So... on the day we didn't have class we went to MOCA for the Lawrence Weiner exhibition. Brandon was the only one that brought a camera so we all used his to take pictures as proof that we were there. We had to be sneaky about it though because there were all these security people standing around. Hopefully there were no security cameras from above...
Posted on June 11, 2008
The following are thumbnail versions of my bound book since the full size would not fit and would take too long to load. I apologize in advance for my bad photography skills.
If you would really like to see the full unbound version click here
Introduction
How does one brand the human species? What is unique about a human being that separates it from other living organisms? How might the human species be examined by another intelligent life form? All of these questions and more are the basis for my project, which is an attempt to brand the human species starting with a human I know best, myself. My project is, therefore, in theory my best effort to capture my life and humanity in some sort of tangible material. Like all humankind, it is not perfect, nor is it by any way complete, as all humankind is subject to change and growth. Yet, it is a reflection of myself at this moment, written in my own hand, using my own photographs and my own thoughts. It is, simply put, an archive of my life complete with photos and self annotations. I am myself, but I am by far not an expert on the entirety of my life. This is showcased in my clueless thoughts and opinions about the early years of my life. I have all these photographs, but even photographs do not bring to memory my past experiences. This too then is part of being human. We have a memory, but not all experiences are available to us. They are perhaps not within our explicit memory, but more or less ingrained as inherent mechanisms within us that may cause us to react differently to certain situations over others.
I did not, however, come to this conclusion by merely sitting at my desk and thinking. The culmination of all these ideas were nurtured from one single idea, “social control.” After contemplating the open-ended question of branding the human species, I was given to thoughts of past lectures in various classes about social control and the aspect of propaganda in both the mass media and education. This fascinated me and I decided that I wanted to focus on this aspect of humanity. However, after weeks of focusing on the “Societies of Control” by Deleuze and other related topics by Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic I realized that I was only trying to visualize Deleuze’s thoughts and not coming up with my own views about humanity. I was pretty much stuck in a rut and holding on for dear life to Deleuze’s statement about how humans are no longer individuals, but have become “dividuals.” While in this rut, I tried to give myself avenues of expression by attempting to break down the concept of being an individual by attempting to map out various areas where I was more of an individual or less of an individual, but even this was by no means perfect. Yet, it was through this step that I happened to stumble upon my final idea.
After deciding to map out areas of my life where I was more of an individual and less of an individual, I was pressed upon to find images of myself to tie all these areas together. It was after gathering these photographs of myself that I realized exactly how I could express my humanity best. My photographs had more power than some beautifully organized chart about myself by way that they displayed my humanity in the mundane activities of life. This is where my answer lay all along as a simple, but powerful idea that had been there under my nose. I felt stupid for taking so long to get to that point, but I was relieved that I finally knew what I wanted to do and how I wanted to accomplish it. I then quickly changed my thinking and stopped bothering myself with the philosophical idea of whether or not I was an individual since it had been causing me to become too confused and lost.
In conclusion, the following pages are thus a series of twenty-five photographs from various points in my life. I originally scanned in over eighty photos, but I narrowed them down to twenty-five by keeping at least one photograph from each photographed stage of my life and eliminating photographs that were too similar to the ones I had chosen to represent certain stages of my life. Over each photograph I overlaid a sheet of translucent paper where I made comments about the photograph, some are quite ridiculous, others are more emotional and tied to what I feel when I see that specific photograph. Yet, as I have
previously stated, all these comments are by no means set in stone and I for one believe that if I were to take more time upon this project, perhaps more of what has been completed may be blacked out and rewritten.
Posted on June 10, 2008
So, after printing out some of my photographs in color and trying them out with the overlay of translucent sheets, I decided that black and white is probably a better choice because I don't want the photographs and text to fight for attention.
As you can see, many of them are not finished and this is not exactly all of them. I think the biggest struggle is really finding the words to say when I really don't know who I was or what I thought about back then so many of my comments on my photographs are random comments about things I see in the photographs and what they remind me of. Every now and then there are anecdotes that I recall, but for the most part, I am just writing what comes to mind, which I suppose still shows some sense of who I am.
