Panopticism

“Everyone locked up in his cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name and showing himself when asked…” begins Michel Foucault’s excerpt about Panopticism in his book Discipline and Punish (283). He starts his piece with a description about the procedures taken to quarantine those with the plague in order to introduce the idea for which all disciplinary methods developed from. The way to assure “automatic functioning of power” is explained through the theory of Panopticism (288). Panopticism is based off of Jeremy Bentham’s idea of a Panopticon, which is a circular building divided into cells with a central tower used to look out onto the people in the cells. With this central tower, a supervisor can view the prisoners but they do not know when they are being watched thus creating the idea that “power should be visible and unverifiable” (288). With this idea, power is distributed and not given solely to one individual. The theory of Panopticism can be used in modern institutions such as schools, hospitals and prisons.