Michel Foucault warned that an all-seeing prison—the panopticon—would mold our character. Has Snowden proved him right? By REID SMITH • July 19, 2013 Presidio Modelo, Cuba As revelations about the NSA’s all-seeing surveillance programs continue to trickle out, debate has consisted mostly of quarrels over Edward Snowden’s heroism or villainy, parsings of the potentially perjurious testimony of senior officials, or challenges to the lawfulness and constitutionality of the programs themselves. Very little attention is being given to a subtly important question: what consequences does the surveillance state hold for the character of our culture? One term flirting around the edges of the discourse has the potential to provide an answer: “panopticon.” The “panopticon”—a creative compound of Greek words to mean “observe all”—was originally conceived as a hypothetical penitentiary by Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century British utilitarian. The prison was designed around a central tower that would allow the watchman to observe each inmate all of the time, while he himself was obscured from view. An inmate would never know whether he was being watched—he would have to assume he was under scrutiny and maintain his best behavior; thus order was assured by the presumption of constant surveillance. Bentham introduced his prison as a “new model of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” Bentham believed that schools, hospitals, and asylums could all be regimented by his social theory of surveillance and constancy, too. While Bentham’s prison was never built during his lifetime, his theory lived on, achieving cult status in academia as a powerful metaphor for social correction and obedience. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, French postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault describes a social evolution from the “culture of spectacle” to the “carceral culture.” Once punishment was administered on display: for thousands of years, men were crucified, hanged, and garroted to demonstrate social rights and wrongs. Now, though, we are “disciplined” internally, through the composition of our character. Foucault suggests that panopticism determines the shape of society and the principles of power. If “Bentham presents it as a particular institution closed in on itself,” Foucault writes that the panopticon today “must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in term of the everyday life of me,” and as “a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.” Dino Felluga of Purdue University has identified the major themes of Foucault’s panoptical society. It is marked by social internalization of rules and regulation—and our conditioned hesitance to contest unjust law. Rehabilitation is favored over cruel and unusual corporal punishment, and while this change may be superficially kind, the emphasis on normalcy harms those who exist outside the status quo. In Foucault’s words: The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social-worker’-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements. Then it gets really scary. Foucault describes the observation of our private lives, as aided by new technology. Felluga notes the French philosopher’s emphasis on surveillance within an emerging information society and a developing bureaucracy that “turns individuals into statistics and paperwork,” followed by an emphasis on the organization of data and specialization of skill. Sound familiar? What emerges now is the new watchman. Historian Arthur Schlesinger’s classic The Imperial Presidency cautioned that our system of American governance is threatened by “a conception of presidential power so spacious and peremptory as to imply a radical transformation of the traditional polity.” A postwar atmosphere of pervasive crisis amplified government surveillance and public acquiescence. Before Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, the office had morphed into a pseudo-sultanate, elected by the people but armed virtually unchecked in the global arena. With the fall of the Soviet Union, there was hope that the imperial presidency would be scaled back by Congress, but such optimism proved hollow. In The Cult of the Presidency, Gene Healy notes that while partisan rhetoric today is as acerbic as it has been in decades, Republicans and Democrats alike accept the bottomless depth of executive responsibility and the president’s unique grasp on power. We’ve normalized dependence on his guidance and our subordination. The modern president has greatly exceeded, in size and scope, the few enumerated powers initially bestowed upon him and in the process has become a great deal more powerful—and potentially more dangerous. His powers of surveillance and social compulsion are virtually unmatched in human history. From a Foucauldian perspective, one might argue our president (Bush or Obama, it hardly matters) has staked his claim as our watchman. We become increasingly aware that all we do takes place under surveillance, and our dull surprise at this revelation suggests our submission to the system—the inevitable outcome of our assent to political power. Reid Smith is FreedomWorks’s staff writer