User:Lbattich/Text on Societies of Discipline and Control
Text on Societies of Discipline and Control
Disciplines of Control
In the chapter "The Means of Correct Training," from his book Discipline and Punishment, Foucault analyses what he terms the transition from sovereign societies to disciplinary societies, which emerged and developed through the 17th and 18th centuries.
"The disciplinary power is to train, rather than to select and to levy" (which would be a juridical/sovereign power: select, levy and punish, according to the written law or the whim of the sovereign)
It trains and disciplines by a two-fold movement: -It homogenized and normalized the "useless multitude of bodies" -It separates the mass into a multitude of individual elements. It separates the homogenized mass into particular individuals each with its particular features. Yet the movement of individualization is closely related to the "norm" (and what is "normal") common to the homogeneous society.
"Discipline makes individuals."
Foucault describes the use of simple procedures or "instruments" of disciplinary powers, such as: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement and their combination in a procedure that is specific to [the disciplinary power], the examination."
Hierarchical Observation
Disciplinary power "coerces by means of observation." The gaze forms part of the overall functioning of power. Whereas in sovereign societies, the visibility of the monarch or sovereign was part of the ritual of display of power. the subjected masses remained in the dark, their gazes did not hold play a central role in the exercise of sovereign power. In disciplinary societies, however, "all power would be exercised solely through the act of observation." All individuals, regardless of their rank within the power hierarchy of the society, act on each other by a constant surveillance.
"The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly." (173) This instrumental observation is manifest in several disciplinary places of power, such as the school and the factory:
"Surveillance becomes a decisive economic operator both as an integral part of the production machinery and as a specific mechanism in the disciplinary power." (175) Surveillance enables the disciplinary power to remain indiscreet (it is everywhere and always alert, present through the gaze of every individual and the network of their relations) and highly discreet ("it functions permanently and largely in silence") This manner of instrumenting discipline, Foucault writes, "makes possible the operation of a relational power that sustains itself by its own mechanism and which, for the spectacle of public events, substitutes the uninterrupted play of calculated gazes."
Normalizing judgement
Every disciplinary system contains a "micro-penal" system within. This micro-penal system differs from the juridical system (even though it may appropriate its rituals) in that it does not take an isolated case and refer it to the written law. Rather, the disciplinary micro-penality acts by making punishable the whole domain of the "non-conforming." That is, whatever does not conform to the disciplinary system. Thus the micro-penal system combines the urge to train (to educate, to make the subject conform to certain parameters) with the act of punishing. Even thought the disciplinary power exercises a movement of normalization (and punishes whoever deviates from the norm), it separates its subjects according the their nature, potentialities, their level or their value. (see 181) "The perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes." (183) The examination
"The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of normalizing judgement. It is a normalizing gaze." According to Foucalut, the examination was developed as a technique during the 17th century, with important transformations to the power relations within several institutions. (Such as the hospital)
The examination established the principle of "compulsory visibility." (187) Furthermore, the examination introduces the techniques of documentation and archiving on a grand scale. The power of documentation is here an essential part of the mechanisms of disciplinary power.
The instrument of examination coupled with it techniques of documentation establish two possibilities:
- "The constitution of the individual as a describable, analysable object."
- "The constitution of a comparable system" for the measurement and description of phenomena and groups. (190)
Through the examination, the individual becomes an object for study (the object of analysis for a "scientific" apparatus, or branch of knowledge), and a node in which power is exercised (and thus manifested). In the double act of homogenization and indivualization that disciplinary power effect, we have:
- "The individual as he may be described, judged, measured, compared with others, in his very individuality."
- "The individual who has to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc."
Case study: Josh Harris' projects
The modalities of surveillance can be explored with case story of dot-com entrepreneur Josh Harris, as it is portrayed in Ondi Timoner’s 2009 documentary ‘’We live in Public’’.
