The Palantír and the Panopticon

*The Lord of the Rings* Reading Challenge, week five

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as illustrated by Willey Reveley in 1791.

Here is a link to our reading schedule for the LOTR Challenge.

Foucault and the Panopticon

In 1975, two years after Tolkien's death, Michel Foucault published a book that would change the ways in which we all think about surveillance and power: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Foucault posited that power structures began to shift in the early modern period: in place of a centralized power that used bodily force as its primary mechanism, new forms emerged, in which power circulated through every point in a vast web of discipline, which served to internalize the effects of power. Organizational and bureaucratic structures—schools, hospitals, prisons, factories, governmental offices—exercised power through disciplinary means and through the sense of continuous, pervasive surveillance.

The book's famous central metaphor is the Panopticon, the prison architecture developed by the eighteenth-century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The Panopticon places a central tower in the middle of a circle of prison cells that are open to surveillance. An under-appreciated but vital aspect of the observational position of the tower is that it must never be clear whether or not anyone is actually watching:

It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. (202)

An important result of this sort of power structure is that discipline and desire are often at odds, and this is the case on all sorts of levels, from the relatively benign to the insidious. For example, on a beautiful spring morning, I may have the desire to ignore my university work and take the dog to the park, but I know that there are mechanisms in place (the academic calendar, the registrar, etc.) that encourage me to exercise discipline and finish my grading before the semester deadline. This seems reasonable in the context of my job, but it is inherent in the disciplinary structure and institution of the university. Likewise, my students may choose to blow off their final papers and go to the beach, but if they want to pass, then they had better internalize these disciplinary power structures.

These structures have further developed since Foucault wrote his book, however, to the point that the technologies of power and surveillance may insidiously generate a desire to use them, and thus our subjection to them is more complete. And, in fact, discipline may have become, ironically, the means through which we may actually resist power. In this way, Tolkien's vision may have been even more forward-thinking than Foucault's.

Technologies of Power in The Lord of the Rings

Last week as we discussed Book Three of LOTR in my classroom, I suggested to my students that it might be helpful to think of the "magic" of Saruman, Sauron, the Ring, and the Palantír as "technologies" of power. These technologies take various forms. In last week’s piece for paid subscribers, for example, we discussed Saruman's "blending" of orcs and men through unspecified techniques to create a new kind of "super-orc," a sort of "Terminator" or cyborg enforcer.

Arguably, however, the most apparently frightening manifestations of these technologies throughout the book appear in various means of surveillance—a notably modern aspect of the narrative. The most obvious of these surveillance technologies are manifested in the Palantír and in the Ring itself, in conjunction with the metonymic "Eye" of Sauron.

A mostly overlooked aspect of the Palantír is the extent to which, like the Ring, it becomes a focus of the desire of those who handle it. After Pippin picks it up, he can't stop thinking about it and continues to be drawn to it, despite his better judgment:

The thought of the dark globe seemed to grow stronger as all grew quiet. Pippin felt again its weight in his hands, and saw again the mysterious red depths into which he had looked for a moment. He tossed and turned and tried to think of something else.

At last he could stand it no longer. (591)

Once he takes it, he actually tells himself to "put it back quick," but he is unable to resist his desire for the object—this portable communication tool which seduces through its beauty and its promise of knowledge, stimulation, and dopamine. Sound familiar?

Actual photo of a 21st-century Palantír. Photo by Neil Soni on Unsplash

The result of Pippin's compulsive behavior is, of course, the closest thing that we have to an actual encounter with Sauron in a book that is named after him as the "Lord" of the title—the figure who is always (potentially) watching but is never seen, like the invisible eyes in the tower of the Panopticon.

