Thepanopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the Englishphilosopher and social theoristJeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a singlecorrections officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.
Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched motivates them to act as though they are all being watched at all times. They are effectively compelled to self-regulation. Thearchitecture consists of arotunda with aninspection house at its centre. From the centre, the manager or staff are able to watch the inmates. Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable tohospitals,schools,sanatoriums, andasylums. He devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a panopticon prison, so the term now usually refers to that.
The wordpanopticon derives from the Greek word for "all seeing" –panoptes.[3] In 1785,Jeremy Bentham, an English social reformer and founder ofutilitarianism, travelled toKrichev in Mogilev Governorate of theRussian Empire (modernBelarus) to visit his brother,Samuel, who accompaniedPrince Potemkin.[4]: xxxviii Bentham arrived in Krichev in early 1786[5] and stayed for almost two years. While residing with his brother in Krichev, Bentham sketched out the concept of the panopticon in letters. Bentham applied his brother's ideas on the constant observation of workers to prisons. Back in England, Bentham, with the assistance of his brother, continued to develop his theory on the panopticon.[4]: xxxviii Prior to fleshing out his ideas of a panopticon prison, Bentham had drafted a completepenal code and explored fundamental legal theory. While in his lifetime Bentham was a prolific letter writer, he published little and remained obscure to the public until his death.[4]: 385
Bentham thought that the chief mechanism that would bring the manager of the panopticon prison in line with the duty to be humane would bepublicity. Bentham tried to put hisduty and interest junction principle into practice by encouraging a public debate on prisons. Bentham'sinspection principle applied not only to the inmates of the panopticon prison, but also the manager. The unaccountablegaoler was to be observed by the general public and public officials. The apparently constant surveillance of the prison inmates by the panopticon manager and the occasional observation of the manager by the general public was to solve the age old philosophic question: "Who guards the guards?"[6]
Bentham continued to develop the panopticon concept, asindustrialisation advanced inEngland and an increasing number of workers were required to work in ever largerfactories.[7] Bentham commissioned drawings from an architect,Willey Reveley. Bentham reasoned that if the prisoners of the panopticon prison could be seen but never knew when they were watched, the prisoners would need to follow the rules. Bentham also thought that Reveley's prison design could be used forfactories,asylums,hospitals, andschools.[8]
Bentham remained bitter throughout his later life about the rejection of the panopticon scheme, convinced that it had been thwarted by the king and an aristocratic elite. It was largely because of his sense of injustice and frustration that he developed his ideas ofsinister interest – that is, of the vested interests of the powerful conspiring against a wider public interest – which underpinned many of his broader arguments for reform.[9]
The Building circular – an iron cage, glazed – a glass lantern about the size of Ranelagh – The Prisoners in their Cells, occupying the Circumference – The Officers, the Centre. By Blinds, and other contrivances, the Inspectors concealed from the observation of the Prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of invisible omnipresence. – The whole circuit reviewable with little, or, if necessary, without any, change of place.[10]
— Jeremy Bentham (1791).Panopticon, or The Inspection House
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Bentham's proposal for a panopticon prison met with great interest among British government officials not only because it incorporated thepleasure-pain principle developed by thematerialist philosopherThomas Hobbes, but also because Bentham joined the emerging discussion onpolitical economy. Bentham argued that the confinement of the prison "is his punishment, preventing [the prisoner from] carrying the work to another market". Key to Bentham's proposals and efforts to build a panopticon prison in Millbank at his own expense, was the "means of extracting labour" out of prisoners in the panopticon.[11] In his 1791 writingPanopticon, or The Inspection House, Bentham reasoned that those working fixed hours needed to be overseen.[12] Also, in 1791, Jean Philippe Garran de Coulon presented a paper on Bentham's panopticon prison concepts to theNational Legislative Assembly in revolutionary France.[13]
