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Bentham's proposals for penal reform were published in Panopticon; or, The Inspection House (written in 1786) and its two Postscripts (1790, 1791). Focusing on these works, and diverging from accounts of the Panopticon that draw heavily on Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, this chapter argues that the optical environment of the panopticon (including the fictitious entities, recording devices, and communication systems that play a role within it) constructs a virtual reality that, by eclipsing the ‘real’ and re-contextualizing the prisoner's actions, provides a new way of shaping behaviour. It concludes with a discussion of later stages of Bentham's panopticon idea, evident in his unpublished plans for a theme park, to be called Panopticon Hill, which placed the Panopticon Penitentiary alongside: a Panopticon Tavern, complete with optical entertainments; a ‘Sotimion or establishment for the preservation of female delicacy’; and a Nothotrophium or asylum for the innocent offspring of clandestine love.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen shows surveillance by the Stasi as an integral part of the East German past. Yet surveillance is not solely achieved through sight, but more importantly through sophisticated methods of eavesdropping. Aural surveillance is the focus of this chapter, which uses Michel Foucault’s Panopticon as the basis for analyzing the power relations between observer and observed, and how the observed internalizes the system of oppression. This chapter explores the two functions of sound in the film: sound as a means of oppression, and at the same time as a vehicle to overcome it.

This chapter treats the fundamental pleasure principle of Bentham's utility, which is Smith's value‐in‐use. It covers a range of Bentham's writings including Principles of Morals and Legislation, ‘Table of the Springs of Action,’ ‘Manual of Political Economy,’ ‘Panopticon,’ ‘Defense of Usury,’ and ‘Sextus.’ Contrary to expectations of a dry Gradgrindian style, Bentham is a spokesman for pleasure in works that are a pleasure to read. Topics include: self‐interest; sympathy; the moral sanction/impartial spectator; critical thinking; critique of asceticism; fascinations and frustrations of language; push‐pin versus poetry in a Utilitarian assessment. The chapter proceeds to an interpretation of Dickens's Hard Times that goes against the grain of most criticism, arguing that Mr. Gradgrind exemplifies not mistaken faith in a false Smith‐Benthamite creed, but failure to hold true to that creed's own first principle of pleasure.

This chapter turns to discuss the contest for the virtual in the twenty-first century as represented in the fiction of William Gibson. In Gibson's earlier speculative fictions of the near-to-distant future, power largely means corporate power, following the posited decline of the nation-state; more recent work, set in the approximate present, place the intelligence agencies in play alongside international corporate interests. In opposition to such power, we find various marginal communities and oppositional groups who occupy outlaw spaces, both real and virtual, with Gibson's protagonists usually occupying an ambivalent position between the powerful and their opponents. The discussion examines Gibson’s contrasting of the Borgesian Aleph (a virtual universe of infinite potential), and Bentham's Panopticon (a virtual prison of total surveillance). It uses the dialectic between these two to ask questions of the contest for the virtual that currently occupies us as we balance the emergence of a potential information utopia against the simultaneous rise of the surveillance state.

This chapter explores C. K. Ogden’s project Basic English against the background of the contemporary international language movement. An exposition of the international language movement, its political and philosophical commitments, is followed by an examination of the features of Ogden’s Basic and the rhetoric surrounding it. The connections between the theories developed in The Meaning of Meaning and Basic English are looked at in detail. The chapter closes with a discussion of the influence of Jeremy Bentham and his Panopticon on Basic, and of the reaction of George Orwell to the project, as revealed in his published writings and correspondence with Ogden, and in Newspeak, his parody of constructed languages.

This chapter explores young women’s experience of leadership in both community organizations and social movement activity. Using the Foucauldian concept of the panopticon, it demonstrates how both non-members of the Arab community and members of it engage in disciplinary tactics towards these young women for their behaviour, asking them to uphold contradictory standards of gendered behaviour. Young women are highly conscious of their position under constant observation, and use a variety of tactics to engage with it.

Raymond Bellour explains why he returned to a preoccupation with cinema in general, and the spectator in particular, and how he came to write Le Corps du cinéma, emphasizing his interest in the diverse dispositifs represented by Foucault’s Panopticon on one hand, and by the phenomena of panoramas and phantasmagorias on the other. He describes how his discovery of Daniel Stern’s The Interpersonal World of the Infant marked a critical turning point, leading him to explore an analogy between the infant and a spectator watching a film in the cinema – an analogy that enabled him to break with the psychoanalytic model, reflected in his eventual substitution of the notion of the body for that of the text.

The chapter begins with a brief history of surveillance starting in the 15th century and the emergence of a “policed society” based on systematically gathering and analyzing personal information. In such a society agents of the state, commerce and industry come to exercise control over ever-wider social and geographical areas. Bentham with his Panopitcon and Foucault and many others have noted these changes. The changes went beyond prisons to schools and factories. Ubiquitous computing is a part of this with ever more networked sensors and measures of time, place and behavior woven together. The chapter defines the new surveillance and contrasts it with traditional surveillance. This is done through identifying dimensions by which any surveillance setting and/or act can be categorized. The new surveillance tends to be more intensive, extensive, extends the senses, is based on aggregates and big data, has lower visibility, and involves involuntary compliance, decreased cost and remote locations. While the historical trend here is clear, it is more difficult to generalize about other characteristics such as whether or not surveillance has become more deceptive, more valid in its conclusions and is harder to neutralize.

