the nsa has already read this lecture.
MA/Rhetoric & Composition
Georgina (GiGi)
Jeremy Bentham
Founder of Utilitarianism “Greatest happiness for the greatest number”. Believed systems should be efficient, moral, and socially beneficial. Inventor of the Panopticon (late 1700s) Circular prison design: inmates can be watched at any time, but never know when. Proposed for prisons, schools, factories, hospitals. Goal is to internalize discipline so people control themselves when they might be seen. Saw surveillance as a tool for moral reform and social order. Irony & Legacy Never built in his lifetime; rejected by government. Became a symbol of modern surveillance.
παν
all
οπτικος
seeing
All Seeing
Panopticon
Digital reconstruction by Myles Zhang of how Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon would have appeared if built
Date 10 March 2020
Source Own work
Author Myles Zhang
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/about-jeremy-bentham/panopticon
To say all in one word, the panopticon will be found applicable, I think, without exception, to all establishments whatsoever. No matter how different, or even opposite the purpose: whether it be that of punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curring the sick, instructing the willing in any branch of industry, or training the rising race in the path of education. In a word, whether it be applied to the purposes of perpetual prisons in the room of death, or prisons for confinement before trial, or penitentiary-houses, or houses of correction, or work-houses, or manufactories, or mad-houses, or hospitals, or schools.
-Jeremy Bentham
04. "All Establishments Everywhere"
Hospitals
Factories
Enforces medical authority by placing patients under continuous observation, turning them into passive subjects of treatment and record-keeping.
Organizing space and time (e.g., workstations, shifts, clocking in) so that workers self-discipline under the logic of efficiency and supervision.
Prisons
Schools
To reform inmates by making them internalize discipline, possibility of being watched replaces the need for physical force or constant guards.
Students internalize discipline through structured routines like bells, schedules, and teacher surveillance.
UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Public and Cultural Engagement, and UCL’s Bentham Project present the PanoptiCam: an online camera that streams what Bentham sees while sitting in his cabinet at UCL. PanoptiCam captures people’s reaction using a webcam mounted above the auto-icon, with the camera feed posted to our website in real time, and time lapse photography generating days in the life of Jeremy Bentham’s current, yet eternal, viewpoint. A genuine research element will be used to test algorithms to count visitor numbers to museum exhibit cases using low cost webcam solutions.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/feb/how-do-you-move-auto-icon
Raider of History
Michel Foucault
French philosopher, historian, and social theorist (1926–1984) Madness and Civilization (1961)Found that repression is inadequate for defining power. "If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it produces" ("Truth and Power" 61). Discipline and Punish (1975) Foucault first came across the panopticon architecture when he studied the origins of clinical medicine and hospital architecture in the second half of the 18th century. He argued that discipline had replaced the pre-modern society of kings, and that the panopticon should not be understood as a building, but as a mechanism of power and a diagram of political technology.
VISIBILITY IS A TRAP
Visible
Unverifiable
USA. Illinois. 2002. Stateville Prison. F house. There were originally four circular cell houses radiating around a central mess hall. The buildings were based on Jeremy Bentham's 1787 design for the panopticon prison house. The first round house was completed in 1919, the other three were finished in 1927. F house is the last remaining panopticon cell house. It's used for segregating inmates from the general prison population and for holding inmates who are awaiting trial or transfer. -Doug DuBois & Jim Goldberg.
https://prisonphotography.org/tag/doug-dubois/
Infrastructure of Power
Foucault on the effect of survellience
"Discipline" is a physics or an "anatomy" of power, a technology. Goal of discipline: 1. obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost (economically by low expenditure and politically at its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses). 2. Bring the effects of social power to maximum intensity and to extend as far as possible. 3. Link "economic" growth of power with the output of the apparatuses (educational, military, industrial, or medical) within which it is exercised. Bring both the docility and utility of all the elements of the system.
02. Modern Survelliance
Author: Jeremy Bentham Date: 1748 - 1832 Relevance: Architect of the Panopticon, Father of Utilitarianism Important Works: The Panopticon Writings (1786) and Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780).
Author: Michel FoucaultDate: 1926-1984 Relevance: Panopticism, Theorist of Power Important Works: Madness and Civilization (1961); The Birth of the Clinic (1963); The Order of Things (1966); Discipline and Punish (1975).
