Foucault’s emphasis on the workings of the panopticon has frequently been misread as a description of a static, spatial structure designed to allow an oppressive surveillance of those without power by those who have it. In fact, Foucault is putting an argument that is far more complex than this. His interest is in developing a notion of power as something no longer only possessed and exercised by others. Rather, he proposes power as productive and interconnected field of forces that creates the conditions of possibility for both pleasure and its repression. We are all complicit in the political economy of this field. To that end, he reiterates Betham’s own point that as the prisoner never knows when he is actually being watched, he must assume that it is always so; thus he necessarily surveys and disciplines himself. As far as the exercise of power is concerned, the prisoner is always caught in an uncertain space of hesitation between tower and cell. He is both the prisoner and the one who imprisons; like the protophotographers, he finds himself to be both the subject and the object of his own gaze. “He inscribes in himself the power relations in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.” The panopticon is, in other words, a productive exercise of subject formation operating such that its participants “are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always also the elements of its articulation.” Thus Foucault reads panopticism’s reverberating economy of gazes as constituting each of its contributors as a self-reflexive doublet – as both the subject and object, effect and articulation of a netlike exercise of disciplinary power.

Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea, 21.