Panoptizmas ir rūmų dvaro visuomenė
Panopticism and the Court Society

Summary/Abstract: This article draws attention to the relation between two phenomena: the panopticism and the court society. The first one is usually derived from the modern structure of industrial society, while the second one has flourished in the monarchical regime of the 17th century. Therefore, the relation between them is not so evident and should not be taken for granted. By the same token, the French thinker Michel Foucault in his research Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison opposed these two (monarchical and industrial) societies. On the other hand, Foucault has noticed that Jeremy Bentham has created a surprisingly similar prison to the menagerie which was built in Versailles by the architect Louis Le Vau. We claim that this similarity is not a coincidence and reach to explicate this relation. Our intention is not to advance panopticism chronologically but to define and extend the variations of the optical societies. This aim is proved by two-level research: the first part of the article shows the structural relation between panopticism and court society: space, time and other practices; the second part reveals a deeper relation between them which is seen in the image of hunting in the baroque culture. The main hypothesis of this article is that the menagerie of Louis XIV is an expression of transformation which started with the common hunting and finally turned into the image of the panopticism of the court society. This dynamics is analogical to that one which was noticed by Foucault talking about physical punishment vs disciplinary model. The argumentation of this statement is made while analyzing Rembrandt’s “Self-portrait with a Dead Bittern” where the sham hunting in the court society is shown using a flavour of irony.

• Details
• Contents