Name: Atirek Bajpai

JGU ID: 22010434

Course: Foundation of Social Sciences-II
BBA/LLB (2022-27) | Section - B
The All-Seeing Eye
How Foucault's Panopticism Predicted the Rise of the 21st-
Century Surveillance State
For the purposes of this assignment, I have chosen to analyse the concept of surveillance in the
21st century by examining one of the best books ever written in relation to it, ‘Discipline and
Punish’ by Michel Foucault, the book I consider to be the true birthplace of Panopticism as we
know it today. As is the usual case whenever I start any assignment, I wonder which path to take
with my analysis. Should I keep it strictly analytical and only take into consideration the excerpts
from the book, or should I truly reflect and synthesize them? The issue of mass surveillance in
contemporary society can be reduced to a historical retrospect if we fail to realize its scope. For,
Foucault was both thoroughly infatuated with Panopticism and deeply terrified by how it will
manifest itself in modern society. If we are to understand what Panopticism is and why we
should care about it in the 21st century, we need to engage with our past and learn from it.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th
century, and the thing that Foucault is perhaps best known for is his analysis of the Panopticon.
We've already engaged with the idea of the Panopticon in class. It's this ingeniously designed
circular prison where prisoners, in cells with transparent walls, are subject to constant
surveillance from a guard who sits at the centre of the prison, able to see everyone while
remaining invisible himself. Foucault believed that the Panopticon could help us understand the
effects of surveillance on our everyday lives because, let's face it, in the modern world we are
being watched, filmed and tracked progressively more and more. Something which we can refer
to as the Panopticon effect. See, what we need to understand is that for Foucault, the Panopticon
is not a prison. It's not a physical building. For Foucault, the Panopticon is a metaphor. It's an
image of a system of surveillance that exists everywhere, all the time.
Now, Foucault can become a complicated subject for the layman if we only focus on his work as
a scientific study of what was. First, it's helpful to remember that Foucault is not just a
philosopher or a theorist. He's also a kind of historian. What he is doing, is also explaining how
the modern world came to be. Ancient and medieval worlds are quite different from our own.
What changed?
So, let's start at the beginning. In Discipline and Punish, before Foucault talks about the
Panopticon, he talks about a plague at the end of the 17th century. And specifically, he talks
about the measures put in place by government authorities to limit the spread of contagion:
“First, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition
to leave the town on pain of death”. Later he expands further, “Each street is placed under the
authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance...”. “Inspection functions ceaselessly. The
gaze is alert everywhere.” “Every day, too, the syndic goes into the street for which he is
responsible, stops before each house, gets all the inhabitants to appear at the windows…”.
“Everyone locked up in his cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name and showing
himself when asked. It is the great review of the living and the dead.” (Foucault, 1995).
Foucault describes this as a system of permanent registration. When the syndic (an official
responsible for a district) does his daily routine, we are reminded that the idea of permanent
registration highlights the ways in which surveillance technologies and practices have become a
part of everyday life and are used to regulate social behaviour. This might seem an eerily similar
predicament to what society had to face as a whole during the COVID crisis, and the umbrella of
tertiary subjugation that stemmed from the same pandemic. Whether it be the obvious parallel to
mass surveillance and forced quarantine or the disruptive change in the system of working
conditions and the education sector, history did warn us of ‘Zoom’ and ‘work from home’, but
more on that later.
Through the aforementioned plague example, Foucault shows us how power can penetrate into
even the most private of spaces. Under these conditions, power is able to organize and discipline
interactions and behaviours that would typically be beyond its reach. From the perspective of
power, Foucault says that the plague town is a “utopia of the perfectly governed city” (Foucault,
1995).
The point of all this is that Foucault wants to show us the value and the utility of surveillance for
power. But as perfect as this expression of power is, Foucault argues it's actually become
somewhat antiquated or outdated. This is not the way that power works in the modern world.
Modern forms of power more closely resemble the Panopticon than they do the iron cage.
Foucault's idea of the Panopticon comes from the English philosopher and social reformer named
Jeremy Bentham who invented it as a prison scheme. He believed very strongly in this
Panopticon prison, and he advocated and lobbied the British government to build one as a
prototype.
Bentham really wanted to build this Panopticon prison. His idea was that it would have windows
on the outside and the inside, but it would have walls on either side so that the prisoners could
not see each other but they could see outside, and especially they could see the tower at the
centre. More importantly, the guard at the centre of the prison could see in. He could look in any
direction and view a prisoner at any given time. Bentham believed that the efficiency of this
model would save the government money on staffing because you would need a very small
