Panopticism

Panopticon

1.The effect of the panopticon is to improve detainees behaviour, work ethic or cooperation by increasing the watch over the prisoners, detainees and students and criminals alike are stopped from influencing and corrupting others whilst also making them feel they are being constantly monitored.
"to avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to be found in places of confinement."

2.The architecture creates a sustained power relation independent of the person who exercises it by isolating all individuals from one another and then making them feel observed at all times by a watch tower that looks in on all and makes it impossible to tell when they are being observed and when they are not.
"The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities."

3.Panopticon is most efficient because it removes the need for 'selective isolation' as punishment and reinforcement. The idea of being constantly watched also drives performance and increases behavioural traits.
"The efficiency of power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the other side- to the side of its surface of application."

4&5.The naturalist can also use the panopticon because of its ability to isolate cases therefore displaying results that are unaffected by extraneous variables and not under consideration in the test or experiment, in students this may be cheating in a test. In this way the panopticon is also a laboratory (its definition is a controlled environment in which to test or quantify results.) Nothing can get in or out so in many ways it is a confine in which to test or detain and monitor the most extreme cases.
"it makes it possible to observe symptoms for each individual."

6. Panopticism strengthens power in several ways; Less people are needed to control a large amount of detainees effectively, it is possible to act or react in order to "intervene in any given moment" and often the constant pressure of observation controls mood and behaviour more effectively than sparse and more direct punishment or discipline. Also 'apparatus of power is more intense' meaning that dividing the subjects so they feel they are singularly subjected to the rule over the overseers makes them more submissive to the power structure than if they were united against an authority.

7. The panoptic principal is particularly useful in a society made of private individuals and the state because it reaffirms the individuality of the persons in question and establishes dominance of the state and its power to dictate and alter opinion, 'In a society in which the principal elements are no longer the community and public life' the state can have more definition and foresight into the reaction and attitude of inhabitants without a contagious effect of social situations.

8. Rather than suppressing the individual the panoptic principal gives the individual the feel that it 'is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies.' The individual feels to be part of a system and structure and needed so that everything can work in unison so that authority and detainee dynamics can work together.