From Zoopticon to Democratic Spectacle: Foucault Goes to the (Schönbrunn) Zoo

 In this talk, Dr Carlo Salzani analyzes the early development of the modern zoo using Foucault's models of power as a theoretical grid and the Schönbrunn Zoo as an example. In the chapter on the panopticon of Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault famously drew a parallel between Jeremy Bentham's panopticon and the radial structure of the Versailles menagerie, the first "modern" zoo, arguing that both the zoo and the prison are expressions of the same disciplinary matrix. In the wake of this comment, many scholars have analyzed the zoo as a "zoopticon" (Ralph Acampora), a space of enforced confinement structured around visual regimes of control. Dr Salzani applies this analysis to the Schönbrunn Zoo, which was completed in 1752, almost a century after the Versailles Menagerie, when the French panoptic model was being challenged and gradually replaced by the new garden philosophy coming from England. In 1778, the zoo at Schönbrunn was…