The Architecture of Control by Vetter Grant

Author:Vetter, Grant [Vetter, Grant]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780992945
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2012-12-13T17:00:00+00:00

5.3 NEO-PANOPTICISM, THE POST-HISTORICAL CONDITION AND THE PERSISTENCE OF DISPARATE MODELS OF SUBJECTIVATION:THE INTEGRATION OF SOVEREIGN-METAPHYSICAL, DISCIPLINARY-RATIONAL AND CAPITALIST-IMMANENTIST APPARATUSES OF CONTROL.

Certainly, neo-Panopticism is not a form of soft totalitarianism, fascism, or even a micro-physics of self-regulating power — although all of these forms of organizing the body socius do inform how we think about the exercise of power in control societies today, especially as a recombant or hybrid force. Even so, neo-Panopticism still requires a complete revision of how we conceptualize inter-subjective relations, psychic subjection and socio-economic subjectivation.

Unlike totalitarianism, the hyper Panoptic regime represents a much more formal power, or rather, it is posited as being such. One could even say that contemporary forms of Panoptic control appear that much more perverse for having finally made the absent center of religious obedience and the strong center of rationalist instruction co-extensive — in essence, (mis)taking both of these forms of subjective interpellation for formal operations.

Perhaps this is what the move from macro to micro to sub-atomizing power is — a co-constitutive (re)configuration of power ‘types’, (Synoptic, Banoptic, Bio-optic and Acoustic), placed under the sign of formulaic efficiency, systemic determinations and axiomatic functions. This transitive property of power relations could even be characterized as a distinctive admixture of (pre-modern) belief, (modern) instrumental reason and (postmodern) technocratic rule, where the last of these three dispositif’s incorporates and updates each prior regime of control through an exhaustive moment of Panoptic synthesis — or even a synthetic recombination of disciplinary dispositif’s.

But here a short digression is in order because the trap of believing in ‘progress’ — or in progressive models of control — is that the simplifications attributable to periodization often erase the persistence of prior models of subjectivation. In so doing, the heterogeneity of ‘historical’ life is reduced to reified generalizations that make it impossible to understand how premodern forms of subjectivation manage to subsist beneath new forms of social control. In drawing out a cartography of contemporary power this is a grave error because ‘progress’ moves not so much by transformations as mutations; not so much by inventing new universes as multiplying retroverses; not so much by clear divisions of innovation as accounting for metastasized apparatuses of cultural condensation. From Hegel to Fukuyama the idea of ‘progress’ is often used as a misnomer of sorts for compounding and redoubling efforts here, diversifying and mystifying applications there, and refining and complexifying the play of reversibility everywhere. Or, to quote Baudrillard on the paradoxes of historical interlocution in the (post)postmodern era: “History has only wrenched itself from cyclical time to fall into the order of the recyclable.”[117] Of course, the problem here is in picturing just what this means, i.e., of understanding what forms, for one reason or another, were neither “degradable” nor “disposable” — especially with regard to different regimes of social control.[118] We must finally confront why it is that “History will not come to an end”, which is the same as saying we must try to understand why History will not begin again as a ‘true’ history, as a ‘real’ history or as a history after history.

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