Del Panópticon

El Panopticon es un eficiente diseño arquitectónico concebido en el siglo 18  por el inglés Jeremy Bentham, para permitir la vigilancia continua de los ocupantes del edificio.

En 1892, en la ciudad colombiana de Ibagué, un panóptico experimental fue construido para encerrar presos políticos. 111 años mas tarde, en 2003, la prisión fue  cerrada y sus ocupantes transferidos a una prisión moderna.

Los susurros y los gritos, las angustias, obsesiones y sueños de los seres encerrados en el Panóptico fueron silenciados por la pintura blanca y los documentos incinerados. Fotografiadas por Diego Samper en una estrecha ventana de tiempo, las historias grabadas en las paredes, graffitis, collages y pinturas murales solo perduran ahora en las imágenes utilizadas en esta película.

El filósofo francés Michael Foucault, en su obra  Vigilancia y castigo: el nacimiento de la prisión (1975), usa la idea del Panópticon como metáfora de la sociedad occidental, que enfatiza la normalización y la observación, y lo describe como una máquina para desasociar la diada ver/ser visto: el observado está siempre expuesto, sin poder ver a quién lo observa. El vigilante, a la vez, ve todo sin ser visto.

La máquina original concebida por Bentham, sólida, con rejas que encierran y exponen, alimentada por nuestros miedos ha mutado y evolucionado en una entidad invisible y global que nos espía desde todas partes … todo el tiempo. Omnipresente, el Panópticon nos mira desde el espacio y desde todos los rincones, escucha nuestras voces, lleva registro de nuestros hábitos y movimientos, sabe que libros leemos, que vino tomamos, a quienes amamos. La máquina lleva una bitácora meticulosa de nuestras travesías terrenales  y ciberespaciales. Y la máquina, en un gesto de supremo ingenio, ha transformado al observado en el observador de su propia existencia.


El Panópticon vigila ahora con nuestros propios ojos.


En su novela 1984, el Big Brother de Orwell es omnipresente y omnisciente. El hermano mayor, quien conoce y regula todo, tiene un rostro y una voz que son ampliadas y multiplicadas por infinidad de pantallas y parlantes, recordando a cada individuo su presencia permanente y su poder absoluto.

Del Panópticon contemporáneo, por lo contrario, no conocemos su rostro. 

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On the Panopticon

A Panopticon is an architectural design that allows for the continued surveillance of the occupants within. Englishman Jeremy Bentham conceived the concept in the 18th century.
In 1892, in the Colombian city of Ibague, an experimental panopticon was built to incarcerate political prisoners. One hundred and eleven years later, in 2003, the prison was closed and its occupants transferred to a modern prison.

Silenced with document incinerators and layers of white paint lay the anguished whispers, screams, obsessions, and dreams of the once imprisoned inhabitants of the Panopticon. During a narrow window of time Diego Samper was allowed to photograph the stories recorded on the walls; the graffiti, collages, and mural paintings within now live on in the images of Samper’s film.

Michael Foucault, French philosopher, in his work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), uses the idea of the Panopticon as a metaphor of western culture that emphasizes standardization and observation. He describes it as a machine to disassociate the observer and observed. The observed is always exposed not able to see them who observe.
The original machine conceived by Bentham, solid with fences that enclose and expose and fed by our fears, has mutated and evolved into an invisible global entity that spies on us from every angle. Omnipresent, the Panopticon looks at us from both the open space and the corners, it listens to our voices, keeps a record of our habits and our movements, it knows which books we read, what wine we drink, and who we love. The machine has a meticulous binnacle of our journeys on earth and in cyberspace. The machine, in a gesture of extreme wit, has transformed the one observed into the observer of its own existence.

The Panopticon now monitors with our own eyes.

In his novel 1984, Orwell’s Big Brother is omnipresent and omniscient. The Big Brother, the one who knows and regulates all areas, has a face and a voice that are multiplied and amplified by countless screens and speakers; reminding every individual of his permanent presence and his absolute power.

 
Of the contemporary Panopticon, on the contrary, we do not know its face.

