From the Power of Gaze to the Gaze of Power
Claudio Steinmeyer
This paper summarizes a journey through the theme of Bentham’s Panopticon, exploring texts by Miller, Foucault, and Lacan.[1] The aim is to situate the history of the gaze as an instrument of power and control and to question its effects on the social and subjective realms. Jeremy Bentham’s panoptic machine will be outlined as well as the emergence of these types of buildings within their historical and social coordinates. Furthermore, I will refer to Jacques-Alain Miller’s description of the panopticon in one of his early articles.[2]
The panoptic configuration introduces a fundamental asymmetry at the level of the visible/invisible. Bentham thus created a kind of artificial God (today we would say a big brother, a society under surveillance akin to George Orwell's depiction).
In the panopticon, everything is calculable, nothing is left to chance, there is no unconscious. Nor is there residue; all expenditure must be productive and profitable.
Foucault adds the detail that the panopticon also prevents lateral visibility among the other prisoners, creating a collection of separated individualities.
We can say that the panopticon is the best metaphor for the technology of control in the service of politics, of power. It is ideal for controlling the bodies of the masses. Lacan seems to say in Seminar XI that the object gaze is the one that best eludes castration.[3] It is perhaps also the most effective and the cheapest way. The gaze has been turned into a commodity. Currently, we have reached the zenith of the idea of the panopticon within neoliberalism in that we pay to be observed. It’s something like prisoners paying the guard in the tower. But even Bentham didn’t go that far.
Structural conditions to define a human institution as panoptic are:
a) The eye must be able to see each of the surveilled individuals.
b) It must be able to see without being seen.
c) The surveilled individuals must not know if the eye is watching them.
d) Lateral vision is closed to avoid collectivization; there is no mass.
e) The guard must also be controllable.
f) All of this must be cheap and with the minimum of unproductive residue.
Daniel Roy, in his introductory argument to the 2024 NLS Congress, wrote, “Today, the object of our gaze is in our pocket, in the form of the mobile phone… For the new generations, it’s simpler: it’s in the hand, inseparable from the body, which can say quite rightly: io sono sempre visto!"[4] This coincides with the perspective of the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, who considers that we live in a post-panoptic era, in the sense that the gaze has become independent of buildings; now it operates through electronic signals.[5]
References
[1] This text summarizes a presentation delivered at a Berlin group seminar (of the L.O.B.) in preparation for the 2024 NLS Congress.
[2] Miller, J.-A., “Matemas I,” Ornicar? No. 3, Buenos Aires: Ed. Manantial, 1999, pp. 24-57.
[3] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, New York/London: Norton, 1981, p. 64.
[4] Roy, D., Presentation of the Congress Theme: “Clinic of the Gaze,” available on this Blog.
[5] Bauman, Z. “Flüchtige Moderne,” Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003, pp. 22-98.