Hi, Michel… I wanted to suggest we talk
a little about Bentham,
Jeremy Bentham, I mean.
Ah, Bentham, the inventor of the panopticon!
Bentham, one of the founding fathers of utilitarianism.
And finally, Bentham, the mummy!
What? Bentham, the Mummy?
Yes, isn’t it strange? His last will spelled
out in detail how to prepare and preserve
him as a seated mummy. Bentham himself called
this creating his “auto-icon,” which certainly
is an interesting notion, but… The thing
is the mummy did not turn out that well, mainly
because of the head. Very quickly, it hardened
and started to look horrible.
The conclusion was to replace the original
skull with a head made out of wax.
However, for a long time the severed head was kept
with the rest of his body in a giant glass
cabinet placed in some hallway of London University.
Than students took out Bentham’s head and
made stupid jokes...
Oh, no! That is disgusting…
I can tell you I am glad I ended up as a puppet,
not as a mummified auto-icon turned into a soccer ball!
Trust me, I wouldn’t enjoy
sitting in a transparent box somewhere in
the Collège de France with students playing
pranks on me…
I am also happy you are a puppet! Otherwise
we couldn’t have these conversations.
At the same time I guess that the students had
lots of fun with Bentham’s skull. And individual
as well as collective happiness was a major
thing for him…
You are alluding to Bentham’s concept of
“greatest happiness”…
Yes, quite an interesting notion. Perhaps his utilitarianism
even impacted on my understanding of biopolitics.
But what I found much more striking was obviously
his idea of the panopticon…
Tell me something about it. You’re famous
for having written about it.
I investigate the panopticon in detail in
“Discipline and Punish”.
Basically, it is a kind of prison architecture. In the late
18th-century, Bentham proposed setting up
prisons as ring-like buildings around a single
observation tower in the center. The advantage
of this architecture was, Bentham argued,
that one prison guard could supervise all
the criminals in their individual cells. In
my book, I reproduce some of Bentham’s original plans.
I recall these images, they are amazing!
But the point wasn’t just about architecture.
To me, the panopticon was a general model
of disciplinary power. The gaze from the central
tower transforms all the prison cells into
glass cabinets, allowing for placing all criminals
under constant surveillance. In other words,
Bentham’s plan devised “a machine for
dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the
peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without
ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees
everything without ever being seen.” OK?
The panopticon is not just some prison architecture,
it is also and above all a technique of power
that can be applied in many instances. Think
of schools, hospitals or factories and modern
institutions in general.
Since you wrote “Discipline and Punish,”
surveillance technologies have changed a lot,
however. For example, our conversation can
be seen almost all over the world. And I am
sure that YouTube allows for counting and
mapping its users, recording viewing habits,
interests and preferences. If you are using
a smartphone, it tracks you permanently. The
architecture of prisons has also changed significantly.
For some criminals, we have electronic tags.
Given digital technologies, it seems, we do
not need the built space of the prison anymore…
I agree. But these new technologies are not
creating totally different forms of power.
I still can see Bentham’s ideas in the use
of digital devices. Electricity might not
belong to the order of the visible, that’s
true, but the guard in the center of the panopticon
is not visible either. To see, while you are
not seen: that was one of the core principles
of panopticism. But it is pretty much at work
in Google, Facebook, or Twitter. In a sense,
they are all putting us into cells or glass
cabinets…
You mean that digital surveillance does not
replace panopticism, but rather restructures
or reinvents it, for example by doing away
with concrete architectures and buildings?
Panopticism is still widely spread, in old
and new forms. Think of security cameras in
public spaces, of behavioral tracking in internet
users, or – more generally, of collecting
movement data via GPS. Coming back to Bentham,
I am also thinking of a somewhat ironic project
called PanoptiCam. A few years ago, they had
mounted a webcam just above the mummy in order
to record and screen the reactions of visitors
in front of the glass case when they spotted
Bentham. At the same time, they counted the
number of visitors…
In general, however, it is rather clear that today’s surveillance
tends to transgress the order of the visible.
Traditional panopticism was about seeing while
being unseen. Panopticism in the digital age
is about tracking and tracing while being
unseen.
Absolutely! Today, every keystroke on a laptop
computer and all of the predefined gestures
by which we operate our shiny touch screens,
can be used for surveillance purposes. Given
the importance of haptics in this context,
we should perhaps introduce a new concept
and, from now on, speak about “panhapticism.”
What do you mean?
In a sense, we are not any more sitting in
glass cabinets, as Bentham does and will continue
to do. There are no cabinets any more, but
there is a new, digital form of power that
operates through ubiquitous scanning, computing,
and tracking. We could call it the panhapticon!
Sounds interesting, indeed. I have to think
about it…
Thank you, Michel, have a happy day!
See you around!
