Panopticism

Panopticism, as Copjec deploys it in Read My Desire, names the ideological-theoretical formation that results when the law is conceived as purely positive and productive — that is, when its repressive and negative dimension is systematically foreclosed. Drawing on Foucault's account of panoptic power and its uptake in apparatus-theory film criticism, panopticism describes a regime in which the gaze is treated as a totalizing, constitutive force that produces docile, self-surveilling subjects rather than splitting and inculpating them. In this formation, the subject is always already seen, always already visible, and this visibility is read as the mechanism of subjectivation itself. The result, for Copjec, is a theoretical "orthopsychic subject" — one whose desire is conceived as fully realized, produced, and legible within the social apparatus, rather than as constitutively unrealized and divided by the repressive cut of the law.

Copjec's critical point is that panopticism, precisely because it posits desire as an effect of a purely positive, immanent power, collapses the psychoanalytic distinction between the subject as effect of the law and the subject as realization of the law's demand. By eliminating this gap — the gap in which Lacanian desire lives, circling around das Ding, never reaching satisfaction — panopticism produces a subject without genuine lack, a subject who is guilty only insofar as visibility itself renders one accountable, rather than being split by the irreducible negativity that psychoanalytic repression installs. It is, in Copjec's argument, the theoretical symptom of a broader conflation of the Foucauldian and psychoanalytic fields: where Foucauldian panopticism places the gaze everywhere and nowhere as a productive apparatus, Lacanian theory insists the gaze is objet petit a — a constitutive absence, never fully capturable within the visual field, that inculpates rather than simply surveils.

This concept appears once, in october-books-joan-copjec-read-my-desire-lacan-against-the-historicists-october (p. 36), where it serves as the negative theoretical foil against which Copjec elaborates the distinctiveness of the Lacanian subject. Panopticism is positioned as the limit-case of what goes wrong when Foucauldian discourse theory displaces psychoanalytic categories: the gaze ceases to be the Lacanian objet petit a — a constitutive void that splits the subject and makes it inculpable — and becomes instead a positive, productive mechanism of total visibility. This directly bears on the canonical concept of the Gaze: where Lacan's gaze "stands watch over the inculpation — the faulting and splitting — of the subject by the apparatus," panopticism's gaze merely confirms the subject within a closed circuit of surveillance and self-regulation, effectively dissolving the asymmetry between the eye and the gaze that Lacanian theory insists upon.

The concept is further entangled with Desire and Repression as cross-referenced canonicals: panopticism's purely positive law cannot account for desire as constitutively unrealized, circling around an irretrievable lost object. By making the law only productive, panopticism eliminates the gap — the negative, repressive cut — within which Lacanian desire is generated and sustained. It also implicates the Orthopsychic Subject (the self-contained, non-split subject that apparatus theory and Foucauldian analytics tend to presuppose) and Ideology (insofar as panopticism is itself an ideological formation that misrecognizes the libidinal-structural underpinning of the subject's social existence). Copjec's use of the term thus operates as a specification and critique: panopticism is what ideology-theory looks like when it jettisons the psychoanalytic account of the divided subject in favor of a flat, immanentist sociology of power.

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the HistoricistsJoan Copjec · 1994 (p.36)

something of the paradox is manifest in Foucault's description of panoptic power and film theory's description of the relation between the apparatus and the gaze

The phrase "paradox" is theoretically loaded: it signals that both Foucault's panoptic power and film theory's apparatus-gaze relation share a structural contradiction — they invoke a gaze that is everywhere-yet-nowhere, totalizing yet subjectivating, which Copjec reads as the telltale sign that the negative, repressive dimension of the law has been suppressed. The juxtaposition of "panoptic power" with "the apparatus and the gaze" also enacts Copjec's central move of showing these two seemingly distinct theoretical frameworks (Foucauldian discipline theory and apparatus film theory) as isomorphic symptoms of the same theoretical elision of the Lacanian split subject.