The great metaphor of the book that one opens, that one pores over and reads in order to know nature, is merely the reverse and visible side of another transference, and a much deeper one, which forces language to reside in the world, among the plants, the herbs, the stones, and the animals.Foucault, The Order of Things, 35
Foucault’s emphasis on the workings of the panopticon has frequently been misread as a description of a static, spatial structure designed to allow an oppressive surveillance of those without power by those who have it. In fact, Foucault is putting an argument that is far more complex than this. His interest is in developing a notion of power as something no longer only possessed and exercised by others. Rather, he proposes power as productive and interconnected field of forces that creates the conditions of possibility for both pleasure and its repression. We are all complicit in the political economy of this field. To that end, he reiterates Betham’s own point that as the prisoner never knows when he is actually being watched, he must assume that it is always so; thus he necessarily surveys and disciplines himself. As far as the exercise of power is concerned, the prisoner is always caught in an uncertain space of hesitation between tower and cell. He is both the prisoner and the one who imprisons; like the protophotographers, he finds himself to be both the subject and the object of his own gaze. “He inscribes in himself the power relations in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.” The panopticon is, in other words, a productive exercise of subject formation operating such that its participants “are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always also the elements of its articulation.” Thus Foucault reads panopticism’s reverberating economy of gazes as constituting each of its contributors as a self-reflexive doublet – as both the subject and object, effect and articulation of a netlike exercise of disciplinary power.
Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea, 21.
I'd been wondering what good all this Foucault might do me in the long run, aside from providing theoretical background for The Thesis. Then I ran across this, from So Is It Important to Think?, a 1981 interview with Foucault:
And then, above all, I don't think that criticism can be set against transformation, "ideal" criticism against "real" transformation.A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established, unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based.
We need to free ourselves of the sacralization of the social as the only instance of the real and stop regarding that essential element in human life and human relations - I mean thought - as so much wind. Thought does exist, both beyond and before systems and edifices of discourse. It is something that is often hidden but always drives everyday behaviors. There is always a little thought occurring even in the most stupid institutions; there is always thought even in silent habits.
Criticism consists in uncovering that thought and trying to change it: showing that things are not as obvious as people believe, making it so that what is taken for granted is no longer taken for granted. To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.
Understood in those terms, criticism (and radical criticism) is utterly indispensable for any transformation. For a transformation that would remain within the same mode of thought, a transformation that would only be a certain way of better adjusting the same thought to the reality of things, would only be a superficial transformation.
On the other hand, as soon as people begin to have trouble thinking things the way they have been thought, transformation becomes at the same time very urgent, very difficult, and entirely possible.
Recent Top Secret Communiqués have implied that my generation is aswim in a sea of branding unimagined by preceding generations. Nike-XBox-Britney, oh my.
One can successfully argue that we are aswim in a surge of media heretofore unseen, but I don’t think there are necessarily more brands than before. The mid-century decades were not a less branded time. I think about my conceptions of those decades, and what I see is children playing in the vacant lot in their Converse All-Stars. I think of kids eating boxes of Cheerios so as to send in the box-tops for an Official Lone Ranger Frontiertown Cutout (or, for an additional ten cents, one’s very own Lone Ranger Atomic Bomb Ring). I’m thinking of the whole nuclear family gathering around the radio and early TV: Kraft Television Theater. Colgate Comedy Hour. Coke Time. Bob Hope on The Pepsodent Show. Fibber McGee and Molly, sponsored by Johnson Wax. The Shadow knows… right after this message from Perfect-O-Lite*.
This would have been the first hard-core wave of daily, consistent marketing directed at children. (Hollywood's marketing departments could only hope for weekly trips to the theater, at best.) This new wave of marketing subtly demanded that kids listen to the show, which meant that they would want the toys, which meant that they would pester their parents to buy the sponsor’s products so as to have box tops to send in.
