reading response

Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic Device Author(s): Jacques-Alain Miller and Richard Miller Source: October, Vol. 41 (Summer, 1987), pp. 3-29 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778327 . Accessed: 21/06/2014 14:11

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic Device

JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

translated by RICHARD MILLER

The Apparatus To begin with, a description of the basic elements of the apparatus. The apparatus is a building. It is circular. There are cells around the

circumference, on each floor. In the center, a tower. Between the center and the circumference is a neutral, intermediate zone.

Each cell has a window to the outside, so constructed that air and light can enter, but the view outside is blocked; each cell also has a grilled door that opens toward the inside so that air and light can circulate to the central core.

The cells can be viewed from the rooms in the central tower, but a system of shutters prevents those rooms or their inhabitants from being seen from the cells.

The building is surrounded by an annular wall. Between this wall and the building there is a walkway for sentries. There is only one entrance or exit to the building or through the outer wall.

The building is completely closed.

The Universal Machine

The Panopticon is not a prison. It is a general principle of construction, the polyvalent apparatus of surveillance, the universal optical machine of human groupings.

And such was Bentham's intention: apart from various minor details, the panoptic configuration could be used for prisons as well as schools, for factories and asylums, for hospitals and workhouses. It has no unique application: it is designed to house involuntary, unwilling, or constrained inhabitants.

The double wall, the stone, the guards, all serve to enclose the space and ensure its impermeability. But this is not the building's original merit, which resides solely in its interior topology, one designed to apportion the visible and the invisible.

From the central point the whole of the enclosed space is totally visible; nothing is hidden, everything is totally transparent, unlike the circumambient

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

4 OCTOBER

cells, from which it is impossible to see out, impossible to communicate with any adjacent cells, and impossible to see the central point.

This configuration sets up a brutal dissymmetry of visibility. The enclosed space lacks depth; it is spread out and open to a single, solitary, central eye. It is bathed in light. Nothing and no one can be hidden inside it-except the gaze itself, the invisible omnivoyeur. Surveillance confiscates the gaze for its own profit, appropriates it, and submits the inmate to it.

Inside the opaque, circular building, the jailer is clarity.

The Semblance of God

The two basic elements of the panoptic building are its central surveillance system and the invisibility of the eye. Each can be justified on its own terms.

The installation of the surveillance system in the center of a circular build- ing is the most economical solution: economical from the viewpoint of personnel, since only one inspector is required to watch over each floor; economical because it reduces to the minimum the need to move about. It is also economical because all of the cells are uniform in size and shape. It is not essential that the building be circular, but "of all figures . . . this, you will observe, is the only one that affords a perfect view, and the same view, of an indefinite number of apartments of the same dimensions."' What gives the circular configuration its great value is the fact that it enables one to partition off identical areas within an area that is homogeneously lit. The only area that is different, the only unusual point, is the center. All of which attests to a common measure, with one exception to which all are obedient.

That the eye may observe without being seen-that is the most cunning thing about the Panopticon. If I can observe the watcher who spies upon me, I can control my surveillance, I can spy in turn, I can learn the watcher's ways, his weaknesses, I can study his habits, I can elude him. If the eye is hidden, it looks at me even when it is not actually observing me. By concealing itself in the shadows, the eye can intensify all its powers -and the economy gains even further, for the number of those on surveillance duty can be reduced with no loss of service. Thus, "the apparent omnipresence of the inspector [can be] combined with the extreme facility of his real presence. "2

We note the de-multiplicative power of the Benthamic device: for a maxi- mum number of watched, it requires a minimum number of watchers; an appar- ent plethora conceals a parsimonious reality. But its powers actually create an all-seeing, omnipresent, omniscient body that condemns the inhabitants to a

1. Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon, Works ofJeremy Bentham Published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring, New York, Russell and Russell, 1962 (11 vols.), vol. IV, letter V, p. 44. All subsequent citations of Bentham are drawn from this edition. 2. Ibid., letter VI, p. 45.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic Device 5

dependency that no ordinary prison can emulate, a body that is very like some fabricated God.

The Panopticon is a machine that creates a semblance of God. Is this not what Bentham must have had in mind when he used the following verses of the 139th Psalm as the heading for one of the numerous "perceptions" he addressed to the powers that be concerning his plan?

Thou art about my path, and about my bed: and spiest out my ways. If I say, peradventure the darkness shall cover me, then shall my night

be turned into day. Even there also shall thy hand lead me; and thy right hand shall hold

me.3

Minute Detail

In his writings on the Panopticon--the pamphlet of 1791, the two longer postscripts, and the correspondence, only a small portion of which is yet known - Bentham theorizes about every element of the building, foresees every action, endlessly computes its advantages and its drawbacks. There are dicta on lamps and dicta on bells, a dictum on water (supply), on air (circulation), on earth (the proper ground upon which to build), and on fire (heating); every height, length, and depth is calculated; every material is tested; several chapters are devoted to theories about stairways, to the manner in which the inmate shall be clothed, how he will sleep, how he will wash and exercise-and every question gives rise to lengthy, impenetrable dissertations.

Such scrupulous realism obviously creates a hallucinatory effect in the reader. Yet Bentham's visionary minute detail ought not be confused with his personal psychology; it is merely an intrinsic part of his plan.

The axiom underlying the panoptic device-we recognize the debt to Helvetius-is that circumstances make the man. Because we are dealing here with an attempt to alter man, all chance must be controlled, banished. The Panopticon is to be an area of totalitarian control.

Everything in it must therefore be weighed, compared, evaluated. Every- thing is to have a place. Everything must be argued out. Everything must have a clear and explicable meaning. Here, the world must be ordered from top to bottom. The discourse will overlook no single detail.

Every circumstance acts upon man. For him, nothing is without its effect. Everything, therefore, is cause. Whoever wishes to master causes in order to reign over effects must therefore engage in an in-depth analysis, which is why Bentham never abandoned his work on the Panopticon. Every element, every group of elements, every act, every gesture had to be dealt with expressly, separately.

3. Bentham, vol. XI, p. 96, note.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

6 OCTOBER

As an example, the disposal of human waste, to which Bentham devotes a lengthy commentary. There can be no question of communal toilets. They would be counter to the necessary requirements for solitude and security. But evacua- tion in private is impossible for the same reasons, and the air in the cells would also be contaminated. Thus, each cell must be equipped with a tube for waste disposal, but not one large enough to be used for escape. And now such a device must be invented and its workings and material components described in detail.

We begin to learn that anything can be grist for the mills of logic.

The Temple of Reason

This utilitarianist concept of the world is based on a simple belief: nothing is without its effect. That is, every thing uses or serves another thing, which is tantamount to saying that things exist only in relation to other things.

Consequently there can be no absolute, but, on the contrary, in all things there is a more and a less, and any effect can be fitted into the hierarchy vis-A-vis its relationship to a result.

In this sense the Panopticon is the model of the utilitarian world: in it, everything is artificial, nothing is natural, nothing is contingent, nothing exists for its own sake, nothing is neutral. Everything is precisely measured, no more, no less. Articulations, systems, arrangements . . . machines on every side.

No object is merely itself, no activity is an end in itself. Surveillance actually begins long before the inspector takes up his position in the space reserved for him in the middle of the building; it begins with the writing out of the plan, with its concept and planning, with the first notion of it. Nothing is allowed "just to exist," because it is the vocation of all things to function. The Panopticon is a vast machine, each element of which is also, in turn, a machine, the subject of calculation.

