The Panopticon
The panopticon is Jeremy Bentham’s famous prison design. As the name suggests, it is designed to be “all seeing” (panoptes) for the guards. It has a single guard tower in the center with a panoramic view of all the prison cells in the building. From there, a single guard can watch the entire prison.
The prison is designed such that light enters from the outside, through the cells, to the guard tower. This way, at any given time the individual prisoner would not know they’re being watched. Bentham describes his prison design like so:
The Building circular — an iron cage, glazed — a glass lantern about the size of Ranelagh — The Prisoners in their Cells, occupying the Circumference — The Officers, the Centre. By Blinds, and other contrivances, the Inspectors concealed from the observation of the Prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of invisible omnipresence. — The whole circuit reviewable with little, or, if necessary, without any, change of place.
— Jeremy Bentham (1791). Panopticon, or The Inspection House
Jeremy Bentham’s popularity as a political philosopher meant that many similar versions of the panopticon were be built over the years. This ranged from the Milbank Prison, which Bentham himself lived to see, to the Presidio Modelo in Cuba, where Fidel Castro was imprisoned.
Foucault’s Interpretation
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault discussed the panopticon and its philosophical implications. Foucault’s general idea about the panopticon is that it is a symbol of social control. With the panopticon, the power and influence on the prisoner is felt, but not observed. The prisoner learns to internalize the authority of the prevailing social institutions and norms. Foucault says:
Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow.
— Michel Foucault (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Foucault saw the panopticon as a symbol of internalized control and authority, the power that is felt but not observed. The prisoner (or member of society) is trained to incorporate the power of the watchful guard (or the invisible control of society) into his own self. Foucault says this about the person subjected to the panopticon: “he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”
The Mandala
In Jungian archetypal analysis, the mandala symbolizes the Self archetype, representing the totality of the psyche. The mandala symbol is the union of the duality of the self: the conscious and the unconscious.
The image of the Self as represented through the mandala has two centers: the ego (as the center of the field of consciousness), as the inner circle, and the Self as the center of the whole personality including the ego. As such, the mandala symbol, reduced down to the bare bones, has two concentric circles. The outer circle represents the Self, and the inner circle represents the conscious ego.
Jung says this about the mandala:
“In such cases it is easy to see how the severe pattern imposed by a circular image of this kind compensates the disorder of the psychic state– namely through a the construction of a central point to which everything is related, or by a concentric arrangement of the disordered multiplicity of contradictory and irreconcilable elements.
This is evidently an attempt at self-healing on the part of Nature, which does not spring from conscious reflection but from an instinctive impulse.”
— Carl Jung (pub. 1981), Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious (CW vol. 9i)
The representation of the mandala in physical media is often unconscious. Where psychic energy builds up to the point of release, the conscious mind will produce this image of concentric circles entirely unaware of its psychological significance. Jung reflects on his own mandalas, as not only the representation of his state of self but as maps that illustrate the path to individuation:
“My mandalas were cryptograms concerning the state of the self which was presented to me anew each day… I guarded them like precious pearls… It became increasingly plain to me that the mandala is the center. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the center, to individuation.”
— Carl Jung (1962), Memories, Dreams and Reflections
The Panopticon as Mandala
It is unmistakable, the resemblance of the panopticon to the mandala symbol. The panopticon is comprised of a center guard tower to which everything is related, and a concentric arrangement of prison cells in which prisoners reside. The center guard seeks to control and observe the chaotic elements of each prisoner.
The guard tower is the know-er, the observer, the all seeing eye at the center of the image. More importantly, the guard is the only person capable of being the observer — especially in sharp contrast with the prisoners, none of whom can observe the guard tower or the other prisoners. The contrast here, then, is between the center-field of the consciousness and the contents of the unconscious.
While it is mere hypothesis, the understanding of the panopticon as a mandala is further strengthened by the orderly substructure of the panopticon design. Bentham, being a zealous social reformer, was devoted to the psychological image of the orderly and efficient society (i.e. the image of the Logos, as detached, rational judgment and insight). This is reflected though his work on utilitarianism, where the moral questions of the day were reduced to a single “greatest happiness” principle. His efforts to codify all of the common law, although unsuccessful, also showed this desire for efficiency.