In 1812, persistent problems withNewgate Prison and other London prisons prompted the British government to fund the construction of a prison in Millbank at the taxpayers' expense. Based on Bentham's panopticon plans, theNational Penitentiary opened in 1821. Millbank Prison, as it became known, was controversial, even blamed for causing mental illness among prisoners[citation needed]. Nevertheless, the British government placed an increasing emphasis on prisoners doing meaningful work, instead of engaging in humiliating and meaningless kill-times.[11] Bentham lived to see Millbank Prison built and did not support the approach taken by the British government. His writings had virtually no immediate effect on the architecture of taxpayer-funded prisons that were to be built. Between 1818 and 1821, a small prison for women was built in Lancaster. It has been observed that the architectJoseph Gandy modelled it very closely on Bentham's panopticon prison plans. The K-wing nearLancaster Castle prison is a semi-rotunda with a central tower for the supervisor and five storeys with nine cells on each floor.[14]
It was thePentonville prison, which was built in London after Bentham's death in 1832, that was to serve as a model for a further 54 prisons inVictorian Britain. Built between 1840 and 1842 according to the plans ofJoshua Jebb, Pentonville prison had a central hall with radial prison wings.[14] It has been claimed that Bentham's panopticon influenced the radial design of 19th-century prisons built on the principles of the "separate system", includingEastern State Penitentiary inPhiladelphia, which opened in 1829.[15] But the Pennsylvania–Pentonville architectural model with its radial prison wings was not designed to facilitate constant surveillance of individual prisoners. Guards had to walk from the hall along the radial corridors and could only observe prisoners in their cells by looking through the cell door'speephole.[16]
In 1925,Cuba's presidentGerardo Machado set out to build a modern prison, based on Bentham's concepts and employing the latest scientific theories onrehabilitation. A Cuban envoy tasked with studyingUS prisons in advance of the construction ofPresidio Modelo had been greatly impressed withStateville Correctional Center inIllinois and the cells in the new circular prison were too faced inwards towards a central guard tower. Because of the shuttered guard tower, the guards could see the prisoners, but the prisoners could not see the guards. Cuban officials theorised that the prisoners would "behave" if there was a probable chance that they were undersurveillance, and once prisoners behaved, they could be rehabilitated.
Between 1926 and 1931, the Cuban government built four such panopticons connected with tunnels to a massive central structure that served as a community centre. Each panopticon had five floors with 93 cells. In keeping with Bentham's ideas, none of the cells had doors. Prisoners were free to roam the prison and participate in workshops to learn a trade or become literate, with the hope being that they would become productivecitizens. However, by the timeFidel Castro was imprisoned atPresidio Modelo, the four circulars were packed with 6,000 men, every floor was filled with trash, there was no running water, food rations were meagre, and the government supplied only the bare necessities of life.[17]
In the Netherlands, historic panopticon prisons includeBreda,Arnhem, andHaarlem penitentiary. However, these circular prisons with approximately 400 cells fail as panopticons because the inward-facing cell windows were so small that guards could not see the entire cell. The lack of surveillance that was actually possible in prisons with small cells and doors discounts many circular prison designs from being a panopticon as it had been envisaged by Bentham.[18] In 2006, one of the first digital panopticon prisons opened in the Dutch province of Flevoland. Every prisoner in the Lelystad Prison wears anelectronic tag and by design, only six guards are needed for 150 prisoners instead of the usual 15 or more.[18]
