The Labyrinth of the Gaze: Nicholas of Cusa's Mysticism and Michel Foucault's Panopticism

Abstract

Panopticism, the title of Foucault's famous chapter in his book Discipline and Punish, derives fromJeremy Bentham's panopticon, an architectural plan to reform prisons at the end of the eighteenth century. The fundamental conception of this utopian project is to build an inspection house in which prisoners are permanently subjected to an invisible and omnipresent surveillance. The panopticon, as Bentham conceives it, is an annular building composed of a central tower pierced with windows that overlook a peripheral building. From this watch tower, and through the effect of backlighting, a supervisor can constantly spy on the individuals enclosed in segmented spaces all around it without ever being seen. Foucault uses the principle on which the panopticon is built — i.e. power through transparency and subjection by illumination — to account for the technologies of observation and the mechanisms of power that organize the social space in our contemporary society. Although Bentham's project has never been realized, Foucault finds in its ‘marvelous machine’ a perfect model for the new forms of control and exercise of power — one which is not aimed at the body, but the soul. The focus of this machine is not on punishing the individual but rather on knowing and altering him or her. Panopticism, as Foucault points out, constitutes ‘the technique, universally widespread of coercion.’ Its ultimate goal is the exercise of control and the intensification and perfection of the new methods of power.