Panoptic Mediation: From Bentham's Panopticon to the P-Chip
Robert Craig
continued . . .
Foucault cautioned against a reductionist view of power as one person or class' heterogeneous domination over another person or class. He viewed power as something akin to a net in which persons may circulate between its threads "always in the position of undergoing and exercising this power" (P/K 98). When he wrote or spoke of domination, it was not of an absolute power but of subjugation in its multiple forms. This conception directs us to consider how subjects are constituted "through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. . . . uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors . . ." (P/K 98). Power dominates through a complex including forces, energies, materials, desires, and even thoughts. The Panoptic Cinema's projected eye is consistent with all representation in the cinema. It is but an illusion. It is not a unified body but a representation in the abstract of an illusory, unified power. In reality power is far more complex. It is beyond the projected eye and beyond the camera and its technological mechanism. It is beyond any recording medium or apparatus within which bodies appear to be contained.
Foucault maintained that in the seventeenth and eighteenth century the French conception of "police" signified a strategy of government positivism:
This can be characterized as a project to create a system of regulation of the general conduct of individuals whereby everything would be controlled to the point of self-sustenance, without the need for intervention (Rabinow 241).
They expanded this concept in the nineteenth century to the idea that the police would infiltrate, stimulate and manage things to the point that the mechanisms of society are nearly automated. The problem that arose to those in positions of dominant power was that at a point when one governed too much, one created the opposite result. One did not govern at all. At the core of the problem of governability is the idea of a society:
Government not only has to deal with a territory, with a domain and with its subjects, but that it also has to deal with a complex and independent reality that has its own laws and mechanisms of reaction; its regulations as well as its possibilities of disturbance. This new reality is society. From the moment one is to manipulate a society, one cannot consider it completely penetrable by police. (Rabinow 242)
Those in positions of dominant power became obliged to reflect on a society's "specific characteristics, its constants and its variables" (Rabinow 242). Bentham leads us to suppose that prisoners were passive entities. They are not and as a society they present a formidable force of resistance. Even in an extreme example of dominant power such as Bentham's prison, one can imagine resistance: Communication through walls, psychological indifference to the gaze and possibly insurrection and riot. And there is always the possibility of disobedience from those who are charged with operating the machine. In the Panoptic Cinema for example, a subversive computer programmer who resisted the idea of such a powerful machine has introduced a technological flaw. This programmer decided to create a moment in which chance operations rupture the monotonous drone of the montage (the giant projected eye and the representation of the spectators' bodies). Using a random sequential command, the programmer has instructed the camera to occasionally turn its lens directly into that of the projector's. This forms a loop between seeing and knowing, an empty space of light where representation and surveillance merge into one and nothing.
