For Foucault, the ideal artectural form of modern disciplinary power is Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, a proposal for maximizing control of prisoners with a minimal staff. Although prisons approximating the Panopticons were not built until the 20th century, its principle has come to pervade modern society. In the Panopticon each inmate is in a separate cell, separated from and invisible to all the others. Further, the cells are distributed in a circle around a central tower from which a monitor can look into any cell at any given time.The principle of control is no the fact but the possibility of observation. The monitor will actually look into a given cell only occasionally. But the inmates have no way of knowing when these occasions will arise and so must always assume that they are being observed. The result is that we ' induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. -- 2020-04-16 15:55:06
