means by which progress is attained, or at least that technology is a manifestation of such progress, and in either case this progress is assumed to be good. Roughly, the idea is that progress correlates to increase in knowledge, which allows for technological developments. Michel Foucault challenges this account of progress, and he does so in his Discipline and Punish by presenting an alternative view through the window of the Panopticon. For Foucault, the so-called progress found in human history does not so much reflect the summation of knowledge, but rather it reflects the amplification of power, and technology is a substantial means by which this is achieved.

The Panopticon is an architectural structure first proposed by Jeremy Bentham, consisting of a central tower encircled by blocks of cells. In each cell an inmate is isolated but fully visible, for on the inner wall of the circle, each cell has a window that faces the tower, and on the outer wall, another window allows light from the outside to illuminate the cell. Though the tower is very visible, it is never clear whether or not anyone is watching from the tower, so an inmate must act as if he or she is being observed at all times. Panopticism, says Foucault, inverts the principle of the dungeon exactly by assuring the visibility of the inmate. The dungeon was meant to cast a prisoner into the darkness to be unseen and forgotten, but the Panopticon does the opposite. The former represents one extreme of discipline, that of “the discipline-blockade,” and Panopticism itself is the other extreme, and it is closely bound with progress.

Nowhere is the relationship among progress, technology, and power better manifested than in the Panopticon. In fact, Foucault states that the Panopticon is “the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form”. The Panopticon is not in the least bit limited to architecture, but rather when the principles of Panopticism are severed from the spatial structure of the Panopticon, one should be left with the essentials of this mechanism of power. For this reason, Panopticism may be applied universally, wherever power is so manifest. Quoth Foucault, “it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use”. Bentham had not stumbled upon a clever building at all, but rather an entire power structure; indeed, precisely the power structure that, for Foucault, was to be found in the world all too soon thereafter.

Foucault places the development of Panopticism in the context of history, and this history turns on the person of Napoleon, whose “character probably derives from the fact that it is at the point of junction of the monarchial, ritual exercise of sovereignty and the hierarchical, permanent exercise of indefinite discipline. The Napoleonic character is unique insofar as it at once embraces the spectacle in all the outward appearances of royal power surrounding the emperor and also effects the surveillance on which Panopticism depends, thereby “extinguish[ing] one by one” the elements of that former imperial pomp. With the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, the ancien régime as well as the European Enlightenment could be said to come to their end, and with their developments came also the end of the dungeon.

Foucault apparently divides his history, at least for the present purpose, into two distinct periods, the older defined by the “discipline-blockade” of the dungeon, and the current defined by Panopticism, with the shift occurring in the Enlightenment and as stated, being represented by the character of Napoleon. As stated, it was after Napoleon that the spectacle of power that had defined the old monarchies ceased to be. The spectacle refers essentially to the ideas inherent in Greek theatre or an ancient temple, which presented a few actors or relics to many spectators or worshipers. The Panopticon, rather, allows a few to observe many at once. Both are manifestations of power, but each is different, especially insofar as Panopticism is closely tied to progress.

The Panopticon at once strengthens power and facilitates progress, something the “discipline-blockade” could never achieve. To place personify power in an individual, such as the king, is to make a spectacle of it and to localize it. The Panopticon as ideal form pervades the mind of each member of the entire society, since its function as a machine of power is, in fact, to internalize that power structure within the individuals. This is the importance of surveillance to Panopticism. In Bentham’s design, this is the tower with its unseen and possibly present, possibly absent observers. The same goes for surveillance in the abstract. In a Panoptical power structure, each individual in the multitude understands his or her place possibly under surveillance, and each individual becomes the spectacle for some few to perhaps watch. The internalization of power that this produces is the instilment of discipline, “a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology”. Panopticism, by this technology of discipline, is able to “amplify” power, through which progress is accelerated. Technology and progress, then, are means of amplifying power.

Returning again to the historical angle, for after all, progress as we know it must range over history, Foucault posits three “historical processes” through which to explain “the formation of the disciplinary society.” These are the “economic, juridico-political, and…scientific”. Starting with the economic, Panopticism can be explained as being the mechanism that effects discipline on a populace—indeed, by the Enlightenment an increasingly large populace—over the greatest number and at the least cost. There is still another consideration beyond this, though, and that is progress, “to link this ‘economic’ growth of power with the output of the apparatuses…within which it is exercised”. The idea is, on the one hand, to ensure that the power structures are strengthened—that the individuals do not resist the structure—and on the other hand to strengthen the utility of each individual within the structure, hence progress for the structure. Such is the economic, and such is readily apparent in the rise of capitalist economies, in whose later assembly lines it became absolutely necessary for a few to have disciplinary control over the multitude of workers completing their appointed tasks on that line.

Of the juridico-political, Foucault argues that there is a separation between the laws and rights found in a given social structure and the disciplines by which the individual members of that society operate. Specifically, while the laws are established under egalitarian pretenses, the disciplines cannot be, since they derive from a power structure that is certainly not egalitarian. “The disciplines should be regarded as a sort of counter-law”, Foucault says. Of modern society, “its universally widespread panopticism enables it to operate, on the underside of the law, a machinery that is both immense and minute”. Hence disciplinary power derives from Panopticism, from the power to observe, and this alongside the law makes for the coexistence of supposed rights as well as the power structures of the Panopticon.

When it comes to science, Foucault emphasizes that Panopticism is itself a technological development, though it is not generally considered as such, and that like any technology, it may be used for the purposes of power. Of the former point, Foucault compares Panopticism to “the development at about the same time of many other technologies,” but that “It is regarded as not much more than a bizarre little utopia, a perverse dream—rather as though Bentham had been the Fourier of a police society”. Alas, Panopticism, as it has been seen, was a pervasive technology, and its institutional manifestations are many, ranging over the gamut from the narrow world of a prison to the broader domain of the state. For Foucault, this is the only means by which something like a modern army could be controlled—through the discipline instilled by this technology of the Panopticon. So the Panopticon is obviously a technology of subjection in Foucault’s view, but so too is any other technology, hence he notes that in a disciplinary society, “any mechanism of objectification could be used…as an instrument of subjection, and any growth of power could give rise…to possible branches of knowledge”. This link between knowledge and power, namely that growth in knowledge is directly linked to growth in power, is demonstrative of Foucault’s view of progress. Knowledge is a function of power, and from knowledge is technology and thence progress, thus progress is merely the growth of power.

Foucault has ventured far from any positive account of progress, and apparently away from any objective account of it, either. If progress is merely growth in power, and if technology is a means of internalizing power, even subtly, then it is very difficult to ascribe any special goodness to progress. In a disciplinary society operating in the structures of Panopticism, or at least so it is in the world of Foucault, one must be very wary of all technological advances, especially with regard to their uses and must take apparent progress with more than a little salt. After all, we cannot see into the tower, but we are wholly visible.