This chapter surveys the history of the emerging academic subfield of surveillance studies, noting key developments in surveillance theory that start with the invocation of Nineteen Eighty-Four and George Orwell by James Rule. Surveillance theory moves, in the 1970s and 1980s toward the rich and generative work of Michel Foucault, and his revision of Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the ‘panopticon’, and then beyond Foucault into new territory. The chapters argues that an often-neglected link between these ideas is that of the utopian genre, which provides a challenging and illuminating set of texts through which to explore some of these notions. The chapter shows how these texts have been used, or might be used profitably to explore concepts raised by such foundational surveillance studies scholars as Gary T. Marx and David Lyon. It shows that more recent and important scholarship by, amongst others, Kevin Haggerty and Zygmunt Bauman, continues to invoke (even if negatively) utopian texts, suggesting the challenge and enlightenment such works still offer to surveillance studies more generally.

This chapter is focused on the intersection of technology, warfare, and visuality. It explores the relationship of orientalism to information technology in the context of “small war”. Said’s Orientalism is read as a failure of the Panopticon, as a story about disenchantment with, and breakdown of, the technical means of seeing the other. Modern information technology and drone fleets represent a new possibility to see the other, where earlier orientalist models failed. This kind of visuality, however, carries its own failures. The argument is that once that second failure occurs, new ontologies—such as that of the network—have to be postulated to understand the other and the foe. This ontology of the network, and the attached technical assemblage, represent a retreat from trying to fix the essence, oriental or otherwise, of a given people. It forms a kind of erasure of the other that can also be detected in videogames and war-games. The weapon is what remains.

New Historicist critics typically approached the novel as if it were a ‘technology of power’ whose main effect was to discipline readers. Recent scholarship, by contrast, has provided a richer understanding of the narrative machinery of eighteenth-century fiction by emphasizing the variety of different technologies available to authors as models for thinking about the different effects their narratives could have on readers. As the Introduction explains, this book aims to reconcile these two approaches by drawing on the work of ‘constructivist’ sociologists and philosophers of technology to argue that although eighteenth-century authors thought in different ways about the mechanics of narrative, they shared a common preoccupation with the problem of how novels mediate human subjectivity. Complementing recent New Formalist work on Romantic organicism, Novel Machines offers a genealogy of modern structuralist approaches to the mechanics and dynamics of narrative and recovers the complexity of the eighteenth-century idea of ‘mechanical form’.

Algorithms play a fundamental role in governing the conditions of the intelligible and the sensible online. If users provide the data, the techniques, and procedures to make sense of it, to navigate, assemble, and make meaningful connections among individual pieces of data is increasingly being delegated to various forms of algorithms. In the case of the world’s biggest and most used social media platform, Facebook, algorithmic mechanisms shape the concerted distribution of people, information, actions, and ways of seeing and being seen. The chapter investigates how this kind of algorithmic intervention into people’s information-sharing practices takes place and what are the principles and logics of Facebook’s algorithmic governance. Through an analysis of the algorithmic logics structuring the flow of information and communication on Facebook’s news feed, the argument is made that the regime of visibility constructed imposes a perceived threat of invisibility on the part of the participatory subject.

Chapter 11 addresses a crossover domain in which images and artifacts co-exist in surveillance. It turns the question of visibility around: not just what we see, but how we are seen, including how we are constituted through various gazes. While most analyses of surveillance look to technology and security, this chapter explores the “culture of surveillance,” in which surveillance is an interactive practice of social-ordering and world-ordering. It traces the politics of surveillance through an analysis of historical and social trends in China and Euro-America: the pre-modern society of sovereignty, the modern society of discipline, and the contemporary networked society of control. It thus compares how surveillance provokes censorship, self-discipline, and creative social-ordering. Chapter 11 concludes that these are political rather than technical or cultural issues, and that they pose problems for both democratic societies and authoritarian states. It thus uses non-Western concepts and experiences to explore the sensible politics of visual artifacts.

Getting to grips with Bentham’s thought is shown to be tricky in that the majority of his writings were not published in his lifetime. Interpretation is involved in the very selection of texts of Bentham on which to focus. Issues in Bentham interpretation are also complicated by the different ways in which he formulates key aspects of his doctrines. Overall Bentham emerges as an Enlightenment thinker who was dedicated to providing a rational formulation of political issues and policy. His many projects involved the Panopticon, an architectural device that he held would simplify issues of custody and punishment. Foucault’s reading of Bentham is shown to rely heavily on his interpretation of what he terms Panopticisim, which is the onset of a pervasive disciplinary society. If Foucault’s reading of Bentham tends to merge him with a wider discourse it is acknowledged that Foucault identifies a darker side of Bentham’s reforming project.