Jeremy Bentham's panopticon architecture was not original, asrotundas had been used before, as for example in industrial buildings. However, Bentham turned the rotund architecture into a structure with a societal function, so that humans themselves became the object of control.[19] The idea for a panopticon had been prompted by his brotherSamuel Bentham's work in Russia and had been inspired by existing architectural traditions. Samuel Bentham had studied at theEcole Militaire in 1751, and at about 1773 the prominent French architectClaude-Nicolas Ledoux had finished his designs for theRoyal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans.[20]William Strutt in cooperation with his friend Jeremy Bentham built a round mill inBelper, so that one supervisor could oversee an entireshop floor from the centre of the round mill. The mill was built between 1803 and 1813 and was used for production until the late 19th century. It was demolished in 1959.[21] In Bentham's 1812 writingPauper management improved: particularly by means of an application of the Panopticon principle of construction, he included a building for an "industry-house establishment" that could hold 2000 persons.[22] In 1812 Samuel Bentham, who had by then risen to brigadier-general, tried to persuade theBritish Admiralty to construct anarsenal panopticon in Kent. Before returning home to London he had constructed a panopticon in 1807, nearSt Petersburg, which served as a training centre for young men wishing to work in naval manufacturing.[23] The panopticon, Bentham writes:
will be found applicable, I think, without exception to all establishments whatsoever, in which within a space not too large to be covered or commanded by buildings, a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspections. No matter how different or even opposite the purpose.[24]
— Jeremy Bentham (1791).Panopticon, or The Inspection House
Though no panopticon was built during Bentham's lifetime, his principles prompted considerable discussion and debate. Shortly after Jeremy Bentham's death in 1832 his ideas were criticised byAugustus Pugin, who in 1841 published the second edition of his workContrasts in which one plate shows a "Modern Poor House". He contrasted an Englishmedieval gothic town in 1400 with the same town in 1840 where brokenspires and factorychimneys dominate the skyline, with a panopticon-like building in the foreground replacing the Christianhospice. Pugin, who went on to become one of the most influential 19th-century writers onarchitecture, was influenced byHegel andGerman idealism.[25] In 1835 the first annual report of thePoor Law Commission included two designs by the commission's architectSampson Kempthorne. His Y-shape and cross-shape designs forworkhouse expressed the panopticon principle by positioning the master's room as the central point. The designs provided for the segregation of occupants and maximum visibility from the centre.[26] ProfessorDavid Rothman came to the conclusion that Bentham's panopticon prison did not inform the architecture of earlyasylums in the United States.[27]
In 1965, the conservative historianShirley Robin Letwin traced theFabian zest forsocial planning to early utilitarian thinkers. She argued that Bentham's pet gadget, the panopticon prison, was a device of such monstrous efficiency that it left no room for humanity. She accused Bentham of forgetting the dangers of unrestrained power and argued that "in his ardour for reform, Bentham prepared the way for what he feared". Recentlibertarian thinkers began to regard Bentham's entire philosophy as having paved the way fortotalitarian states.[28] In the late 1960s, the American historianGertrude Himmelfarb, who had publishedThe Haunted House of Jeremy Bentham in 1965, was at the forefront of depicting Bentham's mechanism of surveillance as a tool of oppression and social control.[29][28]David John Manning publishedThe Mind of Jeremy Bentham in 1986, in which he reasoned that Bentham's fear of instability caused him to advocate ruthlesssocial engineering and a society in which there could be noprivacy ortolerance for the deviant.[28]
In the mid-1970s, the panopticon was brought to the wider attention by the French psychoanalystJacques-Alain Miller and the French philosopherMichel Foucault.[30] In 1975, Foucault used the panopticon as metaphor for the modern disciplinary society inDiscipline and Punish. He argued that the disciplinary society had emerged in the 18th century and that discipline are techniques for assuring the ordering of human complexities, with the ultimate aim of docility and utility in the system.[31] Foucault first came across the panopticon architecture when he studied the origins ofclinical medicine and hospital architecture in the second half of the 18th century. He argued that discipline had replaced the pre-modern society of kings, and that the panopticon should not be understood as a building, but as a mechanism of power and a diagram of political technology.[31]
