Abstract
In Discipline and Punishment, Foucault implicitly rebukes Guy Debord by proclaiming that ‘[o]ur society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance… We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptical machine’ (p. 217). In our indefatigably surveillant twenty-first century, it would be impossible to contest Foucault’s claims regarding the potency of the panopticon, but is this necessarily exclusive of the power of the spectacle? This chapter will seek to answer this question in relation to Dave Egger’s novel The Circle (2013) and its film adaptation by James Ponsoldt (2017). The Circle also foregrounds the extent to which the wheels of Foucault’s ‘panoptical machine’ are greased by Debordian spectacle. Through close reading of The Circle, this chapter will offer a biopolitical reading of the intricate mechanisms of panoptic control at the interface between spaces of work and leisure, public and private spheres, bodies and machines, consciousness and communication networks.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Bibliography
Bentham, J. (1995). Panopticon Writings. Verso: London.
Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E. (2018). The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.
Eggers, D. (2013). The Circle. London: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (1980). The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction (trans: Hurley, R.). New York: Vintage.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (trans: Sheridan, A.). New York: Vintage.
Franzen, J. (2003). Why Bother? In How to be Alone: Essays. New York: Picador.
Fuchs, C. (2014). Digital Labour and Karl Marx. London: Routledge.
Gandy, O. (1993). The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information. London: Routledge.
Garfinkel, S. (2000). Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the Twenty-First Century. Sebastopol: O’Reilly.
Haggerty, K. D., & Ericson, R. V. (2000). The Surveillant Assemblage. The British Journal of Sociology, 51(4), 605–622.
Levin, T. Y. (2002). CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Manovich, L. (2002). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Miller, J. (1987). Jeremy Bentham’s Panoptic Device. October, 41, 3–29.
Orwell, G. (2004). 1984. London: Penguin.
Reisman, D. (2001). The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Simon, B. (2005). The Return of Panopticism: Supervision, Subjection and the New Surveillance. Surveillance & Society, 3(1), 1–20.
Skinner, B. F. (1948). Walden Two. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Thompson, G. (2003). Male Sexuality Under Surveillance: The Office in American Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Thoreau, H. D. (2012). The Portable Thoreau. London: Penguin.
Virilio, P. (2002). Ground Zero. London: Verso.
Zuboff, S. (2015). Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization. Journal of Information Technology, 30, 75–89.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jarvis, B. (2019). Surveillance and Spectacle Inside The Circle. In: Flynn, S., Mackay, A. (eds) Surveillance, Architecture and Control. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00371-5_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00371-5_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-00370-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-00371-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)