Event overview
Following Michel Foucault’s (1975) provocative claim that disciplinary power unavoidably feeds on ‘infra-penality’ and that the Panopticon-based procedures serve to generalize infra-penal discipline, a growing literature has developed around the unavoidable penal implications of panopticism. The Panopticon has, as a consequence, become a synonym of diffuse punishment. I question this strand of literature by showing how Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon is less a disciplinary technique whose consequence was to ‘generalize the power to punish’ and more of a liberal device meant to render punishment parsimonious and to eventually abolish it. I do this in two ways. Firstly, I compare Bentham’s writings on punishment during the 1770s with hisPanopticon Writings at the end of the 1780s. The idea, at this level, is that Bentham’s Panopticon is not a mechanism for ensuring penal transparency through the dissociation of the ‘seeing’ from the ‘being seen’, but a device for minimizing real, physical punishment, while at the same time maximizing apparent, publicly available punishment. Secondly, I revisit some of the examples Foucault associates with the Panopticon (the king’s ménagerie royale or Barker’s panoramas) in an attempt to show that the rationality behind panopticized interventions is one of creating real political effects based on engineered fiction and not one of gathering or centralizing information by means of close watch. The claim, in short, is that there is much more spectacle and less punishment in the Panopticon than we are currently ready to admit.
Andrei Poama is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Sciences Po (Institut d'études politiques de Paris).
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 1 May 2012 | 5:30pm - 6:30pm |
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