Reading Response: Foucault’s Panopticon

This class really had a ton of writing. Fixed some glaring typos, but left the obscure ending. The line I was drawing between philosophers and mental patients isn’t as clear as I’d like, but oh well.

Foucault’s exploration of Bentham’s fictional “Panopticon” is utilitarianism at its brutal finest. The conceit of the Panopticon is simple; cells arranged around a central watchtower, designed so that the watched are wholly visible while the watcher remains invisible. As the application of power shifts from explicit to implied, the submission of those held shifts from their actual jailor to their own conceptions of the jailor’s authority. Bentham sees use in such a model for the design of prisons and sickness wards, where such isolation would pay behavioral conditioning dividends and limit the spread of disease, respectively. Study could be done of the responses of the held to whatever particular criteria. Bentham’s Panopticons would be bubbles of controlled reality, isolated from contamination by rest of the world. Foucault on the other hand would imprison the world within those very bubbles.

Foucault sees the design of the panoptic structure as the model for the most efficient application of authority, regardless of venue. There is some ambiguity as to whether the capacity exists for the model to be applied metaphorically; one can assume that for utmost efficiency it would be acceptable for those walls to be abstract if the outcome is the same. The vocabulary of isolation and dehumanization defines both the tangible and implicit here, so its continued use is by Foucault is appropriate. If prisoners can be conditioned to contain themselves with maximum efficiency on behalf of their jailor, cannot workers be conditioned to produce with maximum efficiency on behalf of their employer? And what of students and the potentials within reach were they to remain always under the watchful thumb of the professor? Foucault for the most part implies the presence of doors through which inmates might leave at the end of the work or instruction day, but at the same time suggests keeping orphans in such isolation as that their introduction to other boys or girls could happen as late as their teens. Just to see what happens.

One almost wonders what kind of philosophy would be produced by scholars forced to do their expounding under such circumstances, and whether that construction would have any measurable difference from the mental wards Bentham proposed.