The utilitarian says: since nothing is without effect, everything can be calculated. When it comes to results, we can always single out what will favor them and what will work against them. So the first must be augmented and the latter diminished; all causes must be evaluated and balanced one against the other.

In other words, logic is the sole imperative in the panoptic universe. Logical calculation reigns supreme over its empire, which is reclusive.

What could be more logical: total power is gained over the inmate, the pauper, the madman, the student, the sick, the entire population for which Bentham designed his invention. Everyone is turned over, bound hand and foot, to logic, to the apparatus, system.

The Panopticon is designed for those who have been forced to eschew any initiative and who are capable of being turned totally into instruments.

From this viewpoint the Panopticon is the temple of reason, a temple luminous and transparent in every sense: first, because there are no shadows and

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic Device 7

nowhere to hide: it is open to constant surveillance by the invisible eye; but also, because totalitarian mastery of the environment excludes anything irrational: no opacity can withstand logic. Henceforth, logic can be brought to bear upon everything, which is what Bentham is actually telling us by means of his Panopticon.

It's a kind of madness, of course - an analytical insanity. On condition that it be understood as follows: it is the insanity proper to logic, which, conceiving a world in which all things are relative, makes itself absolute and, denying the whole of nature, establishes its own artifices.

All Is Usable

We can now formulate the law that governs the panoptic edifice's homoge- neous space: everything must be usable, must work toward a result. Nothing inside it occurs in vain. All loss must be recouped. All activity is to be analyzed in terms of movement: all movement is expenditure and all expenditure must be productive.

A life devoid of leisure-such might be the utilitarian motto. Busy time is productive time.

Example: in the Panopticon, everything has a function, each thing works, and especially the inmates, on the same principle as other elements of the vast system. In order for their labor to bring a proper return, they must rest, from time to time, to refresh themselves, for distraction. Distraction? But that would mean subtracting time from production. So it is not enough to reduce leisure and rest time to the bare minimum. The resultant "sacrifice" -to use Bentham's term--must, insofar as possible, be devoted to some other productive process. Any game must be profitable. Work must be made amusing, and happiness must bring in some return. "Could a man be made even to find amusement in his work, why should he not? and what should hinder him?'"4

In fact, more labor is what Bentham proposes as the purpose of distracting from labor, and the ideal repose is in fact nothing but a change of activity. Only sleep is an unavoidable fact.

The panoptic ideal is to achieve the integral subjection of nature to the useful. Some way must be found to fit even the most basic needs into the profit system. One day Bentham said the following to his editor, Bowring, who has passed it on to us: "Remember we do not exercise, or ought not to exercise, even a besoin ('need,' Bentham genteelly used the French word) in vain. It should serve for manure."'

4. Bentham, Panopticon, vol. IV, postscript, part II, p. 142. 5. Bentham, vol. X, p. 585.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

8 OCTOBER

Polychrestia

The utilitarian demiurge organizes a universe in which life is based upon utility. As we have said, everything must be usable. But in its true form the whole dictum would be expressed thus: Everything must be usable several times.

Each element combines a number of uses. Each apparatus is a multiplier. Bentham, as always, attempts to arrive at a maximum; it was he who introduced into the English language the verbs "to maximize" and "to minimize."

Each Benthamic element represents the meeting point of several networks. For every cause there can be several effects. Contrariwise, each effect can be stronger for having been produced by several causes. Each cog of the machine is a nexus of uses traversed by multiple causal chains.

When Bentham rose to refute arguments against him, he always brought out unexpected uses by engaging in a definitive resection of relationships. He was continually inventing collateral benefits.

When several solutions were available, he would usually choose the one that would yield the greatest number of advantages. Here too, there was a need to divide, to classify, to count, and to organize. For that reason, we must pursue effects as far as we can, fit them into the most varied fields. Any Benthamic system can be dubbed with the term that, borrowing from Bacon, he once used: it is a polychrest, "a tool with multiple uses."

The Panopticon as a whole embodies that definition because it is simulta- neously a prison, a manufactory, a school, an asylum. Yet the same is also true of the individual cell itself, in which the inmate labors, eats, and sleeps.

Bentham has conceived a world without waste, a world in which anything left over is immediately reused, a superusable world.

The Public Eye The Panoptic field of vision derives its unity solely from its central point.

Without the gaze that unifies them, we would have nothing but an unaccounted- for collection of atoms, of inmates immured in solitude, crushed under the yoke of surveillance. From this angle, the Panopticon is really nothing but what the inspector sees.

But such was never Bentham's intent. On the contrary, the house of calcu- lations, the whole of the vast, efficient system, was designed to be a school for mankind. The public was welcome to view the spectacle.

Take the penitentiary version of the Panopticon. It is particularly necessary that punishments be executed in public, since the principal benefit any rational legislator should expect to gain from them is dissuasion by example.

Thus the opening of the building to the public already serves a dual utility: on the one hand, visitors (who can be regarded as potential delinquents, for-as Bentham makes clear- those most in need of such instruction will be the ones to show up to receive it, owing to their fondness for sensation) are deterred, the

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic Device 9

population is made more moral; on the other hand, instruction is given in the virtues of economy, rationality. The moralizing process directly brought to bear upon the prisoners therefore also acts indirectly upon the visitors.

A third use is now added. In the Benthamic system it is crucial to know who watches the guards. Here is the answer: the eye of the public will watch over the inner eye. The visitor, while learning from the spectacle, will also inspect, con- trol, and organize. In this way Benthamic space becomes totally "panoptic": in turn, the invisible surveillance reintegrates visibility; the watcher becomes the subject of surveillance. In addition, the visitors also watch over the inmates-a considerable advantage if it is true that an individual's curiosity may wane, whereas the curiosity of a great number of persons who are merely passing through in search of entertainment will probably be more vivid.

Thus, as a fourth use, we can include the strengthening of control over the inmates, the production of a supercontrol: "Here, to one room, you have inspec- tors by thousands.'"6

Thus, the prison, a place of exclusion, rejoins the social space: it becomes the most luminous, the nearest, the most familiar of sites. A veritable theater of punishment, it offers the spectators "a perpetual and perpetually interesting drama, in which the obnoxious characters shall, in specie, at any rate, be exposed to instructive ignominy."7

From which we can deduce the location for panoptic prisons: they will be built close to the capital, near large cities, in order to facilitate access to them by a large number of people. We are not surprised to learn that Bentham constantly argued against deportation to the colonies. On the contrary, a rational manage- ment will increase in every imaginable way the number of visitors and spectators.

To sum up: we have noted four distinct utilities arising from a single cause, that is, the opening of the prison to the public (which Bentham advanced at various times in different works). There is also a fifth: public observation can only increase the inmates' sense of shame and thus accelerate their moral im- provement. Can one then, Bentham asks, condemn someone to endless infamy when he may one day be released? Here we have a situation in utilitarian ethics that equals the conflict of duties, namely, a conflict of kinds of utilities. And we are forced to admire the delicacy with which Bentham confronts it: "Let the offender, while produced for the purpose of punishment, be made to wear a mask."8

But he immediately invents a new method to gain an advantage from this concession and to make dissimulation an integral part of the display: "The masks may be made more or less tragical, in proportion to the enormity of the crimes of those who wear them. The air of mystery which such a contrivance will throw

6. Bentham, Panopticon, vol. IV, p. 133. 7. Ibid., p. 174. 8. Bentham, Principles of Penal Law, vol. I, p. 431.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

10 OCTOBER

over the scene will contribute in a great degree to fix the attention by the curiosity it will excite, and the terror it will inspire."9

No Cruelty There is no cruelty in Bentham. Here, there can be no question of what

he was really trying to be: a philanthropist. For cruelty is gratuitous -unproductive.