Posted on May 29, 2008
The following are my tests of overlapping of the translucent sheets for my final project. I have decided to create a book that kind of represents an archive of life, or specifically my life. Each of the translucent sheets will then represent different ways in which I interpret my photographs. The first layer will most likely be the most obvious layer, in which I identify people in the photo. The next layer is more about what people or objects in the photo remind me of. The third layer is then my interpretation of my photograph based on the following two layers. I printed out a proof copy of one of my pages in black and white to test the visibility of the photograph under the translucent sheets. The final prints will most likely be in color though.
photograph
photograph overlaid with one translucent sheet
photograph overlaid with two translucent sheets
photograph overlaid with three translucent sheets
In terms of the text, I will most likely be writing directly onto the translucent sheets, but I'm still trying to figure out how to do so without overlapping my text.
Posted on May 27, 2008
When I look at the images of my past and the images from the present, I know there is a humanity to them, but how do I explain what they mean to me and how I relate to the rest of humanity?
I find it hard to really grasp this and how I can truly lay this out and explain it. In many ways, I want to really just make scrapbook-like pages with these images and to add my own comments and thoughts below handwritten. Typefaces are great and all, but somehow I feel that the best way I can capture what I feel about this project is through scratches of text made with my own hand. Letters have always been something personal to me, something beautiful, something that brings inexplicable joy. I could care less if the text was illegible, as long as it was there, written by a person.
I want in that sense to mix photos, handwritten comments and other media, perhaps sewing on tidbits here and there that link my life together. So I am considering scratching the 5 different posters idea and rather making a book of images that are overlaid with my own thoughts. There will be the period when I am a baby, dependent on my parents for life and comfort. Then there will be a period when I am a toddler, exploring, but still innocent and very tied to my parents. Following that will be my years as a child, not quite knowledgeable, but becoming less attached and more adventurous. Lastly, will be my adolescent/pre-teen years to now, which are predominantly years of finding identity and being more aware of the dangerous world we live in.
I want to then, set it out as if it were a sketchbook of pictures mixed with text. In this way, it models humanity's ability to work with their hands and create things from gourmet food to intricate furniture, but the images will also be an expression of our growth both physically and emotionally. Our life is one of growing from innocence to maturity. When I look at these images, I see things in my younger self that I no longer see in myself, but there are also other things that I still see in myself. These lasting qualities then tie my pictures together and indicate that humanity changes and grows, but keeps on to certain aspects of life.
Posted on May 22, 2008
These are some thumbnails of photographs I was thinking of using in my posters, but I'm not exactly sure if these are enough images or if all of them really work well to show my humanity. I realized though that as I grew older, my expressions and composure became more forced and posed in photographs. Perhaps this is a reflection of my understanding of regulatory behavior or my awareness of myself and the importance of my appearance.
Posted on May 20, 2008
Below are a series of images I found to be very "human" and I guess I want to add images like these of myself now and from when I was young to reinforce the humanity of my project.
Posted on May 15, 2008
While I attempt to map out my own life into words and images (hopefully later), I realize just how hard it is to convey an idea through text rather than through expression and movement of the body. Somehow, it seems easier to be rather than to express. Expression, or at least expression that is planned for dispersion, often involves critical thought and linked concepts, while being is just simply existing. In many ways I wonder if is there really a definite or somewhat similar standard that everyone lives by. Are the standards to which I am judging myself also just standards that I have obtained after my mind has filtered through it? Are the standards that we call standards not just opinions that have become slowly morphed into other things by the visual propaganda we are exposed to daily? I don't know, but I guess this is what I have to figure out for myself.
Posted on May 15, 2008
These are still incomplete, as I have so much more I can probably add to these, but this is just a review of my brainstorming as I write down all that comes to mind that relates to the quadrants. I am still in the process of completing the three other posters. Also, I will probably create some sort of hierarchy and organization for the qualities later so I'm quite sorry if it seems a bit disorganized and gray.
Posted on May 15, 2008
After reflecting upon how I consider myself as an individual, I discussed it with Rebeca and we decided it would be interesting to map out my life into five different quadrants to get a better understanding of how I am an individual and how I am not an individual. The following are the five quadrants I have decided to focus in on.
Since we are not specifically an individual or a "dividual," but fall into different degrees and levels of specificity, this map will thereby be a kind of flowchart that shows how I rate my range of conformity based on what I find to be the norm for each category. In doing this, I will be better able to compare myself to others and give others an understanding of how they compare to me in my terminology.
Posted on May 14, 2008
The following are images that I am considering for use in my final project which will be a boundless book. In choosing these images, I picked photographs based on the various levels of information or identity of the people based on their dress and the people that surround them or that they are part of.
One of the first events that I found to have a lot of levels I can break down was the moment before John F. Kennedy's death and the aftershot of how his death affected the nation and those that love him.
