10/9: Bodies under Biopower

October 8, 2007

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  • 1. Clay Walker  |  October 10, 2007 at 3:29 am

    “Foucault to Deleuze: Punish and Modulate as Systems of Power and Control”

    Foucault – Deleuze: If societies whose systems of power are based on discipline and punishment use the body as an avenue to the soul, then societies whose systems of power are based on desire and control use the consciousness (soul) to control the body. Before unpacking this proposition, I should say a little more about Foucault. Foucault situates the development of systems of punishment and discipline in the historical record. He explains how methods of punishment reflected the sovereign’s power over the subjects; punishment shifted from power over the body as such to a mechanism opening avenues of access to the soul – punishing the body was a means of punishing the soul. This movement was reinforced and extended by systems of discipline that spanned across all social institutions (family, school, factory, barracks, prison). The prison was the ultimate site of discipline and punishment – architecture designed to discipline, lines of sight, centralization, limited schedules, incarceration removed the soul from the community into solitary confinement, capital punishment was re-figured not to punish the body, but to punish the soul by subtracting its presence without unnecessary harm visited upon the body; Foucault emphasizes this, points out that doctors accompanied executioners to monitor and protect the body from pain. This system of power remains rooted in the Platonic figurations of body and soul. The soul alone has access to truth, it is transcendental, supreme, the upper element of humanity and although the body may influence the soul, although there may be avenues connecting the bodily sensations/affects/feelings/emotions with the soul the body remains the lower element, lesser; despite any influence the body may or may not have over the soul, it is the soul that matters.

    To restate and shift my position on Deleuze and Control: a society of control overloads and extends human consciousness as a means of limiting and positioning the body. Consciousness is extended by computing technologies that seem to extend the horizon of cognitive awareness beyond geographical space (barriers) but actually work to modulate the individual’s behavior and effectively track or keep record of each person’s position. Deleuze argues that we reform the institutions of discipline (schools, industries, hospitals, armed forces, prisons) to delay their inevitable demise. Their influence wanes. Punish:Modulate – To punish is to subject something to loss (pleasure, freedom, life become pain, incarceration, death); To modulate is to regulate, in music it is the movement from one key (paradigm) to another, it is movement alteration, shifts along an analogical spectrum of varying paradigms. Movement replaces loss. Desire implies a movement toward or for something – while loss represents the absence of something once present, modulation represents the unending replacement of one presence with another presence.

    Some Quotes:

    “In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again [beginning:end; 1:0] (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything — the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation” (“Postscript” 3).

    “The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’” (“Postscript” 3).

    “Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt” (“Postscript” 5).

    “Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighbourhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position – licit or illicit – and effects a universal modulation” (“Postscript” 5).

    Two questions:

    (1) How do the formulations of lines-of-flight (“Desire and Pleasure” notes F and G; “Control and Becoming” page 2) relate to societies of control, or more precisely how does the society of discipline and punishment give way to a society of control by means of lines-of-flight? Is this what Nealon does in “Periodizing the 80’s”; which is to also ask how does Nealon intersect/reflect Deleuze on societies of control?

    More Later – I will either propose an answer to these, or wait and see what pans out in the conversation.

  • 2. Crystal Starkey  |  October 10, 2007 at 1:14 pm

    Crystal Starkey

    Foucault & (T.) Nealon: Luxury & Safety Pitches

    Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish” defines torture, punishment and discipline. Torture, the form of justice in the 18th century was a public display of the crime the convict committed performed to his own body. While a gruesome scene, no doubt, it failed to fully deter would-be criminals who felt pity for the convict’s body and often rioted in support of the convict. Punishment, though short lived, required the convict to publicly give back to the community in the way he had hurt the community through his crime. Discipline is represented in the regimented life of a prison inmate, who’s every day freedom has been stripped.

    But the punishment of the body is not the sole purpose of the penality system. Rather, it is to reform the soul through the regulation of the body. According to Foucault, because the soul is created by individual’s experience with (or lack of) knowledge and power, the soul slowly moves to replace the body as the entity of punishment; it seems like on some levels Foucault would agree with Hawhee and Burke, but I think there would be severe limits to their agreement, as Foucault defines these entities as being different in that Foucault presents the body as being directly linked to punishment. But I’m not sure.

    Still, the not-so-distant past of public executions and torturing is not nearly as gruesome as the penality system because discipline in prison is regimented, and controls the body. This control, though, according to Foucault, simulaneously creates docile bodies, which is to say, the physical control over inmates creates the type of body accustomed to mindless, tedious repetition that would often succeed in strictly regimented settings like factories, military, etc. Our prisons control the body by depriving it of its freedom, monitoring its movements, demanding certain responsibilities, etc. This deprivation of freedom and application of rigorous, regimented schedules of physical bodily control is meant to deter criminal acts, of course, but whether this works or not is (as Dr. Pruchnic says: ) “a question.”

    (Here, I’ve FINALLY gotten to the point):
    Additionally, Foucault discusses the mental repercussions of inmates under constant surveillance, or rather the possibility of this. The criminals, not sure when they are being observed and when they are not, struggle to maintain a level of privacy. Here, Nealon furthers this idea when he writes: “The ‘body’ (that site of negotiation between public, and private, inside and outside) has become the academic topic of our generation. In a related vein, the hottest topic on the literary and cultural theory futures market these days seem to be “affect” (or even more straightforward, a renewed emphasis on “feeling”)” (22). Without assurance of any privacy, the idea of being constantly watched further encourages (though not blatantly or purposefully) the docile body Foucault discusses. In essence, in order for the prisoner to mentally and emotionally survive such conditions, they must render themselves to the tedious, public task of prison life—without holding on to hope for privacy, freedom or ‘better’. Nealon also discusses the idea of “home” as the space where we work and play, which leads “to an unprecedented privatization of the culture and entertainment industries: high speed internet, digital cable and satellite tv, home theater systems, and pay per view movies” (22). Nealon goes on to discuss SUVs as being an extension of this private home, but I would argue these very “privatized” forms of entertainment could pose as the opposite of privatization. The type of movies we watch are tracked, as are the sites we visit on our home computer, movies we pay per view or rent and even the language in our emails are tracked and directly affect the ads in which are posted on our open browsers; on-star is another means of tracking hidden behind a “safety-sell”. But, I digress. While Foucault uses factory workers’ and military enlisted personnel to describe this accompanying mindset of mere survival, my question is: isn’t the prison culture more evident in our society than just behind barred and brick-walled fortresses? Aren’t we all forced to adhere to regiments and schedules while being stripped of freedoms as well as various privacies, all of which are hidden by some sort of “luxury” or “safety” sales pitch?

