Art history students may find themselves faced with Foucault's dense and forbidding essay as a reading assignment. It is necessary to first understand that the material has been taken from its original source and placed into an art historical context. Otherwise, we are likely to be confused by the abrupt beginning, which is a description of steps to be taken in a seventeenth-century town during a plague.
The Plague Example
Soon we realize that Foucault is using the plague example to illustrate ideas about power, vision, visibility and space. Containing the epidemic involves the division, separation, and manipulation of space. It also calls for continuous inspection and surveillance. "The gaze is alert everywhere," Foucault writes. Citizens are monitored from observation posts at every vantage point. Registration of the afflicted allows for the total control and lockdown of the town.
Once quarantined, the purification process begins with houses evacuated and individually sanitized with ignited perfume. The plague is countered by strict rules of order and discipline. Lepers, too, are sorted out and banished from the mainstream, but Foucault distinguishes them by arguing that "the exile of the leper" and "the arrest of the plague" have different political agendas. Separating the lepers is an attempt to create a "pure community", while the plague measures are a way to have a "disciplined society". Lepers are marked, while the plague sufferers are analyzed and distributed. These are, Foucault writes, two ways of exercising power.
Bentham’s Panopticon
After establishing the concept of spatial control through division, order, and surveillance, Foucault brings us to the nineteenth century. He discusses the "disciplinary partitioning" of hospitals, asylums, prisons, reformatories, and schools. Containment of the plague-stricken has become the model for the management of all abnormal individuals. At this point, Foucault talks about Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, an architectural paragon of power and control. It is a central tower surrounded by a building consisting of individual cells. Each cell can be observed by the 'eyes' of the tower and, thus, "visibility is a trap". The prisoner is constantly monitored but cannot see the monitor. He/she is the object of the gaze.
The Big Brother effect is what ensures the power of the Panopticon, "a state of conscious and permanent visibility." Foucault sums it up in this way: "The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees without ever being seen." After mentioning that the design of the Panopticon may have been inspired by Le Vaux's menagerie at Versailles, Foucault discusses its various functions: as a naturalist power-laboratory, et cetera. Ultimately, it functions as a utopia of power, not simply an architectural structure. It becomes the foundation for a set of concepts and actions that Foucault calls, collectively, the "panoptic schema".
The Panoptic Schema
What does the panoptic schema have to do with art? Plenty, actually. There are several applications for this concept—from the way we receive information in the Digital Age, to issues concerning individual rights in society, to the display/manipulation of images, to the way museums are set up and so on. Reality television, webcams, disposable digital cameras and cell phones equipped to capture video and still images are more popular than ever. Meanwhile, traffic light surveillance, GPS tracking devices and national identity cards are emerging as controversial threats to our privacy.
Ultimately, we are becoming more voyeuristic; Western culture reflects this penchant for voyeurism. We derive a sense of power from viewing what is pleasing to us—and with the help of technology, we can see without being seen. But what are we seeing and who manipulates these images? Since the advent of photography, film, television and other media, the voyeur has become a third entity within the realm of the seer and the seen. The dyad is actually a triad. With the proliferation of visual stimuli and information in the Digital Age, these three roles are ever more complex. In the twenty-first century, Foucault's panoptic schema is, indeed, everywhere.
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