The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or los-ing any of its properties, was destined to spread throughout thesocial body; its vocation was to become a generalized function.The plague-stricken town provided an exceptional disciplinarymodel: perfect, but absolutely violent; to the disease thatbrought death, power opposed its perpetual threat of death; lifeinside it was reduced to its simplest expression; it was, againstthe power of death, the meticulous exercise of the right of thesword. The Panopticon, on the other hand, has a role of ampli-fication; although it arranges power, although it is intended tomake it more economic and more effective, it does so not forpower itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened so-ciety: its aim is to strengthen the social forces—to increase pro-duction, to develop the economy, spread education, raise thelevel of public morality; to increase and multiply.

In short, it arranges things in such a way thatthe exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like arigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so sub-tly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself in-creasing its own points of contact.

Utopias, perfectly closed in upon themselves, are commonenough.

animals

By this very fact, theexternal power may throw off its physical weight; it tends tothe non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, themore constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is aperpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation andwhich is always decided in advance.

The morenumerous those anonymous and temporary observers are, thegreater the risk for the inmate of being surprised and thegreater his anxious awareness of being observed.

Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes thetall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon.Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is beinglooked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he mayalways be so.

architectural

General speaking all the authorities exercising individualcontrol function according to a double mode; that of binary di-vision and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; nor-mal/abnormal);

leper

omnipresent and om-niscient powe

This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, inwhich the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in whichthe slightest movements are supervised, in which all events arerecorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links thecentre and periphery, in which power is exercised without di-vision, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in whicheach individual is constantly located, examined and distribut-ed among the living beings, the sick and the dead

whether the syndics have carried out their tasks,whether the inhabitants have anything to complain of; they ‘ob-serve their actions’. Every day, too, the syndic goes into thestreet for which he is responsible; stops before each house: getsall the inhabitants to appear at the windows (those who liveoverlooking the courtyard will be allocated a window lookingonto the street at which no one but they may show themselves);he calls each of them by name; informs himself as to the state ofeach and every one of them—‘in which respect the inhabitantswill be compelled to speak the truth under pain of death’; ifsomeone does not appear at the window, the syndic must askwhy: ‘In this way he will find out easily enough whether deador sick are being concealed.’ Everyone locked up in his cage,everyone at his window, answering to his name and showinghimself when asked—it is the great review of the living and thedead.

Only the intendants, syndics and guardswill move about the streets and also, between the infectedhouses, from one corpse to another, the ‘crows’, who can be leftto die: these are ‘people of little substance who carry the sick,bury the dead, clean and do many vile and abject offices’. It is asegmented, immobile, frozen space. Each individual is fixed inhis place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life,contagion or punishment.

f it is ab-solutely necessary to leave the house, it will be done in turn,avoiding any meeting.

strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town andits outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain ofdeath, the killing of all stray animals; the division of the towninto distinct quarters, each governed by an intendant. Eachstreet is placed under the authority of a syndic, who keeps itunder surveillance; if he leaves the street, he will be con-demned to death. On the appointed day, everyone is ordered tostay indoors: it is forbidden to leave on pain of death. The syn-dic himself comes to lock the door of each house from the out-side; he takes the key with him and hands it over to the inten-dant of the quarter; the intendant keeps it until the end of thequarantine

Given all this, I want to conclude with some thoughts about teaching patience as a strategy. The deliberate engagement of delay should itself be a primary skill that we teach to students. It’s a very old idea that patience leads to skill, of course—but it seems urgent now that we go further than this and think about patience itself as the skill to be learned. Granted—patience might be a pretty hard sell as an educational deliverable. It sounds nostalgic and gratuitously traditional. But I would argue that as the shape of time has changed around it, the meaning of patience today has reversed itself from its original connotations. The virtue of patience was originally associated with forbearance or sufferance. It was about conforming oneself to the need to wait for things. But now that, generally, one need not wait for things, patience becomes an active and positive cognitive state. Where patience once indicated a lack of control, now it is a form of control over the tempo of contemporary life that otherwise controls us. Patience no longer connotes disempowerment—perhaps now patience is power.

Copley’s painting, in other words, is an embodiment of the delays that it was created to endure. If Copley had had instant access to his instructors in London, if there had been an edX course given by the Royal Academy, he would not have been compelled to paint the way he did. Changing the pace of the exchange would have changed the form and content of the exchange. This particular painting simply would not exist. This painting is formed out of delay, not in spite of it.