Foucault argued that discipline had already crossed the technological threshold in the late 18th century, when the right to observe and accumulate knowledge had been extended from the prison to hospitals, schools, and later factories.[31] In his historic analysis, Foucault reasoned that with the disappearance ofpublic executions pain had been gradually eliminated aspunishment in a society ruled by reason.[31] The modern prison in the 1970s, with its corrective technology, was rooted in the changing legal powers of the state. While acceptance forcorporal punishment diminished, the state gained the right to administer more subtle methods of punishment, such as to observe.[31] The French sociologistHenri Lefebvre studiedurban space and Foucault's interpretation of the panopticon prison, arriving at the conclusion thatspatiality is a social phenomenon. Lefebvre contended thatarchitecture is no more than the relationship between the panopticon, people, and objects. Inurban studies, academics such as Marc Schuilenburg argue that a different self-consciousness arises among humans who live in an urban area.[32]
In 1984,Michael Radford gained international attention for the cinematographic panopticon he had staged in the filmNineteen Eighty-Four. Of thetelescreens in the landmark surveillance narrativeNineteen Eighty-Four (1949),George Orwell said: "there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment ... you had to live ... in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised".[33] In Radford's film the telescreens were bidirectional and in a world with an ever increasing number of telescreen devices the citizens of Oceania were spied on more than they thought possible.[34] InThe Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (1994) the sociologistDavid Lyon concluded that "no single metaphor or model is adequate to the task of summing up what is central to contemporary surveillance, but important clues are available inNineteen Eighty-Four and in Bentham's panopticon".[35]
The French philosopherGilles Deleuze shaped the emerging field of surveillance studies with the 1990 essayPostscript on the Societies of Control.[36]: 21 Deleuze argued that the society of control is replacing the discipline society. With regards to the panopticon, Deleuze argued that "enclosures are moulds ... but controls are a modulation". Deleuze observed that technology had allowed physical enclosures, such as schools, factories, prisons and office buildings, to be replaced by a self-governing machine, which extendssurveillance in a quest to manage production and consumption. Information circulates in the control society, just like products in the modern economy, and meaningful objects of surveillance are sought out as forward-looking profiles and simulated pictures of future demands, needs and risks are drawn up.[36]: 27
In 1997,Thomas Mathiesen in turn expanded on Foucault's use of the panopticon metaphor when analysing the effects ofmass media on society. He argued that mass media such asbroadcast television gave many people the ability to view the few from their own homes and gaze upon the lives ofreporters andcelebrities. Mass media has thus turned the discipline society into a viewer society.[37] In the 1998 satirical science fiction filmThe Truman Show, the protagonist eventually escapes the OmniCam Ecosphere, thereality television show that, unknown to him, broadcasts his life around the clock and across the globe. But in 2002,Peter Weibel noted that theentertainment industry does not consider the panopticon as a threat or punishment, but as "amusement, liberation and pleasure". With reference to theBig Brother television shows ofEndemol Entertainment, in which a group of people live in a container studio apartment and allow themselves to be recorded constantly, Weibel argued that the panopticon provides the masses with "the pleasure of power, the pleasure of sadism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, scopophilia, and narcissism". In 2006,Shoreditch TV became available to residents of theShoreditch in London, so that they could tune in to watch CCTV footage live. The service allowed residents "to see what's happening, check out the traffic and keep an eye out for crime".[38]
TheCornell University professor and information theorist Branden Hookway introduced the concept of a Panspectrons in 2000: an evolution of the panopticon to the effect that it does not define an object of surveillance more, but everyone and everything is monitored. The object is defined only in relation to a specific issue.[39]
Paris School academicDidier Bigo coined the term "Banopticon" to describe a situation where profiling technologies are used to determine who to place under surveillance.[40]
In their 2004 bookWelcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control,Derrick Jensen and George Draffan called Bentham "one of the pioneers of modern surveillance" and argued that his panopticon prison design serves as the model for modernsupermaximum security prisons, such asPelican Bay State Prison in California.[41] In the 2015 bookDark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness,Simone Browne noted that Bentham travelled on a ship carryingslaves as cargo while drafting his panopticon proposal. She argues that the structure of chattel slavery haunts the theory of the panopticon. She proposes that the 1789 plan of theslave shipBrookes should be regarded as the paradigmatic blueprint.[42] Drawing onDidier Bigo'sBanopticon, Browne argues that society is ruled by exceptionalism of power, where thestate of emergency becomes permanent and certain groups are excluded on the basis of their future potential behaviour as determined throughprofiling.[43]
