Panoptic Mediation: From Bentham's Panopticon to the P-Chip
Robert Craig
continued . . .
The Panoptic Cinema proposes conditions for thought in its monotonous repetition of the singular image of the projected eye and its empty reminder of finitude (the verb 'to be' and the inferred cogito). It proposes conditions for thought with its circular program—moving from a projected eye, to the spectator, back to a projected eye and then to nothingness (metaphorically swallowing the eye). But what conditions does it propose for the unthought? Foucault describes the unthought as "in relation to man, the Other: the Other that is not only a brother but a twin, born not of man, nor in man, but beside him and at the same time in an identical newness, in an unavoidable duality" (Order 326). He sees the unthought as accompanying man since the nineteenth century as a sort of silent companion:
In Hegelian phenomenology it was the An sich as opposed to the Fur sich; for Schopenhauer it was the Unbewusste; for Marx it was the alienated man; in Husserl's analyses it was the implicit, the inactual, the sedimented, the non-effected—in every case, the inexhaustible double that presents itself to reflection of what man is in his truth. (327)
The key to the unthought may be in the presence of absence, in moments of emptiness when we say nothing. For how can the unthought be articulated but through ruptures, the openings when emptiness creates the very conditions for discourse?
Foucault saw man's thought as at once knowledge and reflection, modification of what is known and his relation to the Other, that which is unthought. The evolution of thought in relation to the unthought is like a riddle:
What must I be, I who think and who am my thought, in order to be what I do not think, in order for my thought to be what I am not? (325)
An answer to the riddle might go like this: I must be in a place where I can think the unthought, articulate upon it and move to where I am not. And once again reflect upon the unthought.
Like Heidegger, Foucault professed to be interested in what the Greeks called techne, meaning, "a practical rationality governed by a conscious goal" (Rabinow 255). In this way he saw government as a function of technology: "The government of individuals, the government of souls, the government of the self by the self" (256). He saw the eighteenth century as a time in which architecture was regarded as a function of the techne of societies. Architecture addressed issues relating to how they should order a society. These issues did not seem to originate with architects but rather is derived from much of the political discourse of the time. In seventeenth and eighteenth century France, the concept of "police" signified a government project to create "a rational 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" (241).
From the beginning of the nineteenth century, disciplinary power in the psychiatric asylum and penitentiary has used procedures of demarcation to designate exclusion. Authorities executing control over individuals rationalize according to binary division:
(Mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal) and that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him in an individual way, etc.). (Discipline 199)
According to Foucault, fear of the plague gave rise to a whole series of techniques and institutions for classifying, controlling and correcting the abnormal person. Bentham's machine is but one manifestation of this phenomenon.
Throughout history changes in technology have resulted in variations in relations of space and power. The introduction of railroads for example, presented the potential for transformations in associations between people. A theory evolved in France that railroads would increase familiarity among people to the point that wars would be rendered impossible because of new forms of human universality. Far from making war impossible, the railroads made war more efficient. Foucault describes this type of dynamic as "relations between application of power and the space of a given territory" (Rabinow 243). In the nineteenth century, political problems of the city such as that of contagious disease reflect upon questions of power, technology and space as they were played out in urbanism and architecture.
