The reading starts with a description of the interventions taken to control the plague that took place in the seventeenth century that condemned many to an untimely death. People went through continuous registration, inspection, closing off households, and partitioning of the space. The procedures managed the purification and quarantine against the plague of leprosy (Foucault, 195). A plague can only be controlled by order to create a pure group of individuals or a disciplined society. The writer looks at panopticism, a building that is a tower housing prisoners that is not possible to see where they are incarcerated, from the creator’s (Jeremy Bentham) point of view. The convicts are kept in a trap where they cannot be seen or communicate with other people such as other prisoners or the warders. The visible tower is pictured as a functioning power that allows the work of naturalists such as the drawing of taxonomies or tables. This article reflects on the disciplined program of panopticism using the depiction of two artists.
Richard Haden, an artist and writer in the Artlurker newsletter firm, talks about the opening night of Guccivuitton in 2015. The event portrayed images and models of steel cages and panopticism. The aim of the producers and artists was to clarify the meaning of panopticism from the general conception of a dream structure to a diagram of a mechanism of power that is limited to its ideal form (Haden, par. 1). Haden draws from the works of Jeremy Bentham, the inventor of panopticism to build and develop the universal model of schools, workhouses, mental asylums, and prisons in Russian factories. The modern form of the system of panopticism underlies the principle of order through the monitoring of patients, learners, workers, inmates, and those people within the view of the eye of a panoptic. Conclusively, panopticism is used to portray a disciplined community to control the rise of population and plagues within the society to restore the purity and balance amongst people.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. Panopticism. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012.
Haden, Richard. The Panopticon, Steel Cages, and More At Guccivuitton’s Opening Night at ICA Miami. Web, 2015. < http://www.artlurker.com/2015/05/the-panopticon-steel-cages-and-more-at-guccivuittons-opening-night/>
