CARCERI
Imagine it, rising out of the ground, a monstrous geometry of purpose-built dread.
There is no beauty in this place. Rendered in brick, iron, or hewn rock, it’s an early-industrial Gothic that’s logical, logistical, and utterly unforgiving.
Skylights in the expansive, domed roof drip-feed a grey, overcast gloom into the vast, perfectly circular space below. Forensic and shadowless, the gloom reveals hundreds of barred cells, levels upon levels, rings upon rings, all arranged around the imposing watchtower that stands ominously, like a colossus, in the middle. The tower offers multiple surveillance platforms from which the activity of each and every cell can be seen, noted and acted upon by the inspectorate. Every gesture, every flicker of anger or doubt, the slightest hint of resistance or insurrection, is made starkly visible to prison guards. But the guards themselves cannot be seen: views into the tower are obscured by darkened glass, curtains. Occasionally, one catches a glimpse of movement, or what might be movement, but it’s indistinct, or maybe a trick of the light.
In this asymmetric setup, a dark and insidious magic takes hold. Not only are inmates physically imprisoned here, their absolute obedience is demanded, and made possible, by the visibility – the sense of being watched, without the evidence of being watched – to which they are unendingly subjected. It is a ruthlessly efficient deterrent, but also terrifying in the extreme.
The abject terror of it lies in its psychological effect. The inmates, always exposed, internalise the gaze of their guards and, in doing so, make them part of their own consciousness. As the very core of their being is unpicked by the relentless pressure of the imagined, omnipresent eye of the tower, their lives cease to be their own. Their lives become performance and spectacle; they discipline themselves; they become their own, exacting jailers. This is no ordinary building. It is a meticulously engineered machine, one that works towards nothing less than the absolute disembodiment of freedom. And this it achieves by extending, on behalf of the nation state it serves, a brutal, radically new and invisible power into the deepest depths of the individual human psyche.
REVOLUTION AND REFORM
We are imagining the bowels of Jeremy Bentham’s all-seeing ‘Panopticon’, conceived in 1791, as revolution raged in France, threatening to infect Britain and beyond with its iconoclastic politics.
To say political paranoia was high during this time is an understatement. In the same decade, Britain would pass its Unlawful Societies Act (1799) ‘for the more effectual Suppression of Societies established for Seditious and Treasonable Purposes; and for better preventing Treasonable and Seditious Practices’. The act afforded the state unprecedented access to information about the private lives of its citizens. America would go even further, allowing for the unlimited detention and deportation of any suspected foreign national above the age of fourteen, with its controversial Alien Enemies Act (1798). Forgotten for centuries, it was most recently dusted off and re-invoked by President Trump at his inauguration.
State control over its citizens was, of course, nothing new in itself. Previous feudal systems of governance, used from the Middle Ages onwards, were dependent upon control, reinforced by an accepted religious apparatus that inscribed and upheld the divine right of kings. Within these systems, the rule of law seemed haphazard at best. The punishments that were meted out were often brutal, disproportionate and made into demeaning public spectacles, their purpose being to appease the wrath of the king and, in doing so, underline a bold and emphatic statement about his absolute power. Rex Est Lex; the King is Law.
The eighteenth-century Enlightenment saw sustained challenges to this traditional, orthodox thinking. Driven by an innate belief in the dignity of Man, but also informed by more contemporary economic, utilitarian and rationalist concerns, Enlightenment thinkers began to question this feudal and essentially despotic setup.
Public executions, designed as an unambiguous assertion of absolute power, were actually unpredictable and liable to break out into rioting and chaos at the whim of the public mood. They were inefficient; they mutilated or destroyed healthy adult bodies that had an economic value and potential. Meanwhile, the severity of punishment, noted in Cesare Beccaria’s On Crime and Punishments (1764), was surely a less effective deterrent than the certainty of punishment. For the latter, the rule of law could no longer be the whimsical affair it had been. The law needed to be fully institutionalised and evenly applied; resistant to power and privilege; consistent; proportional; dispassionate, and fair.
In the course of this overhaul, the system shifts in emphasis, from bodily punishment as public spectacle to discipline, a private, pervasive force, that’s intended to correct, reform and ‘normalise’ individuals. And it was on the back of this seismic paradigm shift that Jeremy Bentham invented his Panopticon.
FROM BENTHAM TO FOUCAULT
Jeremy Bentham never lived to see one of his Panopticon designs built. Globally, approximately 300 prisons would be inspired by his plans, including the notorious Statesville Prison in Joliet, Illinois, which was briefly and controversially reopened during the recent pandemic.
But Bentham’s lasting legacy isn’t the Panopticon building itself but what Bentham himself identified as ‘the sentiment of a sort of invisible omnipresence’ that it inculcated. Its true importance lies here as it’s here that so much power is both concentrated and hidden. The guards must watch for something: the state defines what is acceptable, desirable, or productive; the guards scan for any deviation from that and correct or punish it accordingly; and their continual, unseen gaze internalises, in their subjects, the very values they uphold. In this way, what is expected, what is ‘normal’, becomes defined, imposed, internalised, and naturalised. Not only are the guards made invisible, but the very values they are employed to uphold become invisible too.
