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Left: Elevation, section, and plan of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, drawn by architect Willey Reveley in 1791. Right: First dispenser for the Pill, 1963.
sey; national prisons in Dublin, Bogotá, and Cuba’s Isle of Pines; and the jail in Mataró, Spain, designed by Elies Rogent. For Foucault, the panopticon isn’t just a simple disciplinary device. It’s the material model of disciplinary knowledge-power as a form of “social orthopedics”:96 power and its specific modes of knowledge and surveillance materialized in the form of physical architecture (whether of a prison, school, hospital, barracks, or factory) that automates movement, controls the gaze, programs action, and ritualizes everyday bodily practices. In all such cases, disciplinary power is, according to Foucault “exercised through its invisibility . . . and the examination is the technique by which power, instead of emitting the signs of its potency, 96. Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New York Press, 2000), 57.