The second event I found to have an interesting collective of individuals and dividuals was a photograph from a MLK rally. In this photo, there is a clear distinction between MLK, the photographers, the police and the supporters.
The third event I believed had potential is that of the process of moving the Japanese to internment camps. There are perhaps not as many levels of distinction in this photograph, but it really speaks to me because the photographs are so representative of the melancholy nature of the process.
Other events I found powerful include the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the aftermath of 9/11 and the World's Fair or other national events that bring in people from all places. However, I do not believe I connect so well with these events thus, I didn't end up sticking to them.
In addition to breaking down one of these key events into a series that describes how they are both individual and dividuals, I also believe I need some sort of media by which I can outline what being an individual or dividual means to me. In talking with Zach and Rebeca, I realized just how much my own definition of what it means to be an individual was influenced by the society of control and in this way, I believe it is important to also represent my own ideas of these two constructs so that my deconstruction of the photograph can be read clearly with my train of thought. In this, I hope to create a book of images much like that of Hiromix to highlight my understanding of how individualism has a lot to deal with unique personal experiences which affect the way we think and how we apply subjectivity to everything we do. I hope to perhaps represent in my book a series of images of similar things that are different by the nature that they belong to different people, thus outlining them as "individuals." This would perhaps include the different body parts of humans like hair, skin and facial structure to studies on living conditions and the appearance of one's bed and desk.
Posted on May 13, 2008
The dictionary defines an individual as:
1. A single human considered apart from a society or community
2. A human regarded as a unique personality
3. A person distinguished from others by a special quality.
4. A single animal or plant as distinguished from a species, community, or group.
5. A member of a collection or set; a specimen.
Yet with the many cliches that exist, it is hard to unravel what is truly an individual and how a person is an individual without sounding like a "dividual."
As I look at my own life and how I consider myself to be an individual, I think of elements that combine to create a unique person or being. When our lives are broken apart we form units that are easily contained within a "dividual" standpoint, but together we get so many different mixes of choices and preferences that there is no denying the separation from one person to the next. For example, we are all trained to think critically, but our perceptions of issues will differ due to our own personal views and experiences. Also, the different combinations of skin, hair color and bone structure give us our individual look (except for perhaps identical twins). Yet, in regards to that, even identical twins know that despite looking very similar, they also have their differences in personality and preferences.
So yes, we are involved in a society of control, but it is the different elements of the control taken together that give us our individuality. I am by nature a fragile person that is easily hurt, who easily starts crying when I feel emotionally broken. Others may relate to me on that, but may not also hold the same standard of cleanliness and order. Also, my experiences are unique and mine alone. I must daily battle with my own fears while still upholding an image of peace and calm. I may have been trained to do so, but it does not dismiss the fact that these issues are still my own personal distractions and sorrows.
Experience is then perhaps a very crucial part of the divergence of the individual from the "dividual." No two people will have the same set of experiences. We may have similar experiences which allow us to relate, but we will not have the exact same experiences which impact us in the same way. For example, many children are picked on by bullies in their classes, yet some will experience more pain and depression from that than other kids. Also, the capacity to which the bully inflicts pain can reside on different levels from physical pain to emotional pain. Thereby, the scars that remain behind in each child from their previous experiences with bullies are all painful and hard to dismiss, but the impact will be different, as the origins could have been different in context and the pain could have been inflicted in a variety of ways.
Posted on May 13, 2008
I'm not entirely sure how to convey my ideas and my understandings of being human visually. I can fathom this idea of control within the society emotionally and physically, but this aspect is often so hard to grasp and visualize for me. For me I believe humans have a multitude of possibility, but they are caught in a net of responsibility and repression. Yet, in spite of that, there is hope which keeps us alive. Together we can be a faceless mass of people, but individually we have our own goals and dreams and a limitless capacity for thought and motivation.
Perhaps with this I can create a book, a book of faces which converge together, but also separate to delve into the dreams and hopes of each individual. Images and words will link to map this sense of emotion and feeling of the individuals as themselves and within the group.
Posted on May 6, 2008
By Wayne's suggestion I looked up The Milgram Experiment by Stanley Milgram, which is a series of experiments, which tested an individual's willingness to obey authority even if it is morally incorrect in view of the individual's standards. This was conducted with electro-shock generators which would shock the other participant at varying levels of voltage.
I found it interesting that people were only uncomfortable with shocking the other participant after the 300-volt level and that 65 percent of people actually went to extremes to shock the other participant at the highest shock point 450-volt.
