Bloggrokker (Scott) Foucault

Postmodernity and its Discontents--a sociocultural malady from the future? If so, I'm afraid the future is here, and it's been here for some time.
Foucault, conjuring the uber-utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, told me so.
Writing of Bentham's idea of the panopticon, an uber-utilitarian prison system consisting of a manned central tower surrounded by a concentric outlay of cells, Foucault claims this system ensures visibilty for enforcement in the tower and unverifiability of visibility for the celled inmates: "Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment, but he must be sure that he may always be so."
This all seems peachy and about as utopian as prison systems are gonna get.
It also appears Bentham's panopticon is here--it's here, all right, in the shape of the current media landscape, a media landscape turned prison system.
It cannot be argued--the media is the image and the image is the prison; we are all slaves, prisoners, inmates to the image--the cenral tower standing as metaphor for the spectacle we crave. Methinks Baudrillard might shoot this a Fonzie-esque thumbs up.
Then again, he might not. He might shoot me the bird.
Things might be the other way around, things might be anti-Baudrillardian. Might we rather be the guards in the watchtower--presumably wielding a remote control rather than a Kalashnikov--standing tall over a field of soothing, medicating images for our perusal?
I don't know if I can answer this here. I can say something about Bentham's panopticon being symptomatic of something called a "retrofuturistic semiovirus."
Allow me to drop a theorist we're not gonna read this term, but a theorist I read for a paper I did in another class. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay coined the term "retrofuturistic semiovirus" for a future concept or sign that manifests itself in the past, although you've got to get to the future to realize the concept as "futuristic." Got it? Good.
Seeing the panopticon in this light, seeing it as "retrofuturistically semioviral," Bentham's prison system is a mass signifier for the current prevalence of camera-phones, traffic-cams, and reality tv programs where everybody's got star-power, everyone's got unverifiable potential as the star attraction as everyone's highly visible.
Forget Coke. We're not Generation Next. We're Generation Funt. It's a Candid Camera world, after all.
An old theme tune went with it. What . . . oh yeah, I remember.
WHEN IT'S LEAST EXPECTED--YOU'RE ELECTED,
(Rodney King gettin' hell beat outta 'im)
YOU'RE THE STAR TODAY . . .
(George Bush's seasickness at a Japanese banquet)
SMILE!
(JFK's head turnin' to a Jell-O shot gone terribly wrong)
YOU'RE ON CANDID CAMERA!!
(Thai tsunamis)
WITH A HOCUS POCUS--YOU'RE IN FOCUS,
("When Animals Attack")
IT'S YOU'RE LUCKY DAY . . .
(jetliners hittin' skyscrapers)
SMILE!
(a Chinese student before a tank in Tiannenmen Square)
YOU'RE ON CANDID CAMERA!!
What to do, what to do with the masses of po-mo discomntents? Lock 'em up and feed 'em warm, fuzzy, colorful, hi-def, scary but distant and highly repeatable images straight from a watchtower shaped like a DirecTV dish.