Tear down the walls: on demolishing the panopticon

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.