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Panoptics, Confessions, and Solicitations
The widespread tendency to focus on specific characteristics of the panopticon is hardly surprising given Michel Foucault’s often contradictory, vague, and sometimes brief passages. As a whole, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977) is seemingly marked by a number of contradictions, the most obvious being an instance of violent closure, literally confinement, bumping up against the poststructuralist aversion to binary systems or Cartesian models. Following a philosophical tradition overdetermined by questions of vision and light (cf. Jay 1993), David Michael Levin (1997, 404) also argues that the thesis of self-discipline and governance in Foucault’s carceral vision machine is dependent on the very object of critique—the hegemony of light, vision, and the gaze. Thus, because prisoners are not able to view the guard in the panopticon’s centrally located tower, they must assume an all- seeing gaze as marked and yet masked, at once visible and invisible. Foucault’s thesis follows that since prisoners must therefore assume that at any time they could be under the watchful eye of the guard in the tower, they begin to self-discipline their behavior.Suggesting a link to contemporary forms of data storage, however, Foucault (1977, 198) reminds us that the panopticon is a system of both light and language—a system of optic surveillance that is predicated on and reinforced by the documentation and distribution of personal information. Gilles Deleuze (1986, 18) likewise notes the productive tension in Foucault’s work between the use of the visible and expressible: ‘‘language coagulates around a corpus only in order to facilitate the distribution or dispersion of statements and to stand as the rule for a ‘family’ that is naturally dispersed.’’ Thus, in addition to providing a visual element of power and of self-imposed discipline that is driven by an inability to see agents of authority, the panopticon provides a simple classificatory architecture, an archive in which individuals or bodies are separated and classified with the assistance of files.In addition to questions of light and language, Foucault’s writings also offer a seemingly ambiguous theory of surveillance, institutions, and space. Although he seemed almost caught off guard by such criticisms in a published interview in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (1980), Foucault’s attachment to enclosed spaces in other works, such as Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1965) and The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1973), are explicitly described as ‘‘a generalizable model of functioning: a way of defining power relations in terms of everyday life’’ (1977, 205) (my emphasis). Nevertheless, Foucault’s one attempt to give a geographical representation of panopticism, at the outset of Discipline and Punish (1977, 196), is a decidedly indexical or archival form of surveillance:
At the beginning of the ‘‘lock up,’’ the role of each of the inhabitants present in the town is laid down, one by one; this document bears ‘‘the name, age, sex of everyone, notwithstanding his condition’’: a copy is sent to the intendant of the quarter, another to the office of the town hall, another to enable the syndic to make his daily roll call. Everything that may be observed during the course of the visits—deaths, illnesses, complaints, irregularities—is noted down and transmitted to the intendants and magistrates.
In addition to lingering architectural and spatial questions, a pivotal dimension of Foucault’s powerful discriminatory apparatus, particularly for contemporary studies of consumer surveillance, is the exposition of data accumulation—the means by which information is ‘‘solicited’’ from individuals. Foucault’s panoptic architecture therefore remains formidably closed and static, for prisoners are fixed in their respective cells with no possibility of movement or escape from the potential gaze of the central tower. In fact, the panopticon’s prisoners, as surveyed data-subjects, are categorized and segmented before they are ‘‘solicited,’’ albeit quite forcefully, for personal information (such as behavior). The prison’s architecture—the spatial segmentation of bodies within a system of light—facilitates that accumulation of information. Then again, in keeping with his previous thoughts on broader topographical questions, Foucault maintains that he is more interested in the general deployment of a system of power that calls on individuals to self-discipline their own behavior than he is with the specifics of architecture. Thus, Foucault’s (1977, 220, 206) invocation of an ongoing system of ‘‘continuous registration, perpetual assessment and classification’’ that increases its efficiency through ‘‘increasing its own points of contact’’ raises the question of how we might conceptualize the multiple interactions between mobile subjects and geographically dispersed technologies of surveillance.
In particular, the overtly fixed nature of confinement and discipline in the panoptic prison tends to erase the technological nuances of data accumulation—the significance of repetition, habit, corporeal movement, and the flow of everyday life. Foucault later suggests in the History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1978,61) that behavior is also modified when it is placed into language, whereby the confession of a secret produces a paradoxically unadulterated ‘‘truth.’’ And while Foucault (1978, 60) again focuses on the practice of confessions in institutionalized religion, he is quick to extend this logic into the realm of the topographical, where
the obligation to confess is now relayed through so many points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us.
Typically, theorists of consumer surveillance have viewed Foucault’s qualifications and generalizations of panoptic surveillance as inconsistencies and limitations. All too often, such critiques have focused on the prison at the expense of panopticism or the technology as opposed to the technique. This chapter, however, argues that the panoptic process, manifest in consumer-surveillance technologies, is driven by a panoptic ‘‘generality,’’ characterized herein as a blueprint or carceral ‘‘diagram.’’ For as Foucault (1977, 205) reminds us, the panoptic ‘‘dream building’’ was but a ‘‘diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance, or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use’’ (emphasis added).