  • 3. Kim Lacey  |  October 10, 2007 at 1:30 pm

    The readings for this week insisted that we rethink how control is signified currently by tracking the historical development of being in control, being controlled, and even the appearance of control; but as Discipline and Punish illustrated, control, while it is always shifted from one place to another (home – school – possibly hospital – possibly prison), is usually imposed by someone. However, if our course readings are moving us into the post-postmodern (to borrow Nealon’s term), Foucault and Bentham’s panopticon are therefore moving us into the posthuman, a moment in which we no longer need the presence of the body to enforce any control. Further, if the body is no longer necessary, what do control and the body signify now, in a Burkean sense?
    Previously, control required the presence of bodies; take, for example, the public executions. The theatricality of torture relied upon witnesses for effective punishment—those in the audience realized the consequences of one’s misdeeds, and thus would not repeat them. Here, control is not yet located simply in the incarceration of criminal, but in the reception of the execution. Control is in the spectacle itself, as the presence of the townspeople was necessary for its efficaciousness. The execution disciplines the crowd against future crimes, rather than the criminal.
    On the contrary, the panopticon functions by controlling the criminal, not the crowd. Whereas the success of the public execution’s control thrived upon the presence of others, the panopticon does not need anyone except the prisoner. It is simply the representation of control. In the Burkean analogy sense, the panopticon’s only function, then, is as the implied sense of order and control, and not the actual imposing of control. For example, while driving, one sees a parked police car on the side of the road, and immediately slows down. Even though there is no one in the police car, its mere presence stands for order and obedience. There need not be a police officer present inside of the car, as the object, representing control, is (usually) enough.
    Foucault notes that the panopticon is the “perfect exercise of power” for several reasons, although most significantly “because it can reduce the number of those who exercise it, while increasing the number of those on whom it is exercised” (206). The panopticon, just as the parked police car, does not need a physical body behind it to instill a sense of control. Because any of the prisoners may be watched at any time, simply the possibility of being watched should be enough to maintain order. Further, Foucault says that, “because without any physical instrument other than architecture and geometry, it acts directly on individuals; it gives ‘power of mind over mind’” (206). The panopticon’s strength lies within the ‘power of mind over mind’ since it is the prisoner’s mind that is being controlled. One could assume that no one is ever looking, but one assumes that one is always looking, without ever knowing which is true at any given time. (And, heck, the current political-we’re-listening-to-your-telephone-conversations-rhetoric is doing this, too, although it does not seem to be working as well). Becoming posthuman, or becoming body-less, is previewed by the panopticon. Some sort of actual human presence is not necessary for the panopticon to function—it is self-sufficient. This self-sufficiency is not the issue though, but rather that human presence is no longer needed. We are in a time when we can be absent and present concurrently (i.e. on dating websites, blogs, and myspace and youtube postings). Just as the prisoners did not know when they were being watched, no one knows when we are ‘available,’ as the webpage, posting, etc. stands in for us even when we are offline.
    My question, then, is derived from the idea that we have separate online selves. How separate are these virtual selves from our real selves? Do we ‘dis-embody’ our real selves to become ’someone’ else online? How are we controlled by these ‘alternative’ personalities? Are we controlled by them? Do we control them? (My response-response will attempt to answer this in conjunction with some of the in-class convos we had last week.)