What principle can unify the theory of punishments? First, punishment is a system designed to torment, that is, to extract pain from an individual. To be cruel is to seek pain for the sake of pain, to accept it as an absolute. If the utilitarian maintains that he is a philanthropist, it is because, in his eyes, pain, like everything else, must serve a purpose. A second system must therefore be estab- lished that will include pain, give it a meaning, a value-in short, put it to use.

The first machine, per se, has only one drawback: "All punishment," Bentham wrote, "is a mischief."10 The mischief is legitimized by its subsequent utilization, thus converting a negative into its opposite.

Logically, one must begin by knowing all the ways in which a man can be made to suffer. Drawing up a penal code presupposes an encyclopedia of suffer- ings, the lack of which Bentham can only deplore: "A valuable service would be rendered to Society by the individual who . . . should examine the effects

produced by these different modes of punishment, and should point out the greater or smaller evil consequences resulting from contusions produced by blows with a rope, or laceration by whips, etc."" And both physical punishments and moral punishments must be studied in minute detail.

Punishment builds up a pain-capital ("The pain produced by punishments is, as it were, a capital hazarded in expectation of a profit"12). Bentham's analysis thus deals with its potential profitability.

Many uses make up for dumb suffering. The victim of a crime has the right to assert a claim to benefit from its

punishment. In that instance, pain is compensatory. This isjustice, because every delinquent steals utility, that is, pleasure, and although he is made to suffer, a debtor must also be forced to cough up what he owes. In Benthamic psychology it is axiomatic that the pain of one cannot produce an equivalent pleasure in another. The suffering of the delinquent must therefore be invested in some productive labor, and, correlatively, a rate of measurement must be set for crimes.

Either the state appropriates the pain and puts it to work, or the pain can be turned back upon the delinquent from whom it has been extracted, with the

9. Ibid. 10. Bentham, Of Laws, vol. I, p. 83. 11. Bentham, Principles of Penal Law, vol. I, p. 414. 12. Ibid., p. 398.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic Device 11

purpose of rendering him incapable of repeating his crime. Such incapacity can be produced in two ways: physically and morally. Which is better: to turn a delinquent into an invalid or to improve him morally? To disable or to reform - the question must be settled by a formula.

Each of the three utilities we have enumerated is legitimate and, further- more, each can enter into the systems combining them. But they are subsidiary to the determination of punishments. Only individuals can be interested in com- pensation. Labor on behalf of the state expresses only the determination to "incapacitate" the delinquent. Moral betterment affects only one person.

Prevention yields the maximum profit of capital-pain, because it affects every possible delinquent, that is, "step by step, all of mankind."

The Flogging Machine

So, a penal code can be an economics of suffering. There are no light or rigorous punishments; there are only expensive or inexpensive punishments, punishments that yield high or low profits. Sentences, according to their utility, are calculated in terms of profit and loss.

Now, in order to become part of a calculation, punishments must fulfill certain prerequisites. Thus we must have a criterion for assessing some punish- ments as more effective than others.

Suffering cannot be calculated unless the system of punishment produces a stable, constant, regular effect. Here, this problem arises: the system is general, but individuals are singular; an identical punishment can extract varying amounts of pain from different persons: a fixed fine extracts less pleasure from a rich man than it does from a poor man, or, depriving an illiterate of paper and pencil deprives him of nothing, whereas a literate man is thereby deprived of an invaluable source of consolation.

Utilitarian economics is concerned with the fact that the same cause can produce disparate effects. This is why Bentham attempted to mechanize various kinds of corporal punishment: bodies are alike, and an automated torturer cannot differentiate between them. "A machine might be made, which should put in motion certain elastic rods of cane or whalebone, the number and size of which might be determined by the law: the body of the delinquent might be subjected to the strokes of these rods, and the force and rapidity with which they should be applied, might be prescribed by the judge: thus everything which is arbitrary might be removed."'3 In order to add a secondary utility to this principal one, Bentham further provides that the number of flogging machines can be increased so that a large number of prisoners can be subjected to punish- ment at the same time, "his time might be saved and the terror of the scene heightened, without increasing the actual suffering."'4

13. Ibid., p. 415. 14. Ibid.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

12 OCTOBER

This circumlocution is an explicit formulation of a principle that constantly guides Benthamic analysis: reality is worth no more than the appearance it produces. In fact, it is only the appearance-the visible face-of punishment that influences individual conduct and has a dissuasive effect, while the delin- quent is the only one who experiences any real pain. Reality is the investment, appearance the profit. Whence the utilitarian's humane injunction: maximize the appearance and minimize the reality. "If hanging a man in effigy would produce the same salutary impression of terror upon the minds of the people, it would be folly or cruelty ever to hang a man in person."'5

Thus we see that legislation becomes scientific at the same time as it draws upon the resources of theatrical art. The frugality of penalties supposes a profu- sion, an attraction, in the spectacle. A new angle from which to view the merits of the panoptic stage.

Frugality, stability-the flogging machine shows us a further, third, prop- erty any Benthamic punishment must have: adjustability. The good system must produce a regular but variable effect, so that the gradation of crimes can be rigorously reflected in the gradation of amounts of pain inflicted. Obviously, the mechanical whip meets this requirement, because the force, speed, and number of blows can be varied, thus affording the judge with a whole gamut of intensities.

An exact proportionality can now be established between crime and suffer- ing. It is up to the legislator to codify it. Any active criminal must be able to compare the pleasure he expects to derive from his crime with the pain his punishment will inflict upon him. That is why the legislator's calculations must be unequivocally specific and, knowing them, the prospective delinquent can calcu- late and minimize his crime (that is, choose the lesser of two criminal acts) in order to minimize his future pain. Proportionality thus becomes a factor in dissuasion.

Analogy, Lost and Found

We can now envisage the function of the penal code: it is a table of equivalents that converts crimes into pains and thereby ensures an over-all commensurability among all the activities in which human beings indulge within the communities they form and, further, teaches them the virtues of prudence, of rationality, of calculating profits and losses. The utilitarian Golden Rule: everything has its price.

Thus, punishment is made part of the trade or exchange network. Now we can answer the following question: What punishment best fulfills

the function proper to it, the function of penal currency - in other words, to be

15. Ibid., p. 398.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic Device 13

at once stable, economic, and adjustable? What is the ideal punishment, homoge- neous in nature, if not imprisonment?

Deprivation of liberty can be experienced by all; it can be measured in lengths of time, and lengths of time are easily divisible. Prison is a machine for deducting time. Combined with forced labor, it is a high-yield punishment. Bentham is convinced: it will be the punishment of the future, the punishment fit for modern times.

Yet, what we gain in homogeneity we lose in exemplarity. The universal and monotonous penitentiary equivalence upsets all the natural relationships and all the similarities that heretofore linked the punishment with the crime it punishes, that made it a meaningful and obvious ransom. Imprisonment is, by nature, undifferentiated, it says nothing, it is indecipherable without consulting the code. Uniform, egalitarian, mute, prison does away with the merry profusion of analogous punishments.

Nevertheless, Bentham does devote a chapter of his Principles of Penal Law to the latter. Here, as elsewhere, his goal is to be exhaustive. A note by Dumont informs us that some received this expose with "an extreme repugnance," but the surgeon is in duty bound to have as many instruments as possible at his disposal. The days of analogous punishment are past, but it subsists in the Benthamic text as a possible inspiration, held in reserve.

