Talk:Oligopticon

In Chris Otter's "Making liberalism durable: vision and civility in the late Victorian city" he states "Freedom was only a successful mode of government if the collective freedoms of citizens were enacted in a civil, polite public arena. This social space, with its combination of atomistic citizens displaying their purpose and energy, was the speculum in which liberal governmentality anxiously scrutinized its own validity. Civility was to be made durable by the public self-inspection and, to repeat, this required the crafting of spaces within which this ‘oligoptic’ practice could occur" (2002:3).

Otter's footnotes in reference to the above passage states: "17 B. Latour, ‘On recalling ANT’ in John Law and John Hassard (eds), Actor-Network Theory and After (Oxford, 1999)" (Ibid.:3).

Further on in Otter's text he states, "Thus Henry Greenaway effused about glass hospital construction. A cellular, yet transparent, architecture avoided ‘the unpleasantness often felt in associating with strangers, yet enabled a kind of oligoptic monitoring to function, as ‘the patients would also, to a certain extent, watch each other when awake'" (Ibid.:11).

Otter, Chris. (2002). "Making liberalism durable: vision and civility in the late Victorian city." Social History, Vol. 27, No. 1. Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group.