Jeremy Bentham — The Panopticon Writings

123 published claims from this book.

• A centered watcher who sees all cells is inevitably visible from all cells
• A complete causal account never includes all influencing circumstances
• A contractor can extract profit from both prisoner earnings and spending
• A fabricated fiction of God sustains panoptic deterrence
• A self-interested contractor outperforms a well-meaning magistrate at prison management
• Absolute rest does not exist for any body
• Action and passion are inseparable reciprocal effects
• Action includes tendency to motion, not just actual motion
• Action modifies the being of things, not just their appearance
• Actual inspection probability intensifies the subjective feeling of being watched
• All noun-substantives name entities, which divide into perceptible-inferential and real-fictitious.
• All perceptions can be divided into pain-bearing and pain-free classes
• All thought about the mind requires speaking in fictional spatial terms
• An opaque dummy object substitutes for the inspector in the lantern undetected
• An unseen voice is automatically attributed divine powers
• Apparent omnipresence of the inspector sustains discipline
• Apparent punishment outweighs real suffering whenever the innocent outnumber the punished.
• Backlit lamps extend panoptic visibility into nighttime hours.
• Believing contradictions works because the mind can simply exclude the conflicting object from attention
• Bentham believed the inspectors themselves needed surveillance to prevent tyranny
• Bentham claimed one architectural idea could reform all of society
• Bentham claimed the inspection principle fits every institutional setting, not just prisons.
• Bentham classifies all motion as either will-directed or not
• Bentham distinguishes necessary logical fiction from deceptive priestly and legal fiction
• Bentham found reality unproblematic and fictions philosophically complicated.
• Bentham rejected desert as grounds for punishment
• Bentham saw the inspection principle as a deceptively simple breakthrough
• Bentham sorts convicts into labor classes ranked by transferable skill
• Bentham’s inspection principle aims to make students visible at every moment of their time
• Body annihilation is conceivable but space annihilation is not
• Both legislators and craftsmen resist acknowledging each other’s expertise
• Building the panopticon produces God as an emergent architectural byproduct
• Cause and effect are only distinguishable vantage points on the same motion.
• Celestial motion is endless while surface motion terminates.
• Centralized visibility defeats prisoners’ ability to prepare staged appearances
• Circular prisons achieve greater security at lower cost than conventional designs
• Confinement creates a labor monopoly that lets the contractor set wages
• Each inspector is himself under inspection, losing his omnipresence at moments of visible action
• Even imperfect invisibility can sustain the illusion of constant surveillance
• Even the Inquisition’s stagecraft can be borrowed profitably
• Even unpaid family members become unwitting inspectors in the panopticon
• Every fictitious entity must be discussed as if it were real
• Expectation constitutes real absence while gratuitous negation stays merely abstract
• Feeling watched matters, but actual inspected time must also be maximized
• Feigned punishment could deter crime without real suffering
• For Cusa, the all-seeing gaze itself constitutes God’s representation
• Granting lifetime tenure removes the financial incentive to conceal management details
• Impossibility properly applies only to contradictory propositions, not to objects
• Interest as pleasure-pain desire causes all thought and naming
• Internalized discipline makes the human inspector functionally superfluous
• Invisible inspection can awe prisoners to silence without any physical restraint
• Invisible presence requires real absence to seem omnipresent
• Language’s naming habit makes people mistake fictitious entities for real ones
• Law should presume universal knavery while judges presume individual honesty
• Legal rights exert real effects despite being fictitious entities
• Masks let guilt be displayed without exposing faces
• Matter and form are fictitious decompositions of substance
• Medicine and naval architecture are the fields most prone to causal error
• Mental faculties like will and memory are fictitious entities, not real ones.
• Motion alters a quality’s mode of being rather than its essence
• Motion cannot be represented by any static image or model
• Mystery is a mirage that dissolves on close inspection
• New South Wales flax offered a superior bell-wire substitute
• No effect has a single cause; every effect results from many circumstances
• No higher language could exist without the fiction that dresses abstractions as real
• Number alone lets the mind measure continuous quantity
• Obvious applications of a technology can wait centuries to be discovered
• One observation action suffices to make prisoners police their own behavior permanently
• Only God can naturally produce the idea of omnipresence
• Panoptic architecture obviates the need for a large supervisory staff
• Panoptic architecture reduces the gap between command and execution to near-instant
• Panoptic control operates through gaze and voice detached from any bearer
• Panoptic power derives from invisible omnipresence rather than real presence
• Panoptic power rests on central inspection plus unseen watching
• Panopticon intake was staged as an initiation ritual
• Past, present, and future names correspond to nothing real in the world
• Penal law design requires theatrical stagecraft
• Perceptions provide more immediate evidence of reality than bodies do.
• Perfect inspector invisibility is physically impossible because light is required for work
• Plumbing cells with running water would save more labor than it cost
• Profitability, not severity, is the surest test of prisoner reformation
• Public visitors can supervise the supervisor through gratuitous inspection
• Published management accounts create a competitive market for the prison contract
• Punishment is designed to maximize apparent suffering while minimizing real pain.
• Refuting ghosts’ existence intensifies rather than relieves the fear of them
• Relation arises from successive perceptions and identity is negation of diversity
• Rest is never absolute but always relative to some perceived reference entity
• Screen partitions let a schoolmaster discern each scholar’s distinct talent and aptitude
• Selective punishment builds the impression that transgression is never safe
• Sound audibility requires the speaker to stand off-center in a circular congregation
• Space is a semi-real entity, neither fully physical nor psychical
• Staged ceremony can substitute for added real punishment to deter others.
• Substance and matter are not synonymous terms
• Surveillance architecture embeds a private communication channel for the watched
• Surveillance of every motion is the panopticon’s decisive advantage over ordinary industry
• Taxonomic categories are useful fictions, not real entities.
• The fictitious idea of necessity has caused real murder and persecution
• The inspector’s hiddenness is engineered so prisoners never know if they are watched.
• The inspector’s invisibility is practically achievable despite incompatible ideal conditions
• The oppressed hide their true selves behind fixed masks
• The panoptic inspector must hide for fear his fictional divinity will be exposed
• The panopticon amplifies whatever institution it is applied to
• The Panopticon consolidates work, prayer, and punishment into a single space
• The panopticon could experimentally prove universal educability
• The panopticon governs through prevention rather than detection
• The panopticon prison is sustained by a nonentity that must never exist.
• The panopticon produces God the way an assembly line produces a body
• The panopticon puts subordinate guards under the same control as prisoners
• The panopticon’s gaze functions as God independent of the human inspector
• The panopticon’s power rests on a fiction at its core
• The penitentiary bill specified exactly 888 convicts
• The pierced-blind design lets the inspector see all inmates without any inmate seeing him
• The separated soul ranks as a human inferential entity rather than a perceptible one.
• The word ‘cause’ conflates a body with its action
• Time depends on space, itself a fictitious entity, for any meaning
• Total surveillance environments could control human development from birth
• Traditional prisons separated keepers from prisoners, defeating the purpose of custody
• Uncertainty about being watched suffices to make surveillance effective
• Unlocatable individual addressing makes all prisoners assume they are watched
• Unseen visitors leave prisoners without fear of exposure
• Using necessity or impossibility seriously covertly claims omniscience about all possibilities
• Visibility and invisibility must be balanced for surveillance to function
• Visible visitors in the central tower create avenues for conspiratorial signaling