One of the merits of analogous punishment was that the spectacle of its application immediately evoked its cause-thereby giving it immediate legitimacy-and, conversely, that the preparation of the crime would also bring to mind the eventual punishment for it-intensifying the latter's dissuasive power. In fact, "Analogy is that relation, connection, or tie, between two objects, whereby the one being present to the mind, the idea of the other is naturally excited."16 There must therefore be a similitude between them, or a contrast, a shift of gears by some operator or some characteristic mark.

For example: the instrument is identical, the tool used to commit the crime serves as punishment: the arsonist is punished by fire, the poisoner by poison, etc. Thus, the criminal organizing his penalty is made to put himself in the place of his victim, as if acting as his own executioner: "In every step of his preparations, his imagination will represent to him his own lot."'7 Here, in a way, analogy supplants the lack of identification with the other, the lack of sympathy, that makes crime possible.

Or punishment can strike at the organ used to commit the crime-you have slandered or lied: your tongue will be pierced; you have been guilty of forgery: your hand will be pierced with an "iron instrument fashioned like a pen" -or, for a corporal injury, a similar corporal injury-an eye for an eye, a

16. Ibid., p. 407. 17. Ibid., p. 408.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

14 OCTOBER

tooth for a tooth - obviously easier to comprehend, but not the more equitable therefor.

Bentham devises a special punishment for those who perpetrate crimes with the aid of disguise to evade public view: analogy demands that some representa- tion of the disguise be imprinted on the body, indelibly or not, depending.

This is the rich, inventive spring of original ideas that imprisonment -if it were to become, as Bentham hoped, the universal form of punishment- would dry up. Some compensation must be found for such a homogenizing effect. That was to be provided by architecture: every prison must display its function as such, its appearance must conform to its end use, and even - in line with the utilitarian axiom mentioned earlier - go beyond the reality. Penitentiary buildings are to be constructed in such a way as to "strike the imagination and awaken a salutary terror," to bring to the lips of the passerby these words: "This is the dwelling- place of crime."'8

Further: the three classes into which Bentham separates the prison population - the poor, detained for inability to pay; criminals to be rehabilitated and one day released; and those with life sentences -will be incarcerated in three kinds of prison. Color will announce the guilt of the inmates: prisons of the first category will be white, those of the second, gray, and those of the latter, black. The first will not be distinguished by a sign, whereas the other two will have highly symbolic ones: on the outside may be "various figures, emblematical of the supposed dispositions of the persons confined in them. A monkey, a fox, and a tiger, representing mischief, cunning and rapacity. . . . In the interior, let two skeletons be placed, one on each side of an iron door. . . . A prison would thus represent the abode of death, and no youth that had once visited a place so decorated, could fail of receiving a most salutary and indelible impression."'9 Lastly, the three prisons will bear different names: "House for Safe Custody," "Penitentiary House," and the "Black Prison"-the latter with no applicable sign other than its color, for with regard to it there is nothing more to be said, it's being, on this earth, the symbol of the beyond.

The Utilitarian Mise-en-Schne

It is easy to think of utilitarian thought as being, fundamentally and in principle, hostile to entertainment. Because its intent is to reduce everything to what can be measured, we tend to believe that it must view anything aesthetic, any showiness, as superfluous. But this is to misunderstand the principle of the lowest cost, which, on the contrary, prescribes squeezing causes dry in order to yield the greatest number of effects. This multiplicative ingenuity is typical of Benthamic intelligence. Theatrical art, which can create magnificent fantasies

18. Ibid., p. 424. 19. Ibid., p. 431.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic Device 15

with the slimmest of real means, is in this regard a model of the science of the useful-of course on condition that its prodigality leads to an end that can be otherwise justified.

There is a calculation with regard to appearances, and Bentham puts it into practice in all his writings. The eye, which reigns over the panoptic empire, is the prime organ to which its ruses are directed - Bentham says it straight out: "Preach to the eye, if you would preach with efficacy. By that organ, through the medium of the imagination, the judgement of the bulk of mankind may be led and moulded almost at pleasure. As puppets in the hands of the showman, so would men be in the hand of the legislator, who, to the science proper to his function, should add a well-informed attention to stage effect."20

Bentham criticizes the practice of oath-taking: it brings the deity into public life and it relies on a feeble motive, one's word, thus positing a high degree of morality. But if it is to be employed, then the act must be properly staged: a solemn formula must be used, an emphatic diction and gesture must be estab- lished, the walls must be hung with pictures with clearly legible titles spelling out the punishment for perjurers (in order to increase their effect, such pictures may be hidden behind a curtain and revealed only in extremis), a minister of religion must be present and clearly visible (to emphasize the sacred nature of the oath) or an officer of the peace (if one wishes to accentuate its political nature), and so on. The courtroom, under Bentham's reform, is thus turned into a theatrical machine.

Going deeper, we perceive that every utilitarian system is of necessity theatrical-in that not only does everything in it serve some end, but that everything in it has meaning. Every function is a role.

Prisons of Language

The utilitarian classifies. In order to compose the most profitable assem- blages he must always analyze. His utterance creates in its wake tiny motes of thought that would be lost were they not continually enumerated.

It is to this that Bentham devotes himself: his interminable texts are replete with mutually contradictory lists, in which he painfully strives to capture, reas- semble, get a grasp on the myriad results of his painstaking divisions. And this is why many of his works, Chrestomathia, Defence of Usury, A Table of the Springs of Action, Tracts on Poor Laws and Pauper Management, and so on, not to mention the Panopticon, culminate with the drawing up of a plan, a huge map, a vast general table of contents, a tree of logic, or a synoptic table.

One expression recurs in Bentham's writings: in legal or logical matters, one must always be able to get one's bearings "at first glance." Further, there

20. Bentham, Rationale of Judicial Evidence, vol. VI, p. 321.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

16 OCTOBER

must be "no dark spot." Now, Bentham uses the same expressions when writing of the panoptic building.

And it goes without saying: the vast nomenclatures in all their exhaustive ramifications are prisons of language. It is the same goal of achieving mastery that inspired Bentham's penitentiary theory, his theory of logic. Whether classi- fying men or classifying words, the same eye predominates.

Men, words-it is a question of halting fluctuations, of enclosing all dis- placements, of fixing them once and for all in one place, or at least, of never losing sight of them as they move, of freezing them. Before being a liberal, we realize, the utilitarian is a despot.

Pauper-Land

Bentham's tables create prisons of words; contrariwise, all Benthamic build- ings are materialized classifications. For the utilitarian, discourse and reality are reversible, without remainder.

In 1797, Parliament having put off its decision on construction of the panoptic prison, Bentham began to work to get his polyvalent machine used to house the poor. The depression of 1795 had turned the question of pauperism into a national problem, and the best minds labored to find some remedy for it.

The first tract (Situation and Relief of the Poor) begins with a "Pauper Population Table," which Bentham elsewhere calls a "General Map of Pauper- Land, With All the Roads To It." Here, we find the concept of pauperism separated into categories based on causes: Personal (Internal) Causes and Exter- nal Causes. Among the first are: (1) Perpetual (arising from infirmity of mind or body); (2) Long-continuing but of limited duration (inability to provide for one's own needs because of childhood, "non-age"); (3) Casual and of Uncertain Dura- tion (inability to work because of "sick-hands" or "child-burthened hands"). The External Causes are all temporary: loss of work, inability to obtain work (because of badness of character or want of character and acquaintances), and loss of property.

