Panopticon: An Invention of Discipline or Organized Anarchy
- vshvengseanghai
- Aug 15, 2022
- 5 min read
“The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
The notion of panopticon evolved from the Western romanticism found in bodies of literature on surveillance ranging from novels to philosophy books. For instance, a French novelist, Walter Benjamin, projected his panoptic romance through his work the Flâneur which described how a city idler scrolled around the modern city of Paris to gain sensory perceptions or consciousness of modern culture of observation, which is described as “a mechanism to provide a key to revolutionary change” in an alienated city of what he called a “phantasmagoria fear-inspiring world” (Lauster, 2007, p. 142).
He might sound a bit over concerned by the rapid change in the industrial world, but his concern is still applicable till these days which mark the even more rapid neoliberal transformation. What I captured my attention to his novel is the fact that he urged people in modern society to embrace a sensory careful observation as a mean to gain our innate consciousness or morality in today's society.
Walter’s panoramic literature became an attractive theory and methodology of modernity in nineteen century since it took into account the “sensual turn” in humanities and social sciences (Boutin, 2012). Likewise, in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four, an English novelist George Orwell went on a bit more political since he romanticized the phantasmagoric screening imposed by the central government to watch over its subjects. For him, the central government used the screening technology to surveille and control people’s conformity and social order. However, it seems to leave a room for optimism that proles like Mr. Winston managed to escape from the state’s surveillance as since he wrote a diary to criticize the Big Brother and his authoritarian regime (Orwell, 1949). Now, I have no doubt why the content related to Orwell's book 1984 are not welcomed in some countries, especially the junta states with political unrest (a case in Thailand in 2014).
However, from the state's perspective, there are still some ways to control people's or subjects' discipline. The British authorities managed to utilize a panopticon to control and observe the working class thanks to the father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, whose design of panopticon or inspection-house “concerned the application to prisons of a method for keeping workers under constant observation” (Sprigger, 2017).
Bentham’s panoptic approach is essentially associated with embodiment of disciplines due to his belief that people behave better if they believe they were being watched even when they were not. The belief supports his utilitarian justice that both institutions (i.e. Industry Houses) and workers satisfy each other’s utilities because people receiving poor relief are to be housed “in 250 panopticon Industry-Houses, where they would be obliged to work in return for relief” (see UCL Bentham’s Project [1]). In summary, Bentham’s panoptic architecture is state-centric as it generates automatic functioning of power from state institutions to ensure ceaseless productivity.
Understanding Bentham’s architectural apparatus requires not only state-centric authoritarianism but also individual liberalism (Crimmins, 1996) which better depicts the perspective of the governed subjects from the below. Therefore, Foucault (1995) extended an understanding of “panopticon-ism” in his work Discipline and Punish, which saw a panopticon as an observation post or center from which state-induced violence and surveillance emanate to ensure prompt obedience of subjects in the periphery.
Instead of questioning the intentionality of Bentham’s panopticon (Schofield, 2009, p. 70), Foucault stresses on the violent nature of modern states by linking panopticon with fear on the account of which “the numerous those anonymous observers are, the greater risk for the inmate of being surprised and the greater his anxious awareness of being observed” (Foucault, 1995, p. 202). Foucault’s emphasis on fear became more pronounced when he decoded Bentham’s vocabulary into an adjective form of panoptic, “the application of which strikes fear in the heart of every freedom-loving individual” (Brunon-Ernst, 2012, p. 18). In this way, fear is individually separated by what Foucault called “double modes or binary divisions”, mechanisms to individually control the functions of subjects—mad (the excluded) versus sane (the included).
Later discussions on panopticon have been extended into the context of digital surveillance, challenging our understanding of the emergent “plural panopticons” (Brunon-Ernst, 2012, p. 17). Take an example of Poster’s superpanopticon. In the digital context where time and space no longer limit the circuits of communication afforded by electronic devices, and where illiterate subjects (proles) are replaced by intelligent and educated populaces, social control seems to be a huge problem for the dominant powers to rule over the panoptic subjects. Nonetheless, a superpanopticon, which is “system of [participatory] surveillance without walls, windows, towers or guards”, still enables the panoptic power to control and discipline subjects based upon the discourse of computerized database--individuals must apply for driving license or ID cards. In the way, a panopticon becomes more participatory and self-constituted by subjects themselves (Poster, 1990, pp. 91-102). Individual fear, as Poster added, happens when the recorded information about personal details is bound to be produced and disseminated by ruling powers (1990, p. 78).
Panoptic power influences on both fear and trust in a society. For instance, laypeople who are fearful of land grabbing experiences confirm that they do not trust in the government bodies as they see no difference between investors and rotten government officials (Schoenberger and Beban, 2018). In this way, the study examines only the trust in consequence of the land grabbing attacks; however, trust prior to an attack also matters in predicting the degree of fear as Enjolras, et al. (2019) indicate in their study of the effect of trust on fear in the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Europe.
Particularly, Cambodia Development Resource Institute (CDRI) highlights the lack of public trust in social functions and state’s accountability which are culturally embedded to neopatrimonialism (Pak, et al., 2007). The lack of social trust is more pronounced in the setting of digital surveillance whereby people self-constitute a fearful conception that social and political functions are in the “shadows” and trapped into a panoptic apparatus of the state, Angkar is a Pineapple with Many Eyes or Prison without Wall, remained since the Khmer Rouge regime until the age of digital media activism (Vong, 2020; Nachemson and Kong, 2019; Hinton, 2004). The politics of fear is the essence of the human rights crisis for a reason that fear encourages authoritarian autocrats to legitimize their crack down on human-rights civil societies (Roth, 2016), and to jeopardize judicial courts regardless international rule of laws.
In summary, what it can be included about the notion of panopticon is that it is an invention of discipline or/and chaos because it generates automation of certain behaviors or beliefs in compliance with the pre-written scripts of the big brothers or the elites. That's from a class struggle point of view, but from a public policy and public governance's perspective, it is not about that the upper elites control the weaker class, but instead it is about an invention of "governmentality" in the way that a panoptically-designed policies will better nudge people's behaviors toward a common good.
If policy makers can embrace the concept of panopticon as a core methodology to nudge for automatic practices, that would be great! Unfortunately, if bad authorities use the concept of panopticon to punish or silence a certain voice, it would generate an automatic organized anarchy--it looks peaceful from the outside but rottenly chaotic and fearful from the inside. Hence, please be careful when you use this concept.
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