The panopticon

Sunday morning, March 10

Kilmainham Gaol

After teaching Foucault for many years, I began to think of the idea of the panopticon as a metaphor for the problem of self-sanction and the perception of continuous surveillance, where human behavior suffers from the intensity of normalization. Kilmainham Gaol was one of the jail designs most directly influenced by Bentham's idea of the panopticon: a few guards could see into every cell in the prison (first picture). The glassed-in ceiling provided a view to the heavens.