Chapter 6 The status of the gaze in surveillance societies

This chapter is a refection on the status of the gaze in our societies, often called control (Deleuze 1992) or surveillance societies (Lyon 2002). ¹ Though I will be looking for indications in Foucault's work, my orientation is distinct from frequent attempts in surveillance studies and criminology either to apply panopticism ‘as an analytical ideal type’ procuring ‘an adequate understanding of society’ (Boyne 2000: 285, 302) or to adapt the panoptic framework ² to conceptualize or formalize contemporary practices in felds said to be predominantly biopolitical (criminal justice, public hygiene, medicine). The prolifc morphing of the term itself — Synopticon (Mathiesen 1997), Oligopticon (Latour 1998), Panoptic sort (Gandy 1993), Polyopticon (Allen 1994) — indicates well enough the unsuitability of what Foucault termed panopticism as a grid of intelligibility for the present. And I would argue that holding on to the term itself, albeit in its mutant manifestations, is making us blind to the heterotopic ³ nature of our present.