As you might suspect, there's some Foucault that applies to this:
Let me offer a general and tactical reason that seems self-evident: power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms. … For it, secrecy is not in the nature of an abuse; it is indispensable to its operation. (Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 86.)These early product tie-ins created a way for brands to hide right in the open. They presented an insidious power, one that masked itself behind children’s enthusiasm (and one that never underestimated the power of children’s whining.) And they enabled the gentlemen of advertising to create a generation of children who expected such things, who found them right and good, and who in turn spawned my generation. And you're right - we have never known another world.
*And, as far as I know, branded products were all that was available. Generic products didn’t become available until the 70s. I’ve grown up completely saturated with advertising and media, but I’ve also never known a world where there wasn’t some cheaper alternative around.
We spent some time in Queer Theory talking about the place of talk shows in modern discourse, trying to decide when the Confessional becomes the Sideshow. I brought this up again Wednesday night when we were discussing The Repressive Hypothesis, and we tossed it around for a while. We discussed the scripted fakery of shows like Jerry Springer, and Jeff compared it to Roland Barthes’ essay on wrestling, which presents the wrestling match as a morality play of sorts, a re-enactment of justice. I don’t think that talk shows are really any more fake than some of the old sideshows, though – I mean, the Alligator Girl went home and washed off her dyed cornflake scales just as often as the Bearded Lady went home and trimmed her real beard.
What I did start to think about, as a way to relate all this with the essay at hand, is that confessionals, talk shows and freak shows are all about codification. Maybe this is what the repressive hypothesis is all about – we want to know what category to put you in so as to then know what your place is within greater society, and how you will be handled. The normative, generative couple occupies a different space and function than does the normal-but-not-legitimate queer couple, who in turn are assigned a different space than the solitary leather queen. People don’t know what to do with, say, a lesbian who enters a committed, long-term relationship with a man. (Although perhaps “hasbian” is becoming a more legit codification these days.) In much the same way, someone who clearly fits a racial profile occupies a different space than a mulatto. (Except the Old New Orleans quadroons and octaroons, who occupied a space all their own.)
The notion of repressive codification seems to fit in with Foucault’s fascination with genealogies and archaeologies of knowledge, with assigning things to their place within an interlocking grid. The constant incitement to discourse regarding sexual matters helps with that placement.
Added bonus: Foucault and Porn!
We've been starting out every seminar session with 15 minutes of writing. This is what I scribbled on Wednesday night:
But for decades now, we have found it difficult to speak on the subject without striking a different pose: we are conscious of defying established power, our tone of voice shows that we know we are being subversive, and we ardently conjure away the present and appeal to the future, whose day will be hastened by the contribution we believe we’re making. Something that smacks of revolt, of promised freedom, of the coming age of a different law, slips easily into this discourse on sexual oppression. Some of the ancient functions of prophecy are reactivated therein. Tomorrow sex will be good again. (295)
So here, in We “Other Victorians", Foucault is saying that whenever we talk about sex, we can’t help but sound defiant. How does this interface with the notions of power described in The Repressive Hypothesis, which claims that we are constantly encouraged to talk about sex by the surrounding power/culture? Foucault suggests that we’ve been talking and talking, that this huge socio/political structure has been created that demands constant discourse regarding sexuality; when, then, does that speech become defiant? Is it when we step outside the confessional? Is it when we abandon the prescribed discourse and begin to examine so-called non-normative sexuality (sodomy, sadism, pediatric sexuality)? Is the inherent subversive tone born of a brand of silence? Is it a brand of silence itself? (“We must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things […] There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. (309 – 310)) Beats me.
We're also covering What Is An Author? this evening. I used it briefly in a paper on Creative Commons, and am still very interested in the implications different notions of authorship pose to Intellectual Property. Here's what I have so far, which is a blend of Foucault's What Is An Author? and Barthes' Death of the Author:
[...] If we reveal ourselves on the web and draw readers through ethos and persona, haven’t we attempted a resurrection of the Author?
Not necessarily. Regardless of medium, and regardless of the extent to which we reveal ourselves, we’re still engaged in the act of writing. That act puts our existence squarely within language, which is Barthes’ point: “It is the language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality … to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’” (143). My readers know the words on the screen, not me. Anything they might know of me is “born simultaneously with the text” (Barthes 145). Thus the words live and breathe on their own, and exist within the space and time that the reader devotes to them.
