And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. The arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. He is seen, but he does not see he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. To begin with, this made it possible - as a negative effect - to avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to be found in places of confinement, those painted by Goya or described by Howard. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon or rather of its three functions - to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide - it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two.
The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building at the centre, a tower this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. Bentham's Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition.
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