  • 4. mike  |  October 10, 2007 at 3:04 pm

    Foucault’s Tragedy, or Disciplining Nietzsche

    It is tempting to provide a reductive reading of Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power, to relegate it to a simple axiomatic command: divide and conquer. True, Foucault argues that one constituent element of disciplinary power is its insistence on the individual, though not as any sort of Enlightenment rational subject. Rather, disciplinary power is based on a controlled emphasis on reducing the subject to a docile body, one that “may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (136), to the twofold end of producing “an increased aptitude and an increased domination” (138). The disciplinary methods used to achieve this end fall broadly into four categories: the art of distributions (141), the control of activity (149), the organization of geneses (156), and the composition of forces (162). I’d like to offer some brief (ha!) remarks on the art of distributions.
    Foucault’s analysis reveals that one function of distribution is the partitioning of individuals in space (143). As before, this serves at least two ends: first, to install the individual within a regime of panoptic power, to turn the individual into an object of knowledge; this is a “procedure . . . aimed at knowing, mastering, and using”. The second end, though Foucault writes little of it, uses this procedure to “avoid distributions in groups; break up collective distributions; analyse confused, massive or transient pluralities”. It is not difficult to see why this would be a valuable tactic for disciplinary power. At its most basic level, this does recall the reductive reading offered, satirically, in my introduction: individuals are easier to manage than groups. As Foucault later demonstrates, though, disciplinary power is based on assessing individuals against the norm, and groups, collectives, and pluralities by definition cannot be so assessed: such organizations of individuals are intrinsically plural and heterogeneous, so the disciplinary insistence on normative behavior is only applicable when measured against the individual.
    This emphasis in Foucault on individuals, collectives, norms, knowledge and subjectivity is made still more complex should we try to understand Foucault’s work in relation to Nietzsche’s in The Birth of Tragedy. While we have learned to be suspicious of enforcing strict binary relationship onto Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysiac spirits, it is necessary to remember a key distinction between the two. The Apollonian spirit is one of “measured limitation, . . . freedom from wilder impulses, . . . [and the] measured calm of the image-making god” (16). The Dionysiac spirit, in contrast, insists on a “gospel of universal harmony, [in which] each person feels himself to be not simply united, reconciled, or merged with his neighbor, but quite literally one with him” (18). More importantly, it is under the influence of the Dionysiac that “all the rigid, hostile barriers, which necessity, caprice, or ‘impudent fashion’ have established between human beings, break asunder”.
    It is not without value, I think, to note that Nietzsche’s book first appeared in 1872, well into the period of disciplinary power chronicled in Foucault’s work. Indeed, one may further note that Nietzsche’s Dionysiac spirit is theorized in such a way that it seems a direct reaction to the disciplinary methods Foucault analyzes, as a response to the practices of distribution and partitioning. One way to understand Neitzschean tragedy, then, is as a counterforce to the forces of discipline described by Foucault. At least to the extent that the Apollonian can be aligned with Foucault’s disciplinary forces of partition, individualization, and subjectification, the Dionysiac might then be understood as—if not a revolutionary force—at least a force toward equilibrium, a force resistant to the drives toward production and objectification that disciplinary power is dependent upon. In dissolving the Apollonian limits and boundaries of individual subjectivity, the Dionysiac offers the mass subjectivity that Foucault posits as counter to the disciplinary project; the Dionysiac, then, is precisely the scene where disciplinary regulations fail: hierarchies dissolve, limits are effaced, and norms are rejected.
    As a thought experiment, this Foucauldian reading of Nietzsche seems fairly consistent with my own understanding of the two texts at hand. But what might we discover if we turn this reading around and try to read Foucault in Nietzschean terms? Should we do so, we might first notice the absence of an aesthetic register in Foucault’s work. Given the object of his study, that is perhaps not surprising, but it remains then a place for further inquiry. How does the aesthetic react to disciplinary pressures? And—since our experiment hinges on reading Foucault through Nietzsche—what is the role of the tragic in a disciplinary society?
    In trying to think through such questions, I found that, while Foucault’s project seems to readily map onto Nietzsche’s, the reverse experiment is much harder to achieve. In part, I believe this is a question of method: Foucault takes up a historical analysis that points toward a phenomenological assessment of disciplinary power structures, while Nietzsche offers a quasi-Romantic philosophy of aesthetic affect. But—given my love for all things needlessly complicated—I am discontent to rest the matter on a crisis of method. Similarly, while my own comments point to a possible understanding of the tragic as a counter-disciplinary scene, I find that answer unsatisfying here as well. Rather, I think it describes only unique instances of the tragic, and relates the tragic to revolution in a way that neither text fully accommodates. Finally, then, I leave these questions unanswered, in hopes that more capacious minds than my own may yet take them up and provide the answers I lack.

    Post Script

    I’m still no closer to figuring out a Foucauldian reading of Nietzsche, so I’d like to turn instead to something that Nealon said in response to my follow-up question.

    One thing Nealon said that stuck in my craw (and what is a craw exactly, anyway?) was that thinking of the open source community as a public would demand a radical refiguring of our notions of the public. Well, okay then. I think there’s very good reason to look to online communities as a new model of public discourse, esp. given the way that so much political and social discourse is developed and disseminated digitally (I’m thinking, among many others, of this year’s YouTube presidential debates). Plainly, digital communities are not strictly and solely digital: they can be arranged around commitment to “real-life” public causes as well (ala MoveOn.org). I think Nealon was perhaps too quick to dismiss online communities as not representing a public by describing them as individuals working in private spaces to develop things privately and then sharing them. Such a description, I would suggest, is based on a dependence on a possibly outmoded model of public participation that is dependent on physical corporeal participation–a model which leaves little or no room for the sort of online, digital, or telepresent publics that I see as composing the new public. Oooh! “The New Public” . . . there’s an idea for . . . sumthin’.

  • 5. eric herhuth  |  October 10, 2007 at 6:20 pm

    Jeffrey T. Nealon writes, “The ‘body’ (that site of negotiation between public and private, inside and outside) has become the academic topic of our generation” (Periodizing 22).
    In response to the rhetoric of the rhetoric of the body question that I posited in my last response, I have envisioned rhetorics as existing in layers. Primary is the body and the face. Clothing and things like masks and veils fit the body while changing it—thus, a second layer of rhetoric that interacts/reacts to the primary layer of rhetoric. Currently I am trying to think about speech/writing and deeds as being a third, outer layer. Granted, in terms of this layering it must be noted that it is not temporal or evaluative, but rather outer is outer in terms of public appearance while inner is inner because it is private. I have not yet sorted out any hypothetical dynamic between the first and third layer which may prove an interesting comment on physiognomy. Nonetheless, the concept I want to essay in this response is the body as “that site of negotiation between public and private,” which appears as a pivotal tension in my own analysis as well as the texts we are reading.
    When Foucault describes society’s infatuation with discipline the example of the plague brings the body to the forefront. Discipline responds to the chaos of the plague with analysis, categorization, divisions, regulations, and names. This contrasts with the literature of the festival also cultivated by plague culture. Thus, Foucault writes, “not masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual of his ‘true’ name, his ‘true’ place, his ‘true’ body, his ‘true’ disease” (Discipline&Punish 197-198). I like this point in its illustration of the human power of discipline combating the consuming and terrifying power of disease. The implication is that this analytical ability to name and to make rules for ourselves consoles in the face of a plague that de-individualizes and penetrates us—essentially attacking our discipline at the bodily level.
    Next, I want to connect this point to Nealon’s Foucaultian reference of “biopower.” Nealon writes, “For Foucault, biopower is the primary type of power at work in modern societies—a very efficient mode of power that infuses each individual at a nearly ubiquitous number of sites (‘everyday life’)” (Periodizing 26). Nealon continues by describing Foucault’s primary example of biopower—sexuality—as an identity possessed by each individual. This assignment of sexuality seems commensurate with the individual assigning of identity tropes that occurred in the discipline-response to the plague. Foucault’s discipline is characterized as a process that moves toward saturating the individual and “everyday life,” whereas biopower is the realization of that saturation. I think that Deleuze’s “Societies of Control” fit into this movement as well. As societies shift from productional to informational, this discipline morphs into a control—Deleuze’s example of the shift from the signature and number to the code and password is perfect. Much more needs to be said here but for the sake of the one page limit and my tired mind I press on.
    Anyway, to get to the point, Nealon concludes that:
    such a genealogy of modern power would suggest that what Americans have in common is not our public lives (our fragmented disciplinary roles as citizen, teacher, activist, consumer), but our private lives (our continuous construction of a lifestyle, a sexuality, an identity. If there is something that we might call the realm of the contemporary American “common,” that vector which directly connects the cultural to the economic in the contemporary US, for better or worse it’s the private realm, not the public sphere. (Periodizing 26-27)
    I think that this conclusion explains my intuitive diagramming of rhetoric as a thing with concentric layers, with the further outward moving toward the public sphere. For those of us who have read Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, this diagram situates itself in her analysis as well with the rise of the social and the diminution of the public sphere. Now, Arendt’s social is this private realm where cultural commonalities thrive and yet it is that realm where words and deeds are not primary but secondary—i.e. I’ve heard this described in coffeeshops as ‘being alone with other people’ or ‘being together in solitude.’ In this everyday, individual setting is it the body and the face that reclaim rhetorical primacy? My larger question seeks to consider that Foucault’s Discipline & Punish concludes with a description of how discipline in culture has the effect of normalization. Thus, how might the growth and dominance of the private, social realm affect the everyday life of the individual and our everyday use of rhetoric?

