We are all under the biopolitical regime. Modern biopolitics creates a state of branding: excluding people in an exercise of power that enforces further surveillance on them and the broader community

In a chapter called Panopticism, Foucault (1975) begins by outlining two major forms through which discipline and surveillance were exerted. The first being the spatialisation of the plague-stricken town by means of segmenting and immobilising space as well as placing individuals within enclosures and under severe and permanent supervision. Such surveillance involves ‘tactics of individualizing disciplines’ (Foucault, 1975: 199) which proceed from a system of ‘permanent registration’ (registering the details of each inhabitant of the town) as well as mechanisms of distribution (in which each inhabitant is related to his place, his body and his condition) so that the disease is met by order, eradicating any confusion that may emerge out of the ‘mixing’ of bodies, be these living or dead. The second organisational form is that of the treatment of the leper which, unlike ‘the plague and its segmentations’, functions by means of separation and exclusion of the leper from the healthy community through mechanisms of ‘branding’, ‘dichotomisation’ and ‘exile-enclosure’. From these two different images (plague and leprosy) which underlies the two different projects (segmentation and separation), Foucault goes on to explain the two ways of exerting (political) power: discipline on the hand (as is the case with the plague), and exclusion on the other (as is the case with leprosy). However, and despite the difference of the two modes, they are ‘not incompatible ones’ (Foucault, 1995: 199) for power functions by way of excluding the ‘infected’ (here, the image of the leper stands as an emblematic figure of ‘beggars’, ‘vagabonds’, ‘madmen’, etc, just as the image of the plague symbolises ‘all forms of confusion and disorder’) and individualising the excluded so much so that lepers (all those who are symbolised by this image) are treated as plague victims (all those who are caught up within disorderly spaces). Hence, power is but a concurrent amalgamation of the two forms, and according to Foucault, Bentham’s Panopticon is par excellence ‘the architectural figure of this composition’ (1975: 200).

Bentham’s utilitarian plan for a prison which is based on an observing supervisor placed in a central tower and who can see without being seen, serves as a compelling paradigm for the kind of surveillance that is intrinsic to the compound power of exclusion and individualization. As Elden (2002: 244) explains, the model of the Panopticon is where the space of exclusion (of the figurative leper) ‘is rigidly regimented and controlled’ (as is the case with the figurative plague victim). The idea that ‘visibility is a trap’ (Foucault, 1975: 200) (i.e. the presence of the tall tower at the centre does not necessarily mean the supervisor is watching), that ‘collective’ individualities are overridden by separated ‘individualities’ (the treatment of lepers as a plague victims – the trinity of segmentation, individualisation and separation) and that power is ‘unverifiable’ (uncertainty about whether/when one is being watched), is what makes the model of Panopticon such a subtle and effective architectural apparatus. Power does not need to be enforced but merely ‘internalised’ through mechanisms of self-regulation. Such mechanisms render the observed as simultaneously the bearer (subject) of and the one subjected to power.

Not that the Panopticon is merely a method of observation devoid of other disciplinary modes of power but it is also a machine that could be used to ‘carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals’ (Foucault, 1975: 203) within a variety of institutional spaces, ranging from prisons to schools, hospitals, factories, etc. It is, hence, the way in which the metaphor of the Panopticon encapsulates different technologies and spaces of surveillance and discipline that Foucault places the notion of disciplinary society under the umbrella of panopticism in order to capture the diagrammatic strategies underlying power relations and in which ‘positions’ and ‘identities’ are fundamental features vis-à-vis the functioning of ‘panoptical’ surveillance.