What’s in a name?

This blog’s URL is “panoptical.wordpress.com.” I chose the name “panoptical” for several reasons. First, the inspiration for this blog was a concept I came across several months ago while studying Foucault that I call the “panoptic model of power.” The second is that “panoptical” means “observing all,” and I intend this philosophy blog to be highly interdisciplinary: I intend, to the extent possible in my spare time, to observe all. The third is that “panoptical” gets few google hits and is therefore a reasonably distinctive name.

The panoptic model of power merits more explanation, because I intend to delve very deeply into that subject and I have plans to use this model extensively to explain all manner of social institutions, from the free market to the public school system. Foucault made a study of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a physical prison building designed, before modern surveillance techniques, to make it easy for a single observer to supervise a large number of people. The structure of the panopticon consists of a single, central tower surrounded by a large number of individual cells situated such that each cell can be seen into from the vantage point of the tower. Ideally, the inmates should be isolated from each other, so that no communication is possible. Additionally, the inmates ought not to be able to see into the central tower, so that at any given time they will not be able to determine whether or not they are under surveillance.

The proposed psychological effect of the panopticon is that the inmates exercise self-surveillance and self-discipline. Because the inmates know, at any given time, that they might be under surveillance, they will tend to watch their own behavior to ensure that it conforms to the way they would act if some authority figure were actually watching. It may also be an important aspect of the panopticon that the inmates are isolated from each other. The twin effects of isolation and self-surveillance serve to magnify the power of the central authority over the inmates.

The implication of the panopticon is that this panoptic magnification of power also takes place outside the physical structure. In other words, isolation and self-surveillance occur in individuals in our society due to various other institutions and social factors, and it may be the case that when these things come together with a perceived authority or set of norms, they govern the individual as surely as if the individual were actually in a prison cell. This is where Foucault comes in, because he re-envisioned power as the cumulative effect of every relationship and institution, rather than as the simple effect of one person ruling or dominating another.

This is all a vastly brief summarization of a set of theories that are farther-reaching in their implications than perhaps anything I’ve ever studied, so if things seem a bit unclear, don’t worry – I’ll be going over all of these issues with a fine-toothed comb. To give you an idea of just how far-reaching these implications are, I’ll say this. For about five years I adopted the political and economic philosophy of Libertarianism, studying many of its facets and related ideas, such as Objectivism, Austrian Economics, praxeology, and anarcho-capitalism. All of those systems, at their very core, assume a theory of power that Foucault may have made obsolete. The panoptic model of power and its implications could, therefore, lead me to retrace five years worth of steps and start over at the beginning. The scope of that project is why I felt I needed a new blog and the inspiration, the panoptic model of power, is where this blog gets its name.