Naomi's Panopticon Comment That Wouldn't Leave Me Alone

The permits office moved to an open floor plan about two years ago, no more cubicle walls, just long rows of desks under fluorescent light, supposedly to improve collaboration. What it actually improved was everyone’s awareness of everyone else, and Naomi, who sits two desks down from me, said something offhand about it one afternoon that I haven’t been able to fully shake since. Something like, this is just a panopticon with worse coffee.

I laughed at the time and didn’t think much more about it that day. But the phrase kept coming back to me over the next few weeks, the way an idea does when it’s actually pointing at something true rather than just being a clever line. I looked up what she was actually referencing, because I’d heard the word panopticon before but never chased down where it came from, and that’s how I ended up reading Discipline and Punish on a whim, which is not a book I’d normally have picked up for myself, dense continental philosophy about the history of prisons is not exactly a light after-work read.

It ruined the floor plan for me in the specific way a good, uncomfortable book is supposed to ruin something. The actual argument, that a structure of possible observation disciplines people more efficiently than an actual overseer standing over your shoulder, because you can’t be sure whether you’re being watched at any given moment so you police yourself constantly just in case, mapped onto our office almost too cleanly. I started noticing how differently I behaved depending on which direction my monitor faced relative to the walkway, whether I closed a personal tab a half second faster when someone walked past, small stuff, but real, and none of it something I’d have consciously noticed before Naomi’s joke sent me looking for the actual theory behind it.

I brought this up with her a few weeks later, fully expecting her to think I’d taken a throwaway line way too seriously, which, fair, I had. She hadn’t read the book herself, she’d just picked up the reference somewhere and found it funny, but she was into the idea once I explained the actual argument, and now we occasionally use “panopticon energy” as shorthand in meetings when somebody’s clearly performing diligence for whoever’s walking by rather than actually being diligent. It’s become a running joke that started as a passing comment and turned into both of us reading the actual philosophy behind it, which is a strange way for a four-hundred-page academic book to enter your life, but I’ll take it over how most of the books on my shelf actually got there. Sometimes the recommendation is just someone complaining about the furniture.