Josh Harris -"The greatest internet pioneer you've never heard of."- founded Jupiter Communications in the early 1990s, a firm which sold data and analysis on internet traffic, in advance of the dot com boom. The narrative of Josh's early career: follow the myth of the American dream: he arrives in New York in 1984 with $900, to end up as a tycoon in the 1990s.
He founds Pseudo.com: a mix of video and chat: the future according to Harris. He poses as the Warhol of Internet TV, with Pseudo as platform and environment for artists, etc.
"We are in the business of programming people's lives."
Harris’s projects exemplify the disciplinary power to programme society through surveillance, through visibility. He equates the provision of total freedom to total control.
In the film he is portrayed as someone who really wants to reach out and connect. And the manner he does this is by connecting with people mediated by TV and by technology.
Project: Quiet: We Live in Public
Upon leaving Pseudo he embarks on a new project: "Quiet: We Live in Public" This is an undergroup society, hotel-like: a party-social experiment: a precursor of Big Brother-style TV shows.
Everybody may feel like celebrities, just by being on televised. There's a fascist overtoned to the whole thing, however.
- "Everything is free except the video that we get from you."
Constant survellaice, where everywhere and everyone is televized. It does serve as an analogy of what the internet would be, but also of what disciplinary societies are, specially where there is no one Big Brother, but it is the collective that regulates itself, because of constant visibility.
Someone says: “it's more fascinating to watch your friends than to watch normal TV.”
There is an initial sense of freedom while being watched. Having our lives exposed. People want to have fame everyday (not just 15). It seems to me, however, that there is a very easy equation here that actually does hold: that being on TV makes you famous, or gives you the illusion of fame. That may have been the case when TV was the main media outlet in the early 1990s, and to be televised meant to become famous, to be present for an audience out there, to be broadcast. Yet when everyone is televised, when everyone is "famous", when everyone can be broadcasted (as is the case in Josh experiment, and is the case in today's web 2.0), this doesn't mean anyone is watching, or that you are famous at all. Just means your live is out there, not public, yet it have not much to do with fame at all anymore, but with personal freedom and surveillance.
To Live in Public: everything is exposed, so how do you get to know people? Some don't notice the lack of privacy. The object of the project is not just to film (to exercise discipline by surveillance), but to collect information (here we are already moving to what Deleuze call the societies of control, where the data system, and the individual’s position within this system, is used as a control mechanism.)
Josh introduces a weird concept within his community: interrogation. This is abusive, degrading, and the participant seem to have no option but let themselves into it. The authority of the camera is relevant here.
"It's a hard envirenment to be sober in,” says one participant. Suicidal thoughts and psychological instability among them also became evident.
“Freedom turns people into beasts.” Josh is portrayed as a puppet master, letting everybody go fucked up, but not doing anything to better their conditions. In this manner, he has set up a system and let it run its own course, without interfering. (Interfering in this case may be seen as a mode of sovereign societies, rather than disciplinary societies.)
With the mantra "Yea, that's the future", Josh seems to waive all problems. The subjects in Josh's experiment had become human parasites. “To go from love to hate, from creativity to destruction.”
The police interrupt in the early hours of New Yeas day 2000, and closes the premises: the show is over.
Next Project: We Live in Public
Josh and girlfriend Tanya Corrin set up to live together and broadcast constantly their lives on the internet. There's also a chat platform in their site, so that the audience can interact with them. This means at the same time that they can know what their audience thinks of them in real time. This allows a lavel of interactivity and communication between them and the audience, which goes beyond normal platforms of broadcasting, even of other internet broadcasting. They are giddy the first month. Back to Josh's personal narrative: the relationship with his mom.
He fantazises that people would be able to purchase tapes of him and his daily life: the logic here is that this is implied by being a celebrity (which he is, according to him)
For him, getting in TV was a way to validate yourself.
Slowly there's distance within the relationship. Creating an alientation between them: to be in public yet have no connection. -To be stuck.
