The Panoptiblog
Thanks to the discussion that resulted from last week’s posting, I decided to improve my mind by reading Michel Foucault’s essay/chapter entitled “Panopticism” in Discipline and Punish. It contains a remarkable discussion of an idea of Jeremy Bentham’s, the panopticon. This “all seeing machine” was Bentham’s plan for a prison in which the cells would be arranged in tiers around a central yard, with all of the cells having windows on the outside and inside. At the center of the circular yard would stand a tower with windows all around. This simple device would allow the warder (or anyone else) in the tower to see everything that the prisoners did, while the prisoners could not see the warder, could not even tell if it was the warder or someone else or no one at all watching them. Consequently, the constant visibility of the prisoners, and the invisibility of their guardians, would make control simple, almost automatic.
I don’t know if anyone ever built a prison on this design, and if so if the idea worked. Prison construction in the U.S. has boomed in recent decades, so a simple and automatic means of controlling the prison population would seemingly attract lots of attention. But the actual existence of a panopticon really is irrelevant as far as Foucault is concerned (though, he never tells us that in so many words, instead leaving the impression that panoptic structures are all over the place). Because the panopticon serves as a metaphor for the use of power in western societies since the 17th century. Foucault points to the persistent organization and ordering or humanity in every possible manner (but especially in imagination, in what we might call discourses, perhaps?). And this order serve to regularize and control the humanity that is so ordered. A system that orders must investigate, study, dissect, know what it is ordering—the subject must become transparent, seen in every possible way and at every possible time. Social structures flow into political structures flow into police structures. They are all panoptic, viewing everything from the obscure perch of social statistics or science, and they all serve to establish control over what they examine. At least, this is what I think Michel Foucault is telling us. It’s an interesting and useful perspective. In what follows, I want to try to use it to discuss a peculiarity of contemporary society known as “blogging.” And, of course, I want to take issue with it.
It’s hard to ignore the usefulness of the panopticon metaphor for understanding trends in contemporary society. It tells us that power is maintained by distinctions of knowledge; not just that I know more than you, but that I know about you and you don’t know about me. Foucault seems to have coined the term “surveillance society,” something that has come true in ways that Foucault, let alone Bentham, could not have imagined. Charles “Antipope” Strass, a Scottish writer, has inventoried the many forms of surveillance that have come into our lives in recent years or are potentially available for use. We’re all aware of the direct surveillance through cameras placed at intersections and other traffic areas, in banks, supermarkets, and just about anywhere someone might think about doing something wrong or even fun. So, metaphor shmetaphor, a shopping mall really is a panopticon. “They” can see you, and you cannot see “them.” Just as in the Bentham plan, you cannot even know if they are watching. How many of us would, let’s say, have sex in an elevator if there was a camera in the elevator? Okay, so a few of you would. But at least you’d think twice, right, and perhaps hang your underwear over the camera?
The Antipope page also points to uses that can be made of current electronic surveillance techniques that go well beyond cameras. For instance, Echelon is a cooperative project of U.S. intelligence agencies that “attempts to capture staggering volumes of satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic traffic…” And, in case you’ve been living in a cave for 20 years and this is your first experience of the Internet since emerging, the worldwide web has provided yet another means of looking over the shoulders of ordinary people. David Engberg has constructed a “virtual panopticon” on the web and has also sounded the alarm about the ability of large, undemocratic organizations with little oversight to use the Internet for data collection.
But the structure of the panopticon as described by Bentham, and more generally the implications about the source of power and discipline as discussed by Foucault, conjure an image of a unified, centralized power. I’m not sure this is Foucault’s intent—surely he understood that power has many centers, and not all of them collaborated. He recognized that discourses, although tools for elites, could be turned to the advantage of those being discoursed about, that is, the objects of panoptic investigation. Still, in the essay on “Panopticism,” Foucault’s image of the emerging panoptic state is Napoleonic France, with its administrative center in Paris and a unified rule extending to all of the departments. How well does that fit the United States, where 50 republican governments compete for attention and funding from the federal government; where a single senator, “in the greatest deliberative body in the world” can bring the legislative business of government to a standstill as long as he or she keeps talking; where federal agencies can ignore legislative mandates and where Supreme Court majorities can overturn legislation.