number of guards to operate this prison. The disquieting genius of this model is that because of
the placement of windows and lighting, the prisoners would never know at any given time,
whether they were being watched. And so, they would have to assume that they were being
watched all the time. The prisoners would never know if the guard was looking in their direction.
They only knew that they might be under surveillance at any given moment. And for this reason,
Bentham theorized that the prisoners would behave as if they were being watched the whole
time. Bentham himself wanted to be watched the whole time. Upon his death, he had his body
preserved in a glass case, and it's now on display at the University College London. Originally,
Bentham's mummified head was still attached to his body, but over the years it got kind of
unpleasant to look at. So, they eventually replaced it with a wax replica. Perhaps, such an
exorbitant display of mortality is what Bentham himself would have enjoyed looking at.
Apologies for the digression.
Foucault's account of this surveillance phenomenon sheds more light on the same: “So to arrange
things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that
the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this
architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation
independent of the person who exercises it...” (Foucault, 1995).
Theoretically, this could mean that the prison could temporarily or periodically be unstaffed,
with no change in prisoner behaviour because the prisoners always have to assume that someone
is watching them, even if there's no one there at all. This is what Foucault finds especially
fascinating about this model because of the effectiveness of the surveillance, the prisoners
effectively guard themselves. The author observes, “He who is subjected to a field of visibility,
and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power.” (Foucault, 1995).
Foucault, I think, is both horrified and fascinated by this idea. He describes the Panopticon as a
marvellous machine, this mechanism in which the prisoner is seen without seeing, while the
guard sees without ever being seen. In Foucault's estimation, this Panopticon model could be
used in a wide variety of contexts. It's not just for prisoners; it could be used in a factory setting
to supervise workers, or in a school setting to ensure that students don't cheat on a test.
Foucault has been proven right in his estimation. For example, most of us participating in the
education industry can resonate with this when we consider that this was a point of frustration for
a lot of students and teachers when online Zoom classes were the norm during the pandemic.
When a lot of overzealous school administrators insisted that cameras be left on so that school
authorities could see into the students' bedrooms and private spaces. This is one of the more
pertinent examples for our generation which was affected by the pandemic, of what Foucault was
talking about and what we might call the Panopticon effect. So, the Panopticon for Foucault is a
historical idea, but maybe more importantly, it's an image, an architectural figure of a certain
method of exercising power. The Panopticon “must be understood as a generalizable model of
functioning, a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men. It is, in fact,
a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.” (Foucault,
1995).
This way of exercising power has become the dominant form of power relations in our world,
and this has everything to do with the prisoners who guard themselves because by using
Bentham's model, the world has figured out how to discipline people and, more importantly, be
more efficient in its mode of discipline. It's taught the orchestrators to make people discipline
themselves without any feeling of external subjugation, by using mass surveillance.
Think about information as a concept in the 21 st century. How often do we need to register
ourselves for things, fill out paperwork, disclose medical conditions, disclose our sexual history
or sexual orientation, or clock in and out of work every day? All of these day-to-day disclosures
of our movements and private bodily conditions are what we might call Panopticism. Power has
become increasingly concerned with surveilling us, and we have become increasingly
comfortable disclosing private information about ourselves. But crucially, the thing about
Panopticism is that it does not feel like tyranny. It often feels good to discipline ourselves, like
winning the award for perfect attendance or priding ourselves on never being late for work. We
take pleasure in our discipline. In fact, self-discipline and productivity have become a whole
industry. The truly amazing thing is that our world in the 21st century has exceeded Foucault's
wildest imagination or fears because now not only are states and institutions collecting
information and data more than ever before, but also our personal data has become a kind of
currency. We exchange it with private companies for goods and services. We give out our
contact information in order to get discounts, and we let apps track us in exchange for
entertainment. Our phone knows when we go to bed and when we wake up, and our watch
knows how many steps we take in a day. We take pleasure in being subject to constant
surveillance. What Foucault wants us to recognize is that the modern world is not just about the
emergence of democracy and the invention of human rights. The story of the modern world is
just as much about the emergence of the surveillance state. As Foucault says, “The
‘Enlightenment’ which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.”

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison - Translation by Alan Sheridan (2nd
ed.). Vintage Books.