When arguing in public its all about the egos: performing for an external other. They are always eager to see what the audience's response was. Harris had no control. The audience is on control.
Dom com bubble busts: on March and April 2000, more than 75,000 people lost their jobs. Pseudo was sold, whole, and it went under in October.
He is a celebrity, yet people stop watching. His personal worth depended on other's opinions. The audience's response was a constant reminder: we watch. Big Brother is not a person, but the collective consciousness. The collective eyes of a society that survellance itself, without the need of a Big Brother entity.
"I'm mentally sick." He finally admits.
Tanya Corrin is later portrayed as a "virtual girlfriend", cast for the specific project "We Live in Public". Josh tries to present the whole project as a pseudo relationship with a pseudo girlfriend, in order to protect his image.
Harris predictions slowly become apparent: Google, Facebook, bring the cameras to themselves. We create value by feeding content. We share, enjoy the attention, etc.
We live in public: Looking back Josh's ideas seem like predictions. The "Quiet" community project as a physical prediction of the contemporary online networked survellance society.
Josh Harris’s projects may touch upon the mechanism of disciplinary societies, but they also are part of a digital or numerical society organized by data and the commerce of information (recall his first company, Jupiter). These mechanism have more parallels to Deleuze’s analysys of societies of control.
Societies of Control
In his 1990 essay "Psotscript of the Societies of Control" Deleuze argues that the disciplinary societies, described by Foucault, have incresingly shifted toward what he terms societies of control.
Since the start of the twentieth century, and in a process which accelerated after World War 2, "disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted."
In conceptualizing this shift, Deleuze warns that we should not ask for what is a better or worse type of society, as in both of them "liberating and enslaving forces confront one another." Rather, he urges us to look for new manners in which societies of control can be suverted, to "look for new weapons."
In disciplinary societies, there were enclosed institutions, such as the family, the school, the factory, which have now entered into crisis. On the other hand, the control mechanisms in a scoiety of control do not follow enclosures, but rather these machanisms are modulated across different areas, "like a self-deforming cast that will continiously change from one moment to the other."
Deleuze proposes that the corporation has replaced the factory, and he analyses or sketches the outline of control societies by using the corporation as its paradigm.
A society of control acts on the modulating principle: "perpetual trining" replaces the school, where there is continuous control instead of gradual examination.
In the societies of control "one is never finished with anything." Different institutions (school, army, work-place, etc), "coexist in one and the same modulation."
Deleuze compares the modes of these societies to the legal strategies in Kafka's The Trial. Disiplinary societies would correspond to an apparent acquital, whereby the individual temporarily stops the case, but he could be arrested again and a new case start (in disciplinary societies, individuals move as in between incarcerations, from one enclosed institution to another). Societies of control act on the juridical mode of "limitles postponements". In Kafka's novel, this juridical strategy is termed "protraction," whereby the individual keeps the trial in motion while managing to deffer the final judgement as endlessly as possible.
This comment regarding "protraction" on societies of control has reverberations with Zygmunt Bauman's analysis of modernity and post modernity. Bauman uses the term "liquid modernity" to charaterze the societies where individuals are embeded in uncertainty, constant change, where life-politics and individual experience are in a constant state of fluidity.
Foucalt had noticed the double role of dicsiplinary power: it masses together (normalizes), at the same as it individualizes (molds the individuality of each member in the body mass).
Societies of control do not longer depend on the mass/individual pair. Control mechanisms reply on a numerical system, where each individual becomes a "dividual": a data signature, an identification sign which can be indexed in different data systems. The mass has become these proliferation of data systems: market, samples, data banks, etc.
Deleuze identifies the computer as the type of machine which better expresses the mode of the societies of control.
The kind of societies is relevant to the contemporary development of capitalism, which is more a capitalism of servicesand stock trading, than a capitalism of the production of products. (Deleuze remarks that often production is delegated to the Third World, which would bring the question whether the Third World also operates according to the societies of control, and what would this mean.)