In this way, I believe this really enforces the idea that the society of control can be a collective that has both positive and negative impact due to what an individual is willing to relinquish themselves to. This willingness is then relied upon the due to the person's subversiveness and strength to stand up according to their convictions.
General Information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Milgram's Summary of His Experiment:
http://home.swbell.net/revscat/perilsOfObedience.html
Posted on April 29, 2008
In viewing Peter Lunenfeld's lecture, I realize just how much consumption is not only a big part of my life, but one which continues to create this sense of void. In taking this into consideration with our project of branding the species, there is the sense that as human beings we are constantly in lack of something. Perhaps this is due to an innate nature that has somehow become nurtured to become satisfied in material things. On the other hand, there was perhaps still this desire before we became virtual downloaders in that we are creatures that are innately and emotionally crippled and must therefore feed our emptiness with other things.
In discussing my project with others, I realized how much I seemed to focus on the darkness of the human condition. I suppose I never really considered much about the idea of having a balance between the horrific and the pleasant. Yet at the same time the more I consider my own life, the more I see the pervading sense of insecurity which undermines all that I do and that this is also tied to this idea I described earlier of lack. Thus, in filling this void there will always be good and evil that we are naturally drawn towards. The society of control can thereby be a collective that has both negative and positive impact due to what one is willing to give themselves up to. We are all individuals at some point in our lives and still can be, but we are perhaps drawn or forced into certain circumstances that we either continually resist or relinquish ourselves to.
In this way, Lunenfeld's lecture is in a sense one of these circumstances in which many of us have relinquished ourselves to. Not really becoming aware of what we are downloading, but just going along and becoming subservient to cultural and intellectual diabetes. However, that is not to say that it must always be this way. In fact, there are many ways in which knowing our condition can help us fight it and also use that which we were drawn to for our own advantage, such as Lunenfeld's attempt to use the web to create his own "strange attractors" to encourage intellectual conversation and analysis.
My attempt at taking down all I could from Peter Lunenfeld's lecture:
(I've bolded all the points I find fascinating)
- engage in mindful downloading and meaningful uploading
- critique of television (high fructose corn syrup of the mind)
- sticky media? infotriage? plutopian mirrorism?
- evolution of the computer as our culture machine
- commitment to collaborative practice
- demo media work project: transmedia publishing project engaged in with MIT Press
if there is a secret war we must have dispatches from the front
- no analyses are built from positivist research some evolve out of lyrical epiphanies
a brilliant fiasco (the prayer book)
- 1st and only woven rather than printed book in book history
- needed a lot of the loom punch cards to produce
- took the manufacturer 50 tries to produce the first sellable version
- mixed technological metaphor
- weaver (ariadne) meets printer (gutenberg)
- product of an industrial era, but it remediates medieval content
- woven of silver and black silk and has a very high thread count allowing for crisp lettering and legibility
- like looking at a high resolution display screen
- produced for the collectors market, it was thought of as a brilliant fiasco
- unable sell out its first printing of 60 copies
- very much in line with gutenberg's original project in taking something old and remediating it as something new, but unlike gutenberg's bibles, it failed
- no one since has ever attempted even a small mass market woven book since
- demonstrates that even the most beautiful and seductive of technological artifacts may have no impact whatsoever on the culture at large
- when technologies do affect a vast impact it is because of far more than technological innovation or marketing savvy, it is because of the cultures they come from and that they engender
an overwhelming success
- the second half of the 20th century saw a collection of geniuses, warriors, pacifists, cranks, visionaries, entrepreneurs, great successes, and miserable failures who labored to manufacture a dream machine that could function as a typewriter and a press, a studio and a theater, a paint box and a gallery, the mail and the mailman; not only did they develop such a machine, but by the turn of the millennium, they managed to embed it in a worldwide system accessed by millions of people a day
- how the computer mainframe of 1946 became our 21st century culture machine is another story
- skyscraper designed by frank lloyd wright
- the space race
production vs. consumption
- vision of a machine that did actually come true
- a computer that can simulate any other machine that is now our widely shared reality
- taking these technologies and seeing what emerges from them culturally
- teenagers watch videos on their cellphones
- ubiquitous grids create wireless hotspots in the middle of medieval town centers
- interactive installations can be found in galleries throughout Asia
- even though there is cause to celebrate, there is also cause for caution this is because we are in the midst of a secret war being raged between downloading and uploading
- most animals move through the world downloading and then munching on it, bits at a time
- humans are unique in their capacity, not only to make tools, but to then turn around and use them to create superfluous material goods (painting and sculpture) and superfluous experiences (music, stories, religion, philosophy)
- it is the superfluous that comes to define human culture and ultimately humanity itself
- understanding and consuming culture requires great skills, but failing to move beyond that downloading skill is to scruple oneself of that defining constituent of humanity
- pyramid of consumption: web 2.0 (1% upload, 10% comment, 90% download only)
- why does this persist?