The decentralization and fragmentation of power hardly means that it doesn’t exist. But in the case of the surveillance society, fragmentation means that those under surveillance have many choices about how they will choose to present themselves. When I brought this issue up with the small but ardent blogging community at Seton Hill University, Dennis Jerz immediately pointed out that the blog was a presentation of self, a selection and persona made available to the WWW. The panoptiblog of the Internet allows all of us to see the blog-selves of all other bloggers, but that will include only what the blogger decides to share. After all, I don’t post my journal online (something we can all be happy about).
But the WWW also makes clear that many people want to be observed, want to place themselves under surveillance. Not just with web pages and pictures of pets, but with video cams. They want to reveal as much as they can; they want us to know as much as we can, about them. Is this narcissism or exhibitionism or some other therapeutistic illness? I don’t think so. We live in a society where being seen makes us real, more real than those who remain unseen, unknown. And that isn’t just a reflection of panopticism. In a democracy, we give power to people about whom we know a lot, sometimes more than we want to know. And our ability to observe and monitor our leaders allow us, however inefficiently, to patrol the uses of power. We also turn our hearts and pocketbooks over to people about whom we know an awful lot, whether they are movie stars or sports heroes. The asymmetry of knowledge is all on the side of the masses, while fame fortune and power is all on the side of those observed.
Can I finally leave Foucault alone? Keep watching Blue Monkey or you might not find out.
Comments
So it's might turn into a society split down the middle into two groups; those who steal the spotlight every single time they're around it or those who keep looking over their shoulder trying to escape from invisible eyes. Scary.
Posted by: Neha | April 23, 2004 10:56 PM
GREAT post. It's true that the blog is a representaion of the self (typically but not always an ideal self). And the way in which bloggers are occupying nodes like those in a prison cell is a fascinating concept. I think there's a difference, though., between the desire of the exhibitionist and the idea of paranoiac (or "self-policing") self that Foucault is forwarding in Panopticism. A lot of bloggers are anonymous (or, alternatively, clueless about the surveillance) and use their blogs to simply vent and exhibit that which they must repress in other venues. The thrill of reading those blogs is a sort of voyeuristic pleasure, which is the inverse of exhibitionism. There's a degree, too, to which the blogger can represent themselves AS the all-seeing eye at the center of the virtual panopticon: the blogger who catches every "meme" or news item immediately, in a bid to claim to be the first person to blog it; the blogger who acts as a central portal for the universe online. In fact, one might conversely argue that the net has no central hub, no axle upon which the spokes of the wheel turn. In the Panopticon, it's the unoccupied guard tower which the cellmates imagine could be looking at them at any one moment. But there's a degree to which there is central structure -- no guard tower -- at all on the internet, particularly in the blogosphere, which at times seems more like a prison population underground, digging their way out. Just thinking out loud. Thanks for the thoughtful post. (And you gotta love that word, "Panoptiblog"!)
Posted by: Mike Arnzen | April 25, 2004 12:00 PM
Hmm... while there's no guard tower in the blogosphere at large, Google comes pretty close to being a central observation point. The amount of data hidden in plain sight is amazing... I seem to remember an anecdote about how a tiny town in the middle of nowhere had a huge number of subscriptions to a particular ground-breaking science fition magazine -- and it turned out that the town was the center for a top-secret nuclear program. I'm sure that the professional and personal information we put in our blogs is somehow mineable. But I personally feel that I gain so much from Amazon's "people who bought the books you just looked at also bought these books" that I willingly went through and rated books in my possession, because the recommendations were so valuable to me. Is that the same thing as a central observation tower meant to control the population? No.
But as the blogmaster of blogs.setonhill.edu, I have access to information such as who logged in at what time... in your comment responding to my CCCC 2005 proposal, you noted the ethical questions surrounding surveying people that closely.
Maybe the power of the panoptiblog is that its center moves -- that, without necessarily controlling the people under our surveilence, we can sort and organize, include or exclude, to our heart's content. A problem with that is that we might surround ourselves only with viewpoints that affirm our own.
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz | April 30, 2004 12:36 PM
Dennis' last comment, about the moving center of the panoptiblog, takes us a long way from a prison with a central tower.
Posted by: John | April 30, 2004 2:28 PM