Cities of Surveillance: A Foucauldian Reading of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Arslanoğlu’s Silence Towers 2084

Based on Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon architectural system, Michel Foucault employs Bentham's model as a metaphor to illuminate the mechanisms of discipline and power. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault discusses the Panopticon, a prison model designed by Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The Panopticon is a circular building with a high watchtower at its centre. In this model, the inability of the inmates to see the observer is critical since it gives them a sense of constant surveillance, which causes them to regulate themselves. Discipline is thus sustained through visibility of the inmates and the invisibility of the supervisor. Individuals are categorized, which makes controlling them simpler. With this design, the ultimate aim is to create order and obedience. Similar designs can be encountered on a large scale in dystopian cities. Cities embody the mindsets of the systems to which they belong. This analysis examines the cities that are portrayed in Kaan Arslanoğlu’s novel Silence Towers 2084, a novel by the Turkish author and the city in the renowned Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell from a Foucauldian stance. Both cities demonstrate how control and discipline are ordained through the visibility of citizens, revealing the urban exercise of power. The reason for selecting these two novels is their portrayal of how individuals are taken under control by various tools embedded in everyday life. While the city in Arslanoğlu’s 2084 showcases a more advanced society with technologies absent in Orwell’s 1984, it ultimately lacks crucial elements such as individualism, diversity, and autonomy. Orwell’s city presents a stark contrast. There are the megastructures of the ministries with wealthy neighbourhoods and areas in poverty. In those areas, the underprivileged live without meeting even their most basic needs as humans. In comparison, Arslanoğlu’s city has a more synthetic quality. Cities in both novels function like Bentham’s panopticon by incorporating mechanisms of surveillance, categorisation, discipline and self-regulation. In these cities, where visibility acts as a means of self-regulation and internalizing discipline without questioning, a disciplinary society, as Foucault suggests, emerges.