The Omnopticon ...

4 November 2007

‘Omnopticon’

I sat bolt upright this morning – around 4 AM. This was either because I was having a eureka moment or the pizza I had for dinner was repeating; either way, the word/invention ‘omnopticon’ came to me out of the blue. I had been thinking about ways to get more readers and it hit me that Sweik’s Anabasis was probably not the most common referent for what I was trying to do with it. Like a lot of other lazy people, I use my blog to express shallow opinions and relate short histories; it allows me to set down unthought-through opinions about any topic that my dilettantish mind flits over without really having to break a sweat.

And those things I write about tend to be pretty varied – whatever passes in front of either my physical or mind’s eye. Of course, in the case of the former, I mean my ‘eyes’, I’ve still got two of those. This does raise an interesting question as to whether schizoids have two or more mind’s eyes and another about non-schizoids: are they a sort of mental Cyclops because they’ve only got one eye? I’m digressing here, aren’t I?

Anyway, this multiple streams-of-consciousness approach to putting it out there ought to have a single word to describe it, no? And that’s when ‘omnopticon’ came to me.

So, like any semi-literate denizen of the century, I googled it but found only one use of the term by Jeffrey Rosen in a 2004 book that I’ve got to read within the next decade or so. Intriguingly called ‘The Naked Crowd. Reclaiming security and freedom in an anxious age’ (New York: Random House, 2004), he is apparently, and among other things, worrying that the Age of Google is going to result in not the panopticon where authority can see all but the omnopticon where everyone can see everything.

I think I can better that definition: omnopticon is a place from where everyone can see everything and, indeed, has the freedom to look in all those places. Because it’s a concept rather than a physical place, the omnopticon must be virtual, not real; you can’t be in all those places at once.

So, can I link ‘Anabasis’ and ‘Omnopticon’? Perhaps so. In Jaroslav Hasek’s book, ‘The Good Soldier Sweik’, despite his brilliant, single-minded and endlessly inventive obtuseness, the protagonist eventually has to go off to the war. It is at this point that his anabasis begins.

Sweik goes left, he goes right, he goes north, south, in circles, backwards and, occasionally, forward but every single step is directed at keeping him from being shot. The anabasis is, indeed, a wander around without a map and, hence, its seeming randomness. But, at a deeper level, the trip is an ‘omnopticon’ because it allows Sweik to see (and show us) the futility of that war and the absurdness of the society that is trying to get him into that conflict from a variety of angles. The chaotic nature of the anabasis is actually a way of finding logic and pattern in the world; it gives Sweik an omnopticonic view which enables him to confirm his own instinctive view that the war is insane and, therefore, he’d be nuts to go along with those who want to get him shot in it. The only rational response is the anabasis. But you can’t tell those others that’s what you are doing, they wouldn’t understand, they haven’t got/found an omnopticon (begins to sound like something tangible, doesn’t it? Like a small metal contraption you carry around in your briefcase and pull out from time to time in order to help you figure out where you are. It could be a sort of philosophical sextant, couldn’t it?).

I didn’t really set out to write about ‘The Good Soldier Sweik’ but I did want to fool around with the word ‘omnopticon’.

Let me try the definition again: ‘omnopticon’ is a place from where you can distinguish the patterns behind seeming random, chaotic reality; the omnopticon is a Picasso-like way of looking at the world. It’s a virtual philosophical instrument that permits you to be in that place where you can make those multiple observations from multiple angles. We’ve all seen those works where Picasso tries to show the interior of his subject by painting two dimensional views of the figure from several angles, thereby giving us three-dimensions in a two-dimensional medium. The omnopticon allows you to see the world out there from all angles (or at least from a lot of them) but, it also allows everyone else (and everything else) to see you. I’m positive that the world out there that you are looking at is not reality because that has to be the result of how you interpret what you see; as Richard Rorty says, there is no such thing as objective truth. So, the omnopticon is one tool that gives you the opportunity to create your own truth from the sum of multiple observations (including observations by others and yourself of you). I wonder also if it might require wine for lubrication?

You may not be able to make much of my definition but it makes some sense to me. That may be because I had to struggle through trying to set it down in a comprehensible manner. Reread the above and tell me if you think I’ve done any good. Or, just have a glass of lubrication.