Empire’s knowing operates through inattention and averted gaze, not panoptic surveillance

Evidence

Imperial dispositions are at once ways of living in and responding to, ways of being and seeing oneself, ways of knowing that shape which sentiments are activated, and in turn the affective states that circumscribe what one can know. Rather than the studied surveillance and panoptic gaze that have come to characterize the collective posture of empire’s practitioners, I am drawn to something else: to “skittish seeing” and the adverted gaze, to acts of ignoring rather than ignorance, to inattention, to the shock of recognition, to Sartre’s “abrupt awakenings” and the quick circumspections into which they fold. Heidegger identified one register of “disclosure” as an “evasive turning-away.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1384

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s panopticon literature and to the reader’s broader reading on colonial epistemology; also resonates with the Frankfurt School’s work on inattention and social character. — connects to: Empires affect vast regions while their home populations remain unaware those places exist. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 99
• DEEPTHINKING: Reverses the standard Foucauldian framing of empire as surveillance: colonial knowing here is a matter of deliberate not-seeing, which reorients how we understand colonial knowledge production.