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10/17 - Surveillance/ Biopolitics

A Generalized Surveillance : The Disciplinary Society

What Zizek, Burgin, and Foucault all have in common is the all-seeing eye of our colleague/neighbor, webcams/surveilance cams, and the state (encompassing myriad forms of observation and control). It may help us to focus, initially, on that classic all-seeing eye: the Eye of Providence on the back of the US $1 bill. God is money in the form of a system of total observation and behavioral control.

Zizek, in Big Brother, or, the Triumph of the Gaze over the Eye addresses themes of observation and fantasy vis-a-vis Lacan's bold statement, "there is no sexual relationship." For Zizek (and Lacan), "Fantasy proper is not the scene it self which attracts our fascination, but the non-existant imagined gaze observing it." Through psychoanalysis, we are told that "real sex" is actually just "masturbation with a partner". Sexual enjoyment within this viewpoint originates within, and is amplified by the secret fantasies invested into it.

Zizek goes on to present several sites of sexual fantasy and social control imagined - Disney's Celebration, the british reality TV show Big Brother, and Milan Kundera's La lenteur. Through these examples, Zizek - by way of Lacan - sets up the preconditions for understanding Foucault's ideas of generalized surveillance and the disciplinary society.

Victor Burgin's essay Jenni's Room: Exhibition and Solitude sets out on a path not unlike Zizek's. By focusing his analysis on Jennifer Ringley's Jennicam web portal, Burgin attempts to provide a deeper understanding of her intentions and the psychoanalytical underpinnings of her behavior. Through complex analysis via Lacan's mirror stage and Donald Winnicott's transitional object, we are led to believe Jennicam is less about Ringley's exhibitionism than our own voyeurism as we observe Jenni's transitional rites from the, "protective circle of the family to a potentially hostile outside world."

This suggests to me a sort of global campfire setting masking itself as geek chic. Plato's electronic cave of Jenni's fascinating emergence heightened by the inherent visual intermittence of early web video. The vicarious danger we feel for Ringley as she embarks on a very personal journey into the net, becomes a world we are still only beginning to explore critically (witness the Web 2.0 social networking frenzy).

Burgins' fascinating explication of Jennicam is rooted not in a simplistic reduction of surveillance technology to exhibitionism, or the male gaze. Jennifer Ringley poses more challenging questions of agency, loneliness, maternal identification, violence, and emerging paradigms of social "connectivity" in a wired world.

The window she provides is a two-way mirror in which her public self-reflection becomes a two-way commodity of emerging experience - from her to them and back, as information. The osmosis taking place between the inside and the outside includes imagery, economy, psycho-sexual data in the form of email, and a commerce of critical theory and news media fascinated with her ritual transformation within the public sphere. David Blane clearly learned something from Jennifer Ringley.

I believe Jennifer Ringley was a pioneer, of sorts, in a net which appeared full of connective tissue, but void of bodily authenticity. She took risks no average computer geek could imagine. And therefore, as Homi Bhabha suggests at the end of Burgin's article, produces her own net identity as the transitional object. And in that way encourages Burgin's theoretical summation -

"New technologies confront image theorists with questions which may be most productive when they are least questions of technology." And therefore, more questions arise in the morphogenisis of identity, sexuality, the self, and the other.

A canonical text, Foucault's essay Panopticism elucidates the power matrix of disciplinary control spawned by Jeremy Bentham's architectural system, the Panopticon. Foucault's analysis begins with plague protocol, "a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism," and this rich metaphor continues with such beautiful allegories as, "the capillary functions of power," given life by efforts to constrain, organize, and order societies in times of plague and rebellion.

It is unnecessary here to describe the architectural Panopticon in detail (instead see the wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon - where knowledge is pluralistic). To summarize, its function is to create a system of control which extends well beyond the architectural model into everyday life. The notion that we are always under observation, and therefore our behaviors are modified a-priori is both compelling and disturbing.

Foucault's agenda is to draw and quarter the allegorical architecture of the Panopticon. To demonstrate how it functions well beyond totemic power, a system symbolic of a much more profuse and wide-reaching forms of social control. What he defines collectively as, "The Disciplinary Society." This society, presumably the one we are living in, is one subjected to and simultaneously the subject of the automatic functioning of power.

The below examples I provide from a personal perspective illustrate the "truth" of Foucault's analysis in the course of daily life,

Organized protests become organized individuals on My_Space - "The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individuals."

Olympic park bombing becomes a surveillance camera ring around Atlanta, GA - "The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen."

Former US Special Ops becomes police department protest basher - "...the perversity of those who take pleasure in spying and punishing."

But the operative function of the Panopticon is not limited to architectural systems of control. As Foucault states the Panopticon was also a laboratory, "The Panopticon is a privileged place for experiments on men, and for analysing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them."

Its power is derived not from the fact that it is implemented as an architectural and/or optical (read: surveillance) system, but that, "it is in fact a figure of political technology that may be and must be detached from any specific use."

It is a silent, deadly, pervasive, and therefore fascistic effort to control society by suggesting self-observation as a pragmatic form of safety and security. And it exercises this control spontaneously, from within, by, of, and for its own citizens in the course of their freedom and salvation.

Foucault describes these social systems designed to illicit submission. He calls them "swarming mechanisms" for their combined totalitarian effect. They include the school, the military, religious groups, charity organizations, the hospital, the police (state), and fellow graduate students, amongst others. I would also include the entire suite of websites known as Web 2.0, the CIA's insect surveillance technologies, and the light brown apple moth amongst the newly emerging swarming mechanisms.

gcraighobbs /201 /1017

10/17 - Surveillance/ Biopolitics

A Generalized Surveillance : The Disciplinary Society

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