英语论文网

where at the moment their watchers-free to move at will-were.
The surveillants'facility and expediency of movement was thewarrant of their domination;the inmates''fixedness to the place'was the most secure and the hardest to break or loose of themanifold bonds of their subordination.Mastery over time was thehttps://www.51lunwen.org/secret of the managers'power-and immobilizing their subordinatesin space through denying them the right to move and through theroutinization of the time-rhythm they had to obey was the princi-pal strategy in their exercise of power.The pyramid of power wasbuilt out of velocity,access to the means of transportation and theresulting freedom of movement.Panopticon was a model of mutual engagement and confronta-
tion between the two sides of the power relationship.The man-agers'strategies of guarding their own volatility and routinizingthe flow of time of their subordinates merged into one.But therewas tension between the two tasks.The second task put con-
straints on the first-it tied the'routinizers'to the place withinwhich the objects of time routinization had been confined.Theroutinizers were not truly and fully free to move:the option of'absentee landlords'was,practically,out of the question.
Panopticon is burdened with other handicaps as well.It isanexpensivestrategy:conquering space and holding to it as well askeeping its residents in the surveilled place spawned a wide rangeof costly and cumbersome administrative tasks.There are build-ings to erect and maintain in good shape,professional surveillantsto hire and pay,the survival and working capacity of the inmatesto be attended to and provided for.Finally,administration means,willy-nilly,taking responsibility for the overall well-being of theplace,even if only in the name of well-understood self-interest-and responsibility again means being bound to the place.It re-quires presence,and engagement,at least in the form of a perpetualconfrontation and tug-of-war.
What prompts so many commentators to speak of the'end ofhistory',of post-modernity,'second modernity'and'surmodernity',or otherwise to articulate the intuition of a radical change in thearrangement of human cohabitation and in social conditions underwhich life-politics is nowadays conducted,is the fact that the long
effort to accelerate the speed of movement has presently reached its,'natural limit'.Power can move with the speed of the electronicsignal-and so the time required for the movement of its essentialingredients has been reduced to instantaneity.For all practicalpurposes,power has become truly ex territorial,no longer bound,not even slowed down,by the resistance of space(the advent ofcellular telephones may well serve as a symbolic'last blow'deliv-ered to the dependency on space:even the access to a telephonesocket is unnecessary for a command to be given and seen throughto its effect.It does not matter any more where the giver of thecommand is-the difference between'close by'and'far away',orfor that matter between the wilderness and the civilized,orderlyspace,has been all but cancelled.)This gives the power-holders atruly unprecedented opportunity:the awkward and irritatingaspects of the panoptical technique of power may be disposedof.Whatever else the present stage in the history of modernity is,it is also,perhaps above all,post-Panoptical.What mattered in
Panopticon was that the people in charge were assumed always to'be there',nearby,in the controlling tower.What matters inpost-Panoptical