Notes concerning the Panopticon

Geoffrey Smedley

As I write a cycle of Diego Samper’s amazing photographs runs on an adjacent computer. The hundreds of images are of a Columbian architectural monument, a jail at Ibagué, Colombia. Diego Samper who is as much an architect as he is a photographer, sculptor, painter or biologist hails from a talented family, his father a leading Columbian architect worked with Le Corbusier immediately following the Second World War. It comes as no surprise then that he made such a resonant photographic survey of architectural form. He shows us the cathedral-like aspects of nave, aisles, and clerestory and the arcaded cloisters of a monastery. Every inch of the interior walls are covered with murals, all painted or collaged by the prisoners held there.

The title of Samper’s enterprise Panopticon could not have been better chosen. The word Panopticon refers to a special kind of jail. It was coined by the enormously influential English Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748 -1832). He was working at a time when clockwork, based on the pendulum escapement, had come to represent the definitive model of reason: the train of antecedent cause and consequential effect. Pendulum regulated clockwork transformed the time of personal experience into something capable of being measured, divided, bought and sold – or, imposed upon in the case of penal system.  Clockwork became the prevailing metaphor used to explain all the workings of nature, man, anatomy and every institution. Convicts got time and did it.

The pendulum changed the affairs of man perhaps even more than the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, or the moveable type of the printing press: the pendulum changed our mode of being. Time, the medium of life, had become mechanical. Descartes who died in 1650, seven years before Christian Huygens invented the pendulum clock, had already described man as a machine.  Julian Offray de la Mettrie wrote an influential book, Man as a Machine in 1748.

Given this milieu it is not surprising that the Panopticon, the jail Bentham invented, promoted and eventually had built was conceived from the beginning as an ideal machine with all the virtues of economy and the total control that mechanical perfection required. He described the Panopticon with the morally loaded word penitentiary which he first used in 1776. Its purpose was to store and repair human machines. Intentions can be a mixed blessing: as a classical liberal he valued freedom, and as a utilitarian he recommended the mechanical imposition of the good life for all. Utilitarianism preached the politically correct policy that legal and social reforms should deliver the greatest good to the greatest number of people. This view was first propounded by Helvétius in his book On Man in 1777. It is a strand of thought that found expression with Robespierre’s dictum that it was the duty of the state to force men to be free. Only through freedom can a man be truly happy. Robespierre knew the he knew what people wanted; what they wanted their freedom even though they were in ignorance of their true desire. Such enlightenment gave him the responsibility to speak and act on their behalf, and free them with force if necessary. He promoted their happiness by inflicting pain in the interest of pleasure.

Eighteenth century Britain had seen a growth of social reform. In 1774 as a result of John Howard’s energetic campaign two parliamentary bills were passed addressing the appallingly inhumane treatment of prisoners that had been rationalized over time by the ineffective idea of deterrence. Acts of deterrence, invariably performed as a public spectacle, cloaked vengeance. Deterrence, understood as retributive justice, required strong theatre. The Murder Act was passed in 1752, twenty-four years before Bentham coined the word penitentiary. The act made provision for the dissection of criminals following execution thereby heaping retribution on the condemned even after death. Following the anatomization of the body into small pieces the corpse was denied burial. A few mistakes are known to have been made and dissection proceeded even if the subject was not quite dead. The work of disembodying was carried out in the interests of science, and scientific education - and to help maintain law and order. (see Johanthan Sawday The Body Emblazoned pp 48 ff). The Murder Act largely replaced the traditional punishments of burning at the stake, drowning, hanging - drawing (eviscerating) - and quartering – and, in Britain, beheading by axe or guillotine. Simple humiliation required no more than the stocks. The range of capital crimes started with petty theft.

The number of executions at Tyburn each year fell from 560 in the sixteenth century to 140 in the seventeenth. The advent of reform meant that fewer of the convicted were hung for petty crimes. Consequently the price of corpses available for the universities increased. In addition, changing the sentences brought about further expenses. Killing costs little. But to keep a prisoner at Pentonville in the mid-nineteenth century took about 15 shillings a week. Prisoners were therefore employed to repay their debt to society. Economics played a big part in the debate around reform. In spite of the contradictions and cross currents behind the Bentham’s theories the Panoptic Prison became the universal gold standard from that day on.

It was the cheapest way of storing Descartes’ mechanical men. Fewer staff were needed to observe. Jails were to be centrally planned in a radial form. From the centre the jailor could watch all the cells. They were narrow and deep. At one end the grill-form of the cell door let on to a circulating balcony. At the other a high exterior window admitted daylight. Optics played a double role: symbolically by directing light towards the centre of power and practically by silhouetting the 860 prisoners against the light making total panoptical surveillance a reality.