Case study: Black Mirror
‘’Black Mirror’’ is produced by Charlie Brooker. It is an exploration of the effect of technology, using the catchphrase: "If technology is a drug, what are its side effects?" The television format relies on shows such as ‘’The Twilight Zone’’ and ‘’Tales of the Unexpected.’’
Black Mirror: White Bear
Victoria wakes up in a room and cannot recall anything. Looks like she had tried to take her life. Looks a bit like a post-apolaliptic scenario. She cannots remember where she is. Nor who she is. A mans comes out of car and tries to kill her with a gun. Passers by and many people film the action on their cameras. She encounter 2 other people that are being persecuted. One of them gets killed. The 2 girls manage to run away from the persecutors.. They find them through the cmeras. A signal of pitches tat appeared through any device with a screen, which did something to people. Everyone becomes an spectator. Everyone becomes an audience. Watches, films with their phone devices. Some people were not affected. And some of those affected became aware that under the new rules they can do anything: kill others.
The girl looks into the screen and receives some sort of weird signal.
They are followed again and saved by some other guy in a van.
They go to place in the woods where there is no communication signals. He turn out to be a persecutor, with a shotgun. Taken to a plcae in the wood with many cadavers.
One girl scapes. MAny people come to watch, while recording with their phiones
Girl comes back and shoots eveil persecutor guy. They run away together. Tey head to a tranmission station in order to destroy it. She gets what seem to be flshbacks from somehwere.
They break in a start to covwe thinga with petrol.
Wen sSudenly it is revealed that everything is art of a show. Like a reality show? She's put in a chair in the spectacle and shown about her own life which she couldnt remember.
According to the video shown to her, she's a criminal.
She was watchnig as her partner murdered a girl. Now the audience watches as she is being punished.
Punishment by The reality (of her being paraded and ppl watching, etc) does not seem that dissimilar to the fictional world created for her, when eveyone is an spectator.
Public punishment and execution, as in medieval times.
it seems she
A "Justice Park"
She becomes a n object ina show for entertainment.
She is branwashed again and the show starts again.
Over and over again.
Peter Walkinson, made a film: The Punishment Park Script a moment in society and media.
Truman Show Scripting the situation so someone behaves in particular manner.
A synopticism rather panopticism: everyone watches everyone, rather than one watching all.
Disciplinary: containment, and presets (rules)
Control: digital and deterritorialized.
She has been programmes, scrpted, in amanner in which she is boliged to take part in the system in her particular role.
Black Mirror: The Waldo Moment
Political campaing. The Tory candidate Being followed by a cartoon in a van. Waldo: a cartoon blue bear character, controlled by a comedian real-time.
Waldo is pretends to be campaigning as well. The comedian stablishes a relationship with a campaign manager for the Tory candidate.
Can a cartoon campaing for a political position? Laughing at someone we won't engage? A cartoon having a round panel politics discussion. What is a politician for? no one knows anymote.
The young follow Wanldo. It cannot articulate. Waldo is not real but its more real than all the others (candidates). Wando has no policy, yet at least he doesn't pretend to have one.
A candidate with no party A mascot for protest voters. A voice for the disenfranchasid: neutralized Encourage people not to think deeply about politics.
Walde the bear "people likes" Uncanny. Waldo is a construct people not only embrace put accept. People like Waldo even though they know it is a construct, a team effort (of beacuse of this) He can send a twitter slingshot to the opposition: he is the perfect assassin. Now Waldo is anti politics, yet everything he says can be accepted. Global political entrertainment product people wants. Waldo becomes bigger. If Waldo is the ain opposition then the whole system is absurd, which may well be. Comedian tries to resign by yelling in public "do not vote for Waldo" At the end we are to learn that Waldo becomes a fascist political power with international control.
Is the traditional media (TV) a parasite of the new media (YouTube, Twitter) or vice versa?
Programm consensus.