    ** I am intrigued by Mike’s suggestion for “The New Public.” Though I do know much about online communities, I see the point that the work done in/through such a medium might be accurately deemed Public. That said however, there is much to reckon with in distinguishing such a New Public from the realm of the social (this I derive from Arendt’s The Human Condition; unfortunately my copy of the text is not at hand so please forgive the absence of citations; please hold me accountable for any egregious errors). My understanding of the social is that it is the realm in which people do the same sorts of things. This is where people live in view of or in acknowledgment of each other but it is distinguished from a Public sphere where individuals act to demonstrate unique ability, argument, truth, etc. in the view of many. In the social sphere the daily work and needs of life prevail and modes of action are replaced with “behavior.” I scare quote behavior here to allude to the societies of discipline and control pace Foucault and Deleuze, which foster behavior more so than action. My question then is about the behavioral versus actional (appropriately not a word) character of online communities. I suspect that there is a great deal of action in these realms but it is not yet recognized as such.

  • 6. Katrina Newsom  |  October 11, 2007 at 1:44 am

    As I began to nod off to sleep after reading Michel Foucault’s section on Panopticon (not because it is a snooze but because the older I get the more naps I need), I entered into a fitful dream in which everyone at my job entered my office at different intervals of time to ensure that I was completing my work. After a couple of visits, I become extremely paranoid which caused me to stop writing my response for the class. I tried to print it out but it printed out from my boss’s printer, I was busted – thank God it was just a dream. Yet, I can’t shake the feeling of being watched at my job today, maybe it is because of the window next to the door or perhaps (which is more likely) it is the influence that Foucault’s writings had over me. This is not the first time that I have been introduced to concept of Panopticon. I believe that post-colonial studies reference this discipline as a way to look at the social dynamics of colonialism however, I found that the idea of observation or rather surveillance could prove more productive for me if I referred back to Jeffrey T. Nealon’s “Periodizing the 80s.” In this inexhaustible essay, Nealon uses Frederick Jameson’s technique of periodizing the 60s as the conduit in which he begins to periodize the 80s. According to Nealon’s reference of Jameson, the focus of periodizing a given time is not dictated by the beginning or ending of a decade, but is defined by the social, economic and political progressive/regressive movements. He argues that the 80s began sometime around the Reagan election year or maybe a little earlier but as to the time it ended he gives a more definitive marker; Sept 2001. At this time, the idea of the American government as the “big government” that threatened human free in the 80s transformed into the very vehicle by which Americans now give up their freedom for the idea of freedom. Although “Big Brother” surveillance can easily be examined through Foucault’s Panopticon, I think that Nealon’s explanation of the different modes of privatization that took place during the 80s proves more interesting. First, let me take a step back to explain the particular moment in panopticism that led me to think of Nealon’s work. There is one definition in Foucault’s writing that describes the act of panopticism as the observer being observed. He states, “This Panopticon, subtly arranged so that an observer may observe, at a glance, so many different individuals, also enables everyone to come and observe any of the observers” (207). Also, he describe the power that this form of observance has in a given community, he asserts, “It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power” (205). In taking these two concepts and examine them through Nealon’s work we can see how the power and paradox of privatization within the 80s help to create the government as the “disposition of centres and channels of power.” One example would be to look at Nealon’s vivid description of the shareholder, CEO and manager relationship. According to Nealon, prior to the 80s the corporations were ran by managers whose philosophy was “slow and steady growth” (16). This philosophy was influenced by the fact that neither their income nor the workers were affected by the gain of profit. Yet, the concept of “unlocking the shareholder’s value” (18), opposed the managers’ philosophy of “slow and steady growth” and imposed the idea of “efficiency.” As a result, many people lost their jobs to downsizing and were replaced by “LBO partnership headquarters units” (18). So now the monitoring of products and workers (the bodies) switched to capital (the money). To these observers (the shareholders), the location of the body is limited in importance (the worker, the manager etc) whereas the location of capital became center of importance. Nealon furthers the argument of privatization and extends it to the everyday individual. He begins by giving many examples of how the individuals’ private life informs the public, he proposes, “Indeed, a ‘deeply personal vision’ of some kind seems to be a pre-requisite for any kind of public success these days” (22). The individual is no longer part of the collective. Their personal stories excludes them or positions them above the rest, although their narrative is expressed as something that it is relating to any and everyone in any given situation. However, I argue that it appears as if this individual private sphere is commoditized to ensure celebrity status or financial gain. Whichever is the case, the individual appears to redirect the gaze of the observer – be it Big Brother, their neighbors, critics etc. Thus it could be argued the channels of power are being disrupted by exposing one’s self to the gaze (perhaps exposing is too strong a word) but by displaying the things that someone wants to be observed. Here I am led to think of Franz Fanon’s quote in Black Skin, White Masks,“And already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes.” ‘I am fixed.’ Having adjusted their microtomes, they objectively cut away slices of my reality. I am laid bare. I feel, I see in those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new genus. Why, it’s a Negro!” (116). This moment in the book continues to expand to the idea that maybe this gaze can be disrupted or challenged and that perhaps, the person who fights the gaze of the observer takes that power back. So the question becomes, can Panopticon be challenged by the observed that finds a way to redirect the gaze? And to what extent? Or possibly the fact that because panopticon is the institutions, the school, hospitals and prisons the battle can only be successfully fought once those institutions are dismantled? Did not Nealon state, “…it seems that shape and scope of the private sphere is one of the primary fronts where the public debates of the near future will be fought” (24)?

