Panspectrocism
From Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Panspectrocism is the social diagram associated with the panspectron.
The relation between the two concepts is thus analogous to the relation between "panopticism" (the social diagram) and the panopticon (Jeremy Bentham's prison architecture), as sketched by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish.
Very much a concept "in the making", panspectrocism draws upon (at least) four interrelated ideas:
- DeLanda's description of the actual NSA-developed surveillance contraption dubbed The Panspectron (see the 1991 War in the Age of Intelligent Machines).
- Foucault's description of social diagrams that spread through different social institutions, serving as effective and economically efficent modes of organisation. These social diagrams may originate in specific sites, at specific times, to counter a specific problem (often in relation to social control or war), but can nevertheless be generalised so as to become more generic modes of social organisation.
- Deleuze's description of the societies of control, that succeed the "disciplinary" societies whose advent was charted by Foucault. In the "Postscript on the societies of control" (published in 1990, in the journal October), two concepts are crucial to panspectrocism - universal modulation (digitalised logging of "analog" behaviour) and focus on the use of data banks.
- Michel Serres' description of "machninic eras" - the idea that different "machines" may be more or less predominant (both as actual and as "conceptual" machines) at different times in history. Hence, it is sometimes useful to see history as a succession of the "clockwork" era, the "motor" era, and the "computer" era. As it is actualised through universal modulation and advanced statistical control/data mining, panspectrocism can be seen as a part of the computer era.
Read more about the concept at panspectrocism.org