Bentham’s jail completed by 1816 was built on the north bank of the Thames: the Millbank. Millbank Prison thus called, was demolished in 1897 to become the site of the Tate gallery. It is not too fanciful to say that this historical conjunction represents a tense union of opposites; a dialectical polarity of art and incarceration, freedom and confinement.

Freedom, standing in relationship to obedience and authority is obviously far too vast a subject to enter here. I shall do no more than mention that freedom has two forms, one passive and the other active: freedom from something; or freedom to pursue something else. I reckon these intuitions come from the experience of the unimpeded movement of the body - even when it is limited to pacing the space of the cell. But when totally constrained by a straightjacket, solitary confinement or starvation a man is locked within himself. Beyond there is nothing. He has been mummified alive and freedom ceases to be even a word. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz describes the condition of the living dead – a being known in the camps as a Musselmann, an object once a man, whose subjective life had been extinguished. All that remained was an unknowable entity standing at the extreme threshold between life and death. The Musselmann,inAgamben’s view, was the outcome and meaning of absolute power.

Mercifully Diego Samper’s photographs do not suggest that the prisoners in the Ibagué jail were constrained to a degree that totally impeded their freedom to pursue their subjective lives. Like the rest of us, prisoners may achieve solace or salvation through religion, contemplation, absurdity or humour. Many of Samper’s photographs demonstrate these approaches. The images prove the strength and unbounded freedom of the imagination. The whole building was smothered in pictures, because not unlike a prisoner of war camp the administration was in the hands of the inmates not the guards. In consequence there was sufficient freedom for art to flourish as richly as it did. There were some criminals in the jail although it was primarily built for political prisoners. Images of armed resistance are everywhere. Guns and masked figures abound. Many deeply felt images coming from the Christian tradition can be seen, and there are a few from Islamic sources. The Virgin is shown baptizing the infant Jesus, Christ is martyred, while pain, sin and redemption are everywhere. Meanwhile, in the mode of William Blake, a Satanic winged snake is free to fly in the garden. A dispassionate saint looks straight through us; in his right hand he holds a quill, in the left an axe. There are images of desire and fantasy. Bathing beauties occur with generous supply of bums and brassieres but no pornography. Clichés are given new life. Comic strip characters are very much alive and often rendered with ironic humour: Bart Simpson is seen mooning, and then having broken his chains he runs off to freedom wearing striped prison garb. The Grand Reaper offers an alternative escape route across the Styx: a skeleton is caught rowing - overseen by the figure of Death. Canavis another exit is writ large but not often.

There are many wonderful palimpsests of peeling fragments as if the surface of the wall was, in the imagination, being torn apart. As if the image of a hole, by slight of hand, could be an actual way out. But there was no way out. All exits were closely guarded. Micro-management, the control of prisoners by prisoners, was necessary to keep the costs down. It was of course closely scrutinized as was every other activity. Panoptic design assured total control. Maybe the guards had unspeakable duties in the course of interrogations, but there is no pictorial record if such was the case. Perhaps too there was a reciprocal relationship between the guards and the prisoners. In volatile times a change of government changes the prison population, and maybe the guards are changed with them. Ask not for whom the bell tolls… 

All prison architecture before the mid-twentieth century drew on the austere geometric form of the traditional castle or fort. A fifteenth century rocca, the archetypical fortress, of say, Francesco di Giorgo could serve as a useful example. He was an architect, geometer and a mechanical (and hydraulic) engineer of great distinction. The geometry of design served the psychological purpose of promoting awe: a necessity for both the theatre of war, and to remind citizens of the consequence of their actions. It was from geometry that their architecture derived sublime beauty. The perimeters were developed from polygons of one kind or another centred on the keep. But they had inverse purposes. One faced out to defend the freedom of those within, the other faced in to remove it. Both had the objective of appearing to protect society with visible signs of power: one functioned by keeping the enemies at bay, the other by locking them in. Keeping enemies out was real enough in the days of marauding bands, fiefdoms, and rival barons. The first item on the agenda of any institution is how to survive. To do so an institution has to demonstrate that it is needed, and, by one means or another, the public must be persuaded that it is so. Institutions faced with the absence of real needs has to ask how the can the supply be supplemented?  Forts need enemies; prisons need convicts. If they don’t exist, then they must be created. Sometimes historical circumstances provide the requirements. The rapid expansion of prisons in Britain was made possible by Bentham’s specification, but it was brought about by fear that the French Revolution could be imported. Having more prisons argued for more prisoners. The criminal classes expanded along with expanding proletariat brought about by industrialization. The proletarian unlike the land-holding peasant (from whom he came) had only himself to sell. When there were no buyers petty crime was an option. It was a self-regulating system.