  • 7. Jared  |  October 11, 2007 at 12:36 pm

    Jared Grogan

    After reading through your responses I am glad to see that you all found such diverse personal interests our readings from last week. The sheer depth and abundance of the material called for that, and I’m happy to say that I’ve been really impressed with all the different thought-provoking perspectives.
    Since there was so much to talk about this week, I decided to write a somewhat lighthearted and flippant response… and since you can’t hear my charming inflections and witty asides as I read this… I thought I had better introduce this response as something of a joke (thus making it officially lame). Here it was:
    So, the seminal and formative question Jeff asked us at the end of class last week was about how Foucault may suggest ways we are able to do something with significant agency/intervention now, without waiting for something like a revolution or paradigm shift in consciousness. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy as my most self-stereotyping British students would have said. Simply trace sovereign state power back five hundred odd years and come to terms with Foucault’s intricate mapping of disciplinary power that stems from state violence and torture, which leads to both the modern mechanisms of a criminal justice system and the power to punish all those within an indefinite repressive disciplinary social system based on broad institutional observation, analysis and interrogation; and primarily revealed in a metamorphosis of the punitive method’s political power relationship to the political technology of the body (and, oh, don’t forget to factor in that this procedure will be “at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet infinity! [Foucault 227]) –Meanwhile, (and this should be obvious) master a basic understanding of the shifting history of economics from Fordism and Keynes through to Hayek’s return in Reaganomics, leveraged buyouts, privatization, and the turn into post-postmodern corporatism, globalization and new economic logic that is increasingly dedicated to re-privatizing and unleashing multifarious individual desires, floating capital and values in a new society of control — then trace this to up-to-the-minute theory that circulates what Foucault calls “bio-power,” the most complex and efficient form of social control transversely linked across a nearly ubiquitous number of sites in everyday life, while paying particular attention to control of instant communication –at which point, you should now be familiar with (and empathize somewhat with) the genealogy of power in contemporary American economic and cultural life, what Nealon calls “the operating system.” From here, look for “a new modality of cultural ‘resistance’ to capital” (26), which offers both a strong foothold on how to positively engage with a “present that is not lacking the potential for resistance” and offers means to help stimulate Deleuze’s proposition that we find a mode of creating that “has always been something different from communicating; [where] the key may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.” More than likely, we can now clearly see the opening up of new space-times, the dreams of new war-machines, a bio-political process or unification, resistance and flight!! And, no, it doesn’t involve simply stopping other people from conforming to the market or ranting against those buying red, white and blue M&Ms, or Binladin piñatas and condoms. Instead, believe in the world… don’t set out to change it (per se). Believe that the world runs through you and your most private life. Believe that you and your own artistic response to the new economic situation is an empowered response that you share with a “multitude” in a “ubiquitous private sphere” that will “harbor the intense action in American cultural production…[where] a new modality of cultural ‘resistance’ to capital will have to be born along with it” (Nealon 27). It’s easy. But, just wondering, can anyone suggest whom we should look to as an example?
    One clear answer: Stephen Colbert. Consider Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (And So Can You!) Out this week! The book is loosely structured around Colbert’s (fictionalized) life story which, since he is America, is America’s story. Here’s an excerpt from the publisher: Why write this book now? Stephen fears America has lost its balls. He hopes to re-ballify us. Even the ladies. Ladies can have balls — lady-balls. Stephen likes to call those “Thatchers.” Stephen will show how he got his mammoth swinging sack, with tales of courage and vital documents from his own life: the Mother’s Day card he made at age six, disputed credit card bills, putt-putt score cards — all the major milestones.
    Is this also the new public sphere?

  • 8. MIchael Cipielewski  |  October 11, 2007 at 5:52 pm

    Foucault describes the docile body as “a body … that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved.” This joining of the analyzable body and the malleable body presents a problem: on one hand, we have the Deleuzian mold, where the body is externally exacted, and on the other, we have Jameson’s “new mutation”, or rather, the revolution of the body via the conduit of neo-consciousness. Can the two be reconciled?
    A theme I have played with for some time is the individual and the collective. Certainly collectivism plays a major role in all questions concerning the actuation of the self (and questions of “selfness”, no doubt), this case being no different. What is most interesting is that Foucault separates the objectification of mind and body, in that the mind constitutes the focal point of true power and control (as opposed to earlier methods of physical bondage, as Foucault points out, “on the soft fibres of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest empires.”) So in this sense, the collective influence over the individual not only in the referential, but definitively, where the individual is absolutely “molded” by the collective (Deleuze states that, “power individualizes and masses together, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body.”). Though Foucault downplays what seems to be inherent malice in this relationship – yes, we are talking of penal codes and criminals, but the arch of the argument, the overwhelming master and servant relationship extends well beyond bodies of punishment. That extension seems to be a major “take-home” point for this week’s Foucault – the concepts of punishment reach far beyond that of law and criminality. Really, any place where power is exercised, over the individual or a group, the dynamics of mutability are at work.
    In this way, the objectification of the mind rather than the body points to a new directive: the dividual.
    Deleuze’s dividual bears the resemblance of the archetype and stereotype (especially in his reference to target markets). In this model, the individual ceases to be “in”-dividual due to the aforementioned molds; molds here bear all the signs of socio-cultural norm, whether en masse or on the micro-social level. Further, modulation, that perpetual habitus algorithm, seems to only present an illusion of difference, even where parameters are plainly recognizable. It as though, to Deleuze, these individuals become dividual when only their minds scream ‘difference’, and their bodies show the unavoidable state of sameness (recall Foucault: “a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas.”)
    Nealon briefly describes a new revolution of consciousness – that in the cacophony of culture, a sleeping mass of faculty awaits. Nealon describes the “modernist inability to respond to (postmodern) cultural production”, where a sort of revolution of the self waits to be discovered.
    Response to cultural productions in regards to 21st century methods of socialization is daunting, at very least. (Can I use the term neotribes once more!?) The entirety of the mutability and amalgamation of social groups provides, at best, an unstable base for thinking of the (in)dividual in the compartmentalized environment of contemporary work, life, etc.
    I think my one questions to Nealon tonight will explain more concerning the “revolution of consciousness” :
    Jameson’s example of the art installation, and the subsequent inability of the modernist to engage cultural production in Periodizing the 80s. My question concerns Jameson’s call for the revolution of consciousness – is the “new mutation” of consciousness simply a new capacity for multi-tasking, so to be able to handle situations like the art installation without focusing one piece, but many, or all? Or is the revolution pointing to other capacities of consciousness outside of perceptive limits? If the new mutation is a capacity for higher multi-task functions, does this not conform to an exercise of power over the individual as a “producer”?

