Critical Theory Tuesdays: Foucault, Social Networks, and the Panopticon

 I decided to post something a little more scholarly today. I'm going to try to write and something deconstructive/in the vein of critical theory every Tuesday. Here's my first one. Enjoy!

Many 19th century prison systems in the United States utilized Jeremy Bentham's design of the panopticon (from Greek, pan “all”+ optikon, neut. of optikos “of or for sight” ). This was a groundbreaking architectural structure that allowed all prisoners to be under constant scrutiny of one another. On the level of basic functionality, this eliminated the necessity of many prison guards. This structure, however, created a mental internment as well as a physical one. Additionally, the panopticon permitted an observer to survey those incarcerated without them being aware of whether or not they were being watched. The architect Silke Berit Lang has called this phenomenon the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience." Bentham himself described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example." The unmodified design of the panopticon forced the prisoners to work and live while all in sight of one another, therefore merging the watched and watchers into one.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault presents the idea of the panopticon as an allegory for Western society and its emphasis on normalization and observation. According to Foucault, the exposed inmate becomes an object of information. In all circumstances, panopticism replaces the collective effects of crowds with “collections of separated individualities” (201). Like facebook, the panopticon induces in the “inmate” a state of conscious and permanent visibility that “assures the automatic functioning of power” so that the effects are perpetual and internalized (202). This “machine for dissociating the seeing and being seen dyad” can be operated by anyone, increasing the likelihood of, and anxiety regarding, observation (202). The panopticon was more than a prison; it was also a laboratory. The nature of the converging viewer and viewed transformed this structure into a privileged place for experiments with humans as variables.

Facebook functions as a 21st century panopticon. Like the prison scheme, it can be understood as a generalizable model of functioning. It is a way of defining power relations in terms of the every day. It is numerically efficient. It functions without the necessity of intervention despite its perpetual ability to do so. Like Foucault’s notion of the panopticon, it acts “directly on individuals” regardless of the scale. Facebook and the panopticon both demonstrate ways of “making power relations function in a function, and of making a function through these power relations” (206-207).

This is where the watchers become the watched, and vice versa. This structure forces humans -- as self-perceived hyper-individualists -- into a state of perpetual fluctuation, unrest, and self-creation. We exaggerate ourselves and create elaborate facades constructed of streaming photos and movie titles and pithy status updates. Somewhere, in the midst of all this calculation, the entropy of our being diminishes. It is here, in fully establishing our online personas, that we negate our physical existence.

*Foucault quotes cited from Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault ; translated from the French by Alan Sheridan. New York : Vintage Books, 1979.