Title: Tear down the walls: on demolishing the panopticon
Abstract: The panopticon is oppressive. Since Foucault’s famous reinterpretation
of Bentham’s utopian project of prison architecture, the panopticon
has stood for sinister manifestations of power/knowledge. Today,
however, the panopticon is oppressive in an entirely different sense.
That is because the panopticon is now considerably more than a brick
and mortar edifice, but is also easily the leading scholarly model or
metaphor for analysing surveillance. In this latter role the panopticon
has also become oppressive. The sheer number of works that invoke
the panopticon is overwhelming. More problematically, the panoptic
model has become reified, directing scholarly attention to a select
subset of attributes of surveillance. In so doing, analysts have excluded
or neglected a host of other key qualities and processes of surveillance
that fall outside of the panoptic framework. The result has been that
the panoptic model has been over-extended to domains where it seems
ill-suited, and important attributes of surveillance that cannot be neatly
subsumed under the ‘panoptic’ rubric have been neglected.
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-08-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 161
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