Quotation
Last reviewed:
“The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad.”
Michel Foucault · Post-structuralism · Modern · 1975
What does it mean?
The Panopticon dissociates seeing from being seen. The supervisor sees without being seen. The inmate is seen and does not see, and so ends up watching himself. A rival reading takes the sentence as a claim that cameras are bad, a gadget review. He is describing a diagram of power in which surveillance becomes internal. Another reading thinks the diagram is the whole of his theory, as if power were only the gaze. Discipline and Punish is about timetables, examinations, and norms as well as towers.
Did Michel Foucault really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Alan Sheridan's English. In the panopticon, one sees without being seen, and the inmate is seen without seeing. The dissociation is the machine. Foucault is using Bentham's design as a diagram of modern discipline, not writing a review of a building.
Where it comes from
Discipline and Punish, 'Panopticism', in Alan Sheridan's translation
Approximate date: 1975.
How to use it
An open-plan office, or a remote monitoring tool in a British warehouse, makes the worker visible and the watcher abstract. The sentence says what that arrangement trains, a person who acts as if seen. It does not say the fire exit is a panopticon, and it does not say every window is domination. The test is whether seeing has been split from being seen so that the split itself does the supervising. Many modern tools are built to pass that test. Saying so is not yet a politics. It is the description he made available.
A mindset reading
Bentham designed a prison. Foucault uses it as a figure for a type of society. If you argue with the figure as if he had claimed every school is that prison, you will win easily and learn nothing. The chapter's claim is about a tendency in discipline, not about a single building in 1791.
Understand the philosophy
Discipline and Punish, 1975, 'Panopticism'. Alan Sheridan is the translator. The soul as prison of the body, already in this library, is the same book's thesis about what discipline produces. The panopticon is one machine in that production.
- power
- society
- knowledge
FAQ
What does it mean?
The Panopticon dissociates seeing from being seen. The supervisor sees without being seen. The inmate is seen and does not see, and so ends up watching himself. A rival reading takes the sentence as a claim that cameras are bad, a gadget review. He is describing a diagram of power in which surveillance becomes internal. Another reading thinks the diagram is the whole of his theory, as if power were only the gaze. Discipline and Punish is about timetables, examinations, and norms as well as towers.
Did Michel Foucault really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Alan Sheridan's English. In the panopticon, one sees without being seen, and the inmate is seen without seeing. The dissociation is the machine. Foucault is using Bentham's design as a diagram of modern discipline, not writing a review of a building.
Which work is it in?
Discipline and Punish, 'Panopticism', in Alan Sheridan's translation Approximate date: 1975.