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The Panopticon:
Jeremy Bentham's
(1748-1832) 'Panopticon; or the Inspection House' (circa 1791)
was never build to serve its intended purpose. Bentham struggled
for years to obtain parliamentary permission to construct his
dream prison. The intended site for the structure was to be Tothill
Fields, at Millbank not far from the location of the Tate Gallery.
However, the Panopticon can now be seen manifest in many modern
high security prisons, and has been re-framed to describe the
architecture of Internet surveillance. For the Panopticon was
more than a plan for a building of brick and stone, it 'is' a
fluid architecture that is realised in the mind of the surveyor
and the surveyed. In the words of Foucault:
"But
the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it
is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form;
its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction,
must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system:
it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must
be detached from any specific use."
(Foucault,
1975)
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