In this very simple chart, all the poor can be put into numbered slots: the deaf, the outcasts, brothel-keepers and asthmatics, bastards and their mothers, husbandmen and gardeners out of work in time of long-continued frost, domes- tic servants fired by a wicked master (to be distinguished from those laid off by a good master), the infirm of mind, those with only one arm -in short, an entire vast, colorful population, made wonderfully homogeneous by an implacable taxonomy. A form is to be sent to every parish so that the number of poor in each category can be precisely noted down, along with age, sex, state of health, etc.

And what is this Paupers' Panopticon whose workings Bentham describes in a second work (Outline of a Work Entitled Pauper Management Improved), other than this very chart created in stone?

Around the building's circumference - circular or, if need be, hexagonal

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic Device 17

- the floors, the walls, the cells, all represent divisions and subdivisions. Here, everything tends to separation and reunion. Every proximity has its reason; there is a motive for every separation. One must separate: to forestall corruption- moral- and infection - physical; to ensure security - here, too, the guards will be invisible- and salubrity- to eliminate noise and bad odors and to conceal unpleasant sights; and, above all, to prevent the arousing of "unsatisfiable desires" - to separate the sexes. But there is also a need to unite: to keep families together, to bring the sick into contact with a doctor, to ensure moral inspection and education, and to allow for communal labor. The institution's life consists of the incessant passage from one classification to another, those separated and reunited and then once again separated according to other criteria for other tasks, then to be brought together again for another reason, to meet with their peers in the evenings. In the evening, the inmates are divided up into classes and disposed according to an astute arrangement that establishes complementarity: next to the delirious and nonstop talkers will be put . . . who but deaf-mutes; the blind will not suffer from their proximity to the melancholics, who are silent, nor from being put next to the hideously deformed and infirm.

The panoptic residence is a site of coexistences; does it not demonstrate, in action, that man is compatible with his fellow man? does it not give mankind a being? is it not, insofar as possible, the best of all possible worlds created by an ingenious utilitarian out of all the ills of creation? "The improvement of manage- ment" is nothing but a matter of applying the logic of classes, in which everything has its place.

Identity Police

General transparency, general classification, general calculation, general utilization - these values demand that absolutely no uncertainty shall exist with regard to identities. Everything must have a name-and Bentham, like some new Adam, is a great creator of names-a place, a number. The utilitarian is as repelled by crowds as he is by beggars.

The beggar is a man without a place, a vagrant, a man who cannot be accounted for, who resists calculation, floating, haunting the dark corners af- forded him by a society that is not, unfortunately, uniformly panoptic. Beggars must be somehow incorporated into society; such living logical errors must be eradicated. They will be put into panoptic workhouses.

The mob evades taxonomies, makes enumerations indeterminable. Instead of regulated relationships, confusion reigns, fomenting unrest, excluding reflec- tion; change is constant in a mob, giving rise to impressions as varied as they are striking. Any mob-which is a lack of human classification-is already sedi- tious. It is especially dangerous when it includes individuals of bad moral charac- ter, for it provides them with a common milieu in which they can shield each other from the eye's censure: "Shame is the fear of the disapprobation of those

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

18 OCTOBER

with whom we live. But how should disapprobation of criminality display itself among a throng of criminals?"21 The court of public opinion is removed from their thinking, they make up their own tribunal: "A lex loci is formed by tacit consent."22 Each delinquent is culpable in a different way; there are hardened criminals and neophytes, the mild and the rabid; together, they become homoge- neous and are prone to the worst.

The vagrant must be immobilized, the masses divided up. To achieve this, Bentham calls for a broad policing of identities. He strongly emphasizes the need for increasing the means by which individuals can be recognized and found: "In the capital of Japan, every one is obliged to have his name upon his dress."23 In English schools the students wear a special costume. "Soldiers wear uniforms, why not paupers? - those who save the country, why not those who are saved by it?"24 The least we can do is put the poor into uniform.

The ideal is to unite utter homogeneity - the uniform - with the most systematic and neutral of differentiations -number. But the prisoners in the Panopticon will benefit from an even more concrete differentiation, one that will keep them from being tempted to escape: the men will wear sleeves of unequal length, the left normal and the right no longer than a woman's gown. Thus the skin of the arms will be different in appearance, like a natural tatoo, creating an essential mark that will remain indelibly visible for a long time. "A man escapes. Minute personal description, signalement, as the French call it, is almost needless: one simple trait fixes him beyond possibility of mistake.''25

In fact, the entire nation ought to be tatooed-as Bentham wrote in 1804 to Sir Henry Carew - not only prisoners or deserters. Such a practice would only be doing what sailors, who customarily have their first and last names imprinted on their wrists in clear and indelible letters, have been doing for years. Of course, it's a pity that individuals' proper names are so randomly distributed: indeed, many people even share the same name. It is a real breakdown in logic. A new nomenclature remains to be written, so that in each country every individual will have a proper name that belongs to him and to him alone.

To sum up: a proper name, a truly proper name, for everyone (in short, the equivalent of a number), tatooed on his flesh, ineradicable: this would spread the panoptic order throughout the world, throughout all mankind, and would lead to general security, since one would always be able to respond to the basic question of contracts: "Who are you, with whom I am dealing?"

It goes without saying that all goods and products must also be labeled. The label would be a short version of a certificate that would incontrovertably estab- lish the product's ownership, its receiver, its quality and quantity. 21. Bentham, Panopticon, vol. IV, p. 138. 22. Bentham, vol. III, p. 138. 23. Bentham, Principles of Penal Law, vol. I, p. 557. 24. Bentham, Pauper Management, vol. II, p. 389. 25. Bentham, Panopticon, vol. IV, p. 156.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic Device 19

Once identities are assured, the great bookkeeping of utilities becomes possible.

Books must be kept, Bentham stresses, in every panoptic establishment. "Bookkeeping" is a science - the practice of which, by the way, is facilitated by the omnipresence of surveillance in, and the concomitant transparency of, the area to be accounted for. Chronological entries will be made daily, methodologi- cal entries -products, population tables, stock inventories, health records, moral conduct records, requests, punishments (with a black cover), rewards (red cover). . . . And the entries will cover the entire nation: every event will imme- diately be recorded and broken down into its constituent parts, each of which will then be noted in the corresponding book-once life is totally reflected in the mirror of its exhaustive inscription, the government will be in a better position to take informed and scientific decisions. And on the horizon - Bentham does not say so in his published works, but a manuscript must exist somewhere in which he did -looms planetary bookkeeping, the comparison of everything with every- thing, all of mankind entered in a ledger.

The Totalitarian Philanthropist The utilitarian is, per se, dedicated to the exhaustive. In the first place, no object is beneath the utilitarian's attention or unwor-

thy of it: anything susceptible of being known is matter for a science, just as anything susceptible of being done is matter for an art. There is no a priori discrimination: the utilitarian indiscriminately welcomes anything at all, no mat- ter what; he is a polyvalent theoretician to whom nothing is foreign.

In the second place, he performs the same operation on every object: he sums it up; he compounds it. The subject is always open to division: the utilitarian finds the separable everywhere. He feels compelled to analyze the original object, to denaturalize it, to transform it into a mass of separate elements. The utilitar- ian, therefore, is constantly producing systematic syntheses that must of necessity be exhaustive.

By the same imperative, the utilitarian's discourse is expansive, infinitely stretchable. Restricted as the object or field with which he is dealing may appear to be at first glance, he will reduce it to its basics and deal with it according to a vast general and exhaustive process; breaking it down, he reconstitutes it maxi- mized, methodically turned into a huge montage. Bentham coined the word "methodization" to describe this process. A montage is "methodized" if it repre- sents a subject that has been carried as far as it can go. Thus, the utilitarian solution always goes beyond the particular problem for which it was intended; it always has the validity of a model; it is exemplary and thus naturally imperialist. And, since there is no field that is not methodizable. .

