Cover: The project of a prison by Harou-Romain. A prisoner turns to the center tower while praying.
As Nathaniel Hawthorne mentioned, while New Jersey was being built up, founders had begun by building a gibbet and a prison. While the power of punishment emerged before modern societies, - e.g. John Locke argued that this power existed even in the state of nature and all individuals were a part of it, but then, as political societies emerged, this power got transferred to the monopoly of political powers by individuals themselves- the power of surveillance on daily life and prison is precisely something modern.
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, as the prison started to occupy the core of punishment, seperate ideas of prison got on the surface, as well. Rather than a pure style of punishment, all ideas were absolutely political, and thus, provided a firm political order. Moreover, one of these belonged to the English thinker Jeremy Betham, who came up with the idea of prison Panopticon in 1785. In this view of punishment, -just like other contemporaries- the main goal was to put prisoners under a comprehensive surveillance. Panopticon is consisted of cells constructed circularly around a tower at the center. All cells are both personal and obviously visible from the tower. Tower belongs to the officers. A prisoner, who looks at the tower from his cell, is never able to understand whether he is observed or not. Additionally, what is more necessary than observing: the perception of prisoners, which Panopticon is to create, that all of them are under surveillance 24/7. This is the fundamental aspect of Bentham's idea of correction. Prisoners observed by guards, guards observed by officers, officers observed by the head of prison, and all system is observed by inspectors who might make visit to prison at any time. Therefore, the system sets up a surveillance power based on a strict hierarchy and any revolt in this hierarchy could halt all the surveillance.
The society we live in -generally defined as post modern, whereas, it continues to live under the institutions of modernity- is in a form of community in which the individual becomes object of an area of knowledge where subject is firmly secret. All individual features -including fears, habbits, flaws- have been commodified and beside its commercial price, it has turned out that politics started to take a place in this market of commodified features. Individual is surrounded intensively on all sides and exposed to the common categorizations. Yet, this is not something new. We have been familiar with a skew power of surveillance. Nevertheless, in the 21st century, this power has much more powerful weapons than ever. Moreover, the "prisonization" of public space is not new. The detailed and intensive Medieval power, which was born and intensified during Plagues, has been set up afresh in the veils of modern societies. In the last a few decades, when the attention of individual has been a good in the big market in which corporations are main actors, beside aforementioned conventional power of surveillance, the commercial surveillance by big firms has been a part of our daily lives. We have been experiencing these two sort of surveillance in the last Pandemic for almost a year. While governments around the world, fighting and trying to halt spreading of Coronavirus, have established the governmental interventions upon society -sometimes by violating some fundamental constitutional rights, as well- which reproduce its own legitimacy continuously, corporations found a beneficial way to discover the consumption habits of upper and middle classes who are able to stay home.
"It's totally normal to intervene people's daily lives in order to prevent them from infection." you certainly say. Since, I quite agree on it. This is precisely what I mentioned above: the power which continuously produces intervention legitimacy from the cause of intervention. This might not be so exotic, yet, we might experience it at a different level of intensity. Whereas, political powers -as we notice- have established varied controls, which intensify day by day, upon society and individual since the very beginning of modernism. Modernism, in other words, could be seen as a process of putting individual in the object position, maintaining a control upon it, interfering it, and more often, altering it. Thus, we have IDs in our pockets, plates on our cars, health information on hospital system, income scales, tax transcripts and etc.
In the internet age -as we experience now-, the number of this information has increased dramatically so that we name it "The era of knowledge". The access to information has accelerated not only for individual but also for seperate powers which tend to abuse the process. As personal informations have been included as well. Thus, the prohibitions on social media might not be so logical to governments which are able to reach numerous personal information online. For instance, in case of China, government was not keen on a total abolution of social media, instead, they brought it to a more controllable area.
As we are going through a global Pandemic, it is crucial to be aware that all of our pre-Pandemic attitudes have completely changed in a huge way. What is more crucial, we ought to be aware of what kind of a knowledge area our attitudes have been put into. We do not know who observes us while looking at the tower from our Panopticon cells, and more, we are not sure whether we are being observed by someone. Yet, we are totally certain that we are in a state of open surveillance 24/7. The Pandemic have made our cells much more visionable, and worse, it produced the legitimacy of being under control. Finally, it could be pretty useful for our future to change the words of Michel Foucault on the image of plague: Coronavirus is to vanish one day, yet the image of infected by Coronavirus is to stay longer.