“So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action. The inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.”
–Michel Foucault
“All of us are watchers – of television, of time clocks, of traffic on the freeway – but few are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing.” This aphorism, often attributed to Peter M. Leschak, captures a modern malaise: we live surrounded by images, screens, and surfaces, yet rarely pause to inhabit what we see.
The figure of the flâneur, immortalised by Charles Baudelaire and later Walter Benjamin, offers a counterpoint. The flâneur wanders the city not to hurry through it but to linger, to attend, to notice the unnoticed. Where the commuter watches the crowd for gaps in traffic, the flâneur observes gestures, textures, the choreography of everyday life. Watching is functional. Observing is revelatory.
To watch is to skim. It is the peek at a newsfeed, the impatient glance at the clock. To observe is to dwell, to move slowly enough for detail to emerge. It requires effort and patience.
The flâneur demonstrates that observation is not passive but an art. It is not simply opening the eyes but sharpening them, refusing to be numbed by habit. In a world of constant watching, the practice of observing is almost radical: to find meaning in what others dismiss as ordinary, to discover that the world is endlessly richer than the quick glance suggests.
To observe, then, is to reclaim our role as participants in reality, not simply watchers of its passing show.
