Foucault goes to Schönbrunn Zoo

Dr. Carlo Salzani talks about the "birth" of the modern zoo (Photo credit: Chloé Bolton).

More than twenty people gathered on the 11th of June 2025 to hear Dr Carlo Salzani talk on the development of the modern zoo. Focusing on Schönbrunn Zoo, Dr Salzani used Foucault's models of power as a theoretical grid to argue that ‘the zoo’ and ‘the prison’ are expressions of the same disciplinary matrix.

Dr Salzani focused on the early phases of Schönbrunn Zoo’s development and looked in particular at the ways in which species and space were being constructed differently. Today Schönbrunn Zoo is the oldest zoo in the world. It was completed in 1752, almost a century after the Versailles Menagerie (which no longer stands). Schönbrunn Zoo retains its original structure and is reflective of the French panopticon model that was eventually displaced in favour of a garden philosophy emerging out of England. The central pavilion at Schönbrunn was completed 1759 and, like in Versailles, it is an octagonal, one-story building consisting of one room. The big French widows open onto 13 enclosures that are uniform in shape and house a lawn and pool.

Dr Salzani noted that there has been a fair deal of debate regarding the prominence of radial shapes in menagerie architecture with some believing it is inspiration from sun symbolism and others arguing that it enabled a spectacle space in which wild animals could be observed. Foucault, however, “interpreted the radial shape as a central and paradigmatic feature of the transformation of power at the dawn of modernity.” As Dr Salzani noted Foucault argued in Discipline and Punish that sovereignty and “the right of life and death” was being substituted from the eighteenth century with a disciplinary power that sought to control through processes of normalization.  

Dr Salzani discusses some of the guiding disicplinary logics found within early zoos (Photo credit: Chloé Bolton).

Interestingly Foucault drew a parallel between Jeremy Bentham's panopticon and the radial structure of the Versailles menagerie and while he spent little space expounding on this, many scholars – namely Ralph Acampora – have analyzed the zoo as a “zoopticon,” a space of enforced confinement structured around visual regimes of control. As Dr Salzani expounded:

“Foucault can establish the parallel between the Versailles menagerie and the Panopticon, between zoo and prison, because both are expression of the same disciplinary matrix: they create spaces of enforced detention structured around visual regimes of control. The menagerie and the zoo are part (perhaps even the paradigmatic part) of what Foucault called the “carceral archipelago,” of the series of socializing institutions based on the new disciplinary regime, which includes not only prisons and reformatories, but also military institutions (the army), medical institutions (the clinic, the hospital, the asylum), educational institutions (the school), and work institutions (the factory).

That is: Foucault analyzed mental institutions, schools, prisons, etc., as institutions of power which discipline and control individuals through a certain distribution of bodies in space – and the zoo is in its structure, organization, history and very essence not only very similar, but, more importantly, intimately connected to these institutions and to their development. That is why Ralph Acampora could rename the zoo as “zoopticon.”

The remainder of the talk saw Dr Salzani unpacking what could be mean by this “scoptic regime” and thinking more deeply about the ways in which visibility worked to establish the early zoo and an established objectification of animals, as he continues:

“The panoptical model installs also a very precise economy of the gaze, which is never reciprocal but always unidirectional: from the onlooker to the looked at, from the watcher to the watched, from the keeper to the kept. This unidirectionality of the gaze is the first instance of de-subjectification of the observed, since the nonreciprocal gaze constitutes an act of “visual possession” that reduces them to mere objects.”

Dr Salzani noted that the “scoptic regime” objectified animals and saw a gradual introduction of civilizing logics used to manage and understand them. While not the focus on this talk, Dr Salzani also pointed to how the disciplinary logic of these early zoon would, in the 19th century, become more centered on “the right to let live” and opens the zoo to a wider population and transforms it into a “spectacle” for the people.

A great deal of the conversation that followed the lecture focused on this later stage of the zoos’ development with audience members raising questions about the role of conservation in the maintenance of zoos as well as ideas regarding how visual regimes of control are changed by the large influx of visitors these spaces and the introduction of digital technologies.

Lively discussion about the ethics of zoos and the changing nature of animals' visibility in them followed the talk (Photo credit: Chloé Bolton).

 Despite the rising temperatures guests keep speaking for well into the evening, illustrating how the Vienna Animal Lecture series is fostering a growing and engaged community of people interested in animals and the ways in which we know them. This marks the conclusion of our Summer Lecture Series with details of the Winter Lecture series expected to be announced soon. Sign up for our newsletter to stay on top of updates!