Panoptic Mediation: From Bentham's Panopticon to the P-Chip
Robert Craig
continued . . .
Martin Jay speculates that Foucault was drawn to the importance of sight. Jay attributes this to having occurred "through his exposure to phenomenology, particularly through his association with Jean Hyppolite, Martin Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and psychologist Ludwig Binswanger" (386). As he came to distance himself from phenomenology's theory of a unified intermeshing of vision and language, Foucault's writing exhibited a cautionary attitude as to the neutrality of vision. His mistrust seems to be rooted in the French tradition of the philosophy of science as articulated by Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhelm. They understood scientific evidence to be "mediated by the cultural construction of our apparently natural perception" (389). For these men, as for Foucault, scientific evidence could no longer be thoughtlessly associated with the Latin verb to see (videre).
In The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault contended that painting is a "discursive practice . . . not a pure vision that must be transcribed into the materiality of space . . . it is shot through . . . with the positivity of knowledge (savoir)" (qtd. in Jay 407). In The Order of Things Foucault's portrayal of the ascension of the human sciences at the end of the Classical Age suggests the placement of Man within a visual field:
Man appears as an object of knowledge and a subject who knows; enslaved sovereign, observed spectator, he appears in the place belonging to the king, which was assigned to him in advance by Las Meninas, but from which his real presence has for so long been excluded. (312)
Jay notes that in this statement Foucault had declared "the extent to which humanism was based in his view on the replacement of the absent spectator, the king, by the 'observed spectator,' Man in a still visually constituted epistemological field" (406). Man was a supposedly unbiased metasubject of knowledge while simultaneously its proper object. This is what Foucault refers to as the "the strange empirico-transcendental doublet" as much as it is the heart of the Panoptic Cinema and the modern gaze (318).
In the Panopticon, the feeling of always being the object of the gaze becomes internalized to the point of becoming a type of self-supervising mechanism. Power is visible yet impossible to verify. It instills a consciousness of constant visibility that assures the unconscious functioning of power by breaking down the reciprocity of seeing and being seen. The inmates are seen without ever seeing who is seeing them. The guardian in the central tower sees without ever being seen by the inmates. In the Panopticon Bentham has structured visibility around a dominant all-seeing gaze. However, the gaze is just one form of power. In an interview in Power/Knowledge Foucault stated that Bentham's thought was, even for its time, archaic in the emphasis it places on the gaze while modern in the emphasis it places on strategies of power:
The theme of spatializing, observing, immobilizing, in a word disciplinary power was in fact already in Bentham's day being transcended by other and much more subtle mechanisms for the regulation of phenomena of population, controlling their fluctuations and compensating their irregularities. (159)
In this sense the Panopticon becomes a useful metaphor for the functioning of disciplinary power while providing something of a snapshot of disciplinary society. In one sense the Panopticon is not a power one can use over others. As Foucault said, "it is a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power as much as those over whom it is exercised" (P/K 156).
