The Panopticon
Drawing by Willey Reveley of a panopticon prison, circa 1791. Source: Wikimedia commons.
Digital Panopticon
What is the Digital Panopticon?
The Digital Panopticon website allows you to search millions of records relating to the lives of 90,000 convicts from the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, to search individual convict life archives, explore and visualize data, and to learn more about crime and criminal justice in the past.
Introducing Foucault
Foucault for Beginners by
Michel Foucault's work has profoundly affected the teaching of such diverse disciplines as literary criticism, criminology, and gender studies. Arguing that definitions of abnormal behavior are culturally constructed, Foucault explored the unfair division between those who meet and those who deviate from social norms. Foucault's deeply visual sense of scenes such as ritual public executions, lends itself well to Moshe Süsser's dramatic illustrations.
Call Number: Olin Library B2430.F724 F55 2007ISBN: 9781934389126Publication Date: 2007-08-21
Sources on Jeremy Bentham & the Panopticon
Beyond Foucault: new perspectives on Bentham's Panopticon by
In his hugely influential book Discipline and Punish, Foucault used the example of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon prison as a means of representing the transition from the early modern monarchy to the late modern capitalist state. In the former, power is visibly exerted, for instance by the destruction of the body of the criminal, while in the latter power becomes invisible and focuses on the mind of the subject, in order to identify, marginalize, and 'treat' those who are regarded as incapable of participating in, or unwilling to submit to, the disciplines of production. The Panopticon links the worlds of Bentham and Foucault scholars yet they are often at cross-purposes; with Bentham scholars lamenting the ways in which Foucault is perceived to have misunderstood panopticon, and Foucauldians apparently unaware of the complexities of Bentham's thought. This book combines an appreciation of Bentham's broader project with an engagement of Foucault's insights on economic government to go beyond the received reading of panopticism as a dark disciplinary technology of power. Scholars here offer new ways of understanding the Panopticon projects through a wide variety of topics including Bentham's plural Panopticons and their elaboration of schemes of 'panoptic Utopia', the 'inverted Panopticon', 'panoptic governance', 'political panopticism' and 'legal panopticism'. French studies on the Panopticon are groundbreaking and this book brings this research to an English-speaking audience for the first time. It is essential reading, not only for those studying Bentham and Foucault, but also those with an interest in intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and those studying contemporary surveillance and society.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780754668435Publication Date: 2016-03-08- Panopticon; or, The Inspection-House by Containing the idea of a new principle of construction ... in which persons of any description ar to be kept under inspection. And in particular to penitentiary houses, prisons, houses of industry, work-houses, poor-houses, manufactories, mad-houses, hospitals and schools. With a plan of management adapted to the principle. In a series of letters written in the year 1787, from Crecheff in White, Russia. to a friend in England.By Jeremy Bentham, of Lincoln Inn, Esquire. Vol. 1 of 3 also available in original form in the Rare Book collection, Kroch Library by special request: Rare Books HV8805 .B47 1791Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 1791
Boyne, Roy. "Post-panopticism." Economy and Society 29.2 (2000): 285–307. (Requires Cornell affiliation)
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Subject terms:
- Bentham, Jeremy, 1748-1832. | Panopticon.
- Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984.
- Prisons.
- Imprisonment > Philosophy.
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Michel Foucault
Look up Foucault in the International Encyclopedia of Ethics:
The International Encyclopedia of Ethics by
Unmatched in scholarship and scope, The International Encyclopedia of Ethics is the definitive single-source reference work on Ethics, available both in print and online. Comprises over 700 entries, ranging from 1000 to 10,000 words in length, written by an international cast of subject experts Is arranged across 9 fully cross-referenced volumes including a comprehensive index Provides clear definitions and explanations of all areas of ethics including the topics, movements, arguments, and key figures in Normative Ethics, Metaethics, and Practical Ethics Covers the major philosophical and religious traditions Offers an unprecedented level of authority, accuracy and balance with all entries being blind peer-reviewed
Call Number: OnlineISBN: 9781444367072Publication Date: 2013-02-15
The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon by
The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon is a reference tool that provides clear and incisive definitions and descriptions of all of Foucault's major terms and influences, including history, knowledge, language, philosophy, and power. It also includes entries on philosophers about whom Foucault wrote and who influenced Foucault's thinking, such as Deleuze, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Canguilhem. The entries are written by scholars of Foucault from a variety of disciplines such as philosophy, gender studies, political science, and history. Together, they shed light on concepts key to Foucault and to ongoing discussions of his work today.