    Postscript: (NEXT WEEK I’LL DO A RESPONSE TO RESPONSES I PROMISE) Nealon did indeed shed some more light on this question and more… it’ll take me at least a week to work through everything he told us Tuesday evening.

    One of the first things he said really put the dividual/agency question into perspective “We’re too in love with control.” This business of difference and sameness really does tie into the bit about Foucault, “a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas.” That is, our own agency becomes an extension of control society in this way, doesn’t it?

    Yes, definitely maybe possibly.

    And this is further complicated by two things:
    1 – in my readings I’ve ran into the amalgamated identity ( Hawhee expressed that the fragmented “self” didn’t exhibit false-selves, simply aspects, and Katherine Hailes discusses that the authorial “I” has now become “We” in the context of autopoeisis). That is, (to speak freely) we humans are slippery bastards not easily thrown into Deleuzian “banks.”
    2 – One of the last things that Dr. Nealon said on Tuesday: “being yourself sutchers yourself into the system.”

    So is the culmination of this fragmented self tied into the “system”? Only a few of them?
    If it is only a few facets of the self that are tied into the system, engaging in the act of self-making, then how does this complicate autopoeisis in the meta sense?

    I have 8000 more questions and concerns with the mediascapes, biopower, and self-making in context of body and… well, “seeing what it can do.” I’ll be diving into this in the coming weeks.

  • 9. Clay Walker  |  October 11, 2007 at 10:14 pm

    So lines of flight, disciplinary societies, and societies of control. I asked the question at the end of my response above, how do ‘lines of flight’ link disciplinary societes to societies of control and where does Nealon fit in all of this? Here it is:

    (1) Lines of Flight – Since I do not have a copy of “1,000 Plateaus” but basically I understand LoF to represent the avenues or channels through which society changes, it is a relational means of connecting the actual to the virtual.

    (2) It seems the primary lines of flight for the disciplinary society was the capitalistic corporation. Once focused on its own image, producing quality products, while making profits sufficient to pay its workforce and continue reinforcing its own strength as manifested in products and productivity, the corporation shifted focus from quality to quantity.

    (3) Key here was the shift from the gold standard to a fluctuating market.

    (4) The futures market economy (discussed in “Empire of teh Intensities”) cuts out the need for quality product – make money from money. I think about the cost to get my own money out of the ATM, the cost to use my Debit Card, the ridiculous interest on loans that are miles away from the paltry interest accrued in bank accounts, student loan debt, credit card debt – Nealon really emphasized this in his interview iwth the class.

    (5) I see lots of Massumi connections here. The logic of intensity “on both the global and the subjective level [works] in a world that contains no ‘new’ territory – no new experiences, no new markets – any system that seeks to expand must by definition intensify its existing resources, modulate them in some way(s)” (“Empire of the Intensities” 82).

    (6) The disciplinary sociey is the factory society. Late capitalism has made the factory useless, its new factories are virtual where assets are liquidified to increase capital flow, the beneficiaries are stockholders, not union-card-holders. The factory is a means to an end: its something like increase the stock value = increased profit; it used to be something like improve quality of product/service = increased quantity stock value. “Servicing the stockholder is, in fact, destabilizing for those who actually work at the firm — so-called ’stakeholders.’ Keeping the stock price and dividends high commits everyone at the firm to an uncertain, quarter-by-quarter, what-have-you-done-for-me-latley mindset, rather than a long-term pattern of steady growth” (“Periodizing the 80s” 16).

    (7) “So while societies of control certainly extend and <intensify the tactics of discipline (by linking training and surveillance to ever more minute realms of everyday life) … ” –Nealon calls it a “warehousing of bodily traces” like security cameras, Lowes wants your phone number, ‘Do you have your Kroger card?’, please use your pin now, OneCard to park — ” … they also give birth to a whole new form of power” (87).

    (8) This new power is the society of control and modulation where the nation state no longer functions like a machine, where globalized control does not just replace nation state discipline, where different is still bad, but maybe we think we are more individualized, where “The logic of intensification> is the (non)site where the logic of the idividual subject overlaps with the logic of globalization” (“Empire of the Intensities” 89).

    So I am not going to tie these all together exactly. But they point out, I think, some of the many ways the disciplinary society has become the society of control. What I did not address is reistance, but as Nealon seemed to suggest, it always has to happen after the society has shifted and it also has (as he points out in “Periodizing the 80s”) to match up with the new social paradigms of power and authority in order to be a/effective.

  • 10. Kim Lacey  |  October 11, 2007 at 10:28 pm

    Response-response:
    I want to comment on Mike M.’s postscript, because I, too, was interested in Nealon’s public/private distinction (I now fear that Arendt will haunt me forever—another grad school nightmare—but I won’t walk that path right now). While reading for my presentation next week, Hansen says in New Philosophy for New Media that, “as media lose their material specificity, the body takes on a more prominent function as a selective processor of information […] the digital ‘medium’ requires bodily activity to produce any experience whatsoever” (22, 25). When Mike says, “Plainly, digital communities are not strictly and solely digital: they can be arranged around commitment to “real-life” public causes as well (ala MoveOn.org),” this seems to clearly connect with Hansen’s insistence upon the body being behind our actual online experiences (here, I use ‘the body’ to represent one performing online activity—writing blogs, reading/writing e-mails, watching YouTube debates, etc.). Bodily action is what makes these events public—we’re joining, then, the ‘new public’ at the moment of participation—by watching, reading, responding, or whatever. Our attention should not be focused on the private individuals coming together in a collective space, but rather on the collective space itself. The individual who chooses to enter into these collective spaces is no longer private since this ‘new public’ has been formed as a result of bodily action (someone has to access these sites). MIke, I like this idea of the ‘new public,’ and I think it would be cool to talk about this more in class–good question/postscript!

  • 11. Andrea J. Vought  |  October 11, 2007 at 11:38 pm

    Foucault writes: “We are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects and power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism” (217). This passage is especially telling if we look at it through the filter of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and perhaps, too, with Michel Maffesoli’s “The Return of the Tragic in Postmodern Societies.” Upon my first reading of the passage, I took Foucault at his word. However, I think that Foucault misses a key point in his assessment of the “Greeks.” By seeing the current carceral system through the lens of Nietzsche’s definition of the tragic myth, the similarities between the two become more apparent.
    The spectacle of corporal punishment and torture, if I am allowed to make simple comparisons, seems more akin to the dramatic than to the tragic of the ancient Greek variety, at least for audiences watching beneath the scaffold. Yet vestiges of the Tragic with a capital T are nonetheless still there in the . In the chapter entitled, “The Spectacle of the Scaffold,” Foucault describes torture as “the art of maintaining life in pain” (33) and “in the practice of torture, pain, confrontation and truth were bound together” (41). These ideas are indeed reminiscent of Nietzsche. An offender’s innocence was bound in withstanding the torture presented to him. Through the pain inflicted during the torture, the truth would be revealed. During the torture these criminals are painfully aware that they are indeed alive; is this painful realized truth so different from the Sublime epiphany of the tragic myth?
    So allow me to discuss this “panoptic machine.” Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, an architectural dream in which prisoners are seen, but cannot see, and surveillance can see, but cannot be seen, is a modern representation of the Apolline: cold, calculating, a way of “understanding the soul” through study of behavior. The panoptic machine, it seems, can be connected to Nietzsche’s idea of the Apolline, at least in the regard that the Apolline is static, automated, much in the same way that the Panopticon is meticulously constructed to allow for surveillance of its tenants at all times.
    On the other end of the spectrum, we have the delinquent culture that Foucault seems to argue proliferates thanks to the modern penal system. This sort of violent criminality thrust back into the social system could be paralleled with Nietzsche’s Dionysian in a basic way. However, since these delinquents are simultaneously entrenched and reassessed in the carceral system, the fundamental prison indoctrination remains with them, too: a hybrid of violence and automation; perhaps an amalgamation of the Dionysian and Apolline as well?
    Whether he realizes it or not, Foucault actually amends Nietzsche’s idea of the Tragic. To quote Nietzsche: “The tragic myth can only be understood as the transformation of Dionysiac wisdom into images by Apolline artistry; it leads the world of appearances to its limits where it negates itself and seeks to flee back into the womb of the one, true reality…” (Nietzsche 105). So let’s adapt that theory to Foucault’s passage above. The “wisdom” of the delinquents, police informers and undercover agents, become currency only once they have been filtered through the penal system, the Apolline machine. It is just this that Foucault writes about when he discusses the relationship between prison and police: “Police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send back a certain number of them to prison” (282). So perhaps Maffesoli is right in his argument that culture is indeed cyclical, and that the modern prison system represents a new manifestation of the tragic culture of the Greeks.

    Post-script and question/answer forthcoming. 9-5 has been insane this week.

  • 12. Katrina Newsom  |  October 12, 2007 at 3:15 am

    Post-script
    As much as I would love to comment on many of the responses, I am compiled to revisit my response to this week’s readings (however narcissistic it may appear) because there are so many problems with it. After or maybe during the class (I’m not sure), I concluded that I did not adequately analyze Nealon’s essay through Foucault. I was hoping to explore the private sphere as a compartmentalized space in which each of us leaves our subdivision home, through our adjacent garages to climb in a car, greeting neighbors through a slighted tainted glass window. Within those same mechanisms, I view the bloggist sphere (I am probably spelling that word wrong), myspace, and the E-Mail as part of compartments that separate us. It appears to me that in the same manner that we communicate through the car window, we communicate with each other within the world of cyberspace through the window of a computer screen disguised behind whatever identity we choose. I guess perhaps because of this , biopower functions as a form of control and resistance. 1. Control – because we are all quite aware that at any given moment “Big Brother” can look at our E-mails and other internet activities. 2. Resistance – because it that allows us to manipulate the system while we are part of it. Behind the screen we can display ourselves fully or not at all. Within this form of private sphere, we are able to display ourselves in any shape or form we want. I see this as an extension of Nealon’s description of the memoir in which he describes it as an important literary genre that allows the narrator to display him/herself in any given fashion. So instead of the overt resistance that Frantz Fanon appears to offer, perhaps within the 21st century, the resistance to the Panoptic is merely the result of the evolution of technology or maybe, it has far greater implications then I know. Do any of you want to take a stab at it?

