Anthony Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange" and Michel Foucault's "Panopticism"

Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange offers a "disciplinary technology," the "Ludovico Technique," which resembles Michel Foucault's interpretation of Jeremy Bentham's architectural figure, the Panopticon. Burgess's novel functions analogously to Foucault's image of the panopticon by dehumanizing and controlling the criminal, Alex, by omniscient, omnipotent surveillance, and also by disciplining the reader to assimilate an ambiguous vernacular language: the reader is "trained" by panopticonic techniques to read and interpret the novel.