This week Laila and I are leading the discussion concerning Three different authors and their works: Foucault's Panopticism, Victor Burgin's Jenni's Room: Exhibitionism and Solitude and Slavoj Zizek's Big Brother.
These three essays are working with the themes of Suveillance and Biopolitics
Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” from Discipline and Punish (NY: Vintage Books, 1995), 195-228. Originally published in French in 1977.
Victor Burgin, “Jenni’s Room: Exhibitionism and Solitude” ” in CTRL (SPACE): Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2002), 228-235.
Slavoj Zizek, “Big Brother, or, The Triumph of the Gaze Over the Eye” in CTRL (SPACE): Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2002), 224-7.
What are their arguments, support and conclusion?
I'll begin with Zizek because I am attracted to him and his hype. His article is about Big Brother, a television show from the Netherlands and reinterpreted in the US. His argument seems all over the place relating Milan Kundera's La Lenteur, The Slow, to 18th Century French erotic games to the Khmer Rouge total control of the people. I found his threads very interesting but confusing. Ultimately, he argues we are not ourselves, we play ourselves. Big Brother is the best example of what Zizek calls this “fact”.
Milan Kundera's characters feign sex in a pool to make "psuedo voluptuous (indulgent sensuously pleasurable) sex". Why are these characters doing this? I’m inferring this is for the entertainment of the gazing guests. The poor couples under the Khmer's control have to have sex, feign sex under the threat of death, not for entertainment but survival. Why is this mentioned or needed?
I have not read The Slow nor do I know anything about the 18th century French erotic games. These references were lost on me. I know enough of Kundera's work that he is enjoys investigating the problem of sex in today's Western world culture under the strains of politics. The Big Brother exemplifies an entertainment show that is somehow derived from “real” people in “real” life, reality shows.
Zizek brings up Lacan it is in reference to "there can be no sexual relationship” – it can only be staged of the Other’s gaze? Zizek is interested in the power of the gaze concerning sexual relationships both to oneself and another. I’m guessing that is why he brings up the Khmer and Kundera. He looks for examples of this in “pop” culture and finds it easily in Big Brother.
Burgin investigates the “power” and finds it also in “pop” culture.
Interestingly with Burgin's essay, the Lacan's gaze is also referenced. This time it is in disagreement with Lacan. The Mother and child gaze relationship actually gives the child existence. Zizek says "I exist only insofar as I am looked at all the time." Jenni needs to be looked at all the time. She misses the camera and is lonely without it. Burgin asks if Jenni is a sexual exhibitionist as judged by the newspaper reportage or just a product of our times.
My 16 year old still yells "Mom look at me" and will impatienly wait until my gaze is upon him before he does the "trick". I still call my mother and desire her gaze or her kudos whenever I have an accomplishment. I am unsatisfied and cannot fully enjoy my success until I have her reciprocating "mirror" like pride.
Foucault's essay investigates the history of surveillance starting with the time of the Black Plague in Europe through to today’s penal system and the architecture that expresses the penal ideology.
Foucault is the proper beginning for the two other essays by Zizek and Burgin because he gives us the set-up (background) for surveillance and control over the masses, and the political POWER of the gaze. Foucault gives us the context for the idea of surveillance being used to control the “uncontrollable” world and the need for police.
Zizek and Burgin are writing of ways that surveillance has expressed itself in popular culture. Burgin is investigating a "new media" with webcam on a "new" video content delivery system Youtube. Zizek is investigating a TV show on an "old" content delivery system.
These concepts of surveillance are rearing their ugly heads in ways that have cost us our individual rights, from the Ant-terrorist Act to London’s cameras. The city has created a panoptic schema in hopes that the very presence of the cameras will make the citizens act better and stop terrorism. The all-seeing eye will make us all behave better for fear of getting caught and the consequences. I can imagine Guilliani arguing, I have nothing to hide….only the criminals are against monitoring.
Interesting connection: Foucault talks of Bentham and architecture around the cell. Zizek gives reference to Bentham’s architecture in the first paragraph of his essay.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Burgin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_Zizek
http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/index
Recent Zizek writing http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/opinion/11zizek.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
References brought up in class:
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