Los Angeles and Foucault's Panopticon in Mike Davis's work

¶ … Foucault and Davis

The idea of the panopticon came from English philosopher and thinker Jeremy Bentham, after he helped to design a building in which one supervisor could observe all of the workers within. Eventually, Bentham's panopticon was converted into prison design, as people realized the benefits of a building which contains a point from where all of the prisoners inside could be watched by a single guard. While the architectural theory of the panopticon failed to catch on during Bentham's lifetime, many philosophers have since examined the idea from a variety of angles, discussing ideas like social control and authoritarianism. One of those philosophers was the Frenchman Michel Foucault, who wrote a book called Discipline and Punish in 1975 which contained many references to the panopticon as becoming the model for social structures. According to Foucault's view, the panopticon as imagined by Bentham has become more than just a physical building, and is now the model for how cities are planned and major institutions are formed. Foucault talks about the idea of "panopticism," which he describes as "the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social 'quarantine,' to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of 'panopticism'" (1984). Simply put, Foucault believes that the panopticon's original idea of ensuring that people obey a central authority has been transferred to the way society is made up today. When one thinks about the sheer number of surveillance cameras and other tools used to promote the government's presence, it is hard to say that Foucault's ideas were entirely off base.

In an article titled "Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space" which was published in 1992, author Mike Davis examines the second-largest city in America from a unque perspective, as he analyzes the idea of modern urban environments as representing the panopticon. Davis begins his article by reviewing the many ways in which Los Angeles is set up to be a hostile, closed off place where people are scared of strangers and keep to themselves. According to Davis, society's overwhelming need to secure its major cites has led to a situation where they basically become panopticons, because the citizens of urban areas are made to feel as though they are constantly being watched. The idea of ever-present supervision by an unseen authority figure is the heart of the panopticon concept, and as Davis sees things, Los Angeles has adopted all of the philosophical ideas put forth by Foucault. Davis mentions the rising use of personal security systems to suggest that people living in Los Angeles are always being filmed without their knowledge, which is similar to what Foucault observes when he mentions panopticism as a growing trend. Continuing with this theory, Davis discusses the ways in which Los Angeles restricts movement for its citizens, with poor highway design and urban planning leading to traffic jams, urban sprawl and other trends. In the end, Davis' views Los Angeles as the modern representation of panopticism as first imagined by Foucault.