"A row of screaming Russian dolls": Escaping the Panopticon in David Mitchell's number9dream

Abstract

In 1786, Jeremy Bentham began a series of letters detailing a controversial prison structure. Printed in 1791, the preface opened with a hefty promise: “Morals reformed health preserved industry invigorated instruction diffused public burthens lightened [. . .] all by a simple idea in Architecture!” (31). Bentham’s ‘simple idea’ was the panopticon, a new architectural concept and principles aimed at reforming an outdated prison system. In his design, prisoners were separately housed in transparent cells around the outer ring of a circular prison, built around a central inspection tower. Allowing a perfect view of all inmates at all times, blinds at the windows of the tower made it impossible for prisoners to see when they were being watched. Run by a single inspector, it harnessed a powerful method of psychological control. Bentham’s letters emphasise “the most important point” of its design: inmates “should always feel themselves as if under inspection,” fostering constantly compliant behavior (43). Bentham’s model penitentiary was never built. Yet its principles of surveillance, mental control and societal self-regulation continue to resurface as contemporary criticism explores their wider implications. In Discipline and Punish (1975), Michel Foucault’s reading of Bentham’s legacy moves the critical focus from the prison’s architecture to a more widespread theory of panopticism, investigating a leaking of these principles into everyday life as a sinister and dehumanised method of control. Leading on from Bentham’s later plans for other panoptic structures – in mental institutions, hospitals, and even schools – Foucault uses the term panopticism to warn of its “generalizable model of functioning,” arguing “the Panopticon presents a cruel, ingenious cage” whose surveillancebased discipline and control “spread throughout the whole social body” (205-209). In bringing Bentham’s principles out of the prison and into contemporary social structures, Foucault’s reading of the panopticon’s darker consequences has had such far-reaching impact – in literature, comics, computer games and even Doctor Who 1 – that social historians are now at pains to defend Bentham’s original panopticon. In “Deconstructing Panopticism into the Plural Panopticons” (2012), Anne Brunon-Ernst emphasizes the liberal, utilitarian aims of Bentham’s project, arguing for