Emily Gettis
GEOG390: Professor Simpson
Reading Response 3
9.16.2020
From his book Discipline and Punish (1975), French philosopher and author Michel Foucault uses the chapter "The Means of Correct Training" to explore how institutions strategically use discipline to control, create, objectify, and train individuals, and then ultimately sort them as data. This institutional discipline requires several working parts that submit to each other. Foucault claims that these cogs are in the form of controlling a group's space, time, and material objects within the levels he describes as 'Hierarchical Observation,' 'Normalizing Judgement,' and 'The Examination.' At the surface, we may be led to believe—or have we been strategically misled to believe—that controlling our space, time, or material objects may be for our own 'good.' Foucault assures us that the levels assess our margin of error to what has been constructed as normal, and any deviation from the norm can be overcome by using the cogs as a disciplinary tool. Hierarchical Observation can be identified as the looming threat of the 'gaze' (an image that works for me here is the Eye of Sauron), an ingredient that paves the way for the production that a dominant force expects. Under the constant gaze, those being controlled will act accordingly. Foucault describes how this can be accomplished through architecture and space. Punishment through a 'Normalizing Judgement,' both creates expectations of the norm and the lens of the normal. Through this lens, individuals' daily lives (objectified and created) interact within the perspective of 'normal.' The 'Examination' is a "…repeated ritual of power" (pp. 198) that "holds them (individuals) in a mechanism of objectification" (pp. 199). Malleable and molded from control, information mined from the object fuels the mechanism of power and strengthens its place in our life, however furtively. In this chapter, I struggled to understand Foucault's opinion on being an 'individual' and when someone deviates from the norm.
In the chapter "Life on the Market," co-authors Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri of the book Multitude (2005) analyze property and ownership and who claims and controls them in spaces where those two devices may seem obvious, or the boundaries are far less rigid. They explain that as we enter a digitized era, the physical grids that were once applicable to decipher property no longer apply. This thread continues to scientific or intellectual discovery; out of the labor of science, knowledge becomes available to the public or common good versus what is deemed private and therefore not open to the public. Their claim is that the strategy of the private resists and conforms potential scientific discovery that would seek to further intellectual thinking and benefit society as a whole. This chapter was an example of how the scales we use to organize are fluid and open to transition; as overlapping and evolving as they are, the result stays rigid.
Some questions:
Do you see any connections about the use of control and discipline online? Or claims about what is normal that Foucault describes throughout the Hardt/Negri chapter? I thought a lot about social media in these two articles and what we agree to put online. Is there an agreement that it's not 'ours' out of fear?
How do we see Foucault's claims of observation, normalization, and examinations today? (How do you act when you see a security camera? How do you or how do you think other people respond to the threat of getting in trouble when interacting with the internet?)
Do you think the 'piracy' and reproduction of culture we saw manifested in the Adelaide Zoo article is for the common social good that Hardt and Negri appreciate in their chapter?
Quick take -
ReplyDeleteThere seems to be some sort of reversal of Foucault's structure of 'observation' ("a single gaze to see everything constantly" p191) in the way that normal people can take videos of police actions and make them visible to a huge audience.
Absolutely, and this is something I hope that we go over tonight.
DeleteIn Foucault's context, we engage in and accept that everything we do is up for grabs in terms of whether it will be put online and scrutinized. We (or at least I have been) have grown up in an era where I have been told that there is a threat of loss always looming, and that the watchful eye of the internet should control my actions--and I think, to an extent, it does.
But as we have seen and as you bring up, police can look into the eye of the video, know the far reaching implications of something going on the internet, kill someone, and not experience loss as a form of control (for example, losing their job or going to jail). So, you're right, to me this is a 'reversal' or a contradiction to this article, and I don't exactly know how this fits in with Foucault's claims.
Foucault is building upon the discussion we had about the Enlightenment last week where we saw that with the birth of science and rationalization over and above the authority of the church, a new 'ratio' of perspective was also produced. That perspective placed the human eye/I at the primary position of vision. Recall those euclid perspectives and the dawn of the mercator map. This transformation of the world into gridded structures--including the grid of city streets or excel spreadsheets--is a "transparent" spatial ordering that functions invisibly, but also permits the ability to see quite clearly those subjects of the mass crowd. It allows private property to become the basis of one's relationship to nature and the environment. It permits the world to be known and experienced through mechanisms of discipline. It produces knowledge and reality as much as it exercises power. Individuality, Harvey and Foucault both identify, is a construction of this historic process. It too can be utilized for isolation and alienation or the development of a new kind of social world that unites differences (as opposed to creates homogenizations). In which case the new ability to video the police is not a reversal at all, but rather the further expansion of Foucault's argument. Whether this expansion is something that can alter the current relations of power/knowledge is a question that Gramsci would also have something to say about.
ReplyDelete