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Transcript
the nsa has already read this lecture.
MA/Rhetoric & Composition
Georgina (GiGi)
Jeremy Bentham
Founder of Utilitarianism “Greatest happiness for the greatest number”. Believed systems should be efficient, moral, and socially beneficial. Inventor of the Panopticon (late 1700s) Circular prison design: inmates can be watched at any time, but never know when. Proposed for prisons, schools, factories, hospitals. Goal is to internalize discipline so people control themselves when they might be seen. Saw surveillance as a tool for moral reform and social order. Irony & Legacy Never built in his lifetime; rejected by government. Became a symbol of modern surveillance.
παν
all
οπτικος
seeing
All Seeing
Panopticon
Digital reconstruction by Myles Zhang of how Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon would have appeared if built Date 10 March 2020 Source Own work Author Myles Zhang
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/about-jeremy-bentham/panopticon
To say all in one word, the panopticon will be found applicable, I think, without exception, to all establishments whatsoever. No matter how different, or even opposite the purpose: whether it be that of punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curring the sick, instructing the willing in any branch of industry, or training the rising race in the path of education. In a word, whether it be applied to the purposes of perpetual prisons in the room of death, or prisons for confinement before trial, or penitentiary-houses, or houses of correction, or work-houses, or manufactories, or mad-houses, or hospitals, or schools.
-Jeremy Bentham
04. "All Establishments Everywhere"
Hospitals
Factories
Enforces medical authority by placing patients under continuous observation, turning them into passive subjects of treatment and record-keeping.
Organizing space and time (e.g., workstations, shifts, clocking in) so that workers self-discipline under the logic of efficiency and supervision.
Prisons
Schools
To reform inmates by making them internalize discipline, possibility of being watched replaces the need for physical force or constant guards.
Students internalize discipline through structured routines like bells, schedules, and teacher surveillance.
UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Public and Cultural Engagement, and UCL’s Bentham Project present the PanoptiCam: an online camera that streams what Bentham sees while sitting in his cabinet at UCL. PanoptiCam captures people’s reaction using a webcam mounted above the auto-icon, with the camera feed posted to our website in real time, and time lapse photography generating days in the life of Jeremy Bentham’s current, yet eternal, viewpoint. A genuine research element will be used to test algorithms to count visitor numbers to museum exhibit cases using low cost webcam solutions.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/feb/how-do-you-move-auto-icon
Raider of History
Michel Foucault
French philosopher, historian, and social theorist (1926–1984) Madness and Civilization (1961)Found that repression is inadequate for defining power. "If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it produces" ("Truth and Power" 61). Discipline and Punish (1975) Foucault first came across the panopticon architecture when he studied the origins of clinical medicine and hospital architecture in the second half of the 18th century. He argued that discipline had replaced the pre-modern society of kings, and that the panopticon should not be understood as a building, but as a mechanism of power and a diagram of political technology.
VISIBILITY IS A TRAP
Visible
Unverifiable
USA. Illinois. 2002. Stateville Prison. F house. There were originally four circular cell houses radiating around a central mess hall. The buildings were based on Jeremy Bentham's 1787 design for the panopticon prison house. The first round house was completed in 1919, the other three were finished in 1927. F house is the last remaining panopticon cell house. It's used for segregating inmates from the general prison population and for holding inmates who are awaiting trial or transfer. -Doug DuBois & Jim Goldberg.
https://prisonphotography.org/tag/doug-dubois/
Infrastructure of Power
Foucault on the effect of survellience
"Discipline" is a physics or an "anatomy" of power, a technology. Goal of discipline: 1. obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost (economically by low expenditure and politically at its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses). 2. Bring the effects of social power to maximum intensity and to extend as far as possible. 3. Link "economic" growth of power with the output of the apparatuses (educational, military, industrial, or medical) within which it is exercised. Bring both the docility and utility of all the elements of the system.
02. Modern Survelliance
Author: Jeremy Bentham Date: 1748 - 1832 Relevance: Architect of the Panopticon, Father of Utilitarianism Important Works: The Panopticon Writings (1786) and Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780).
Author: Michel FoucaultDate: 1926-1984 Relevance: Panopticism, Theorist of Power Important Works: Madness and Civilization (1961); The Birth of the Clinic (1963); The Order of Things (1966); Discipline and Punish (1975).