The blogger, and the author, serves as a conduit that allows the words to be born – a function, as Foucault would have it. Like Barthes, he defines “author” as a concept devoid of persona:
Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence… To imagine writing as absence seems to be a simple repetition, in transcendental terms, of both the religious principle of inalterable and yet never fulfilled tradition, and the aesthetic principle of the work’s survival, its perpetuation beyond the author’s death…” (102-105, emphasis mine)
Whether that death is metaphorical or physical is of little consequence – either way, the issue is the perpetuation of the work itself. (Or, as Lanham would call it, the potential of the text.) Viewed in this manner, the words belong to themselves, independent of their creator, just as knowledge belongs to itself. Any potential the text has belongs to the reader. Barthes writes, “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. … refusing to assign a ‘secret,’ an ultimate meaning to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary…” (147). This directly coincides with our discussion of shared knowledge on the web.
Perhaps most important to the topic of Creative Commons is Foucault’s concept of the author as transdiscursive. He sees the author as not only the creator of his/her own work, but also as the producer of other works: “They have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other text” (114). Authorship produces not only concrete original work, but also the possibility of additional derivative work.
These are excerpts that I want to revisit later, since I'm convinced they apply to Intellectual Property issues that I'm interested in. Everything is from Rabinow's The Foucault Reader.
But it seems to me now that the notion of repression is quite inadequate for capturing what is precisely the productive aspect of power. In defining the effects of power as repression, one adopts a purely juridical conception of such power; one identifies power with a law that says no; power is taken above all as carrying the force of a prohibition. Now I believe that this is a wholly negative, narrow, skeletal conception of power, one which has been curiously widespread. If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression. (61)
Each society has its regime of truth, its "general politics" of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with sayng what counts as true. In societies like ours, the "political economy" of truth is characterized by five important traits. "Truth" is centered on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions which produce it; it is subject to constant economic and political incitement (the demand for truth, as much for economic production as for political power); it is the object, under diverse forms, of immense diffusion and consumption (circulating through apparatuses of education and information whose extent is relatively broad in the social body, notwithstanding certain strict limitations); it is produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic apparatuses (university, army, writing, media); lastly, it is the issue of a whole political debate and social confrontation ("ideological" struggles). (73)
"Truth" is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements. "Truth" is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extends it. A "regime" of truth. This regime is not merely ideological or superstructural; it was a condition of the formation and development of capitalism. And it's this same regime which, subject to certain modifications, operates in the socialist countries (I leave open here the question of China, about which I know little). (74)
Since we're proceeding along with the first batch of readings for the Foucault Seminar, I thought I'd post my notes here. As this is my first time through many of these essays, it'll most likely be a hodge-podge of synopses and attempts to pilfer bits that apply to Intellectual Property rather than any Deep Thoughts on my part. I'm feeling a little guilty about not attempting closer readings of these, but I suppose the nature of a five-week reading seminar is to encourage participants to just plow on through. My goal is to cover as much ground as possible and find the parts that apply to my current project, and then revisit those in the last half of summer.
My synopses are always very short. I guess it comes from old journalism training and the notion that if you can't reduce your concept to 25 words or less, then you must not understand it. I wouldn't dare try to reduce Foucault's grocery list to 25 words, but I still have the notion that brief summaries suggest at least a decent general understanding. Maybe, maybe not - but it is my way.
The first text is What Is Enlightenment?. It has four primary sections:
1. Reflection on Kant's Was is Aufklarung
2. Reflection on Baudelaire as exemplar of the proper attitude of modernity
3. Investigation of whether The Enlightenment and Humanism are equivalent (he concludes that they aren't: "tension, not identity")
4. Practical applications and method
The overarching message is:
Enlightenment is all about attitude. We must, as 1 - 3 suggest, assume the appropriate attitude in order to construct a "historical ontology of ourselves" and thus venture toward a state of Enlightenment. This attitude demands gonzo engagement rather than passive absorption. (Baudelaire: we must eat and be eaten by knowledge, be drunken always, etc.)