The metaphor of the panopticon prison has been employed to analyse the social significance ofsurveillance byclosed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in public spaces. In 1990,Mike Davis reviewed the design and operation of ashopping mall, with its centralised control room, CCTV cameras and security guards, and came to the conclusion that it "plagiarizes brazenly from Jeremy Bentham's renowned nineteenth-century design". In their 1996 study of CCTV camera installations in British cities, Nicholas Fyfe and Jon Bannister called central and local government policies that facilitated the rapid spread of CCTV surveillance a dispersal of an "electronic panopticon". Particular attention has been drawn to the similarities of CCTV with Bentham's prison design because CCTV technology enabled, in effect, a central observation tower, staffed by an unseen observer.[44]: 249
Shoshana Zuboff used the metaphor of the panopticon in her 1988 bookIn the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power to describe how computer technology makes work more visible. Zuboff examined how computer systems were used foremployee monitoring to track the behavior and output of workers. She used the term 'panopticon' because the workers could not tell that they were being spied on, while the manager was able to check their work continuously. Zuboff argued that there is a collective responsibility formed by the hierarchy in theinformation panopticon that eliminates subjective opinions and judgements of managers on their employees. Because each employee's contribution to the production process is translated into objective data, it becomes more important for managers to be able to analyze the work rather than analyze the people.[45]
Foucault's use of the panopticon metaphor shaped the debate on workplace surveillance in the 1970s. In 1981 the sociologistAnthony Giddens expressed scepticism about the ongoing surveillance debate, criticising that "Foucault's 'archaeology', in which human beings do not make their own history but are swept along by it, does not adequately acknowledge that those subject to the power ... are knowledgeable agents, who resist, blunt or actively alter the conditions of life."[44]: 39 Thesocial alienation of workers and management in the industrialised production process had long been studied and theorised. In the 1950s and 1960s, the emergingbehavioural science approach led toskills testing andrecruitment processes that sought out employees that would be organisationally committed.Fordism,Taylorism and bureaucratic management of factories was still assumed to reflect a mature industrial society. TheHawthorne Plant experiments (1924–1933) and a significant number of subsequent empirical studies led to the reinterpretation of alienation: instead of being a given power relationship between the worker and management, it came to be seen as hindering progress and modernity.[46] The increasing employment in theservice industries has also been re-evaluated. InEntrapped by the electronic panopticon? Worker resistance in the call centre (2000), Phil Taylor and Peter Bain argue that the large number of people employed incall centres undertake predictable and monotonous work that is badly paid and offers few prospects. As such, they argue, it is comparable to factory work.[47]: 15
The panopticon has become a symbol of the extreme measures that some companies take in the name of efficiency as well as to guard against employee theft.Time-theft by workers has become accepted as an output restriction andtheft has been associated by management with all behaviour that include avoidance of work. In the past decades "unproductive behaviour" has been cited as rationale for introducing a range of surveillance techniques and the vilification of employees who resist them.[47]: x In a 2009 paper by Max Haiven and Scott Stoneman entitledWal-Mart: The Panopticon of Time[48] and the 2014 book by Simon HeadMindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans, which describes conditions at anAmazon depot inAugsburg, it is argued that catering at all times to the desires of the customer can lead to increasingly oppressive corporate environments andquotas in which many warehouse workers can no longer keep up with demands of management.[49]
