birth of mass surveillance

The beginnings of the industrial revolution in England, at the end of the 18th century^e century, generate new ways of thinking rationally about social functioning and the relationship with the population. The problem of the unproductive and delinquent, in particular, now presents itself not only from a moral but from an economic angle. The English philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) tackled this problem by writing, in 1786, his Panopticon Lettersof which the translation reappears, The Panopticonaccompanied by a preface by Emmanuelle de Champs and the beautiful afterword that Michelle Perrot devoted to this text in 1977, here revised. Today, Bentham’s project indeed sheds light on a new context.

But what does the panopticon consist of for its creator, who coined this word from Latin meaning “to see everything”? This is an ideal prison project, based on a circular architectural model which allows a “inspector” to constantly monitorfrom a central point in space, all the cells distributed around its “pavilion”. The inspector must see without being seen, and can address the prisoners through long tubes through which one can hear, writes Bentham, the “lighter murmur at either end”. The geometric rationality of the prison plan thus optimizes a surveillance function for which “the many must be constantly under the inspection of the few”.

For this father of so-called “utilitarian” philosophy, the key to reasoning here is neither moral nor humanist: it is a question of thinking about social organization based on a rational calculation of pleasures and pains or gains and losses. Thus, the aptly named “prison sentence” must be based on its usefulness for society. He explained it a year earlier in Theory of punishments and rewards : doesn’t the death penalty or amputation, for example, deprive society of a workforce?

Prisons inspired by the panopticon

When the revolution of 1789 occurred, Jeremy Bentham saw in France the opportunity to have his reforming vision of prisons adopted. “Let me build a prison on this model, and I will make myself the jailer”he wrote to the revolutionaries, who translated The Panopticon in 1791. However, no more in France than in England, his panopticon was realized, despite the twenty years of effort he devoted to this ambition. It is especially towards the end of the 19th^e century, and even the beginning of the 20th^ethat prisons inspired by the panopticon will be built, such as in Stateville Joliet, Illinois, in the United States.

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