Last week, I started reading Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. A casual survey of other students in the same class suggests that they don’t really see its utility; it seems hopelessly vague, for one thing. There are also problems with the terminology used—relatively “normal” words like strategy and tactics are repurposed to different ends. But the term that troubles me most is the use of “panoptic” or “panopticon”— this term is name-dropped by critics all the time to signify so many different things that it has really lost its luster. Though de Certeau really traces a twisted path from this keyword compared to most, I really wonder if it is a meaningful point of departure for the sort of experiences that he tries to group around it.
The worst case for “just not getting it,” however, was something I heard on an Art: 21 program, Structures, last week. While the introduction to the program by Sam Waterston was excellent, the first artist up really made my head explode—and not in a good way. I have nothing against the artwork of Mathew Ritchie, it was his description of the odd continuum without boundaries experienced by a young child as a “panoptic synergy” that baked my noodle. It sounds like a plausible combination of words, but it really isn’t. It’s a total misunderstanding of what “panoptic” (at least in the meaning suggested by Bentham or Foucault) signifies. Panopticism is all about the avoidance of synergy by isolating the individuals into bounded cells which can be viewed from a singular perspective.
Foucault’s characterization of the word when pressed by Jean Pierre Barou and Michelle Perrot in an interview cuts to the heart of the problem. Barou and Perrot claim that they “just don’t get” why the panopticon is such a big deal. Foucault responds by saying that virtually all the documents regarding the penal system from the first half of the nineteenth century gesture at Bentham’s “device,” the panopticon.
Anyway, even if the idea of the Panopticon antedates Bentham, it was he who truly formulated it. The very word “Panopticon” seems crucial here, as designating the principle of a system. (Power/Knowledge 148)
It seems to me that Panopticon, panoptic, et. al. have come to designate any sort of system involving an observer and a thing observed. Foucault is very specific in speaking of a system which involves a single point of view (not necessarily elevated) which constructs a “gridded” form of knowledge that in the process, totalizes that particular view. This is not the stimuli experienced by a child unable to process sensory input, nor is it the vertiginous view from a tall building suggested by de Certeau.
It has baffled me that de Certeau does not use “panorama” or “panoramism” to describe the sort of view he’s working with—but I have come to believe that he conflates two opposed experiences (the panoptic and the panoramic) and argues that they are the same—without overtly stating it. It’s an odd mystic twist which de Certeau eventually resolves as the “synoptic.” There is more to be said about this; I’m trying to get it down so I can move on. I do think that de Certeau is on top of some really interesting things that deserve more than a casual dismissal of his vocabulary; as far as Mathew Richie is concerned, I’m not so sure.