The dynamic is one that would form the primary template for modern society, leaving no corner of life untouched. Twentieth-century cultural theorist Michel Foucault explores how the apparatus of school and work environments (rosters; timetables; examinations), combined with the constant, implied surveillance of Panopticism, turns its subjects into economically productive ‘docile bodies’. He shows how fixed notions of ‘healthy’ or ‘normal’ come to define the clinically insane. ‘[I]t is not necessary to use force’, writes Foucault,
“to constrain the convict to good behaviour, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations […] He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”
INTIMACY
Nor is even human intimacy exempt. In his History of Sexuality, Foucault observes how ‘sex became a matter that required the social body as a whole, and virtually all of its individuals to place itself under surveillance’. The wholesale pathologising of sex that proliferated in the nineteenth century, combined with social attempts to rigorously police and control it, turned everyone into subjects of power.
Early clinical definitions of female hysteria held the ‘nervous woman’ up against received notions of feminine behaviour, and prepped her for treatment if she was uninterested in sex, if she was overly interested in sex, or otherwise found wanting. There’d be the identification and suppression of the ‘Malthusian couple’, too, partnered people whose future children the state deemed undesirable or economically unviable. ‘Perversion’, meanwhile, became a clinical catch-all for everyone who wasn’t heteronormative, including gay people, themselves a ‘new species’, writes Foucault, in this panoptical taxonomy. And because these new, medicalised models were internalised, these diagnostic labels weren’t just tools of oppression: they informed how those being labelled saw and understood themselves.
If this sounds like a nightmare history of medicine that’s thankfully buried in the distant past, one only has to look at the gay aversion therapy routinely offered by the NHS in the 1970s; or Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder in the current psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual; or the ongoing attempts in several countries to criminalise the purchase of consensual adult services, legislation that claims to “protect” vulnerable people but often ends up driving intimacy and sexual expression further underground, to see how these impulses doggedly persist.
But, while intimacy is certainly circumscribed by state power, it also exists relationally to power, defining itself against power and its accepted social milieu.
It’s often said that Shakespeare invented contemporary romantic love, and that’s made all the more incredible when you consider that, in his own time, marriages were strategic, economic alliances between households that upheld social order and cohesion. During the Renaissance, the dominant social unit wasn’t the loving couple or the nuclear family that followed, but the extended household or community group. When the dominant social unit finally becomes the nuclear family, a shift that occurs from the eighteenth century onwards, intimacy pushes again, insisting on its truth. Evidently, monogamous, heteronormative marriages remain the mainstay (noticeably, polygamy remains illegal in the UK), but, within those restraints, sweeping changes take place, most clearly seen in the changing legislation on the same.
The Matrimonial Causes Act (1857), for example, began to make divorce more accessible to more people, newly codifying cruelty as legitimate grounds for a divorce and establishing, for the first time, a woman’s right to own property. It paves the way for the Divorce Reform Act (1969), with its attendant child custody reforms, current to this day.
In America, interracial marriages were legalised as late as 1967, following the Supreme Court’s overturning of the decision to convict Richard and Mildred Loving for violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act (1924). In the same year, Britain decriminalised gay acts in private, before lowering the age of consent in 1994, and again in 2000. Gay civil partnerships were recognised in 2004, and gay marriages in 2014, with the exception of Northern Ireland, where they were only made permissible in 2020.
Kink communities have perhaps been less successful than their LGBT counterparts: R v Brown (2003) ruled that consent was not a defence to actual bodily harm, effectively making BDSM practices involving any amount of injury illegal. That notwithstanding, recent developments in prosecutorial discretion seem to informally draw a better balance of upholding the rights of consenting adults while protecting the truly vulnerable and at risk.
Even from this brief précis of legislative changes, a complex interplay between power and intimacy begins to emerge. Both power and intimacy are largely invisible, and both are usually assumed to be timeless when, in actuality, they’re always historically contingent, so it’s often hard to discern what’s going on. But in the legislative changes, we see evidence of intimacy challenging state power, and, more importantly, winning.
Intimacy, in this way, becomes a site of resistance, an often high-risk escape route away from, and a bold, poking finger in the glaring, all-seeing eye of power. It’s a protracted conflict, with many casualties, to be sure. Almost two centuries elapse between 1835 when James Pratt and John Smith were hanged for being gay, and Northern Ireland’s recognising of gay marriage in 2020, with Oscar Wilde’s daring to write about the ‘love that must not be named’ in 1892, and the chemical castration of Enigma-codebreaker Alan Turing, following a conviction for ‘gross indecency’ in 1952 in between.
Power is anathema to intimacy and quickly destroys it. Predictably, the tools of the Panopticon – surveillance, control, coercion, gaslighting, lack of communication – are precisely the things that destroy intimacy on an individual, interpersonal level as well as a societal level.
But the engines of intimacy – desire, connection, authenticity – are persistent. Given time and faith, they achieve the impossible: they eke out a sanctuary away from the prying, unseen, all-seeing eye of panoptical power. More than anything else, intimacy challenges and eventually changes power, then challenges it again, and changes it some more.
For those brave enough and determined enough, intimacy is nothing less than a political revolution in the making. It constitutes the most fragile, most precious sliver of opportunity to step beyond the internalised, invisible, panoptical prison of normalcy and social convention. Those who dare to choose and embrace intimacy truly challenge and change both themselves and the world.