Panoptic Mediation: From Bentham's Panopticon to the P-Chip
Robert Craig
continued . . .
The heart of the Panoptic Cinema, its focal point and its source of power are the eye. This eye is a giant orb projected onto a screen facing a forward-seating arrangement typical of any cinema. In the middle of the screen where the pupil is projected, at the point of the punctum caecum (the eye's blind spot) there will be an opening. This perforation is a small round hole behind which a camera will be pointed outward in the direction of the audience. A computer will operate the camera (with a microphone attached) in a gesture of sweeping surveillance. Totally automated, even the computer's programmer will not know the logic of its movement. The programmer will insert a random function into the program so that power and knowledge are removed from human control. At intervals, seeming both random and meticulous, the computer will instruct the projector to project sequences of what the camera sees. There will be individual shots of audience members combined in montage sequences with the giant eye projected onto the screen. To the side of the screen speakers shaped like giant ears will broadcast sound coming from the audience mixed with an incessant narration repeating the verb 'to be.'
A black curtain surrounds the screen obscuring the audience members' knowledge of the gaze of which they are the objects. Is there an operator behind the camera or is it automated? The spectators only know for sure that someone is watching them when the mechanism projects their image onto the screen. Yet besides the other spectators they will not know who or what is within the field of seeing. Could it be a room full of bureaucrats sitting around a table? Could it be a silent recording tape to be catalogued and classified under a code corresponding to their identity? How could one account for the time when the mechanism has projected the giant eye onto the screen? The camera could still be recording. Perhaps it is not recording. It could simply be the mute emptiness of unseen technology—a soulless machine performing calculated movements in a vacuum of indifference. Here the only surveillance is the close and familiar, the spectators, one by one, taking their turn on the screen. On the other hand, the Panoptic Cinema could be supplying a satellite feed broadcast around the planet and as telecommunication streaming out into the cosmos for all eternity. The spectator is clearly the object of a gaze but the question becomes, to whom does the gaze belong?
In Power/Knowledge, Foucault explains that to eighteenth century reformers, democratic surveillance was desirable, they believed "people would become virtuous by the simple fact of being observed" (161). These reformers believed in a form of consciousness in the social body and a kind of reflexive activation of the social contract. Foucault found this position to be naive:
They overlooked the real conditions of possibility of opinion, the 'media' of opinion, a materiality caught up in the mechanisms of the economy and power in its forms in the press, publishing, and later the cinema and television. (161)
Caught up in believing opinion to be inherently just, the reformers had failed to see that opinion also varied with material and economic conditions. They failed to see that opinion is interdependent with power.
