pan·op·tic

(păn-ŏp′tĭk) also pan·op·ti·cal (-tĭ-kəl)

adj.

Including everything visible in one view.

[From Greek panoptos, fully visible : pan-, with respect to everything, fully; see pan- + optos, visible; see ok^w- in Indo-European roots.]

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Adj.

panoptical - including everything visible in one view; "a panoptic aerial photograph of the missile base"; "a panoptic stain used in microscopy"

panoptic

seeable, visible - capable of being seen; or open to easy view; "a visible object"; "visible stars"; "mountains visible in the distance"; "a visible change of expression"; "visible files"

Mentioned in

panoptic

References in periodicals archive

As Bartky has asserted, working through Laura Mulvey's work on spectatorship and the male gaze: "In contemporary patriarchal culture, a panoptical male connoisseur resides within the consciousness of most women: they stand perpetually before his gaze and under his judgement.

Subverting Transnormativity: Rage and Resilience in Kim Fu's For Today I Am a Boy

The sense of shame, guilt, and furtive wrongdoing fraught in Caliban's speech situates himself in a panoptical world, where any authority of creation in his role-playing of God is paradoxically undermined.

Simian, Amphibian, and Able: Reevaluating Browning's Caliban

(13) He analyzed institutions such as schools, hospitals, factories, and the military as utilizing panoptical mechanisms for surveillance.

VIRTUAL SHACKLES: ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE AND THE ADULTIFICATION OF JUVENILE COURTS

Power centers use it for their own extremist propaganda and for controlling the population (Morozov, 2011) as well as building a "panoptical" DPS (Stahl, 2016).

The Digital Public Sphere: An Alternative and Counterhegemonic Space? The Case of Spain

Leavis, (14) a prominent literary critic of the day, who characterized Snow's "panoptical pseudo-cogencies" as expressive of his "intellectual nullity" (15) and criticised him for not having read Mathew Arnold.

The Dual Matrix of Life: On Genetic Science, Art and the Truth Games of the "Third Culture"

Similarly, Sauron's physical appearance in Frodo's visions is a fiery, shadowy eye, and in the films, a panoptical one at the summit of the tower, Barad-dur.

"A WARP OF HORROR": J.R.R. TOLKIEN'S SUB-CREATIONS OF EVIL

See also the opening scene of Il Cristo proibito, with the panoptical view from the plane encompassing the entire Tuscan landscape.

Curzio Malaparte and the Tragic Understanding of Modern History

3 & 4), which envisages a surveillance society where humans are controlled by a panoptical social media platform, uses mirrors to implicate the audience in her fiction.

The here and now