On Drones and the Panopticon

Thomas L. Lynn, Jr.

This past Friday (19 February 2016) marked the deadline for owners of so called private drones to register with the FAA, a moment which passed with little fanfare, but which at least grants us opportunity for some thoughts on the significance of drone technology and its proliferation over the past two or so decades. While originally attaining prominence for use in an explicitly military context, of late it is increasingly installed in other ‘applications’ seemingly more benign, or even amusing. This development though is not simply an accident, but indeed flows with an almost organic logic from drone technology epitomization of a more deeply situated technology - that of the Panopticon.

The Panopticon...an ominous word corresponding to a portentous notion. Originally, an architectural schema of Jeremy Bentham for the ideal construction of a prison, the principle underlying the logic of its construction would render it a blueprint for more than a building, but for the basis of a disciplinary society. Hence Michel Foucault remarks in his seminal consideration of Panopticism,

...[T[he Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form: its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use. (Discipline and Punish 205)

But what is that political technology? To recapitulate the outline of Bentham’s first casting of the project, we can echo Foucault’s own description well enough, namely, “...at the periphery, an annular building; at the center, a tower…” Within the “periphic buildiing” cells are so arranged as to enable them and their inhabitants to be viewed from the central tower, though in a manner whereby they are precluded from seeing back into that tower, or, if you like, from watching the watcher. (ibid.,200)  “Hence, the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” (ibid., 201)  The basis of that automatic functioning then is surveillance, and, moreover, a particular sort of surveillance in which, again as Foucault puts, it the seeing/being seen dyad is severed. “...in the periphic ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.” (ibid., 202)

The significance of this dissociation is thrown into sharper relief by a consideration of the relationship instantiated by gazing, or the Gaze itself. To render the matter after a roughly Lacanian fashion, the gaze of another represents the compromise of one’s experience as a free, as an unfettered subjectivity. The encounter, though, of the perceived, fixed look of another constitutes an experience of, if not one’s outright objectification, at least that very possibility. That such an encounter can arise not only with regard to other “uncontroversially” sentient beings (e.g., people, cats, or octopi), but also ‘mere’ objects (e.g., paintings, televisions, a gaping elevator shaft) proves to render this significance of the phenomenon all the more unsettling. Yet what marks these various occasions of the gaze is at least a capacity to relate with the onlooker in a manner that can aspire to a reassertion of one’s subjectivity, one’s freedom. Yet among the salient features of the panopticon is its annulment of this capacity for relationality. By contrast, the watcher remains invisible and thus immune to the defiance of the watched, at least inasmuch as that defiance is manifested through their own gaze, their own fixed return of the searching stare  of the overseer. In virtue of this, the negation of the person as a subject within the panopticon is radicalized. And, maybe even more remarkably, this de-personalization extends not only to the watched, but even to the watchers. For, in contrast to how their position might be seen as an exhibition of sovereignty or power under a different more monarchical dispensation, within the disciplinary society enacted by panopticism, they are merely functionaries of a power which is decentered from affiliation with any singular individual.

For, as Foucault notes, “Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of  bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up...The Panopticon is  a marvellous machine which, whatever use one many wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power.” (ibid., 202) Now, the ramifications of this protean adaptability of the panopticon extend beyond its capacity for the subjection of individuals to also its suitability for the thematic coordination of historical processes that might otherwise be conceived as heterogenous, or even disparate: the economic, juridico-political, and the scientific. By means of this coordination, the disciplinary society is brought into being. (ibid, 218 ff.).

It will be salutary to recall also here in what discipline consists. For it would be natural enough to identify it with a specific institution such as the police, or a broader framework, such as the State. Yet, Foucault is quick to resist such an identification, marking it as a mistake, Rather, he avers,

‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; is is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures levels of application, targets; it is a  ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology. (ibid., 215)

The question is begged as to who or what then wields the power which is exercised by the framework of the panopticon? Certainly, a straightforward reply is no longer possible here (if it ever was) in virtue of the structurally impersonal nature of the “all seeing” matrix. It is here that we can circle back to our point of departure, namely the question of the drone. Predominantly, it has been a technology available and controlled by the state apparatus until the past four or so years (speaking approximately). Broader commercial availability has undermined that monopoly somewhat. Thus the action instantiated in past Friday’s deadline to bring private owners within the registering mechanism of the bureaucracy. In this way, the drones, as the eyes of the panopticon, are at least implicitly subordinated to the logic of the broader disciplinary apparatus, even if loosely so. But the main thing to glean here is how this consolidation, and the particulars of the production, distribution and usage of the drone is, at all events are brought under the sway of a specifically capitalist array. And, in fact, this too is not accident, but is expressive of the connection between a disciplinary and a capitalist society.Again, we can turn to Foucault’s acuity. Following on a reflection on how the technologies of the disciplinary apparatus, and panopticism in particular enable capital to “solve” the problem of multiplicities, he goes on to say, “...the technological mutations of the apparatus of production, the division of labour and the elaboration of disciplinary techniques sustained an ensemble of very close relations...Each make the other possible and necessary; and each provides the model of the other.” (ibid., 221) So when are confronted by the question as to who or what exercises the power of the disciplinary apparatus, we are brought again to the spectre of not so much a class, as class society itself. That I proffer the latter derives from the circumstance that class society ultimately negates the agency of all within it, regardless of whether they might happen to be among the more ‘beneficially situated’. Or, at least, it conspires to produce the appearance of such negation.

Yet the drone assists our appreciation of this circumstance not merely in virtue of the happenstance of the political, economic and legal processes that have accompanied its emergence. Indeed, these are almost of secondary importance. Rather, it is of avail as precisely a concretization of the principle of the panopticon in a form which not only grants its a new and unnerving mobility, but which further radicalizes the objectifying power of its gaze. For by the drone, the onlooker is removed even further from an implicitly human subject. Indeed, in the ultimate instances of fully automated drones, the human subject is absent altogether. And thus one is brought under the fixed surveillance of a mere machine. Hence, the capacity for meaningful relationality disappears, and one is designated a mere object. Is this the world into which we wish to enter? If not, then shall we not do well to scrutinize the drone more cautiously? Should we not consider more particularly how complicit we are with this technology, and the technology of the Panopticon itself?  But what would this involve?

To draw my thoughts to a coda, it seems that one surprising possibility presents itself here. That possibility is to actually trust ourselves and each other to create a different, less mechanized world.

Work Cited:

Foucault, Michelle, (trans., Alan Sheridan).(1995) Discipline and Punish - The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.