In utilitarian theory the maximum represents the sovereign good. Of course, this sovereign good is not a defined object, maximization cannot be

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

20 OCTOBER

definitive; on the contrary, it is fundamentally variable, always capable of "im- provement"; as function, however, it is constant. Stubbornly, unflaggingly, the utilitarian builds and creates hierarchies- more and less prevail everywhere- and reforms-there is always something better.

It should now be clear that the utilitarian's point of reference, whatever the impetus behind his thinking, always turns out to be the great All itself: the universe, mankind. It is in this sense that the Panopticon is not just one theme among others in Bentham's work: the utilitarian is basically a panoptician.

Utilitarianism, which, in the political sphere, would seem, like radicalism, to be a variant of liberalism, is in fact a totalitarian concept of the world; it aspires to perpetual and universal maximization. Such totalitarianism is precisely what enables it to pose as a philanthropy: the expansion of its empire is limited, in effect, only by the human species.

In volume XI of his edition of the master's works, Bowring published extracts from Bentham's last notebooks: there we find the following entry, in which the principles of the maximum, philanthropy, and imperialism are lumped together with a refreshing charm:

1831 - February 16- The day after arrival at the age of 83. J.B.'s frame of mind. J.B. the most ambitious of the ambitious. His empire-the empire

he aspires to-extending to, and comprehending, the whole human race, in all places, - in all habitable places of the earth, at all future time.

J.B. the most philanthropic of the philanthropic: philanthropy the end and instrument of his ambition.

Limits it has no other than those of the earth.26

The Formula

As we know, utilitarianism, whose scope is all-embracing, can be summed up in one single sentence. It is, according to Bentham, a sentence that underlies the entire theory, that expresses it, that embraces it wholly; it is "all-directing" and "all-comprehensive." He condenses it so well that, once formulated, it became a platitude that almost renders nugatory any commentary. And this is not its most remarkable property. Bentham's dictum, into which some life must be breathed -one that, of course, has earned its author a high moral position in every textbook, alongside the stoics, the epicureans, and the skeptics-is:

"The greatest happiness of the greatest number." "Priestly was the first (unless it was Beccaria) who taught my lips to pro-

nounce this sacred truth.'"27 As in the case of the Panopticon, Bentham does not

26. Bentham, vol. XI, p. 72. 27. Bentham, Commonplace Book, vol. X, p. 142.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic Device 21

claim paternity of the idea to which he was to devote his entire life. And indeed, the expression did come from the pen of Priestly, in his 1768 Essay on the First Principle of Government, as well as from that of Beccaria, who used it ("la massima felicitad divisa nel maggior numero") in the introduction to his treatise Dei delitti e delle pene of 1764. But we can find it even earlier in a work by Hutcheson, who wrote: "That action is the best that procures the greatest happiness for the greatest number" (Inquiry into the original of our ideas of beauty and virtue, 1726).

But Bentham came to favor the formulation of the principle of utility over the formula of the greatest happiness, a formulation that may well utter the same thing, but with a difference: one approves or disapproves of any action according to its apparent propensity to increase or diminish the happiness of the interested party. In 1822, Bentham was to express regret that his 1789 formulation failed to be sufficiently explicit as to who the "party" was whose interest, in the last analysis, is always the subject of any human action, in all circumstances: that "party" is mankind, the "happiness" is its well-being.

It is from this axiom that the over-all instrumentalization inherent in utili- tarianism flows: Any proper means must work toward this end: "A use," Bentham writes in his Logic, "is either a modification of the universal end, i.e., well-being, or a subordinate and subservient end, i.e., a means capable of being employed in contributing towards that same universal end.'"28 Bentham's im- mense discourse, which creates so many systems, is all supposed to have this one point of reference, the maximum happiness of the maximum number of human beings. But the entire discourse is actually based on another, shorter formula, one that flows from the first.

The Maximum

This is the maximum, per se. In other words, use for the sake of use: for is this not the law we can observe at work in all of Bentham's constructions? Everything must be useful vis-a'-vis something other than itself, must serve. Nothing exists that is not relative to something else, namely, that does not function. And thus this functioning has, in principle, no end. It is infinitely extensible. It affects everything, transforms everything. It includes the entire globe. And although its end is "mankind," it is an end in the sense of its uttermost limits, its ultimate frontier -extrinsic because, left to its own devices, it would go even further. The paradox that underlies utilitarian discourse is, very simply, that it transforms something essentially relative - use - into an absolute. Bentham attempts to get around the paradox with his formula. Instrumental fanaticism is disguised as maximum philanthropy. At one fell swoop, willy-nilly, systems are designed to achieve a single universal end: you may be certain, Oh fellow men, that everything useful is useful to all!

28. Bentham, Logic, vol. VIII, p. 231.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

22 OCTOBER

For Bentham, the formula is Archimedian: it is a reference point from which one can posit everything that can be posited, an absolute criterion that is always valid, so much so that the Benthamic world has been forever rid of uncertainty. Every utterance in utilitarian discourse is, de jure, subject to the formula. But the formula itself, the foundation of all validity, is an autonomous utterance, it is self-enclosed, undemonstrable: "Is [the principle of utility] subject to any direct proof? apparently not, for that which we use to prove everything else cannot itself be proved: a chain of proofs must have its beginning somewhere."

But the fact that it defies any demonstration does not therefore make it any the more susceptible to refutation: Because it embraces All, it must be argued outside the All, that is, from an unthinkable position. "Is it possible for a man to move the earth? Yes, but first he must find another earth from which to do so." All-encompassing, the formula covers the entire surface of the discourse's uni- verse; if we argue against it, we still do so, in some unperceived way, in its behalf. Its empire has no exteriority.

The arguments against the formula fit into two categories: First, the principle of asceticism, which is nothing but the opposite of the

formula, which teaches us to prefer the harmful to the useful; it can be refuted by its inconsistency. Bentham held that it had never been pursued to the end by any living creature, nor could it ever be.

The second is the principle of sympathy, a category to which Bentham relegates, pell mell, any criterion based on a personal estimation of good and evil, whether in the name of a moral sense, commonsense, understanding, natural law, natural justice, etc.; indeed, he maintained, it is capricious to see this as a principle at all, for it is not so much a positive principle per se as it is a mere term used to signify the negation of any principle.

Only the formula can provide a legitimate foundation for a law applicable to the whole of the human community, for it makes mankind its ultimate refer- ence, it legitimizes the objective calculation of rational choices. Men quarrel amongst themselves only on behalf of the useful, and Bentham takes great pains to discern in every adversary argument a dissimulated appeal to the very princi- ple it is seeking to refute. Differences arise solely with regard to interpretations of the useful, with regard to correct or false computations of use or between partial computations and the universal computation. Bentham is the only one who takes into account the human race as a whole, who calculates for all of mankind.

Obviously, it follows that the inscription of J.B. within his system is not contingent, that his person is necessarily implicit in his theory, for there must exist at least one man whose personal usefulness is totally bound up with univer- sal utility-an exception analogous, within the human race, to that of the formula in all its manifestations and personifications.

That being so, we can say that Bentham found himself incomprehensible.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic Device 23

Two Masters

Is there any point in our following Bentham's example and enumerating pleasures and pains? In the Introduction to the Principles ofMorals and Legislation he

distinguishes fourteen principal varieties of the former and twelve of the latter; to which are added subdivisions and combinations. Other works contain slightly modified lists; terms are altered, species regrouped. For example, the nomencla- ture established for the "springs of action" contains "Prying," "Interest of the Spying-Glass," "The Pleasure of Curiosity," or "Pleasure of the Palate" as countervalent to the "Pain of Labor," and so on.

But this matters little, since his "species" do not differentiate pleasure, do not differentiate pain. All are homogeneous, the "Pleasure of Smell" and "Repu- tation," "Pleasure of the Sexual Sense" and that of "Skill." And this homogene- ity extends even to the difference between pleasure and pain, for they are to each other as positive to negative. Whence, all one need do to calculate is posit that pleasure and pain come in discrete units, that is, that they do not flow in streams but are articulated like links in a chain. Sensibility is, from the outset, broken down into units; we thus speak of a pleasure, a pain, qualifying a single positive or negative quantity; we have an actual monetary system, with values that can be set and compared.

We might briefly review the six criteria that individualize a pleasure or pain and allow them to be evaluated: intensity, duration, certitude, proximity, fecun- dity (tendency to be followed by a sensation of the same sort), purity (tendency not to be followed by an opposite sensation); if the sensation concerns several persons at a time, we add the criterion of extension. We can be brief, because the calculation is purely regulatory: Bentham has told us that we should not expect this process of evaluation to be applied to every moral judgment or every legislative or legal proceeding. It must, nevertheless, always be borne in mind: and, depending upon the effective use made of it on such occasions, it is, to all intents and purposes, "an exact process."

The calculation of pleasures, on which Bentham's fame is to a great extent based, is the necessary postulate to the rationalization of politics. It is the instru- ment of a judge, not of a psychologist. It symbolizes a perfect justice capable of measuring penalties and reparations. The system, the device, for calculating pleasure and pain, with which Bentham's commentators have sometimes solely been concerned, as if it could actually be made to work, represents an ideal means of achieving absolute mastery over individuals and communities. Its secret is contained in the first section of the "Introduction" to the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, which reads: "Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure."29

What is innate to Benthamic man is subjection. The calculation of pleasures

29. Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, vol. I, p. 1.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

24 OCTOBER

is a commentary upon a single utterance: Man is subjectable, he is governable, he can, by nature, be denatured by his feelings; to lead him, one need only manipu- late the levers that motivate and activate his actions; seeking pleasure, fleeing pain, he is an elementary machine delivered by nature into the hands of the dispensers of happiness.

Anything Is Possible

In utilitarian theory, nature is nothing but the following: It is what provides sources of pleasure and pain to the masters so that they may train and lead men. Here, nature is mute, it sets no standards, creates no point of reference, imposes no limits. It engenders an indefinedly plastic mankind.

In all of Bentham's work we find only two exceptions to this universal malleability. On the one hand, man's feelings are not inexhaustible; first, because his life is limited and, second, because an overly intense pleasure becomes painful, and excessive pain ends in unconsciousness. On the other hand, each individual body and mind is implacably different; there is a radical frame of body just as there is a radical frame of mind; this basic structuration is inalterable. The gamut of mutations cannot be crammed into a narrow space.

Thus, Benthamic optimism posits an "anything is possible" that leaves the future wide open to the furious activity of the powers of utility.

Bentham's first published work was devoted to a point-by-point refutation of the introduction to Blackstone's Commentaries on English law (A Fragment on Government). Indeed, it is solely intended to advance the theory later adopted by Hume: There is not and cannot be either an innate social contract or a natural law.

Indeed, nature must be mute for utility to reign supreme. Laws do not spring from any anterior discourse of nature or God; we cannot speak of their departing from it, nor can they be made to refer to it. Laws are only a system of language, controlling pleasure and pain on behalf of utility.

"Ex Nihilo"

To conceive a natural law, to establish concrete law on the basis of suppos- edly preexistent rights and duties, is to posit unuttered utterances-other than those providentially emanating from some Divine source. If a legislating nature does not exist, if use is the only source of legitimacy, then rights and duties must derive from the law, from its effective, humane utterance, in other words, from an act of language. Legislation is wholly a phenomenon of discourse, an effect of discourse.

How can language not reproduce a model but create entities that derive their being from it alone? Herbert Spencer, for example, has declared such creation incomprehensible in The Great Political Superstitions. Who, he asks, can

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic Device 25

produce something from nothing? That would be an effect imputable solely to divine omnipotence, and, he adds, there are many who reject even that.

The "ex nihilo" nature of law obviously presents a problem the utilitarian finds it difficult to circumvent, since it forecloses any natural or divine guarantee. Bentham deals with it in his theories of fictions, which do not form a single work but are a running theme, marginal enough for neither James nor John Stuart Mill-nor Bowring and Dumont-to have isolated them as such. C.K. Ogden was the first to assemble the various texts into a single volume.30

It is impossible to express oneself without positing the existence of certain of the elements contained in the discourse. In other words, all discourse recog- nizes entities. One cannot express oneself without making reference to some- thing. Substantives fulfill this referent function.

Now, the nature of such posited existing entities is not univocal. Perception underlies and forms the basis of discrimination: there are entities directly appre- hended by the senses-physical objects- and entities apprehended by the mind-the incorporeal, the soul as such, or God-all, as Bentham reminds us, invisible. Thus the perceptible is contrasted with the inferential, as that which can be apprehended immediately as opposed to that the apprehension of which is mediated. Yet in mentioning such entities, whether sensed or deduced, I do mean that they exist in reality and that the substantive is founded on a substantiality.

Which brings us to a second dichotomy: that between the real and the unreal. There are in language substantives without substance. There are more nouns than there are objects. Discourse is excessive, plethoric; it enables us to speak of what does not exist as if it did exist. This simple observation, accepted in English philosophy since the time of Hobbes and Locke, motivates all linguistic analysis: not taking words for things, measuring discourse against reality, breach- ing the gap, instituting language inspection, repressing contraband vocables, foreclosing the unreal.

Yet, Bentham argues, the unreal is not homogeneous. In its sphere, we must distinguish between fable and fiction. If I state that in such and such a house in such and such a street in such and such a town there resides a devil with horns and a forked tail, and observation contradicts that statement, I have merely created a fable, describing as real an entity that does not exist: a "nonentity," a nothing. There are other entities that have no more concrete an existence, but which the demands of the grammatical form of the discourse constrain me to name, to evoke, to express, whereas "in truth and reality" it is not my intent to attribute an existence to them. If there is a fable, it is a necessary one. It is not

30. Here I have made use of Bentham's writings on fictions as collected by Ogden in Bentham's Theory of Fictions, London, 1932. Most of the texts are drawn from volumes III, IV, IX, and XV of the Bowring edition. Ogden has also examined the unpublished manuscripts Elie Halevy described as "lengthy and useless" (L'evolution de la doctrine utilitaire, p. 357).

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

26 OCTOBER

created by me; it is the fabrication of the discourse per se: I cannot express myself without creating substantives, that is, without producing the unreal but indis- pensable entities Bentham chooses to call fictions.

Fictions are necessary to language. As long as language is used by human beings, we cannot do without them. Conversely, they derive their being solely through utterance; they have no separate existence; to posit real correlatives for them is to transform them into fables. It is to language and to language alone that fictive entities owe their existence, their impossible and yet indispensable exis- tence. So we have linguistic beings wholly created by the stuff of language.