and editor. Follow him on Twitter @reidtsmith. MORE IN IDEAS ALAN JACOBS Where and When DWIGHT MACDONALD Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” 7 Responses to The Surveillance State in Your Head the colonel says: July 19, 2013 at 8:44 am the concentration of executive power in the American power system isn’t really an inevitable function of the pervasive, invasive surveillance state. these are distinct events, though they are mutually supportive here. the surveillance state and the steady bureaucratization of society is the halmark of our age, with or without our particular political structure. and while it’s true that Foucault observed the nature and progress of bureaucracy in the modern state, it’s not clear in the article how or why the concentration of US executive power ought to be viewed in, or how it is informed by, a Foucauldian context, perhaps the point of the article is to be found in a postmodern reading of the text; the referencing and juxtaposition of memes is its own justification. Aaron Paolozzi says: July 19, 2013 at 9:21 am Just because there is not a clamoring chorus of people upset with this does not mean that all of us are so acquiescencent. I’m sure I’m on some NSA list purely because I have written letters to my congressmen asking them to help scale back the insanity of this surveillance state. I value my freedom over my security. Simple as that, and it boggles my mind to think that other American’s may not feel that way. Frank Stain says: July 19, 2013 at 10:54 am You are making Foucault sound like a rather traditional critic of totalitarian government here, as though he were telling us about the dangers of putting too much power in a central governmental apparatus. This is mistaken. In order to see this, you have to understand what Foucault means by power. From the interviews in Power/Knowledge ‘If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourses’ Foucault’s notion of power is radically decentralized, and it courses throughout the system. Not only that, it is primarily productive, not punitive. This means that, for Foucault, you must see the interior life of the family, the Church, Schools, etc. as sites where power is both produced, exerted and (to a minimal extent) resisted. You should think carefully about whether this really adds up to a critique of the central Leviathan State, which seems to be clearly what you are trying to do with it. df says: July 19, 2013 at 2:36 pm Foucault saw power as a kind of all enveloping gravity, an ether. He uses Bentham’s plans for the panopticon as metaphor for a change in how punishment is dealt. The opening of his book, Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et Punir), begins with a detailed recounting of the torture dealt to prisoners and contrasted that to the more humane, or rather “humane”, style of punishment established during the Enlightenment which focused on the prisoner’s “soul”, what we would call, reform via rigorous hourly discipline. Hence the stunning sentence in Discipline and Punish where he conflates the dissimilar: “We have, then, torture and a time-table”. (Not verbatim, but close to the book…it’s my own translation.) What Foucault, our own master of suspicion, feared was that the Enlightenment, with its “regimes of knowledge”….a wonderful phrase so applicable to the NSA….represented, not an advance, but the old feudal torture system under a different guise. In other words, plus ca change, plus ce la meme chose. Michael Kaiser says: July 19, 2013 at 5:52 pm Yes, America now is comprised, politically, in almost the exact opposite fashion for which it was intended. We have an all powerful Executive branch, a Judicial branch that has grabbed, and been ceded, power way beyond what was intended, and, frankly, a lap-dog Legislative Branch marked by, at best, partisan warfare because that is all it has been left with. (I actually had to think for a second what the Legislative branch is even called! And I have political science and law degrees. I finally wanted to say “Congressional” branch before I caught myself with the help of wiki. LOL.) JB says: July 19, 2013 at 7:08 pm Honestly, I am fearful and more constrained in what I say on this blog, in my e-mails, and in my phone calls, than I was before we discovered the extent of the police-state surveillance we’re being subjected to. Never thought I’d say that. Marsillac says: July 19, 2013 at 8:04 pm If the mind becomes entrapped in the virtual space of its incarceration can it be said to be any different than the mind that turns out of itself in pursuit of psychotropic distraction or physical fetishistic concentration? As was previously remarked, the function of power is not purely punitive, its vise-like grip can also manifest in the form of an irresistible urge, let us call it a deviation, that enslaves the will without ever exercising its effect physically, that is without the active localization of its policed or interpellated ‘subject.’ We live in a world where it is we who increasingly seek out the flame of our own entrapment and incineration, not just incarceration.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 11:07:02 +0000
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