Panopticon

Shakespeare’s The Tempest is an outstanding theatrical microcosm representing the unavoidably overwhelming Foucauldian power relations in all human civilizations and their intricate interdependency of such power relations with the possession of knowledge and construction of reality. The fictional world of The Tempest is thoroughly endowed with the mechanisms of an intense web of power struggles and domination fixations which typically have been, are, and will be characteristic of any human society throughout history. For the sustenance of such a complex texture of power structures and for the manipulation of the overall balance to the advantage of a specific minority, the pivotal function of a constructed reality is as substantial in the story as the real life. Prospero, the central character, successfully manages to subdue all other dangerous, power-thirsty rivals by making use of his superior knowledge enabling him to shape the subjectivities/beliefs of other characters by different means including language and masquerades in an induced world of realities on the island. Shakespeare’s text can well be drawn on to reveal the stealthy workings of different social, cultural and especially moral institutions in recruiting subjects to their malignant power/knowledge network and duping the individuals with the desired notions produced constantly by the institutional apparatuses leading to the construction of an exploitive ‘truth.’

 Although Michel  Foucault (1926 - 1984) emphasizes that the dominant paradigm of the renaissance era is based on resemblance and analogy, contrary to Foucault's view, metaphorical thinking and analogy is not merely dominant in the pre-modern society, but is also active in the modern and contemporary era, and according to the cognitive theory, it exists in the human being's whole life. The present research aims to investigate the relationship between socio-space metaphors in Foucault's thought. By studying Foucault's works and applying the metaphor identification procedure model, his main metaphors were extracted and analyzed using the qualitative content analysis method. Based on Foucault and Derrida’s theories power is the determining metaphor and has a linguistic character, other metaphors are a function of the metaphor of power. They believe in metaphorical form Power and knowledge are the same. Further, power creates knowledge and controls it spatially and has a great share in its reproduction and chain circulation. Most of Foucault's metaphors of space, such as situation, displacement, place, context, realm, sphere, the horizon, archipelago, land, and landscape, have a military background and are intertwined with power. Foucault likened the modern world to Jeremy Bentham's panopticon power. Foucault's panopticon architecture metaphor is location-based and social one. In other words, he has embodied or objectified the modern world as a disciplinary field or society. The results show that based on Lakoff and Johnson's theory, Foucault has used the metaphors of architecture as well as the panopticon as a source domain to explain the target domain (modern society).