But since we can only speak of a fictive entity as if it were real, its expression is caught up in an interior drift; a malign, fallacious power -that of grammar- works upon it, and the fictive is constantly being confused with the fabulous; utterance engenders a belief- indeed, a superstition -that for every word there is a corresponding thing. We must therefore be on the alert for fictions. Yet how can we distinguish them? They are not susceptible to definition by genus or species; they are neither subsumed nor subsumers. As a result, they can be taken in, circumscribed, only by paraphrasis. Fictions must be retranslated. Any proposition having for its subject a fiction can be translated into a proposition having a real entity in its place. A proposition bearing on a fiction is emblematic: it proffers an image; to paraphrase it is to refer the image to a corporeal being. In this sense, a Benthamic fiction is what logicians would call an empty or incom- plete symbol - witness the name Bentham coins to describe the fictional para- phrase: phraseopleorisis-a filling up of the sentence.

Does this mean that Bentham's ideal is to fill up the discourse integrally, to reduce fictive entities? We must bear in mind that there can be no language without fictions. Utilitarianism is not a nominalism: it is not a question of elimi- nating fictions, but of controlling them, for fictions can also act.

And it is here that we discover the purpose of the "theory of fictions," which is not disinterested linguistic investigation: the purpose is to arrive at a theory of legislation, of language as legislative power. Fictive entities mobilize real entities, distribute them, organize them. To speak is to legislate, in other words, to bring into play things that do not exist.

All legal entities are fictive entities -rights, duties, powers. Natural law is a fable; all law is a creation of language that brings into play two real entities: pleasure and pain, which are the sole, unique referents of all legal discourse. A law is only a linguistic system that artificially associates actions and perceptible effects, on the formula: such and such action will lead to this or that suffering, or this or that happiness.

Pannomion

Law is one of those objects we pretend exists for the demands of discourse through a fiction so necessary that, without it, there could be no human dis-

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic Device 27

course. The same applies to the other entities put into play by legal discourse: crime, duty, power. Such entities are, let us say, simultaneous, exactly correla- tive, reciprocally translatable, substitutable. Without an awareness of their fic- tional natures, our heads begin to spin: a law is a power, or a power is a law, and so on; the weight of the definition is made to shift backwards and forwards, from one word to the other. Taking the Benthamic theory to its extreme, we could maintain that there is but one legal entity and that laws refer to one unique object upon which they comment, which they amend, translate, divide, and redistrib- ute. And that unique object is suffering.

Suffering and pleasure, but suffering first of all. The law promises suffer- ing, not reward. "By reward alone, it is certain that no effective part [of govern- ment work] would ever be carried forward, not even for half an hour."31 Pain, in fact, is more reliable than pleasure (less dependent on circumstances, susceptible of greater scope, its sources are myriad; every part of the body is open to it, as we have seen), and fear, Bentham held, is the necessary instrument, the only one applicable to the goals of society. Consequently, of all legal fictions, crime is unquestionably the most elementary because it is the closest to punishment.

Similarly, codes are convertible: the discourse of legislation can be uttered in both penal and civil language. But, if there must be an order, the penal code will necessarily take precedence over the civil. The civil code, in fact, creates rights and duties, while the penal code creates crimes and punishments- whereby it implicitly includes the former. The penal code is the fundamental code; it is in its discourse that, Bentham tells us, the legislator makes himself manifest to each individual. He allows, he orders, he forbids; he lays down for each person the rules of his conduct; he employs the language of a father and of a master.

Still, the discourse that legislates is a single thing, and it is only for conve- nience's sake that it is divided up into codes. The theory of fictions tends to a universal and integral code-all laws brought together, assembled, unified, harmonized upon a single principle, each complete, individualized, numbered, drawn up in a univocal algebra -achieving "the projection of the legal sphere so that all its parts can be seen at a single glance"- which Bentham calls the Pannomion-the great panoptic code.

The panoptic legislator must be a linguist. What is a law if not the statement of a will clothed in an exterior sign. The master, Bentham tells us, makes the law for his manservant, the father for his child, man for woman. The laws that make up the codes can be distinguished only by the source of their transmission, that is, the sovereign, defined simply as the authority in a position to command obe- dience within a state. Another opportunity for classification: that authority can either delegate its powers or it can disperse them, or it can concentrate them;

31. Bentham, Of Laws, vol. I, p. 135.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

28 OCTOBER

legislative transmission takes paths of varying lengths; each legal utterance can be disassembled. Who is uttering? to what does the utterance apply? how? what motives underlie it? how is it expressed? and so on. (This painstaking dissection is the aim of Bentham's tract entitled Of Laws.) Every word counts. Which is why Bentham wrote his Nomography, a treatise on legislative language and style.

The legislator is a logician, in the Benthamic sense: logic is the science of the means to be used to attain ends. In other words, he is an engineer of egoisms. Legislative fiction adjusts interests and directs them toward the same ends. It employs fear to ensure the linkage between duty and interest. Thus the legislator is also a psychologist. In his great undertaking he summons before him every branch of learning and all the people, and he does not release them until they have been ground fine.

A Style Bentham does not reserve his nomographic style to legislation alone; he

employs it throughout his entire work. Thus, in discourse, everything must be in its proper place; whence it follows that the writing must continually carry out its own analysis. It must divide up- "The process of subdivision cannot be carried too far"32-down to the very atoms of meaning, the very single digits of thought. It must enumerate, so that no particle is overlooked, and it must designate, to individualize. Every element, every grouping of elements, must have a name. Thus each signification, like the prisoner in his cell, will be captive to a word-there will be adequation, transparency, between signifier and signi- fied. To write is to remove ambiguity. Substantives are preferable to verbs. Through their use one can flush out existential suppositions; instead of saying that you implement a regulation, say rather that you make it applicable-and you also reveal an entity hidden by the verb, an entity whose extension and comprehension you can then vary, and you can, in turn, divide it down into categories to be numbered and named and classified in order of preference, variable according to cases-cases that can themselves become the subjects of numbering and classification, and so on and on. Thus, the discourse you write will be flat, without depth, without semantic thickness, it will be Bentham's writing, which he strove to make "algebraic." But just look at the effects pro- duced by pursuing this ideal of absolute dis-ambiguity: Bentham continually finds himself forced to go over his classifications, to branch out into other classifica- tions that overlap and intermingle, to draw out his sentences to interminable lengths, dividing them up, clause upon clause, filling every ellipsis and pursuing every allusion, each clause mangled by colliding parenthetical phrases after nearly every word, enveloping them, and proliferating so rapidly that the author

32. Bentham, Nomography, vol. III, p. 267.

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic Device 29

no longer has time to enter them in new lists, and he abandons his manuscript and starts all over again from the beginning, this time promising himself to leave nothing unilluminated, nothing ambiguous. But, try as he may, he cannot keep his word, the matter escapes him, his subject reforms behind him even as he pursues it, and he must add a note, the note becomes a chapter, the chapter grows longer and longer, it turns into a book, but another unfinished one, better to start over. ... "Go on," we read, the last words of a manuscript, abandoned, on fictions. Of Laws was the result of a note and grew out of Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.

So Bentham tirelessly continued to write away - this theorist of transpar- ency, this promoter of a style free of all ambiguity, of a panoptic style, if we may use the term-producing unreadable texts, most of which were to see the light only after having been heavily edited by others: Dumont, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Francis Place, Bowring. . . . In addition, he preached the virtues of brev-

ity: "The shorter the sentence," we read in Nomography, in a section subtitled "Remedies for Longwindedness," "the better"-and drew up a theory of the art of abbreviations. An opaque panoptician.

February 1973

This content downloaded from 69.41.96.102 on Sat, 21 Jun 2014 14:11:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions