Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [594]

A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had no caption, and represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face and enormous boots, a sub-machine-gun pointed from his hip. From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 594

Note

The poster literalises the panoptic gaze — ‘from whatever angle you looked, the muzzle… seemed to be pointed straight at you’ — an image-engineered surveillance that follows the viewer. The passage materialises the always-watched condition as visual technology.