"Panopticism is thus not a technology of incarceration as much as it is a form of power that “programmes, at the level of an elementary and easily transferable mechanism, the basic functioning of a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms,” reshaping subjectivity and social relations as it is increasingly installed and integrated within them.53

Reflecting on Jeremy Bentham’s writings, scholarship on the panopticon has almost always described it exclusively in terms of observation, characterizing it as a technology structured by visual exposure and concealed oversight. What has been fatally missed in these characterizations were Bentham’s plans for a network of speaking tubes that would allow for a guard to audibly communicate with each prisoner at will. The panopticon thus would act not just as an observatory, but also as a network of communication where Bentham noted that: “(orders could be) circulated instantaneously, with the utmost facility, to the greatest distance. Even the intervention of the local inspector is not necessary: a call from a speaking trumpet brings the remotest prisoner to the front of his cell, where he may be seen by the customer, as well as heard. Under each speaking-trumpet hangs a list of the prisoners to whose cells it corresponds. The names are on separate cards, which are shifted as often as a prisoner happens to be shifted from cell to cell…”54

While the panopticon has been principally understood as an architecture premised upon optical supervision, Bentham’s plans for a network of speaking tubes in the panopticon significantly complicates this picture by introducing a communicative dimension to the prison that should push us to substantively reevaluate the conceptual limits of panopticism.

Whereas the panopticon’s observational structure is premised on the unidirectional flow of visual information from the prisoner to the guard, in which the imprisoned subject can be seen by the guards but cannot see the guards watching them, the prison’s communicative structure facilitated by its speaking tubes allows for information to flow back and forth between the prisoner and guard in the form of spoken messages, and thus creates the possibility of implementing more responsive and elaborate forms of intervention and control.55 The communicative architecture of the panopticon forms a centralized network of circuits between the central guard tower and each prisoner, in which the prisoner is subjected to persistent surveillance but also must persistently remain ready to respond and reply to a guard’s messages. The digital partitioning of prisoners into cells thus not only drives prisoners to supervise themselves because they are visually exposed, but also compels them to remain receptive and responsive to commands and queries because they are communicatively exposed as nodes of a carceral network.56 Disciplinary power thus facilitates a form of subjectification structured by both observation and communication, facilitating a recursive informatic capture and networked control which would later come to be theorized as the science of cybernetics.57

The communicative dimension of the prison to some degree resembles the forms of informatic domination which were present elsewhere in disciplinary societies—exemplified as the confession of crimes to the court, the confession of sins to the priest, the confession of symptoms to the doctor, or the confession of dreams to the psychoanalyst—in which subjects were compelled to reveal their inner selves so their behavior could be modified on the basis of what they had divulged. The true technical innovation of Bentham’s design was thus not the imposition of observation or communication as such, but the articulation of observation and communication as centralized networks, a distributed form which Foucault noted “makes any apparatus of power more intense” as a result of “its continuous functioning and its automatic mechanisms.”58 The panopticon was appealing as an ideal model not only because of its subjectifying function but also because of its efficiency, allowing fewer guards to exert power over greater numbers of prisoners in a network of observation and communication. By rendering power never always and everywhere at work but always and everywhere present as a potential, networks made the exercise of power more efficient and more diffuse.

Bentham wrote that while the observational power of the panopticon was intended to negate the prisoner’s opacity and render them wholly transparent to observation, its communicative power was intended to negate the prisoner’s capacity to think, noting that “action scarcely follows thought” and that a quicker “execution might here be made to follow upon command.”59 Prisoners who were expected to surveill themselves still needed time to contemplate their relation to the panopticon in order to fully constitute themselves as the disciplinary subjects of panoptic surveillance, and thus the need to think represented a barrier to power’s efficiency. Bentham thus imagined that the elimination of contemplation in favor of communication would render power more immediate, imagining prisoners not only as subjects that surveill themselves as objects but as objects that are subjected to the communication of networks.60

The communicative structure of Bentham’s design should lead us to retheorize the prison and disciplinary power more generally as not only being structured by a panopticism, but by what we can call a panreticularity, in which everything is persistently subsumed within and exposed to the communication of networks. Just as earlier we had to depart from Deleuze in order to properly theorize the digital continuity between discipline and control, here we have to begin to depart from Foucault in order to fully theorize the way in which the disciplinary subject was not simply the subject of observation, but the subject of communication as well.61 In so doing, we will be able to outline the panoptic and the panreticular as complementary modalities of a shared historical movement that began as discipline and then accelerated into control, a movement which above all else pursues the automation of politics through the automation of the subject.

In order to begin diagramming panreticular power and the automation of the subject, we can again turn to Discipline and Punish and explore Foucault’s theorization of the docile body in order to chart how docility emerges not simply as a result of observation but of networked communication and computation. Foucault defines the disciplines as “projects of docility,” noting that a “body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved.”62 Disciplinary power is thus interested in “the formation of a relation” that makes life “more obedient as it becomes more useful,” just as it con­versely makes life more useful as it becomes more obedient.63 Through the production of docile life, discipline aims to “obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost, … bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible, … (and ultimately) increase both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system.”64

Docile technologies are digital and disciplinary technologies that subordinate life by dividing it into ever more minute elements, having as their horizon the goal of becoming an “infinitesimal power” which nonetheless operates upon all things.65 This focus on the infinitesimal is applied to the body as well as its gestures and actions, transforming power into a form of “uninterrupted, constant coercion, super­vising the processes of the activity rather than its result … according to a codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement.”66 As a result of these transformations, discipline and docility emerge as “an economic or technical rationality” that facilitates the “calculus of the infinitesimal and the infinite,” operating upon the smallest fragments of each particular life while expanding as a totality that is intended to encompass all life.67

Above all else, a docile life is a life that has been subjected to a “precise system of command” that places “bodies in a little world of signals to each of which is attached a single, obligatory response.”68 This little world of signals treats each life not as a subject but simply as a component of a larger system within which a life’s value does not arise from its “understanding” but only from “perceiving the signal and reacting to it immediately, according to a more or less artificial, prearranged code.”69 In other words, what Foucault calls a docile life is perhaps better described as a reticulated life, a life reimagined as communicatively receiving and responding to the commands and codes of networks in an automated fashion. Just as we saw in the panopticon, corresponding processes of observation and communication join “the analysable body to the manipulable body” in a network of power, in one gesture capturing and partitioning life digitally and in another corresponding gesture subjecting that life to a networked power.70

This “machin­ery of power that explores (life), breaks it down and rearranges it” desires to produce a subject that is capable of undertaking its own productive activity, but which remains subordinated to the communicative domination and dynamics of the larger system.71 This form of power thus does not aim to simply exert itself upon life, but rather aims to technically integrate it totally as simply another functional component of its operations, “making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through these power relations.”72 In other words, the imposition of the network form aspires to produce automated subjects, subjects that are subordinated to the networked world of signals they are subsumed with, that are “punctuated and sustained by injunctions” in which each order “does not need to be explained or formulated; it must trigger off the required behaviour and that is enough."73

The digital continuity between discipline and control, the acceleration of discipline into control, and the automation of the subject can be traced in the historical development of policing more broadly, which was shaped by a technical evolution that began with the prison and arrives today in the nascent field of nanotechnology. In the 18th century, Foucault notes that police power emerged conjunctively with prisons to transform “the whole social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized network."74

Ian Alan Paul