Watched bodies, captured emotions: the parkland shooting as a scene of affective governmentality

Abstract

This article addresses the Parkland shooting (Florida, 2018) from a contemporary philosophical perspective, integrating the notions of dispositif (Foucault and Agamben), societies of control (Deleuze), and psychopolitics (Byung-Chul Han) to analyze the structural conditions that enable and intensify these episodes of violence. Using the case of Nikolas Cruz and the real-time broadcast of the shooting by students via their cellphones, the paper offers a critical reflection on the school as a disciplinary, panoptic, and technologically saturated space. The aim is to explore how dispositifs operate as technologies of power and subjectivation, producing not only controlled bodies but also regulated affectivities and colonized desires. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative hermeneutic-critical approach, grounded in textual and philosophical analysis of secondary sources and audiovisual records of the event. Among the findings, the paper identifies processes of internalized control that transform victims into witness-spectators and reveal the mutation of panopticism into affective and digitized control. It concludes that extreme school violence cannot be understood without addressing the technological, biopolitical, and affective frameworks that constitute subjectivity in contemporary society.