Panopticism: Power That Watches Without Being Seen
Michel Foucault · 1975
"Bentham's Panopticon — a prison where every inmate can be seen at any moment but can never tell whether anyone is looking — is, for Foucault, the diagram of modern power: visible and unverifiable surveillance that makes people discipline themselves, in schools, factories, hospitals and barracks as much as in prisons."
In 1787 Jeremy Bentham sketched a prison he called the Inspection-House. A ring of cells surrounds a central tower; every cell is backlit so its occupant is always visible, and the tower's windows are shuttered so the occupant can never tell whether the inspector is there. He borrowed the idea from his brother Samuel, who had used a 'central inspection principle' to supervise unskilled workers in Russia, and promised it would deliver 'a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example'. The building was never constructed to his design — Tate Britain now stands on the site he bought for it — but Michel Foucault argued in Discipline and Punish that its principle was built everywhere else.
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Preference Falsification
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