Panopticon

When Fred wrote a piece about Isis’ album Panopticon yesterday, I thought for sure he was going to explain what exactly a panopticon is. He does know, I’m sure of it, because we talked about it some time ago. Anyway, I guess his prediction that it wouldn’t be the last time for the word to be used in a blog, will come true even more quickly than he thought!

The Panopticon (from the Greek πᾶν ὀπτικόν, ‘all visible’) was originally a type of building designed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Think of it like this. Imagine you need to make a prison for a thousand people but can’t afford more than one prison guard. How can you control that many people with that small amount of man power?

Bentham came up with the following solution to create an incredibly a cheap prison system. Build a prison with a circular structure and an ‘inspection house’ in the middle from which the one prison guard is able to watch the inmates who live in cells around the perimeter of the building. Like this:



Now make sure that the guard can watch the prisoners at all times and that the prisoners do not know when they are watched. You could do this, for instance, with one way glass - you know, the mirror/glass in the interrogation room in movies (Bentham’s nineteenth-century method was slightly different, but never mind). Now, in this way no prisoner of the Panopticon would ever try to escape, because they would never be sure whether the guard was watching them or not. In this way, one man could guard a thousand prisoners, and more. Moreover, he wouldn’t even have to work all the time. There would be no way for the prisoners to tell if he was on duty or not. In fact, if you think about it, you wouldn’t even need a guard at all. No prisoner would ever be the wiser. Indeed, the Panopticon leaves the watching to the watched, so to say, and thus operates by ‘power of mind over mind’, as Bentham put it, rather than by physically guarding people.

Over time (and largely thanks to the analysis of this concept by Michel Foucault) the panopticon came to stand metaphorically for the hierarchical social structure of modern society and its increasing tendency to observe and control people. Indeed, nowadays ‘they’ can see you in the street with CCTV, they can locate you with satellite imaging, they can listen to your cell phone conversations, they can see the websites you’ve visited, what you bought with your credit card and so forth. So I guess you could say we effectively live in a panopticon today.

However, I’m always slightly annoyed when people then turn paranoid (and even more when they use paranoia as an adjective talking about it) and start shouting Big Brother is watching you! There is, in my mind, one important difference in our case. The panopticon aims to keep prisoners from escaping, or generally stated to keep people from doing what’s illegal. So if you are not trying to do anything illegal, what does it matter if you might be watched? You don’t even know for sure if you’re ever really watched or who does the watching for that matter.

Think of it like this. Suppose there is a chance – but it’s not a certainty – that at some point someone – but you won’t know who – could see you in the shower – but you won’t know when it happens, provided it does. Would you then be afraid to take a shower? I don’t believe I would, actually.

So I’m not too crazy about all the shouting in the media that our privacy is being invaded. Come to think of it, I’m glad someone’s watching my streets, my credit card or the internet our children visit. So watch me all you want, Mr Big Brother, thou lonely guard of the Panopticon, I couldn’t care less.

But apparently the sludge metal band Isis did mind and that’s why they called their third album Panopticon, because it deals with ‘the proliferation of surveillance technologies throughout modern society and the government’s role in that spread’.

Such cry babies those metal heads...