The Global Panopticon? The Neoliberal State, Economic Life, and Democratic Surveillance

Abstract

One impoverishes the question of power if one poses it simply in terms of legislation and constitution … the state and the state apparatus. Power is … more complicated, dense and pervasive…. It's impossible to get the development of productive forces characteristic of capitalism if you don't at the same time have apparatuses of power…. The system of power takes a pyramidical form. [The apex] and the lower elements of the hierarchy stand in a relationship of mutual support and conditioning…. The bourgeoisie … construct[ed] machines of power allowing circuits of profit, which in turn re-inforced and modified the power apparatuses in a mobile and circular manner … techniques of power are invented to meet the demands of production … in the broadest sense — it can be a matter of the “production” of destruction, as with the army…. The power of the bourgeoisie is self-amplifying, in a mode not of conservation but of successive transformations.1