This is the record that turned me on to Isis. I heard a copy of The Red Sea when I was 18, and didn't enjoy it much. Five years later, I heard Panopticon, and was blown away. While band members insisted in interviews this not a political record, the liner notes and lyrics bring up some political themes, that astute listeners would not miss.
Central to the theme of the record, is Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon.
The atmosphere of dread and paranoia, of a technological culture gone awry run thickly throughout this record. You can feel it in resonate through your bones in the slow build up of track 3, In Fiction, it's as if the band captured the feeling of walking down a dark city street, seemingly alone, yet knowing somewhere a surveillance camera may or may not be zooming in on you perfectly. Power is thus maintained by being everywhere, and nowhere at the same time.
A dead 18th century British Philosopher's idea, for constructing prisons, in an effort to maintain the illusion of constant surveillance, and thus fear, and order, has disseminated through the rest of our culture, ensuring a certain amount of social control. Let's think about that for a second: we allowed our culture to be shaped to resemble someone's bad idea for prison construction. Surveillance, and control may not be total, but we are led to believe they are.
"Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen."
- Michel Foucault quoted in the the liner notes
"Magistrates dream of plague
Tongues loll in anticipation
You are awake in their darker visions
Drool slips from grinning mouths
The plague is forced on us all
Is it there? Are they there?
Shouts of fact abound
But whispers of truth burn through
Is it there? Are they there"
Track 7 - Grinning Mouths
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