Bentham sought to diffuse disciplines through the entire social body

Evidence

The celebrated, transparent, circular cage, with its high tower, powerful and knowing, may have been for Bentham a project of a perfect disciplinary institution; but he also set out to show how one may ‘unlock’ the disciplines and get them to function in a diffused, multiple, polyvalent way throughout the whole social body. These disciplines, which the classical age had elaborated in specific, relatively enclosed places – barracks, schools, workshops – and whose total implementation had been imagined only at the limited and temporary scale of a plague-stricken town, Bentham dreamt of transforming into a network of mechanisms that would be everywhere and always alert, running through society without interruption in space or in time. The panoptic arrangement provides the formula for this generalization. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 325

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘network everywhere and always alert, running through society without interruption’ is nearly a blueprint of Oceania’s telescreens — the reader’s core thesis that Orwell dramatizes the internalized, generalized panopticon. — connects to: Bentham claimed one architectural idea could reform all of society — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 279; Bentham designed the panopticon to internalize productive labor habits
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Bentham actually hold this de-institutionalizing/diffusing intent, or is Foucault reading it into him? If there’s scholarly debate, it bears on the solidity of the Orwell parallel.

Related

• Bentham claimed one architectural idea could reform all of society (similarity 0.87)
• Bentham claimed the inspection principle fits every institutional setting, not just prisons. (similarity 0.83)
• The panopticon amplifies whatever institution it is applied to (similarity 0.81)
• Panopticism extends discipline from enclosed quarantine to every distant element (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Bentham designed the panopticon to internalize productive labor habits #expands (0.85)