Imperial power operates through selective ignoring rather than 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. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1384

Categorization

• XREF: Reframes the power/vision relationship — connects to Foucault’s panopticon debates and to the discipline’s assumptions about colonial surveillance. — connects to: Mapmaking is a fundamental instrument of imperial and surveillance power. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 485; Elite power over the imperial matrix is not absolute
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does ‘acts of ignoring’ as a technique of rule map onto specific archival silences or gaps in colonial documents?