Quotes & Sayings About Panopticon

To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn't a metaphor. It was the greatest failing on everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself. She would always be confined by what everyone expected of her because she was too afraid and too unwilling to correct our imperfect imaginings. — Robyn Schneider

If Tolstoy were alive today and working at Panopticon Insurance, he'd say that all insurance companies are the same, then throw himself through an eighteenth story window and plunge to his death in a hail of glass and shattered dignity (70). — Paul Neilan

We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary
made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to.
"I think I'll stick with reality," I said, handing Cassidy back her phone.
She stared at it, and then me, disappointed. "I'd think you of all people would want to escape."
"Imaginary prisoners are still prisoners. — Robyn Schneider

Why did you do all that, Frankie?" asked Porter. "I mean, it was brilliant, what you did, what you made us do - but why would you bother? That's what I can't figure out."
Frankie sighed. "Have you ever heard of the panopticon?" she asked him.
Porter shook his head.
"Have you ever been in love?"
He shook his head again.
"Then I can't explain it," Frankie said.
They went inside and took the geometry test. — E. Lockhart

I never knew I liked to be outside so much. I never knew I liked lochs and views and that, but I could seriously handle living in a cottage by the side of somewhere like this.
The Panopticon — Jenn Fagan

Psychedelic drugs undoubtedly open the doors to the mind's panopticon, but what we see in the mental mirrors are mere distortions of reality, not reality itself. — Georg Feuerstein

The sky's gray and there's mizzle. It's so soft on my skin
it's nothing like rain. It's even softer than the lightest drizzle! Lift my face up, so it can kiss my skin. The Panopticon — Jenn Fagan

I could be the lone Eskimo, friend of whales and seals.
The Panopticon — Jenn Fagan

I was going to suggest some hard-won guidelines for responsible reviewing. For instance: First, as in Hippocrates, do no harm. Second, never stoop to score a point or bite an ankle. Third, always understand that in this symbiosis, you are the parasite. Fourth, look with an open heart and mind at every different kind of book with every change of emotional weather because we are reading for our lives and that could be love gone out the window or a horseman on the roof. Fifth, use theory only as a periscope or a trampoline, never a panopticon, a crib sheet or a license to kill. Sixth, let a hundred Harolds Bloom. — John Leonard

Jenni Fagan is the real thing, and The Panopticon is a real treat: maturely alive to the pains of maturing, and cleverly amused as well as appalled by what it finds in the world. — Andrew Motion

It was one of those country parties where it felt as if no matter where you went you were always being watched by either a live horse or a dead stag, until you found yourself lingering by the washbasin after a piss just to escape this weirdly oppressive ungulate panopticon. — Ned Beauman

There was this philosopher-slash-historian called Foucault, who wrote about how society is like this legendary prison called panopticon. In the panopticon, you might be underconstant observation, except you can never be sure whether someone is watching or not, so you wind up following the rules anyway."
"But how do you know who's a watcher and who's a prisoner?" ...
"That's the point. Even the watchers are prisoners. — Robyn Schneider

You can't truly hear your own voice until the shouting around you disappears. New ideas and possibilities - our own ideas, our own possibilities - will occur only when we step away from the Virtual Panopticon. — John Twelve Hawks

Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses, I shall cal an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, determine, intercept, model, control , or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and - why not - language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses - one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primitive inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face. — Giorgio Agamben

It's that you are having a mental conversation with all the forces that could be watching you and condemning you for your nose-picking (potential or actual) - even though rationally you know that no one can see you. That's the panopticon. — E. Lockhart

Well, Mr. Illiterate Jock, let me enlighten you. There was this philosopher-slash-historian called Foucault, who wrote about how society is like this legendary prison called the panopticon. In the panopticon, you might be under constant observation, except you can never be sure whether someone is watching or not, so you wind up following the rules anyway."
"But how do you know who's a watcher and who's a prisoner?" I asked, pulling into the empty parking lot.
"That's the point. Even the watchers are prisoners. Come on, let's go on the swings. — Robyn Schneider

For a spy novelist like me, the Edward J. Snowden story has everything. A man driven by ego and idealism - can anyone ever distinguish the two? - leaves his job and his beautiful girlfriend behind. He must tell the world the Panopticon has arrived. His masters vow to punish him, and he heads for Moscow in a desperate search for refuge. — Alex Berenson

You pass the old L.A. County jail, which is surprisingly beautiful. It's got a handsome stone facade and stately columns. The new L.A. County jail - called The Twin Towers - isn't beautiful at all; it's a stucco panopticon the color of sick flesh. — Leslie Jamison

You'll never escape the panopticon thinking like that. — Robyn Schneider

But I know now that isn't true; history is filled with fictional people. And even the epigraph Fitzgerald placed at the beginning of The Great Gatsby is by a writer who doesn't exist. We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary - made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to. — Robyn Schneider

Big Government is erecting a panopticon state - one that sees everything, and regulates everything. It's great "customer service," except that you can never get out of the store. — Mark Steyn

Women are no longer required to be chaste or modest, to restrict their sphere of activity to the home, or even to realize their properly feminine destiny in maternity. Normative femininity [that is, the rules for being a good woman] is coming more and more to be centered on women's body - not its duties and obligations or even its capacity to bear children, but its sexuality, more precisely, its presumed heterosexuality and its appearance. . . . The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle, or who, feeling
fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate
of Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience
to patriarchy. — Rosemarie Tong