The image that Bentham chose as his mandala, the panopticon, reflects this tendency for the Logos. The panopticon is a place where the watchful eye of the guard tower sees all that is chaotic and undesirable through the darkness. The panopticon as a symbol, likewise, represents the ego’s desire to observe and influence the unconscious, without it being observed and influenced by the unconscious. Jung remarks:
“This is the paternal principle, the Logos, which eternally struggles to extricate itself from the primal warmth and primal darkness of the maternal womb; in a word, from unconsciousness.”
— Carl Jung (pub. 1981), Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious (CW vol. 9i)
Assimilation of Self into Ego
Interesting insights arise out of the conjunction of Foucault’s symbolic analysis of the panopticon, and the panopticon as a mandala symbol. The panopticon as a mandala is unique in the sense that it illustrates the ego’s watchful gaze over the contents of the unconscious. Furthermore, in the panopticon mandala, the ego center seeks to impose total control over the unconscious.
Foucault’s writings allow us a deeper look into this control theme. Describing the prisoner of the panopticon, he writes:
He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.
— Michel Foucault (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Foucault perceived the panopticon as the structure of one-way influence, from the ego to the unconscious and never the other way around. The ego in this image, guard tower, seeks to control the totality of the personality. In other words, this image shows the assimilation of the self into the ego. The role of the ego is over-accentuated, and it seeks to control and ultimately assimilate the unconscious into the conscious psyche.
The end goal in this analysis is to subject the unconscious entirely to the control of the ego. The “prisoners” of the panopticon, unable to see if they are being watched, eventually learns to self-regulate their behaviour. Bentham and Foucault’s mandala, then, reflects the over-accentuated ego’s desire to subjugate the unconscious. Perhaps this is the result of the maligned Logos and its desire to do away with the unconscious altogether.
Implications for Social Psychological Development
The gripping power of the image of the panopticon is difficult to overstate. As a metaphor, the panopticon has taken on a persistent role in political philosophy. The round prison of Bentham came to represent the entire spectrum of socio-political effects, from intolerance to power to the effects of mass media on modern society.
The fact that the image of the panopticon has such a strong grip on society, on the psyches of many, must have some archetypal origin. I hypothesize (with a complete lack of evidence) that the popularity of the panopticon metaphor is a reflection of the socio-cultural development of the ages. The panopticon is the product of late-enlightenment thinking, which shifted the culture to one dominated by rationality and conscious knowledge; in other words, culture elevated reason as the primary source of knowledge.
The central precept of the enlightenment ideals is not lost in the panopticon. If it can be said that the enlightenment was driven by a cultural resurgence of the Logos image, then the panopticon can be seen to represent the ultimate goal of the Logos: the complete extrication from the unconscious. In this sense, the panopticon is a cultural, collective mandala: a “safe refuge of inner reconciliation and wholeness”, and a symbol spontaneously generated to repair the damage left by the Logos-image-possession of the cultural tides.
What is remarkable is that the panopticon is not a positive image. Contemporary scholars use the metaphor to describe some condition of society, generally a condition that is centralized and totalitarian (such as the surveillance state or the distribution of mass media). Still, the grip of the panopticon persists always the same: a central dot, the omniscient observer, and the illuminated but non-interacting outer circle. What we see then is no more and no less than the representation of the psyche of the modern post-enlightenment man: overrepresented and all powerful consciousness, and diminished and subjugated unconsciousness.
The panopticon is, perhaps, a cry for balance in the modern psyche. As with all mandala images, it arises out of the unconscious as snapshots of the state of the self. If this is the case then we should consider what the snapshot of the panopticon mandala is telling us. If we see the panopticon as a mandala, then it shows that the contents of the unconscious, segregated, subjugated, controlled by an all seeing consciousness, casting deep shadows into the conscious ego. The same ego, through identification with the Logos, is elevated to its “rightful” primacy as the locus of power, attention, and source of all knowledge. What must we do to achieve balance?
I say we break out of prison.
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