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Panopticism: Then and now

EXCERPT (Page 117)

"As such, the fourfold diagram of power is everywhere expanding its affective domain through the deployment of two socio-psychological vectors: omniscient simulation and omnipresent virtuality. If we were to name it, revisionary Panopticism is closest to being a metaphysical power in the sense of constituting not only an ‘all-hearing’ and ‘all-seeing’ assemblage, but also in producing an ‘all-knowing’ judico-legal apparatus. Yet this term is something of a misnomer because metaphysics is too strongly associated with the beyond, the transcendental and the super-sensible. In counter-distinction to the commonplace conception of otherworldly belief, hyper-Panopticism has enacted the greatest reconfiguration of subjective experience since the birth of Christianity — even sanctifying the spread of de-worlding belief (economic de-regulation, infrastructural de-cay, environmental de-gradation, social de-sertion, subjectivizing de-ification, resource de-pletion, etc., etc.). We might even say that neo-Panopticism is an oblique qualifier for the production of what Alain Badiou calls an atonal world (monde atone) — or the production of a world that lacks “the intervention of a Master-signifier to impose meaningful order onto the confused multiplicity of reality.”122 Perhaps this is even the best way to understand the rise of neo-Panopticism and control societies — as the production of four distinctive disciplinary dispositif’s that try to compensate for an irreducible lack. Or, to go one step further, we could even say that neo-Panopticism is the Master-signifier of the post-modern era, qualified as it is, by sovereign practices of governmentality, disciplinary experts and security specialists."

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