What is remarkable about this representation of power, however, is that those who most depend upon surveillance to achieve their ends, Saruman and Sauron, are also, ultimately, subject to the very technologies they employ. As Gandalf explains, Saruman was seduced by his ability to use the Palantír to see distant places and times, “until he cast his gaze upon Barad-dûr. Then he was caught!” (598). The device continued to draw him back to it with the illusion and promise of power, but in reality he was subject to his use of it. Gandalf continues:

Easy it is now to guess how quickly the roving eye of Saruman was trapped and held; and how ever since he has been persuaded from afar, and daunted when persuasion would not serve. The biter bit, the hawk under the eagle’s foot, the spider in a steel web! How long, I wonder, has he been constrained to come often to his glass for inspection and instruction, and the Orthanc-stone so bent towards Barad-dûr that, if any save a will of adamant now looks into it, it will bear his mind and sight swiftly thither? And how it draws one to itself! Have I not felt it? (598)

I know that I promised no Prince digressions in this reading challenge, but the Great Purple One really does sound like Gandalf here:

As Prince says, the battlefield here really is the mind, despite all of the orc blood spilled at Helm’s Deep. Unexpectedly, this is a psychological gambit that eventually traps Sauron himself, as he becomes overly dependent upon his technologies of power. (More on this in a few weeks.)

Reimagining Discipline

This reality of a mental battlefield becomes even more apparent as we move from the end of Book Three to the beginning of Book Four in The Two Towers. Despite all of the action, fighting, marching ents, and racing about the country on fast horses in Book Three, the beginning of Book Four reminds us that the more important narrative strand is this one: two hobbits walking slowly and resolving to continue walking despite their physical and psychological fatigue—while evading surveillance: “In fact with every step towards the gates of Mordor Frodo felt the Ring on its chain about his neck grow more burdensome” (630). This is the vision that we have of Frodo on his journey, with the heaviness of his burden weighing him down. On this rereading, however, I was struck by this passage that describes the threat of surveillance as even more powerful than the weight of the burden (though, of course, the two phenomena are related):

But far more he was troubled by the Eye: so he called it to himself. It was that more than the drag of the Ring that made him cower and stoop as he walked. The Eye: that horrible and growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable. (630)

Note the use of the second person here, as power is projected outwards to the reader. It is unfortunate that Peter Jackson’s film adaptation makes the idea of “The Eye” overly literal, with a manifested, flaming eye acting like a giant spotlight at the top of Barad-dûr. Tolkien’s vision is more insidious than this: a web of technologies that seeks omniscient vision, exposure, and subjection, a web more invasive than anything that even Foucault ever imagined.

It is a vision that we may be living through now, a mere half-century after Tolkien’s death.

And what can we do to resist such a vision of subjection to omnipresent power structures—of data-driven capitalism, of big tech, of pervasive surveillance? Ironically, it is the very discipline that Foucault saw as a source of our subjection and docility that may help us to resist. Tolkien, as a practicing Catholic, would frame it differently, as self-denial, as the taming of desire, or perhaps the as avoidance of sin. Either way, we may take Frodo as an example, as he resists using the source of power unless absolutely necessary, despite the temptation to do so. Perhaps the most potent illustration of this struggle comes at the end of Book Two, as Frodo sits at the top of Amon Hen while wearing the Ring. He is granted here a totalizing vision of the world, viewing the landscape as if it were an animated map. He is able to perceive hyper-objects, to borrow Timothy Morton’s term: phenomena too large for the scope of normal perception.

At this point, he feels two powers strive within him, which the text implies are the Eye of Sauron and the Voice of Gandalf (though the source of the voice is not made clear until later)—the battlefield is his mind. But, significantly, neither of the powers ultimately sway him completely:

The two powers strove in him. For a moment, perfectly balanced between their piercing points, he writhed, tormented. Suddenly he was aware of himself again, Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose, and with one remaining instant in which to do so. He took the Ring off his finger. (401)

This is discipline, or self-denial, or free will, or whatever you choose to call it. In a moment of self-awareness, Frodo becomes an integrated self and makes a decision independently. Though discipline may be the ultimate manifestation of power as envisioned by Foucault, it is possible for us to make use of it in order to resist the webs of power that seek to subject us.

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I’ll be back on Friday with a bonus piece for paid subscribers on the destruction of Isengard. More ents! Also, on Thursday, I will post a bonus thread for paid subscribers, which will take stock of our reading experience so far, now that we are at the half-way point in our journey.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet computer to yours.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash