Space and surveillance

1. Space and surveillance

2. “The Panopticon ("all-seeing") functioned as a round-the-clock surveillance machine. Its design ensured that no prisoner could ever see the 'inspector' who conducted surveillance from the privileged central location within the radial configuration. The prisoner could never know when he was being surveilled -- mental uncertainty that in itself would prove to be a crucial instrument of discipline.”

6. “The building is circular. The apartments of the prisoners occupy the circumference. You may call them, if you please, the cells. These cells are divided from one another, and the prisoners by that means secluded from all communication with each other, by partitions in the form of radii issuing from the circumference towards the centre, and extending as many feet as shall be thought necessary to form the largest dimension of the cell. The apartment of the inspector occupies the centre; you may call it if you please the inspector's lodge. It will be convenient in most, if not in all cases, to have a vacant space or area all round, between such centre and such circumference. You may call it if you please the intermediate or annular area. About the width of a cell may be sufficient for a passage from the outside of the building to the lodge. Each cell has in the outward circumference, a window, large enough, not only to light the cell, but, through the cell, to afford light enough to the correspondent part of the lodge. The inner circumference of the cell is formed by an iron grating, so light as not to screen any part of the cell from the inspector's view. Of this grating, a part sufficiently large opens, in form of a door, to admit the prisoner at his first entrance; and to give admission at any time to the inspector or any of his attendants. To cut off from each prisoner the view of every other, the partitions are carried on a few feet beyond the grating into the intermediate area: such projecting parts I call the protracted partitions. It is conceived, that the light, coming in in this manner through the cells, and so across the intermediate area, will be sufficient for the inspector's lodge. But, for this purpose, both the windows in the cells, and those corresponding to them in the lodge, should be as large as the strength of the building, and what shall be deemed a necessary attention to economy, will permit. .” Jeremy Bentham 2.3

7. His own self-description was that of a critical historian of thought. By this he meant not ideas, but the possible knowledges that evolve from the division – and consequent interaction between – subject and object (Foucault, 1984), that which can be called ‘modernity’. David Wood

8. Jeremy Bentham • Panopticon • Michel Foucault • Dicipline • Space • Surveillance • Society

9. "Without any physical instrument other than architecture and geometry, [the Panopticon] acts directly on individuals; it gives 'power of mind over mind." (Foucault, 1979)

10. This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in l which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead

11. Two kinds of dicipline • Dicipline-mechanism (plague-outbreak) • Space is “enclosed and segmented” • “Uninterrupted reporting” (center-periphery relation) • “Each individual is constantly located” • Dicipline-blockade (leprosy-outbreak) • “Massive binary division” bw leper and non-leper • Spaces are “saperated”

12. “They are different projects, then, but not incompatible ones. We see them coming slowly together, and it is the peculiarity of the nineteenth century that it applied to the space of exclusion of which the leper was the symbolic inhabitant (beggars, vagabonds, madmen and the disorderly formed the real population) the technique of power proper to disciplinary partitioning. Treat 'lepers' as 'plague victims', project the subtle segmentations of discipline onto the confused space of internment, combine it with the methods of analytical distribution proper to power, individualize the excluded, but use procedures of individualization to mark exclusion…” Michel Foucault

13. “the functional inversion of the diciplines” – not for only security or punishment but to increase productivity • Foucault points out a moment in the history of dicipline, where the power prefers gaze rather than punishment, for its efficiency in production

14. “political technology and the scientific practice” to come together in a single body of architecture; disabling the subjects, both to be able to do, but also, to wish to do, anything that is not working for the sake of power and process.

15. How architecture regulates?

16. “Specifically, how buildings can control the spatial ability of actors as well as define a set of rules that govern their interaction—define the locations, the paths of movement, their visual paths, their programmed encounters, and place limits on chance encounters.” Rajiv C. Shah & Jay P. Kesan

21. what about today?