Panopticism, the performance of subjection, the prison of the 'Self'

I think it fit to begin such an exercise with Foucault's first principle of an ‘art of living [to] counter all forms of fascism’ in the introduction to Anti-Oedipus, where he calls for ‘Free political action from all unity and totalizing paranoia’ (xiii). No one but Foucault, with Nietzschean mistrust, so masterfully examined the violence of this 'paranoia' in its hidden forms so common to public discourse on governance: nationalism and national unity, punishment and 'protecting freedom,' and on and on. But Foucault was often keen to point out the presence of such coercion even in movements of resistance, which, for Foucault, possess their own internal coercive mechanisms, racisms and power relations. Such resistance is always defined with the sphere of a 'power network' or the broad regime of power relations; resistance in some ways, in the Foucauldian sense, justifies and recognizes that which it denounces, and can never be defined outside the codes it desires to banish.

It is thus useful to enter Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison into this discussion, which I consider to be Foucault's finest work. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault's target of critique is prisons, and, as the title suggests, the disciplining of bodies and behaviors, as well as the acts of punishment meant to reiterate that which is deemed "correct" or "good." But Foucault's project, though never explicitly stated, is highly suggestive of a different project than simply tracing the genealogy of prison development; Foucault is after a whole set of societal forms built on the prison. It is at the end of 'Panopticism,' which will be given more attention shortly, that Foucault asks: 'Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?' (228). Foucault's analysis of Bentham's Panopticon prison is an indictment of a society built on containment, punishment, guarding and restriction.

The specific drawing is worth looking up (Foucault provides a picture of the architecural drawing in the book, the drawing is also easy to find on the web), but the structure of Panopticon consists as such: a series of prison cells in a circle, with a guard tower at the center, to which the cells are back-lit, allowing the guard(s) to see every move of the prisoner, but the prisoners are unable to see the guard. The structure of the Panopticon makes a whole number of power relations possible, as the 'panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately,' where '[v]isibility is a trap' (200). It is through this exposure of the prisoners and the lack of exposure of the guard that the Panopticon is possible: 'this invisibility is a guarantee of order' (ibid).

Here Foucault names the 'major effect of the Panopticon' which is 'to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. 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; in short, the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers' (201). Thus, and I apologize to the reader for such a long quotation, the prisoners are presented with a situation in which they must be their own guard, bound by the prison that they help build at every moment. While the structure of the prison itself matters, it is "always already" (to use Nietzsche's phrase) tied to it's receival by the inmates and the guards, employing the prisoners as the guards of their own personal prisons. Foucault writes such rather eloquently when he remarks that the Panopticon is 'polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons' (205).

Thus, power, or as Foucault defines it, "force relations," work in two different, but complementary ways: through direct coercion on bodies and through the performance of "subjects" under the threat of outside coercion, where those "subjects" continue to invent roles conducive to their imprisonment. While one could argue that the guard maintains the quality of a 'pure signifier,' I would stray from this, suggesting instead that the distinction between guard and prisoner breaks down; the goal of the Panopticon is to render the guard useless, instead working towards a pure performative imprisonment, or rather a behavioral schema built solely on maintaining the "individual subject's" role in the Panopticon, where the "subject" shapes itself around the possible gaze of the guard, which is in turn shifting and changing as well. The prisoner relations with this schema would, as well, extend between each other, establishing hierarchies, methods and organizational patterns around, and as further codes, these power relations, regulating each other. Such a positing of the guard-as-pure-signifier maintains the hierarchy that Foucault is so keen to break down: 'Consquently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants' (202).

Foucault, here, offers a decentered view of analysis of power, stripping it of a top-down nature and demonstrating how power can in fact work at the bottom. This is key, I will pick up here another time.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans: Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans: Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1995.