But Foucault thinks it is a figure for the state of power in modern society as a whole. The Panopticon, again, was a design for a prison. This makes power flexible and even infinite: since you never know when power is operating, it’s actually operating all the time. Power should be “visible and unverifiable”: the tower makes visible the possibility of being watched, but, unable to look into the tower himself, the prisoner can’t know at what exact times he’s being watched.
In order for this to have a maximum effect, it should actually be the case that people can’t know for sure if, at any moment, they are in fact being watched.
What matters is that they think they are being watched. Again, it doesn’t matter if people are actually being watched. Panopticism, for Foucault, is this condition of feeling constantly under surveillance. It was always possible you were being watched, and so there was always a pressure to behave correctly. What was most important to Bentham is that even if a guard wasn’t actually watching a prisoner at a given time, the prisoner would have no way of knowing. A prisoner in a cell could be seen at any time by a guard stationed in the tower. To achieve this effect, Bentham imagined a prison with a tall central tower and cells arranged in a circle surrounding it. “Pan” means “all” and “optics” refers to sight the Panopticon is therefore an institution in which everything is seen, or everyone is constantly under surveillance. The third chapter of Foucault’s section on “Discipline” is called “Panopticism.” Here, Foucault draws inspiration from Jeremy Bentham’s proposed design of a prison he called a Panopticon.
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