Both industry and Bentham’s prison design have to be seen in the larger context of the explanatory metaphor of mechanism which I have already touched upon. Bentham’s utilitarian enterprise was couched in mechanical terms, as were Descartes’s anatomy lessons. The first part of Treatise on Man has the title On the machine of the body. His second paragraph opens with “I suppose the body to be just a statue or a machine made of earth”. By the fourth paragraph he is writing “… the bones, nerves, muscles, veins, arteries, stomach, liver, spleen, heart, brain, nor all the other different parts from which this machine is composed…”

These attitudes are the bedrock of Enlightenment theory. Stick to the facts, then all the facts concerning the physical world will prove to be mechanical at root. Wound into theories and to some extent resting on them are systems of value. Facts are neutral, values however are a guide to action. We have seen how the Rousseau’s sentiments concerning the freedom of man lead to bloody revolution the guillotine. In 1952 Isaiah Berlin gave a  series of six lectures for the B.B.C. Freedom and its Betrayal in which he made a radical rereading of six philosophers concerned with the idea that freedom arises from reason.. He dealt with Helvétius, Rousseau, Fitche, Hegel, Saint-Simon, and Maistre and demonstrated that the paths they trod led to the subversion of freedom, either directly through French Revolution and the Terror or in response to them.

Behind their enterprise was Newton’s amazing demonstration of applied reason. Reason writ large. The fabric of the world he chose to see embodied reason, not chance. Through reason he invented classical mechanics, optics, etc.  His central intuition concerned change. How can the changing rate at which things are changed be found? It was   necessary to the understanding how falling bodies gather speed. His answer, an act of genius, involved extending the properties of static geometry into the flux of calculus. But this was still only part of the great transformation. It is one thing to say how things move; how they speed up or slow down, but it is quite another thing to say why they do so. For the first time in the history of physics he introduced the idea of force. The force of gravity causes things to fall: the moon falls towards the earth, but fortunately another force is at work. Centrifugal force acts away from the centre of rotation to exactly equal the pull of gravity and stabilizes the orbit. Newton had replaced traditional kinematics that concerned motion without reference to its cause, with dynamics which examines the forces responsible for motion. By using simple observations and equally simple but crystal clear reasoning he changed the world. He demonstrated that the universe was one great machine. The nature of things, for physics, was no longer coloured by myth as it had been for a materialist like Lucretius.

Reason was the solution to all problems for enlightenment thinkers. Objective reason uncluttered by myth would lead to freedom, justice and the examined life for all. The great edifice, the machine of the enlightenment was the Encyclopédie which after a difficult beginning, involving the dismissal of two editors, was put in the hands of the philosopher Diderot and the mathematician D’Alambert. They commissioned articles from the leading French intelligentsia. The work eventually running to 37 volumes was a forum for their ideas. Riding on the enormous mass of information were opinions and values weighted towards materialism. Beliefs, feelings, responses, subjective judgment, traditions and meanings were swept away. Nothing that made humans human was included. Of course there were counter-currents, the rights of man flowed from the same source, but they were soon to be drowned in blood. From one perspective it is a monumental work of propaganda. By 1751 the first seventeen volumes had been published and by 1772 eleven volumes of plates had been engraved and printed. On the fourteenth of July 1789 the Bastille was stormed and its seven prisoners released.

