The post-panoptic society? Reassessing Foucault in surveillance studies

Abstract

Foucault's panopticon has become the leading scholarly model or metaphor for analysing surveillance. Surveillance studies scholars have recently turned away from Foucault in an attempt to understand contemporary social and technological developments in surveillance and society. This article argues against this trend in surveillance studies by returning to Foucault's writing, interviews and lectures on the panopticon. It begins by reviewing the surveillance literature that supposedly goes beyond Foucault. It resituates the panopticon in the broader context of Foucault's theory of power to show how surveillance scholars have misinterpreted both his analysis of the gaze and power. In the second section, it assesses the ‘Deleuzian turn’ in surveillance studies against Deleuze's own writings on Foucault. By way of conclusion, it returns to Foucault's recently published lectures on security to show how these pre-empted many of the developments in contemporary surveillance studies.