EXCERPT: (Pages 58-59)

"In short, the crisis of enclosures is a crisis of capital related to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and its radical acceleration vis-à-vis the erosion of market regulations, global competition and the dramatic expansion of the financialization sector through hyperbolic fractalization.⁶⁵ Such a heightening of contradictions is apparent wherever spiraling poverty is reinforced by the escalating cost of education; where the lack of prison reform mirrors the evaporation of jobs and the need for perpetual retraining; where escalating health problems are exacerbated by the unlimited working-day; where falling wages are further eroded by the extension of the retirement age and reduction of social security benefits; where the factory society is speeded to its death by the dismantling of unions, the institution of right-to-work acts and crowd-sourcing; where public schools cease to serve their democratic function with the institution of limited charter programs, lottery selections, the spread of the voucher system and a general crisis of funding and corporatization; and the nuclear family is dissolved by the exhaustion of contending with the implosion of every last public institution that once supported its continuing viability as a social-form. This is the common horizon of the crisis of enclosures today — a general inability to resist being liquidated and incorporated into the ethos of hyperbolic capitalism, or what Benjamin would have called the transformation of capitalism into religion — where cultural, familial, educational, and correctional institutions become little more than the remainder of production itself.⁶⁶ But what does the crisis of enclosures have to do with Panoptic control — if anything? How are we to think about Panoptic power after the deterritorialization of institutional space, and even after the end of the experience of interiority associated with the modern autonomous subject?

 

The most readily apparent answer to these pressing questions is that Panopticism is implicated in every form of social organization that relies on the power of enclosures to (re)produce the effects of subjectivation, (prison, factory, hospital, school, etc., etc.). However, what Gilles Deleuze could not have foreseen was that Panopticism would return as a power of disclosure rather than enclosure — that it would become an ‘all-revealing’ apparatus rather than an ‘all-seeing’ device."