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The Open Air Panopticon

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Nation of One:
While reading an essay,  Double-edged Satire in Zamyatin’s We, by Patrick Eichholz, I came across a word-concept I have been considering a long time:

"Privacy has been eradicated in the city built entirely of glass.  The sense of surveillance is compounded by the unseen but all seeing "Guardians," OneState's secret police force.  Each Number polices his neighbor in this construct, since it can never be known for sure who is a guardian and who is not.   The resulting panopticon effect has been previously addressed by Michael Amey and can be summarized here as a cultivated anxiety that one's every action could be monitored by the authority, without any way to verify when you are being observed."

also see

1. Living Under the Bell Jar: Surveillance and Resistance in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We  (Michael Amey)

2. Escaping  the  Panopticon:  Utopia,  Hegemony,  and Performance in Peter Weir’s  The Truman Show

3. Holden also mentions the panopticon-effect by name here in the by-now-book-length "A Question for Herr Hauser and Senor Raul" thread.   8)


--- Quote from: Holden ---Why must the host be such a gort? –Herr Hauser

I would say the question,for me, is –how come Carlin turned out to be a non-gort.Nature itself is gortish. Nature is the Uber-Gort.The system is set up in a manner to make sure that every baby turns into a gort. Yet, there might be a very small chink in the armour. Through that chink arrived Carlin’s brutal honesty.

These days most organisations have an “open plan office”. Essentially, it means that everyone can see what one is doing all the time. I personally think, that this idea, the idea of this kind of an office, can be traced back all the way to Jeremy Bentham in the 18th Century.Bentham came up with with the idea for a new kind of prison, and he called it, the Panopticon.

In this prison, there is no privacy for any of the prisoners ,not even for a single second. Total surveillance. Every employee is turned into a prisoner and a guard simultaneously. The ultimate nightmare.Always someone is breathing down one’s neck.

The great thing about Schopenhauer and his philosophy is that he goes straight for the jugular.It is clear to me as to why he preferred to stay on his own with his small dog. He lived in the anti-Panopticon.

A boss of mine in the previous organisation I was working in, told me to stay in shared flat and not to stay alone. The flat had 3 room and about 6 or 7 employees staying together. It was provided by the Company and so was almost rent-free and was close to the office( or the mine). The alternative was a far more expensive attic room ,about 25 kilometers away. I choose the attic room.

That scoundrel called  me to the office a number of times during the off-duty hours knowing full-well that I was staying far away, but,I continued to stay there even then. I could spend very little time alone in my room but I chose that anyway.

I would choose to be tortured night and day,in solitude, over , a comfortable room in the Panopticon.
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4. employees as prisoners

also:  Watching You Watching Me: Boundary Control and Capturing Attention in the Context of Ubiquitous Technology Use

Nation of One:
From Living Under the Bell Jar: Surveillance and Resistance in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We  (Michael Amey):

Resistance is Futile ?


--- Quote ---... numbers (what citizens of the One State are called) are to be so completely invested in the social body that they will view any attack on it, any difference of opinion or behaviour, as a threat to their personal well-being.

The function of architecture in The One State corresponds in many ways to the function of the Panoptican as described by Michel Foucault. The Panoptican, advocated by the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, was a multi-purpose building-plan designed to assist in the regulation of prisoners, factory workers, students or any part of the population that needed to be controlled. This proposed structure consisted of a surveillance tower surrounded by a circular outer building.

... the authorities could view the activities of the inmates at any time. Just as importantly, the surveillance tower was designed so that the inmates could always see the tower, but could never see inside the tower, and thus could never know when they were being watched. In theory, because the inmates would never know when they were being observed, they would constantly regulate their own behaviour. Thus, the Panoptican induces ‘in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.’

Foucault goes on to explain that ultimately:

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principal of his own subjection.

This description of an inmate’s response to the vigilant eye of the Panoptican parallels D-503’s response to the unremitting surveillance of his own carceral society.

... D-503 posits himself, and indeed all numbers, as completely at the mercy of an
impersonal and incomprehensible state. It is not The One State, however, that has subjugated D-503, but rather his awareness that at any time The One State’s vigilant eyes may be watching him. As a result, through his internalisation of the power of the state he has become the principle of his own subjection.

Although the Panoptican and society in The One State are similar in their reliance on the gaze as a mechanism of power, because The One State system is operating under different conditions it has by necessity modified its use of surveillance. The most obvious difference between these two systems is the scale upon which they operate. While the Panoptican empowers some individuals to regulate and modify the behaviour of other individuals, The One State uses everyone to regulate and modify the behaviour of everyone. It follows then that there is no clear distinction between those who watch and those who are being watched, those who regulate and those being
regulated.

While the Guardians possess greater authority and perhaps, though this is never stated, more privileges than other numbers, the only clear distinction between them and ordinary numbers is that they are licensed to act upon information gathered, whereas numbers are expected to report any signs of disobedience to the Guardians.

But Guardians, because they live in a society rendered literally transparent, are subjected to the same scrutiny as other numbers. The inevitable result of this constant policing by everyone is that The One State is nothing less than a penal colony where all serve equally as prisoners and prison wardens.6 While the inmates of the Panoptican may, however futilely, dream of either escape or release into free society, for the citizens of The One State there is, as far as they are concerned, no place to escape to, and no limit to their incarceration.
--- End quote ---

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