  • 13. Jule Wallis  |  October 12, 2007 at 9:00 pm

    Jule Wallis – Nealon Response 5
    Deleuze and Nealon move beyond Foucault’s historical understanding of “disciplinary societies” where power is exercised within discrete institutions, towards the concept of “societies of control.” Just as the Nam June Paik audience is presented with a unsteady array of images, we too, in a society of control are more and more presented with a dizzying array of cultural productions and ideologies which ultimately “solicit[s] our (modernist, all-too-modernist) inability to respond.” The news, along with the majority of modern information, mirrors Nam June Paik’s dyssynchronous winking screens. Audiences are barraged with so many visual, auditory, emotional, and factual productions that they feel helpless and overwhelmed. The audience, therefore, either focuses upon one topic, or refuse to respond at all. The modern condition forces the viewer to practice the older aesthetic of focusing upon one image: “who bewildered by this discontinuous variety, decided to concentrate on a single screen.” To push this further, society reacts to the presentation of multiple images by focusing upon the individual and the private rather than the whole picture. The show Extreme Home Makeover is not only a wonderful example of the post-modern response, but the turn from the public to the private and back again. A “deserving” family struggling with physical, emotional, and/or economic disaster is presented with the ultimate gift- a new and technology infused home! Poverty, injustice, economics, and so on, is privatized and represented via the individual family (deemed deserving) to receive an economic and social upgrade. Thus, the show not only capitalizes upon the misery of an individual family, it also effectively sells the notion that all one needs, all one desires, can be obtained through the acquiring of a home. And, as Nealon asserts, the new private becomes the new public. This private/public action comes from: first, the communal engagement of the viewing audience; second, the belief that all individuals are the same in that they all need/deserve their own private sphere/home; and third, if one wishes to contribute to the public sphere, one can buy a private commodity from Sears, thus benefiting not only the next Extreme Home Makeover family, but themselves as well. To be a part of society means to consume and accrue debt.
    How do we resist societies of control and systems of capitalist control hell bent upon infusing the private into the public act of consumerism and cultural production? For Nealon, the answer is periodizing and the construction of a new vocabulary: “So among the tasks of periodizing the present…is to construct a vocabulary to talk about the ‘new economies’…and their complex relations to cultural production in the present moment, where capitalism seems nowhere near the point of its exhaustion.” Referring back to the show Extreme Home Makeover and the new individualization of social debt (I am envisioning Tiger Woods and his commercial “My life…my American Express” and commercials like the visa check card), one can begin to investigate the underlying foundations of capitalist, cultural superstructures as functioning in at least two ways: they visually (and ideologically) introduce a new form of capitalism which privatizes and individualizes the act of debt and consumerism- to be a true member of society, one must acquire debt; second, the visual medium becomes infused in the psyche of the audience and society as a whole. The correct way to act and spend is solidified for the viewer, and those who refuse to be integrated are ostracized. If one doubts this rather over generalized statement, one need only imagine completing the simple task of booking a flight without a credit card, or renting a movie from a new video store for that matter. What better way, then, to ensure control over its citizens and privatize assimilation and dissassimilation. You are either a card holding consumer, or you are (literally and virtually, a play on cyberspace vocabulary) no one. Unfit or unwanted individuals (those who cannot monetarily contribute to our debt laden and free-floating capitalist reality) are refused entry. How? By declining credit card access, for one.
    On another level, capitalism occurs in our private space, the home. Thus, shows like Extreme Home Makeover function dually. Audiences are not only encouraged to buy items (to be good consumers) but are also once again inoculated with the importance of the private sphere, the home. “The home is the new work and play space of our time—leading to an unprecedented privatization of the cultural and entertainment industries: high speed internet, digital cable, and satellite tv, home theater systems, and pay-per-view movies.” Extreme Home Makeover integrates the new “work and play space of our time” into their show and into the homes they build. The house is a technological marvel. The non-integrated family becomes incorporated into the new socially controlled and privatized cultural apparatus. No longer is there the need to step outside of this virtual reality of desire, capitalization, and privatization. Everything one could imagine or dream of is inserted into the new family home. In addition, the family also becomes part of capitalist consumerism and the world of debt that follows. The new family has a new house, but they also have a new mortgage, new bills, new cultural status to maintain, and so on. Thus, as Guattari states, “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.” And so, shows such as Extreme Home Makeover are direct responses “to the current economic situation—where capitalism has already worked its way into every fiber of our ‘private’ lives;” where the private sphere now “harbor[s] the intense action in American cultural production.”

    Question: You state that the new society of control, the new economic market of “capital has become increasingly deterritorialized, floating, flexibly free from production processes, and coming to rest more centrally in the orbit of symbolic exchange and information technologies;” and is a system “where capitalism seems nowhere near the point of its exhaustion.” Deleuze in “Postscript in the Societies of Control” asserts that “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.” What do you make of the new commercials that associate credit cards with freedom and individuality (I’m thinking American Express which uses celebrities such as Tiger Woods to talk about his card, his American Express)? And this idea that the private credit card holder now has some sort of power over his/her life and debt. I also would like to reference the new commercials for the visa check card which seems to “unlock” the “shareholder value” and criminalize individuals who refuse to enter into this new mode of economic and capital consumerism.

  • 14. Jennifer Niester  |  October 13, 2007 at 6:22 pm

    Response to Jule’s Critique of Our Credit Card Nation

    In your response, you asked what others thought of the ideologies surrounding credit cards. When reading your critique of American Express commercials and Extreme Home Home Makeover, I was reminded of Burke’s idea of “ethicizing.” There has been a progression in the value assigned to debt, from debt being a negative state, to some debt being good (such as home mortgages and school loans), to all debt being of value to our economy. Of course, no financial consultant would ever endorse an individual running up a retail credit card without having the income to pay it off every month. However, we are fed the positive freedoms and benefits that credit cards will add to our lives not only through Internet, television, and roadside ads, but also through the many community landmarks (such as football stadiums) they sponsor. As Delueze writes, “Marketing has become the centre or the ‘soul’ of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters.” I would like to modify this idea and say that our terror should lie more specifically in the fact that credit card companies are seen to have a soul, and ethicized as such, debt is seen as social value rather than potential bankruptcy.

    On a side note, I would like to say that I do not have a credit card, but a debit card (granted, it can be turned into a credit line with a reasonable rate at my request) that allows me access to basic necessities, such as electricity and videos. However, when you look the larger picture of how cars are now leased instead of owned, how increasing educational requirements lead to increasing debt, how health services are now typically rendered on payment plans, etc., there is no doubt that debt is a requirement to achieve access into even the most basic economical level of society.

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