EXCERPT: (Pages 120-121)

"If the fourfold diagram of control could be given a singular name; one that exceeds its seventeenth and eighteenth century designs by realizing them; one which pertains to the rule of technocratic logic and bureaucratic justification; one which captures something of its intensive and extensive dimensions; one which points to the supersession of all previous paradigms of control including the radical potential to transcend and overcome its own limitations — such a name would have to be found in the dubious title of Fiberopticism, (a term that our generation has already naturalized and mythologized). Fiberopticism has been enshrined in the glowing circuitry of blockbuster films like the Matrix, Tron and Avatar to name only a few. Almost from its inception, the Fiberoptic apparatus called forth an intangible life-force, a new nervous system of electro-connectivity and a new metaphysic based on internal illumination rather than an otherworldly glow. But in what does this new dimension of control consist — and how is it made to function with any consistency? How is it internalized, externalized and realized throughout the fabric of social being? And is Fiberopticism the final overturning of neo-Panopticism or just the newest dimension of Panoptic subjectivation?

 

As an articulated force of control Fiberopticism is something like the unlimited power to effect the fibrous dimension of being through affective-electronic intimations, i.e., projections (Synopticism), prohibitions (Banopticism), subjection (Bio-opticism) and subjectivation (Panacousticism). It is the sign of our fading belief in a higher power as well as the demand for a heightened power of subjective control — a virile and viral replacement metaphysics to compensate for the death of God. It is even a limit event in our understanding of the techniques of social control — one which reaches inside the electro-synaptic automations of being to retrieve, reconfigure and recall every last trace of error or prohibited action."