Prem Chandavarkar wrote: > The 18th century English utilitarian philosophy Jeremy Bentham came up with > a design for prisons called the "panopticon". In this design, the prison > cells are arranged in a circular configuration, and at the centre of the > circle is a watch tower. The guard enters the watch tower from a hidden > staircase at its base, and the watch point is screened by louvers so the > prisoners cannot make out whether the guard is in his tower or not, or when > he comes and goes.
It was actually Bentham's brother's idea. See Peter Linebaugh's interesting work on related issues in "The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century", Chapter 11 "Ships and Chips: Technological Repression and the Origin of the Wage" (pp. 371-401). # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
