According to the book “Ways of Reading” by Bartholomae, Petrosky, and Waite, panopticism in Foucault’s paper is the all Seeing Eye. He starts his essay of by talking about the plague in the seventeenth century. There was a closing of the town and its outer lying districts. Each street was placed under the authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance. Each house was watched over by the syndic who would come to lock each door from the outside of the house. Everyone was quarantined into their homes. The severity of this lack of freedom was expressed in Foucault’s essay when he said inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere, and a considerable body of militia, commanded by good officers and men of substance, guards everyone, everywhere, to prompt the obedience of the people. Foucault discussed the rise of lepers, which also gave rise to disciplinary projects. Rather than separating people into groups, like they did during the plague, multiple distinctions were used to separate people. The plague-stricken town was, as Foucault states, traversed throughout the hierarchy, surveillance, writing, the town immobilized by the functions of extensive power. In order to have the perfect disciplinary functioning, one would put themselves in the place of the syndic during the plague. This control over people functioned to cut them off from all contact with each other.
According to the reading, Foucault talked about the Panopticon, a building that was separated into cells. There were two windows corresponding to the window of the tower that was in the center. There was a supervisor placed in the tower to watch over the mad men in each cell. What the inmates could see was limited, while the supervisor in the tower could see everything. The major effect of the panoptical, according to Foucault, was to induce the inmate into the state of consciousness