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"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Jane Jacobs's Lively Panopticon
1/29/2008 09:17:38
For a while now—probably since the obituaries that appeared after her death in 2006—I have been possessed by a desire to read Jane Jacobs's masterwork of urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The chance finally came when I saw it on my friends' bookshelf and immediately asked to borrow it. There was something cosmic about the whole thing; both of them whose apartment it was denied that the book was theirs or that they knew anything about it, as if it had been put there for me (how self-centered to suspect!). Over the course of the last week, The Death and Life has brought my new city (and Jacobs's), New York, wonderfully to life. Her praises for the vitality of the streets and the native creativity of people are a great awakening. As she writes in a prefatory note entitled "Illustrations":
The scenes that illustrate this book are all about us. For illustrations, please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.
Several times since I've been carrying the book around I discover that I was not alone in being subject to its subconscious attraction. My friends keep saying, "Oh yeah, I keep meaning to read that book."
In an earlier posting I have gestured toward the possibility of theological appeal for the demise of privacy, written in the age of the Patriot Act and reality TV. There has been fierce backlash against surveillance cameras, consumer tracking, phone-tapping, and all the other tools of modern observation. Just the other day I went with a friend to a NYCLU meeting aimed at raising fear and anxiety about the looming possibility of a national ID card. In certain theological contexts, though, it is the constant gaze of God that makes us human, and the desire for secrecy can only be a sign of sinfulness. For Jacobs's world, hiding from public view seems rather suburban—foreign to the species of the city. It isn't possible. She makes powerfully clear, however, that absolute privacy and Big Brother are not the only options.
One of the most stirring characters in her book is the stranger. What distinguishes the city, because of its density and size, is that it is populated by strangers. There are too many people for them all to be familiar to any. In the village, town, or suburb, where people know their neighbors, the stranger is a cause for suspicion and a possible threat. In cities, however, strangers bring the possibility of safety, by their very anonymity. Because they are unknown variables, they raise the risks attending wrongdoing. They watch carefully, because they are as in need of a safe street as anybody. Jacobs writes,
There must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind. (p. 35)
After reading this, as I walk and bike the streets of New York, I want to bow to every passerby. Each stranger, despite his fears or her intentions, is my protector, my friend, and my confidant. I have no need for secrecy, because I have them.
 In recent decades Michel Foucault has drawn attention to Jeremy Bentham's eighteenth-century idea of the Panopticon, a prison where all prisoners are potentially always visible to their keepers. This total visibility, it was hoped, would be the key to reforming delinquents, enforcing total disciplinary attention to good behavior. There, "the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary" (Discipline and Punish, p. 201). The prison takes a conical form, with its walls made up of prisoners' cells, all facing in. At the center is an observatory from which the enforcers can watch everyone at all times. The prisoners, too, can see into each other's spaces, but not nearly so well as the keepers.
Foucault sees the Panopticon as representative of modern disciplinary society. Power is observation and identification; it labels, and thereby gives rise to the very delinquency that it tries to uproot.
Both Jacobs's street and Foucault's Panopticon demolish privacy, casting what we do into public view. They are worlds of continuous observation, which serves as a deterrent against criminal behavior. Foucault's, however, is dystopic, while Jacobs's is almost utopic (except that her book is an attack on modernist utopia architecture).
What explains this difference? First, Jacobs's street is self-organizing, organic, mutual, and participatory. All strangers on the street take an equal share. The city's world of strangers is one that its denizens can be proud of, for they are serving to protect each other. The police are important, but they do not make a street feel safer the way a handful of strangers does (see how safe you feel in a neighborhood crawling with cops). While the police may have a special power of deterrent and enforcement, it comes from the extent that they are not strangers, that they come out and identify themselves. This points to the second difference. The identity of the stranger is essentially unknown, based in a measured ignorance. Because all are unknown, they must all be treated as equals. Here, in the city, lies a proper place for privacy: preserving the dignified isolation that keeps people who encounter each other on the street strangers, to be respected, feared, loved, and implicitly trusted.
The Panopticon, by contrast, leaves no room for ignorance, and it locates almost all power in the central observer. It feels cruel and empty, exposing the bare life of its prisoners, and by extension the captors also.
 Strategies for government surveillance should keep this distinction in mind. Big Brother need not be watching if people can be enlisted to watch out for each other—not necessarily with the paranoid gaze that accompanies "war on terror" alert levels, but with casual presence.
The comparison with Jacobs reveals that Foucault's analysis of modern society as Panopticon was sloppy, incomplete, and alarmist. Yes, it is true that we all observe each other and manifest power through our gaze. But rather than the dehumanizing prison Bentham imagined with its single site of power, the theater of the city is symbiotic, distributed, and lively. It also depends as much on the knowledge of the gaze as on the mystery of the stranger. We are not all inmates, but each other's keepers.
Jacobs quotes Tillich - 1/30/2008 08:51:13
Posted by nathan
On p. 238 of The Death and Life, Jacobs enthusiastically quotes the theologian Paul Tillich:
By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange. Since the strange leads to questions and undermines familiar tradition, it serves to elevate reason to ultimate significance & #0133; There is no better proof of this fact than the attempts of all totalitarian authorities to keep the strange from their subjects & #0133; The big city is sliced into pieces, each of which is observed, purged and equalized. The mystery of the strange and the critical rationality of men are both removed from the city.
re: Jane Jacobs's Lively Panopticon - 1/30/2008 19:31:22
Posted by
I disagree with your characterization of Foucault's analysis as "sloppy, incomplete, and alarmist" - at least, I find this conclusion unjustified by your argument here.
The Panopticon is not the mutual surveillance of strangers. It is the surveillance of the mass by a superior and centralized power, the state. The state doesn't generally show itself on the street; it shows itself when it needs to. Should a disruption of the status quo occur, it will intervene immediately and decisively, with a power that no mere citizen could possibly resist, and especially not as an anonymous mass of strangers. The state will intervene backed by a power unseen at any earlier point in human history.
It's this - the powerlessness of any isolated individual, reduced to an atom, stranger among strangers, to create any more than a minor and promptly annihilated disturbance - that makes the Panopticon metaphor apt.
As in the Panopticon, the order on the street is not a result of mutual regulation - no, that's how it works in small communities where everyone is familiar with everyone. In fact people in the cities are terrible at regulating themselves; I find that, usually, someone making a disturbance or causing a problem for others on the subway is ignored, to everyone's detriment. If someone intervenes it's usually because of personal confrontation.
Order is maintained by the invisible, decisive hand of the NYPD, which is the size of a small army.
If there's any mutual surveillance, it's the Orwellian kind, encouraged by the NYC poster you've posted above. On a deafening subway platform surrounded by industry and massive construction, a disembodied mechanical voice informs me that "All packages and large bags are subject to random search. If you see any suspicious activity, say something."
re: Jane Jacobs's Lively Panopticon - 1/30/2008 20:26:34
Posted by Nabil
Sorry - btw, the above was posted by me.
re: Jane Jacobs's Lively Panopticon - 1/30/2008 22:41:46
Posted by nathan
I think some of your critiques are justified, others not. I do, for instance, make the distinction between Jacobs's street (mutual surveillance) and Foucault's panopticon (centralized surveillance). My argument is that hers, in vibrant cities, is the more prevalent and active - or at least she invites us to think this way.
She also downplays the role of the police in maintaining the general order. In vibrant parts of New York with lots of shops and people around, the police presence is low, yet people do not fear to walk on the street alone. it is, however, in criminalized areas, where the police cars are everywhere, that I find myself looking over my shoulder. Point is, both kinds of surveillance are active. One is more effective than the other, but it requires certain conditions. Jacobs's whole book is devoted to how vibrant, safe streets can be fostered.
Where you are correct, I think, is in pointing out the ambiguity of the subway ad with all the eyes. I hate those things. In my article, though, I attempt to point toward a preference for "casual presence" rather than the "paranoid gaze" of these ads. Do you think such a distinction is possible?
Thanks so much for your comments.
re: Jane Jacobs's Lively Panopticon - 2/03/2008 15:57:01
Posted by Nabil
I appreciate your response.
I think I may have been unclear about my point, and specifically about the mechanism of enforcement at work in NYC. I absolutely agree that there is a distinction between mutual and centralized surveillance, and I did not intend to contest that. Like I suggested, mutual surveillance is very common in small communities and in communities where a powerful centralized government has yet to intervene decisively in people's everyday lives. For example: when I was in Pakistan, I felt a pervasive sense that the government was not there; it's absence was palpable for someone coming from a country like America. The government simply isn't as powerful as America's; its monopoly on power is uncertain. Most Westerners don't understand this until they've experienced it directly. Like my relatives told me, if somebody robs your shop, you don't call the police: you round up a bunch of strapping young men from around the block to find the robber and beat them up. That's mutual surveillance.
Foucault is making a similar point in Discipline and Punish: the extravagant, spectacular brutality of punishments before the turning point in the 18th century was actually a sign of the weakness of government, not of its power. Most of the work of enforcement was done by individual consciousness, and spectacular punishments were necessary to make an impression on those consciousnesses.
Once the impression has been made, there is no need for the central power to continue making its presence felt, and it can recede from view. It is then free to focus on marginal areas where disorder still reigns (e.g., the heavily policed communities you mentioned).
I admit that there are some points that remain unclear in my interpretation. They have to do with the role of individual consciousness in maintaining order. My sense is that it is more important in a society where, materially speaking, the central authority doesn't have an overwhelming or decisive power. In such a situation, social order depends more directly on the belief of each that his membership in the community is valuable for himself and for all. In a society with a central authority possessing overwhelming material force, individual consciousness is unburdened of its responsibilities. Without the burden of "self-legislation," of what Freud called the superego, or the internalized commands of one's society, the consciousness is free to roam unbounded. As a society gains strength, it can tolerate more "parasites," or socially unproductive individuals. Nietzsche makes this argument in (I believe) the second book of the Genealogy of Morals, which Foucault is building on.
The problem is that Foucault argues that modern society depends more on psychological mechanisms of control, not less. I'm not sure which is more plausible.
To address your claims more explicitly: yes, in general, having more people around makes you safer. But only in modern societies, where autonomy and self-sufficiency are highly valued, have there ever been any substantial number of people who live as relatively autonomous individuals who do a lot of walking home alone. The tension is evident in your statement that, in "parts of New York with...people around, ...people do not fear to walk on the street alone." Strictly speaking, if there are people around, one isn't walking alone.
re: Jane Jacobs's Lively Panopticon - 2/04/2008 12:23:40
Posted by Nabil
Here's a summary of the Panopticon idea I ran into on the Internet. I mention it because I don't think I was clearly enough about how central surveillance could be a fact without the actual presence of a police force on the street.
"The Panopticon is a structure wherein the watched cannot see the watchers, but know they are being watched: At the periphery an annular building, at the center a tower. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive cells in the periphery. But this light creates a veil placed over surveillance, for the light that illuminates each cell also blinds each prisoner to the presence of guards, or the lack thereof, as it may be. Each cell then becomes a stage for an unknowable audience; each prisoner alone, individualized, at once performing for no one and everyone; each guard capable of seeing each cell and all prisoners at once at their will. Thus creating an economy in surveillance – one doesn’t need many guards in a panotpicon and they don’t need to always be there or always be aware – the actors (or prisoners as it were) will perform the same whether someone is watching or not, for they do not know whether someone is watching or not.
"Hence, by the use of irregularly mete out punishments, prisoners learn to police themselves. The punishments need not be deserved or just, for ideally, the prisoner cannot visually see another prisoner and any communication is entirely mediated and processed through the central guard tower. The prisoner can of course ‘rat’ on a near inmate from whose cell the sound of wrongdoing he may (or may not) have heard. However the prisoners cannot collude and expect to get away with it for lengthy time periods; the watchers will watch eventually. And at all times prisoner ears are present, ready to notify the guards of any real or imagined wrongdoings, so that they may be spared punishment in the future."
re: Jane Jacobs's Lively Panopticon - 2/05/2008 09:09:58
Posted by nathan
I appreciate the clarifications, while admittedly I've lost track a little bit of where we differ. I guess I am taking a sort of optimistic view about New York City (for example) mutual surveillance in the streets. You are suggesting that this does represent the top-down panopticon, while I have argued, following Jacobs, it is something quite different. Right?
Yes, there is some overlap between the police observation and mutual observation, but I think this is partly explainable by a genuine (partial) overlap between police interests and people's interests. But there are differences. Take, for instance, when cars flash their headlights to oncoming traffic to indicate that a speed trap is ahead. Clearly an ethic of mutuality is manifest here that is distinct from the police panoptic view.
I maintain my criticisms of Foucault, and I think my phrasing in the title has caused confusion. I don't mean to call Jacobs's mutualism a true panopticon, but rather an alternative system, one which actually seems to be much more the one in force in modern cities.
My interest here resides in the possibilities of self-organized order in human societies.
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