"Panopticism" from Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Abstract

he following, according to an order published at the end of the seventeenth century, were the measures to be taken when the plague appeared in a town. 1 First, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death, the killing of all stray animals; the division of the town into distinct quarters, each governed by an intendant. Each street is placed under the authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance; if he leaves the street, he will be con-demned to death. On the appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors: it is forbidden to leave on pain of death. The syn-dic himself comes to lock the door of each house from the out-side; he takes the key with him and hands it over to the inten-dant of the quarter; the intendant keeps it until the end of the quarantine. Each family will have made its own provisions; but, for bread and wine, small wooden canals are set up be-tween the street and the interior of the houses, thus allowing each person to receive his ration without communicating with the supplier and other residents; meat, fish and herbs will be hoisted up into the houses with pulleys and baskets. If it is ab-solutely necessary to leave the house, it will be done in turn, avoiding any meeting. Only the intendants, syndics and guards will move about the streets and also, between the infected houses, from one corpse to another, the 'crows', who can be left to die: these are 'people of little substance who carry the sick, bury the dead, clean and do many vile and abject offices'. It is a segmented, immobile, frozen space. Each individual is fixed in his place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life, contagion or punishment.