We are the subjects of study via our discourse and actions. These must be systematically studied, especially with regard to (inter)connections with the axes of knowledge, power and ethics. Attention must be given to both general and specific elements. (Hence Foucault's topics of "Birth of the Clinic" (specific) vs "The Order of Things" or "Archaeology of Knowledge" (general)).
We must perform and embrace a "labor of diverse inquiries." As Kant wrote in the piece referenced here, "Have courage to use your own reason!"
It also includes interesting implications about reason and freedom, and I'm still working on understanding those.
A bit-by-bit outline of the essay is here. A deeper reading by one of my classmates is here.
We started the Foucault Reading Seminar last Wednesday. I'm looking forward to it, and not just because I was the one who suggested the class way back last fall. At the time, I was interested in Foucault's relation to Queer Theory, but my interests have changed over the last few months. Now I've moved on to Foucault and Intellectual Property, since it ties into my thesis topic. The professor is the same one who taught Queer Theory, and she has the best, most basic approach to reading seminars: she just shows up and asks everyone what they want to read, and then wades in along with the rest of us. I'm definitely not fearless enough to teach that way, but she pulls it off. I've rarely been more engaged than I was with the work we did in Queer Theory, and it was largely because I felt directly invested in the class.
The Foucault class is pretty evenly split by extremes: half hard-core grad students who have already read some Foucault and are working on theses, and half undergrads who aren't completely sure who Foucault was. So we spent the first class covering basic intro stuff and recommending background readings.
I had already read Introducing Foucault a while back, when I was first reading Archaeology of Knowledge. (I wouldn't recommend that anyone in the world pick that as their first exposure to Foucault.) Even though I've read more Foucault since then, I went ahead and picked up Foucault for Beginners since that seemed to be what everyone else in the class was reading in preparation. (It's published by Writers and Readers, whose catalogue also includes the always-amusing Domestic Violence for Beginners.)
The world needs a good Foucault for Dummies book, but Foucault for Beginners ain't it. First off, it's overly simplistic - Fillingham claims that Foucault can be reduced to the aphorism "Knowledge is Power." I'm certainly not a Foucault expert, but it seems to me that if you wanted to boil the man's work down to three words, they would have to be "Power Impacts Knowledge." Even that doesn't really do it. Perhaps it's just best to stay away from such reductive statements altogether. Plus, I always get irritated by "overviews" that include traces of the author's agenda, which in this case clearly originates in Women's Studies. She snarks about Foucault's tendency to ignore women in a number of places. And it's true, he does ignore them, but I didn't notice any snarkery about Sartre's misogyny in her passages that lionized him. Unfortunately, the rest of the book is just as reductive and slanted.
The thing that most irritated me was her treatment of Foucault's relationship to and works on sexuality. She asserts that Foucault's work is all about abnormality: "Madness, Criminality and Perverted Sexuality." Fair enough, but the term "perverted," with its connotations of inherent judgement, got my hackles up right off the bat. Although Foucault's sexuality is occasionally mentioned throughout the book, it's largely glossed over. There's no discussion in the biographical section of the fact that growing up queer in Catholic France (and its attendant notions of psychological propriety) might have fostered his interests in language, power, and madness. There's no discussion of his relationship with Roland Barthes, although Daniel Defert, his more commonly recognized lover, is mentioned. Only the briefest mention is made of how Foucault's philosophy was played out through his involvement with S/M. All three volumes of History of Sexuality receive only 15 pages of consideration, while the other major works receive around 30 pages apiece. And Herculine, his "recovered memoirs of a 19th century hermaphrodite," is completely missing both from the text and from the list of Foucault's additional works. I, Paul Riviere... is mentioned in both, and it's just as minor a work as Herculine.
One would think that Gender Studies and Queer Theory folks would look out for each other, but that's rarely the case. It's certainly evident in Foucault for Beginners. So if you're looking for a competent general introduction to Foucault (with pictures!), I suggest you check out Introducing Foucault instead. It's much better, as it adheres to the standards of the "Introducing" series. I haven't been disappointed by any of their books yet.