The concept of panopticon has been referenced in early discussions about the impact ofsocial media. The notion ofdataveillance was coined by Roger Clarke in 1987, since then academic researchers have used expressions such assuperpanopticon (Mark Poster 1990),panoptic sort (Oscar H. Gandy Jr. 1993) andelectronic panopticon (David Lyon 1994) to describe social media. Because the controlled is at the center and surrounded by those who watch, early surveillance studies treat social media as a reverse panopticon.[50]
In modern academic literature on social media, terms likelateral surveillance,social searching, andsocial surveillance are employed to critically evaluate the effects of social media. However, the sociologistChristian Fuchs treats social media like a classical panopticon. He argues that the focus should not be on the relationship between the users of a medium, but the relationship between the users and the medium. Therefore, he argues that the relationship between the large number of users and the sociotechnicalWeb 2.0 platform, likeFacebook, amounts to a panopticon. Fuchs draws attention to the fact that use of such platforms requires identification, classification and assessment of users by the platforms and therefore, he argues, the definition ofprivacy must be reassessed to incorporate strongerconsumer protection and protection of citizens fromcorporate surveillance.[50]
According to professorDonald Preziosi, the panopticon prison of Bentham resonates with thememory theatre ofGiulio Camillo, where the sitting observer is at the centre and the phenomena are categorised in anarray, which makes comparison, distinction, contrast and variation legible.[51] Among the architectural references Bentham quoted for his panopticon prison wasRanelagh Gardens, a Londonpleasure garden with adome built around 1742. At the center of therotunda beneath the dome was an elevated platform from which a360 degreespanorama could be viewed, illuminated throughskylights.[19] ProfessorNicholas Mirzoeff compares the panopticon with the 19th-centurydiorama, because the architecture is arranged so that theseer viewscells or galleries.[52]
In 1854 the work on the building that was to house theRoyal Panopticon of Science and Art inLondon was completed. The rotunda at the centre of the building was encircled with a 91-meter procession. The interior reflected the taste for religiously meaningless ornament and emerged from the contemporary taste for recreational learning. Visitors of the Royal Panopticon of Science and Art could view changing exhibits, includingvacuum flasks, apin makingmachine, and acook stove. However, a competitiveentertainment industry emerged in London[53] and despite the varying music, the large fountains, interesting experiments, and opportunities forshopping,[54] two years after opening the amateur science panopticon project closed.[53]
Panopticon principle is the central idea in the plot ofWe (Russian:Мы,romanized: My), a dystopian novel by Russian writerYevgeny Zamyatin, written 1920–1921. Zamyatin goes beyond a concept of a single prison and projects panopticon principles to the whole society where people live in buildings with fully transparent walls.[citation needed]
The 1948 American filmCall Northside 777 features a scene filmed on location at theStateville Penitentiary near Chicago, inside the so-called "Roundhouse," a panopticon cell block built according to Bentham's original concept, with the important difference that the central guard tower had transparent windows, making the positions and activities of the men inside it visible to all the prisoners.[55]
Foucault's theories positioned Bentham's panopticon prison in the social structures of 1970s Europe. This led to the widespread use of the panopticon in literature, comic books, computer games, and TV series.[56] InDoctor Who, an abandoned panopticon is featured.[57][non-primary source needed] In the 1981 the novellaChronicle of a Death Foretold byGabriel García Márquez on the murder of Santiago Nasar, chapter four is written with a view on the characters through the panopticon ofRiohacha.[58]Angela Carter, in her 1984 novelNights at the Circus, linked the panopticon ofCountes P to a "perverse honeycomb" and made the character thematriarchalqueen bee.[59] In the 2011TV series,Person of Interest, Foucault's panopticon is used to grasp the pressure under which the character Harold Finch suffers in the post-9/11 United States of America.[60] The horror fiction podcastThe Magnus Archives features a modified version of theMillbank Prison panopticon.[61]Peter Gabriel's 2023 single is named "Panopticom".
In the 2014 movie,Guardians of the Galaxy, the Kyln high security prison incorporates panopticon features.
In the 2019 video game,Control, one of the major locations in the containment sector is named 'Panopticon,' and has architectural features that align with the use of the word.
