The Panopticon

In 1791, thirty years before the industrial revolution transformed England, Jeremy Bentham's theoretical invention, the Panopticon, was published. Bentham as architect and social scientist devised a prison architecture to remove all privacy from the prisoner by placing them in a transparent wall encircling a guard tower. Argued as an objective system, the new penal philosophy, Utilitarianism, used knowledge acquired through surveillance as a way of obtaining power over one's subjects. Michel Foucault suggests the purpose of the Panopticon was 'to arrange things so that the surveillance is [an] architectural apparatus...a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers'(Foucault,201). The prison authority was now in the position of a self-adjuster, attempting, not unlike an industrial middle-man, to guarantee a corrected and productive citizenry as 'a return on the capital invested in the penal system'(ibid,251). In actuality, the separation between authority and prisoner had forever been dissolved. Prisoners were arranged and categorized according to their physical ability to work. This hygienic power was used to assimilate, converting free will into obedience and the Puritan ethic based upon physical labor. In the Panopticon, Robin Evans observes, 'architecture...became not just the container, but the organizer of human functions: an active agency in the formation of experience and morality'(Evans,222). Program and architecture were melded into seamless unity, and the Panopticon became the first modern surveillance device. Another motive behind incarceration is to create a distance between prisoner and society. This distance is potentially liberating because of its separation from accepted collective values. Because individual and collective identities are separate, the suppression of one enhances the other resulting in many separate and distinct collective identities(collective prisoner identity, collective worker identity, collective corporate identity, etc.) which signifies the increasing difficulty in conceiving of collective identity as a unified(striated) field based upon individual values. The prison incubates only collective identity.