SECURED EXPECTATIONS VERSUS UNFORCED CHOICES?

Even utilitarians, it seems, cannot do without conscience. Bentham shifts moral philosophy's focus on the opacity of conscience toward a utilitarian manipulation of character formation. Since Foucault's analysis of Bentham's Panopticon in Discipline and Punish, he has become most familiar as a reformer of penal institutions. Critics have frequently presented him as someone who channels fantasies of subjection to sublime forces into institutionalized identifications of consciousness with a social structure. The differences of opinion among critics as to the psycho-socionomic function of Bentham's penitentiary suggest that his call for transparency in matters of solitary confinement is highly ambivalent. In a recent study, Janet Semple traces these ambivalences even back to the biographical complexities reflected in his two postscripts to the letter on the Panopticon, as well as in some of the many unpublished manuscripts at University College London. Considered in the light of Bentham's approach, Yorick's incarceration fantasies, in which the prisoner's Civil Death and the spectator's conscience fuse into a spectacle of mutual character-altering inspections, emerge as the transparent institutionalized form of Smith's theater of the sympathetic gaze.