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Michel Foucault.  “Panopticism (Excerpt)” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory.
Neil Leach, ed.
 

Foucault’s main concern in this rather short piece is the organization of power in terms of space. He argues that since the early 19th century two different concepts of structuring power merged, thus creating a control device that he compares to the Panopticon, an architectural concept developed by Bentham in the late 18th century. The image of the Panopticon underlines Foucault’s notion of the individualization of the masses. The Panopticon serves as a metaphor for “defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men.” Foucault’s concept of the Panopticon as a way of describing power relations offers interesting possibilities for analyses of cultural landscapes. He points out that hospitals, prisons, or schools are organized along the Panopticon structure. Thus, his model is extremely useful in order to describe the distribution of power in specific landscapes. The concept of the Panopticon stresses the self-motivation of many power structures that discipline both small and large bodies of people, meaning that certain power structures operate without actual control by another person. For the analysis of cultural landscapes, the conceptual framework of the Panopticon can serve as a descriptive model in order to describe how power structures operate in a cultural landscape. [I. Cserno]