Publisher's Synopsis
The Panopticon is a long poem on the politics of surveillance in society and the many ways that people classify each other. Aurora Elms suggests that there are similarities between the surveillance and control tendencies of people in popular culture and social media and that of governments and corporations working for national security and criminal justice objectives.
The Panopticon is an examination of our drive for perfection and our need to restrain the life choices of others, often expressed in an intolerance of their mistakes and a disbelief in their ability to evolve. These dynamics shape how we see the world and how we codify and organize the diverse people in it. Elms suggests that the way out of political and social fragmentation is through personal accountability, active participation, and a validation of the inherent right of all human beings to flourish in states of freedom, guided by the Golden Rule. Elms addresses the difficulty of this challenge, particularly, following Michel Foucault and Kimberlé Crenshaw, the gaze's impact on intersectionality: how a host of identity markers, gender, race, class, sexuality, age, ethnicity, even parenthood are coded for observation and social control in ways that create interlocking forms of exclusion. In this poem, Elms writes that we can build greater social and political trust by engaging each other directly, defending gender and racial equity, bolstering democratic oversight, reforming the criminal justice system, honoring treaty agreements, slowing down, and recognizing our innate spiritual oneness. This book was distributed as an album of spoken word poetry backed by soul-infused beats written by Genesis 7 Productions and is available on all major music platforms. The Panopticon is "an incredible amount of work and volume of thought...the content is so rich...truly interdisciplinary in a highly unusual way, [mixing] political-social activism...with performance, poetry, and music." Anne-Marie Donovan Theatre and Opera Director and Creator Founder of Inter Arts Matrix
