Reading the Boston Bombing Through the Panopticon - Foucault

Bentham designed the Panopticon as a Prison

By seymourblogger/abbeysbooks

Foucault is emphasizing that the Panopticon is a TECHNOLOGY of Surveillance.

Surveillance is the primary and most important variable to reduce the occurrence of crime. 

Foucault has told us that surveillance is our most crucial danger today and that resistance should be targeted there in the grid of power/knowledge/capital/normality

Edward Snowden has employed a strategy worthy of Baudrillard.

He has not resisted.

He has imploded the secrecy of the NSA and its spying on American citizens and the rest of the world. 

The American government can no longer stand for the principles on which it was founded: the rule of Law, equality, freedom, liberty, private use of property.

Because the case of the Tsarnaev brothers follows the Snowden Event, It is taking place in a world where the US government is known to lie, assassinate, torture, fabricate evidence, a world in which no one anywhere believes in anything the US government says, writes, proclaims. 

A government disrespected by its people and by the world. This will help influence US and world opinion about the guilt or innocence of the Tsarnaev Brothers. We owe Edward Snowden a lot.

______________________________________________________________________________

The Foucauldian Grid is a spiral of power/knowledge/capital/normality
There is no escape
We are trapped like insects in a spider web and can only resist

Today we are informed that:

(Reuters) - Three college friends of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev pleaded not guilty on Friday to charges that they helped cover his tracks when the FBI was trying to find the people responsible for the April 15 attack.

Dias Kadyrbayev  

Azamat Tazhayakov

Robel Phillipos

These three have just stepped into the Foucauldian Grid

Canetti and Baudrillard have opined that no one thinks to the end of something. 

All the way to  the end. No way out. 

DEATH

This recent action of our government has chilling consequences if we think through it to the end. To Death.

You go to university, even have a roommate from a different country, say Chechnya for example. 

That person is now under surveillance by you.

What if they are secretly terrorists and you have been friends with them. You too will be implicated, faced with proving your innocence, tried and condemned.

Or at least subjected to financial ruin by lawyering up.

Avoid persons who look different, who come from other countries than our western allies. 

Become paranoid of these other persons.

Become paranoid.

While the other will become paranoid also.

It is to teach a fear, a distrust of the Other.

This is the mental template of families who practice incest. Sex with daughters, sisters, mothers is safer than sex with the OTHER, the outsider, the stranger, the unknown.

This kind of surveillance is far worse than spying on your emails, phone calls, internet use. It is insidious and invisible and it is constant. It is like God's eye described by Gaddis in The Recognitions. 

God sees everything, even the dewdrop on the rose at dawn. God has morphed into the technology of the Panopticon.

Do you see where this is going? 

This is incredibly more frightening and dangerous than NSA spying. It is relentless and comes from below, through the interstices of power/knowledge,normality.

And all because three friends are being prosecuted so prosecutors can put 3 more notches on their belt.

It will look great on their CV.

Thinking through to the end, to a metaphoric death, is to know the US Empire is tottering.

It is destroying the integrity of its people. 

The one variable Toynbee found invariant for all 

disintegrating empires.

Therefore, in a totally sickening, mind-fucking way, Edward Snowden might end up being the best thing that ever happened to the NSA and “national security”. His revelation has the power to instill fear and constant vigilance into people, essentially scaring them into submission in a way that the surveillance programs themselves couldn’t.

Couldn't Resist.

When I first read Foucault's account of the panopticon, where the individual at the 

centre can simultaneously see and judge a whole multitude of other individuals, I 

thought it was brilliant but overheated. Now, it actually seems like somebody's 

plan. 

That's what we risk becoming: a society which is in crucial respects a giant 

panopticon, where the people with access to our secrets can see, hear, intercept 

and monitor  everything. LINK HERE

Welcome to the Hunger Games. May the 

odds be always in your favor.

NOTE:  Please scroll down to leave a comment in the box.