End of the Panopticon

Definition

The end of the panopticon is Baudrillard's claim, in "The Precession of Simulacra" (Simulacra and Simulation, 1981/1994), that contemporary power no longer works by surveillance — Foucault's panoptic visibility — but by deterrence and participation. Reading the 1971 television-verité experiment on the Loud family (An American Family), he writes: "You no longer watch TV, it is TV that watches you (live)… a switch from the panoptic mechanism of surveillance (Discipline and Punish) to a system of deterrence, in which the distinction between the passive and the active is abolished." The panopticon "still presupposes an objective space (that of the Renaissance) and the omnipotence of the despotic gaze," "playing on the opposition of seeing and being seen." What replaces it: "There is no longer any imperative of submission to the model, or to the gaze 'you are the model!'… Such is the last stage of the social relation… which is no longer one of persuasion… but one of deterrence: 'you are information, you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc.'" Because "you are always already on the other side," there is "No more subject, no more focal point, no more center or periphery: pure flexion or circular inflexion." The corollary is that "we are no longer in the society of the spectacle": the medium "is no longer identifiable as such," and its model is not the tower but the genetic code — TV as DNA, "an effect in which the opposing poles of determination vanish." The concept is Baudrillard's explicit revision of Foucault, and the hinge between the wiki's panopticon page and its simulation cluster. See panopticon, deterrence, implosion-of-meaning.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: the panopticon superseded by deterrence; TV that watches you; power without a locatable source (1981/1994).
• Michel Foucault — the theory revised: Discipline and Punish and the panoptic diagram of visibility.
• Guy Debord — the spectacle, which Baudrillard here declares ended ("We are no longer in the society of the spectacle").
• Iain Borden — the panopticon's terminal built extension, via Broadgate's self-disciplining screens (see panopticon).

Related Concepts

• Panopticon — the apparatus this concept supersedes.
• Simulation / Hyperreality — the condition in which surveillance gives way to deterrence.
• Deterrence — the mechanism that replaces the gaze.
• Implosion of Meaning — the media process by which the medium dissolves into the real.
• Discipline — the regime the panopticon served; deterrence is post-disciplinary.
• Spectacle — the society Baudrillard declares past.
• Power — now circulating without source: "who made you a psychoanalyst? the analyst can well reply: You."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the defining source ("The Precession of Simulacra"): "You no longer watch TV, it is TV that watches you (live)"; "End of the panoptic system"; the surveillance-to-deterrence switch; TV-as-DNA; "No more subject, no more focal point."
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — Rheingold's inverted panopticon ("a Panopticon [that] evolves to the point where it can convince everyone that it doesn't exist") and the carceral-urban security regimes, which complicate or confirm Baudrillard's claim.
• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the panopticon as abstract machine and its reversals, which give the concept its built tests.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Does the end-of-panopticon thesis hold for the post-2000 surveillance apparatus (dataveillance, CCTV, the platform)? Baudrillard's "you are always already on the other side" arguably anticipates the participation-surveillance of social media — or is platform surveillance a return of the panopticon, not its end?
• If there is no longer a subject, focal point, or center, is power still a useful category — or does the concept dissolve the very object of political critique? (Compare the wiki's complicitous-silence and governmentality.)
• The wiki's panopticon page carries Foucault and its extensions; should this page sit as a revision of it, or should the two be merged? (Currently linked as revision.)