Abstract
In his novel Les Bijoux indiscrets, Diderot depicts an African empire in which purity of mores is established and maintained by the unseen voice of female sex organs which is aware of all sexual transgressions and impure thoughts of its bearer. In this chapter, the author argues that Diderot’s fantasy of a transparent empire is later realized by Bentham in his plans for the Panopticon prison, where Diderot’s multitude of unseen voices, each of which knows all actions and thoughts of its bearer, is replaced by a single never-seen voice which of itself knows everything about everyone and, in this way, ensures the smooth running of the compact, transparent microcosm of the panopticon.
… but even transparency is of no avail without eyes to look at it.
Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon; Postscript, Part II
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Histoire des deux Indes: “Chaque enfant qui naît dans l’État, chaque nouveau citoyen qui vient respirer l’air de la patrie qu’il s’est faite, ou que lui a donné la nature, a droit au plus grand bonheur dont il puisse jouir” (Diderot 1994–1997: 3, 717). In several other respects, their views widely differed, of course—for example, in their attitudes to public opinion: while Bentham thought highly of the “Public-opinion Tribunal” (see Bentham 1838–1843: 9, 41), such a “tribunal” was dismissed outright by Diderot in ‘Madame de la Carlière’ as “le sot public,” the stupid public (see Diderot 1994–1997: 2, 522).
- 2.
In the mid-eighteenth century, this idea was not as uncommon as it might seem. The use of live criminals for practicing surgical procedures was also recommended by Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis in his Lettre sur le progrès des sciences (see Maupertuis 1752: 375–381). Dissection of live malefactors was apparently a well-recognized punishment in the African empire of the Congo, as depicted in Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets: in the novel, one of the former emperors is said to have had “his surgeon and his chief physician dissected alive” for having prescribed him a purgative at the wrong moment (see Diderot 1748: 46).
- 3.
An important and, as it were, vital enrichment of Bentham’s already busy afterlife is provided by an online camera placed in March 2015 on top of the case containing his auto-icon, as a part of an interdisciplinary research project being conducted at University College London. The camera, most happily termed by the research team “PanoptiCam,” streams live images of visitors observing the auto-icon. Since the observers are themselves being observed from the point of view of Bentham’s auto-icon, the “PanoptiCam” project could, perhaps, alternatively be called “On the Observing of the Observer of the Observers,” to borrow the subtitle of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1986 novel Der Auftrag. (Dürrenmatt 1986 [2008])
- 4.
Incidentally, the firm belief that a criminal, strictly speaking, does not deserve punishment, and that the punishment is less intended for the criminal being punished than it is for everyone else, that is, the innocent, or in other words, that the setting of an example by far outweighs reformation, is another idea Diderot and Bentham shared, although each of them embraced it for different reasons. For Bentham, reformation is useless because it is aimed at a comparatively small number of individuals, that is, at those who have already offended, whereas setting an example is aimed at all those exposed to the temptation of offending, that is, “all mankind” (Bentham 1838–1843: 4: 174n). For Diderot , on the other hand, reformation is quite impossible: “Can one cease to be wicked at will?” asks Diderot in his letter to Landois of 29 June 1956, and goes on to answer: “Once the crease is taken, the fabric will keep it forever.” And later on in the same letter, he adds that it is for the “beneficial effects of example” that the malefactor must be “destroyed in a public place” (Diderot 1994–1997: 5, 56).
- 5.
For a more extensive treatment of the role of gaze and voice in creating the fiction of God in the panopticon, see Bozovic 1995: 11–18.
- 6.
The “inspection-lantern,” a device introduced in Postscript I, has the shape of “two short-necked funnels joined together at their necks”; it is pierced in certain places, and pieces of colored or smoked glass, through which the inspector looks, are inserted into the holes. The lantern is just big enough for the inspector to see everything around him without having to move—a turn of the head or body is sufficient. Although the lantern is translucent and the inspector’s body within it is to a certain degree discernible, this does not allow the prisoner to determine whether the eye of the inspector is at that moment directed towards him any more than he can if the inspector is invisible. All that the prisoner can see inside the lantern is a dark spot that is always gazing back at him. And this dark spot that returns the prisoners’ gaze can, in Bentham’s words, be constituted by “any opaque object” placed in the translucent lantern (see Bentham, 1838–1843: 4, 82).
- 7.
Although Bentham saw one of the “fundamental advantages” of the panopticon in that it combines “the apparent omnipresence of the inspector” with “the extreme facility of his real presence” (Bentham, 1838–1843: 4, 45; Bentham’s emphases), he was, it goes without saying, well aware that by showing himself at any particular spot in the panopticon, the inspector “los[es] thereby his omnipresence for the time” (Bentham, 1838–1843: 4, 83).
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Božovič, M. (2018). Seeing It All: Bentham’s Panopticon and the Dark Spots of Enlightenment. In: Alloa, E., Thomä, D. (eds) Transparency, Society and Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77161-8_7
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