User:Luisa Moura/notes/foucault and deleuze

25-09-2013

- Intro – Guardian | Orwell 1984- NSA – return to a totalitarian state? “Obama is a nice guy” “David Cameron is a nice Social Democrat” (?) - General guidelines lecture - - This is something else than a state control: participatory surveillance / capitalism/….? - Information flow is free but the way it flows is designed. Tailored channels are made to fit profiles, consumer data, and all kind of information (…) - Notion of panoptic (um) – internalization of the surveillance system [govern mentality – Foucault] - Governing from a distance; distribution of power (really?)

- Panopticum, Jeremy Bentham and Foucault- Panoptic - “the means of correct training” (1975, Foucault) + Super-Panopticum “Foucault and databases” (Poster) (Panopticum scheme-floor plan and section) it doesn’t matter anymore if somebody is really in the tower observing once the notion of being observed is already internalized. Prisoners would naturally behave as if being surveyed. (“Means of information makes out of us different people, its shapes us”) Panopticum: maximum efficiency / utility; disciplinary, formative structure (corrective). We normalize our behavior when we believe we are being watched.

Classical age: body was the subject of power and punishment Modern age: body goes through disciplinary and corrective procedures in particular institutions (prison, factories, barracks) – efficiency – body docility. Efficiency gained through codification SPACE and TIME; normalization. Time code (ranking for each individual) – timetable Space code – architectural plan (gives each individual a place).

Foucault’s bio power: distribution of bodies in space and time. “The body is no longer subject to the will of a ruler but enters a disciplinary system where surveillance, discipline, ranking and self regulation, are key elements” (…)

Disciplinary Society – “can we actually have good guys in charge?” advantage: common right to education and healthcare and so on. Disadvantage: cogs in a machine. “Anyhow, we are born in a disciplinary society, how could it otherwise be?” “How was it before?”

Correct training = norm achievement (Example- the use of photography for a normative research and statement) Eadweard Muybridge – “Motion Studies” observation, examination, normalization Cesare Lombroso – “Typology of Criminals” 1870, classify, qualify, diagnose, punish

Difference between Disciplinary Society and Society of Control (synthesis) Disciplinary Society: behavior regulation through time and space code Society of Control: control of information, knowledge and perception (coding, filtering, encrypting). We discipline ourselves to perform in a certain way. We become a commodity (Foucault)

Performance: volunteer for an eternal state of performance (social media). It became imperative to present ourselves through an integral profile in which professional skills, personal life and personality mingle in one single narrative (the eternal performance).

Super Panopticum: cards, receipts, chips, codes, passwords, we became a walking database for our own commodity. We use devices that translate our behavior, choices and actions into images and data. The new ways of control go beyond a space or time code. To consume we have to hand in information and we believe it benefits us.

Digital age: deterritorialization of control mode; this is the essential difference between disciplinary society and society of control. We need both though, and they overlap at the moment. Do we fake a need for time and space code?

We live in Public 1999 You get the freedom to behave, exactly as you are expected to behave. Stanford experiment The performance of roles and how you become what you are told to be, despite your background, education or principles. The OZ tale “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”

(What can we actually conclude form the Reality TV phenomena, besides the fact that it seems to be an evil massive tool of behavior control? Where is the ethical limit between the experiment in the pursuit of knowledge and the arbitrary voyeurism?)