The military camp models power exercised through general visibility.
Evidence
These ‘observatories’ had an almost ideal model: the military camp – the short-lived, artificial city, built and reshaped almost at will; the seat of a power that must be all the stronger, but also all the more discreet, all the more effective and on the alert in that it is exercised over armed men. In the perfect camp, all power would be exercised solely through exact observation; each gaze would form a part of the overall functioning of power. … The camp is the diagram of a power that acts by means of general visibility. For a long time this model of the camp or at least its underlying principle was found in urban development, in the construction of working-class housing estates, hospitals, asylums, prisons, schools: the spatial ‘nesting’ of hierarchized surveillance. The principle was one of ‘embedding’ (‘encastrement’). The camp was to the rather shameful art of surveillance what the dark room was to the great science of optics. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 266
Categorization
- XREF: The camp as diagram of power prefigures the panopticon; that all gazes supervise one another is the distributed surveillance that Bentham later centralizes in the tower. — connects to: Politics inherited the military model as a means of preventing civil disorder — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 252
Related
Broader Connections
- Politics inherited the military model as a means of preventing civil disorder
#expands(0.78) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 252