Call Number: OnlineISBN: 9781139022309Publication Date: 2015-06-05
Discipline and Punish by
In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.
Call Number: ebookISBN: 0679752552Publication Date: 1995-04-25
Exhibiting Mestizaje by
See chpt. 3; author applies Foucault's surveillance theory to museum exhibition design.
In this authoritative study, Davalos challenges the sometimes hidden, sometimes blatant assumptions that underlie the practice of creating museum exhibits, and asks what happens when people of Mexican (American) descent put themselves in command of the collection, display, and interpretation of their cultural products. Davalos pays particular attention to museum and cultural centres in major Mexican diaspora communities, including the Mexican Fine Arts Museum in Chicago and Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco. Throughout she critically examines Chicano, Mexican, Mestizo, and Mexican American subjectivities as they are expressed in curatorial decisions and practices, in educational materials and catalogue texts, and in the performances and other public events that accompany museum exhibits. That practice -- what Davalos calls 'exhibiting mestizaje' -- produces complex representations of Mexican (Americans). Davalos's analysis shows clearly that the value of mestizaje and diaspora lies in their ability to create a cultural poetics from fluidity and conflict.
Call Number: HathiTrust ETAS titleISBN: 0826318991Publication Date: 2001-01-01Textual Strategies by See Donato, Eugenio. “The Museum’s Furnace: Notes toward a Contextual Reading of Bouvard and Pécuchet.” pp. 213-238.
Call Number: HathiTrust ETAS titleISBN: 0801412188Publication Date: 1979-12-01
Foucault on Painting by
Michel Foucault had been concerned about painting and the meaning of the image from his earliest publications, yet this aspect of his thought is largely neglected within the disciplines of art history and aesthetic theory. In Foucault on Painting, Catherine M. Soussloff argues that Foucault's sustained engagement with European art history critically addresses present concerns about the mediated nature of the image in the digital age. Foucault's writing on painting covers four discrete periods in European art history (seventeenth-century southern Baroque, mid-nineteenth century French painting, Surrealism, and figurative painting in the 1960s and '70s) as well as five individual artists: Velázquez, Manet, Magritte, Paul Reyberolle, and Gérard Fromanger. As Soussloff reveals in this book, Foucault followed a French intellectual tradition dating back to the seventeenth century, which understands painting as a separate area of knowledge. Painting, a practice long considered silent in its operations and effects, afforded Foucault an ideal discipline to think about history and philosophy simultaneously. Using a comparative approach grounded in art history and aesthetics, Soussloff explores the meaning of painting for Foucault's philosophy, and for contemporary art theory, proposing a new relevance for a Foucauldian view of ethics and the pleasures and predicaments of contemporary existence.
Call Number: Olin Library B2430.F724 S68 2017ISBN: 9781517902414Publication Date: 2017-11-23
Searching for books in the CATALOG
Subject terms:
- Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984 > Criticism and interpretation
- Power (Philosophy)
- Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984 > Views on punishment.
- Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984 > Views on prisons.
- Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984 > Views on prison discipline.
- Punishment > Philosophy.
- Motion pictures > Moral and ethical aspects.
Keywords (not necessarily subject terms): surveillance, prisons, punishment, discipline
Subject browse:
Simone Browne
Dark Matters by
In Dark Matters Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave ship Brooks, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and The Book of Negroes, to contemporary art, literature, biometrics, and post-9/11 airport security practices. Surveillance, Browne asserts, is both a discursive and material practice that reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines, so much so that the surveillance of blackness has long been, and continues to be, a social and political norm.
Call Number: ebookISBN: 9780822359197Publication Date: 2015-10-02
Canella, Gino. “Racialized Surveillance: Activist Media and the Policing of Black Bodies.” Communication, Culture & Critique 11, no. 3 (September 2018): 378–98. doi:10.1093/ccc/tcy013.
Grubbs, Victoria Netanus. “The Subject of Slavery in Translation: Between Jack Qiu and Simone Browne.” Communication Theory (1050-3293) 27, no. 4 (November 2017): 411–13. doi:10.1111/comt.12126.
Womack, Autumn. "Visuality, Surveillance, and the Afterlife of Slavery." American Literary History 29, no. 1 (2017): 191–204. doi:10.1093/alh/ajw061.
Subject terms:
- African Americans > Social conditions.
- Blacks > Canada > Social conditions.
- Electronic surveillance > United States.
- Government information > United States.
- United States > Race relations.
- Canada > Race relations
- Electronic surveillance > Social aspects
- Racial profiling in law enforcement > United States
- Social control > Philosophy