POLICE PANOPTICON

Prologue: New York, 1998: the mayor Rudolf Giuliani invents the “ zero tolerance”. At the base, an assumption: a close, nay, a real connection exists among the slight unrests by the youth, the immigrants, rebels, hashish-smokers, etc, and the big crimes, the bank robberies, the homicides. First step to stem the crime at the shout of “ zero tolerance! ” is the violent repression of every form of dissidence. Namely: many more cops and a more strict justice. Then the prevention comes through the moltiplication of optical systems of video- surveillance: cameras at every street- corner, mostly with a persuasive aim. Someone has an idea: why not exploit this unheard spaces of free visibility? Why not profit by a new cable television with a palinsest to fill? A group of situationists and dissidents have taken the opportunity: short performances, shooted by the cameras of video-surveillance, where the occasion offers: schools, banks, hospitals, streets, underground... a performance directed at a double audience: who is in the other side (whoever he may be) and the passers- by. These latter not only watch the performance, but also (with surprise?) they discover the existence of the optical system of video-surveillance. The performances happen once a
week and first comes the publicity. The topics acted are various, but the performances of repression, racial
discrimination, social injustice are favoured. The duration of the show depends on the arrival of cops, it can be more or less tardy...

Police! Police!
Behind a dull prism,
judge and coscience of never committed crimes.
Eyes without orbits,
uncovered nerves,
opaque audience at a surrealist theatre,
we dance the rythm of the Power.
In the metropolis under video-sorveillance the night drops and the life runs away, transparent like the glass.
Prisons without bars, figures in perpetual purgatory.
God has new eyes!

Epilogue: One of the most emblematic signal of the transition that we are living between the old Disciplinary
Society and the new Society of Inspection is the ubiquitarian explosion of the optical power. The philosopher Michel Foucault denominated “ disciplinaries” those societies that have expanded during the 18st century and the 19st century and that are culminated in the first half of 20st century, they were charaterized by a management of power accomplished by big confinement places (schools, factories, barracks, hospitals and, in case of need, prisons and lunatic asylums). The Disciplinary Societies have discovered into the scopical practice a formidable strategical resource that has given an increasing importance to the look since it has become a generator of unheard-of power effects. The most complete paradigm of that visual form of the domination is the panoptical jail that was planned by the English thinker Jeremy Bentham in 1791 as an exemplary model for every disciplining institution. Among his walls the potentially concrete visual control of the prisoners by the overseers those are concealed at the look is functional to the incessant inscription in the subjectivity of the prisoners of the manners automatisms requested by the Power. If the decisive mechanism of the panoptism is the radical foreclosure of every scopic reciprocity between the observer and the observed, the panoptical devices are aimed technologies at the rigorous disjunction between the see and the be seen: the more the strict figure of the overseers is invisible, the more the disciplining power of his look results guaranteed into his constancy and deeply interiorized by the subjectivity of the supervised. The contemporaneity places us in front of a renewed strategy of overseeing that is founded on the diffusion and on the decentralization of the panoptical technologies and on a correlative entrance into a crisis by the relation between the imprisonment and the panoptism. The panoptism, thanks to the capillary diffusion of the new technologies of video-surveillance doesn’ t need really the imprisonment, in fact, it becomes nearly widespread on every space that is practicable by the subjects. The modern Society of the Control, that is founded on the crisis of the seclusion places and on the high-tech power that diffuses itself and articulates in the everyday life according to polymorphous modalities those evolve rapidly, sinks us into a horizon that is always visible, that tends to model our manners, it foresees every deviation from the conducts those are considered lawful. The individuals are transformed into obliged actors of an ubiquitous fiction, that is directed by the Power that organizes their surveillance: that seems to be the most radical scenery that the modern panoptical society gives us. The emergence of forms of social entertainment like the reality-shows, those are founded in the tv-staging of the individual everyday life and those are able to attract masses of aimed protagonists, is the worrying symptom of a new and enthusiastic availability to be subjected to the scopic technologies and to the radical asymmetry between the observer and the observed those it implicate. Into this social scenery a necessity becomes visible: the necessity of increasing the consciousness of the individuals about the unheard-of dangers of a society that, as it has surpassed the old disciplinary horizons, is making of the technological-visibility his rule. A crucial figure for the analysis of the new powers is the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, he wrote: “ it is not appropriate to ask what is the most hard or the most tolerable régime, because the discharges and the enslavements are clashing into each one of these régimes...it is not appropriate to cry or to hope for, it is rather appropriate to seek new weapons...”.