It is not sensible to attribute the causes of revolution to a single source, but on the other hand it is not possible to overestimate the significance, impact and universal availability of the Encyclopédie. The programme was, as Diderot wrote, to change the way people think. They systematically detached knowledge from its origin in the matrix of the past. Knowledge became information pure and simple. Reason aimed to appropriate value. This was achieved by presenting all that men made as the result of technique not of reverie, and meaning. Everything was reduced to its operational purpose: to utility, to how it could be used, including men. The guarded secrets and rituals of all the guilds, livery companies, trades, professions and callings were revealed. Traditional knowledge carrying a penumbra of comprehension, insight, accord and harmony was stripped and laid bare. The key to knowledge was reduction: its method positive science: the governing principle of modernism. Technique is reasonable but meaningless.

A.N. Whitehead saw that the purpose of reason is to promote the art of life. The utilitarians, however, regarded reason as the tool of technique. Bentham’s concern was with method; with the application of technique. By proper planning prisons could become observatories, not for scanning the heavens, but for inspecting every moment of a prisoner’s life. Seeing is the most direct form of knowing, and all seeing is all knowing, and all knowing is all powering. Using the technology of the Panopticon men could be constrained, controlled, organized, made penitent and reformed by force, just as readily as  Robespierre could free men by coercion, prison and death..

One part of Diego Samper’s achievement is to highlight aspects of modernism and the consequences of utilitarian thinking by focusing on the operational employment of panoptic technique in a series of images. The cell-form is the essence of architectural reduction. A parallelepiped with a single source of light falling on bare walls: built in strict conformity to utility and structural function is the ideal model of modernist design. Decoration, apparently serving no purpose, was censored by the red-lettered rubric of modernism. But within confines of the Ibagué jail, prisoners seeking subjective freedom and solace, protested and expressed their opposition by richly decorating every surface. They deluged the prison with flowers, stars, saints, birds, fishes, mermaids and peacocks. The captive population  asserted the significance of decoration for the soul in opposition to the machine aesthetic stripped down by the philosophy of modernism. Goya knew that one picture is worth a thousand words. Samper’s pictorial record  is the strongest possible critique of the panoptic aspect of Bentham’s utilitarianism. By doing so he brings the issues up to date.

Total panoptic, or rather pan-electronic, surveillance of whole populations is now near to completion. The nineteenth century was haunted the fear of sedition by sympathizers of the French revolution, today the fear of terrorism plays a similar role, and has similar results.  I am not concerned with conspirator theory: The risks are real, and the threat needs constant and carefully measured intelligence. Unfortunately intelligence agents, by the very nature of their job, endanger civil liberties and human rights.

Scrutiny no less searching than that which they have to use should be directed towards the giant Lilliputian institutions of investigation, interrogation, allegation, control and constraint. They have grown ostensibly to defeat the threat. But they have become juggernauts; propelled like satellites by their own inertial force. Institutional rivalries can as easily thwart their purpose as expedite it. Political ambitions and the misuse of words abound. I have in mind the substitution of the word war for crime: as in the phrase, the war on crime. Since the industrial revolution war has become a totality demanding the total resources of the state. However large the drug gangs, and however ruthless, they remain criminals not combatants. The legalization of drugs would put them out of business. But it would also cost the jobs of judges, jailers, police, informers, construction workers and cooks. A similar distortion occurs when the word terror carries with it the word war. In bloody reality it is the act of a few misguided and manipulated youths attempting or achieving merciless criminal assassinations.

Terror is an act of provocation; it is the response that is being sought by the puppeteers of the assailants. The response should be imaginative, inventive, unexpected and directed towards eroding the base of opinion from which they operate.

The people, the target of the terrorist, are the first line of defence. If the people are divided so is the defence. Together we stand, divided we fall, is necessary a truth. While it is the job of the security forces to reveal and confront enemies they must not create them by weighing heavily on the minorities of difference, whether racial or religious. When the do, they intimidate those sections of society that should be greatest source of reliable information, and the most effective means of re-educating those young people who could be seduced by the heroic myth of killing and being killed.  Social cohesion is vital in the present circumstances. The state by the clandestine study of individual citizens using pan-electronic means creates insecurity and suspicion. 

Whether or not total surveillance promotes social stability is the issue. It certainly cuts across many of the fragile rights of man fostered by democracy. Heisenberg, the father of quantum mechanics, discovered the truth that at a microcosmic level the observer changes the observation. At our median scale the question becomes will total observation wreak total change. Will it bring about the circumstances it was made to combat? I am sure that at the Seeing, it is said, is knowing. All seeing is all knowing. Invasion of the psyche.