Just a few examples from the first hour of my own experiment: It took me nine minutes to notice that the shape of the boy’s ear precisely echoes that of the ruff along the squirrel’s belly—and that Copley was making some kind of connection between the animal and the human body and the sensory capacities of each. It was 21 minutes before I registered the fact that the fingers holding the chain exactly span the diameter of the water glass beneath them. It took a good 45 minutes before I realized that the seemingly random folds and wrinkles in the background curtain are actually perfect copies of the shapes of the boy’s ear and eye, as if Copley had imagined those sensory organs distributing or imprinting themselves on the surface behind him. And so on.

the 1 ,000 movies to seebefore we die, the 1 00 tourist destinations to visit before we die,the 5 00 books to read before we die.60

there will always be someth ing online moreinformative, surprising, funny, diverting, impressive thananyth ing in one's immediate actual circumstances.

The possibility of a sense of accompl ishment in some end product ofone's work became less and less tenable in large factory conditions.

Over the last two decades, a growing range of emotional stateshave been incrementally pathologized in order to create vastnew markets for previously unneeded products. The fluctuating textures of human affect and emotion that are onlyi mprecisely suggested by the notions of shyness, anxiety, variable sexual desire, distraction, or sadness have been falselyconve rted into medical disorders to be targeted by hugely profitable drugs.

The same difficulty arises with the problem ofd rugs as with that of media objects - the impossibility and thei rrelevance of isolating any single determinant as responsiblefor the alteration of consciousness.

one can counterpose the parcell i zation andfragmentation of shared zones of experience i nto fabricatedmicroworlds of affects and symbols.

Admittedly, Stiegler's postulation of a global mass synchronization is nuanced , hardlyreducible to the notion of everyone th inking or doing thesame th i ng; and it is based on a sustained, if recondite,phenomenology of retention and memory.

The idea of long blocks of time spent exclusively asa spectator is outmoded.

"mass synchronization" of consciousness and memory

raison d'etre

There is an effective prohibition not only on the c ritique ofmandatory tech nological consumption but also on the articulation of how existing technical capabil ities and premises couldbe deployed in the service of human and social needs, ratherthan the requirements .of capital and empire.

Many who celebrate the transformative potential of communication networks are oblivious to the oppressive forms of humanlabor and environmental ravages on which their fantasies ofvirtual ity and dematerial ization depend.

Most i mages are now produced and circulated in the service of maximizing the amount of time spent inhabitual forms of individual self-management and self-regulation.

he fear of falling beh ind, of being deemed outdated

This unrelenting rhythm of technological consumption, asit has developed over the past two or three decades, preventsany significant period of time elapsing in which the use of agiven product, or assemblage of them, could become famil iarenough to constitute merely the background elements of one'slife

Death, inmany guises, is one of the by-products of neol iberalism: whenpeople have nothing further that can be taken from them,whether resources or labor power, they are quite simply disposable.

At present, the particular operation and effects of specific new machines or networksare less important than how the rhythms, speeds, and formatsof accelerated and intensified consumption are reshapingexperience and perception.

Theseperiods, in which certain key features seemed to be permanent, allowed critics to expound theories of cinema, television,or video based on the assumption that these forms or systemshad certain essential self-defining characteristics. In retrospect,what were most often identified as essential were temporaryelements of larger constellations whose rates of change werevariable and unpredictable.

therewill be billions of individuals with a similar level of technological competence and basic intellectual assumptions

Glare here is not a phenomenon ofliteralbrightness, but rather of the u ninterrupted harshness of monotonous stimulation in wh ich a larger range of responsivecapacities are frozen or neutralized.

interval ofsleep and restoratio

market day

24n is shaped arou nd individual goals of competitiveness, advancement, acqu isitiveness,personal security, and comfort at the expense of others

24n disables vision throughprocesses of homogenization, redundancy, and acceleration.

It not onlyincites in the individual subject an exclusive focus on getting,having, winning, gawking, squandering, and deriding, but isfully interwoven with mechanisms of control that maintain thesuperfluousness and powerlessness of the subject of itsdemands.

Rather, the effectiveness of24n lies in the incompatib ility it lays bare, in the discrepancybetween a hu man l ife-wo rld and the evocation of a switchedon universe for which no off-switch exists.

wh ich for the ancient Mesopotamians,Hebrews, and others became a seven-day week.

In spiteof its insubstantiality and abstraction as a slogan, the implacability of 24n is its impossible temporality.