- different media have their own unique cultures
- our culture has been defined by television and television culture is defined by downloading
cultural diabetes
- 50 years of television dominance has given birth to a contemporary junk culture
- due to our addiction to this box, we have contracted cultural diabetes
- type 2 diabetes (treatable w/out drugs)
- cure for this diabetes: individual has to be mindful of consumption of certain things and the production of other things
- being fattened up by a food industry that values novelty over nutrition and profits over public health
- broadcasted junk culture has created a nation of intellectual diabetics
- in order to cure ourselves, we must control and rationalize our intake and increase our level of uploading
- watching is ingesting is downloading
- making is exercising is uploading
be a potato anywhere
- AOL into tv campaign
- Patio Potato (Be a potato anywhere. Watch classic tv on aol.com/in2tv
- television becomes ubiquitous, it moves around with you
- what do we feed the electric sheep? we feed them patio potatoes
- technological teleology
- the destiny of the computer is to become a portable wireless tv
- no one produces more culture than they consume
- this is in contrast to conversation (the give and take is at the heart of the activity), cooking, eating, and religion
- we need to establish a balance between consumption and production
strange attractors
- what we should be uploading
- lorens' strange attractors
- early 1960's MIT's meteorologist Edward Lorens
- looking to analyze atmospheric conditions and came up with a dynamic model in which seemingly random chaotic outliers created these vortex diagrams that remind ppl of owl's eyes
- extremely sensitive to their initial conditions and even a minor change in the original condition can affect a hugely different outcome
- entered culture as the "butterfly effect"
- one attractor can bring into being another very different attractor collapsing it into a fixed solution or tumbling it back into apparent chaos until a new strange attractor can establish itself
- a strange attractor can be any point within an orbit that appears to pull the entire system towards it
- one goal for uploading is to put forth cultural strange attractors hoping to move the whole system of the world into their own orbit
the mediawork project (collection of lunenfeld's own strange attractors)
- the pamphlets
inspired by:
- marshall mcluhan and quentin fiore's the medium | the message
-- electric circuitry (an extension of the central nervous system) -> men change
- simulations by jean baudrillard (french theorist)
-- small black and thin book
-- shot leather jacket (patti smith and lou reeve) has a pocket in which this book fit perfectly in
series:
- utopian entrepreneur by brenda laurel
-- doing culture work within capitalism
- writing machines by n. katherine hayles
-- technotexts
- rhythm science by paul d. miller
-- dj as a model for creative common multi-mixed culture
- shaping things by bruce sterling
-- designing our way out of the problem we designed our way into
analysis:
- what can the book do or analyze or encourage?
- turning private theory into public discourse
- media experimentation into culture intervention
- trying to create a new class of public visual individuals who will pursue non-trivial ends with the kinds of pragmatic rigor that are laden with the pleasures of the visual and the joys of tweaking
- the website
mitpress.mit.edu/mediawork
- interested in the intersection of form and content
webtake
- commisioned people to produce multi-mediated responses to the pamphlets (modeling the type of conversation he hopes his books/pamphlets will bring in)
brenda laurel:
- repurposing content for one medium to another (film to tv, comics to film, dolls and toys to videogames, videogames to dolls and toys, movies to the web, etc.); it is an inelegant and inefficient solution
- the book
user infotechnodemo
- solitude enhancement machines
- History is spunk or at least the history of media is the technics of what a friend once delicately referred to as "solitude enhancement," drives the successes and failures of vast enterprises. Owners, heirs and dot technologies paying a premium for self pleasure sustaining media until they broaden their appeal and drop their price point.
Posted on April 26, 2008
I'm not exactly a proficient note-taker thus, these notes may be a bit scattered and perhaps also misquoted in some cases. Although, I found this lecture very intriguing in the way he was able to explain the ideology of the interface and the logistical space in that there is so much of an influence of how certain things are governed and intermeshed by our interconnectivity with one another.
computation is:
- not a thing and is not invented
- a property of objects
- discovered
"interface"
- all design is interface design
- any point of contact between systems
- any boundary or point of contact that governs exchange
- example: an airport is an interface to another city
- community is driven by the interface power
- availability of cheap and powerful computation
terrorism
- all men are models, prototypes
- blurring reality and fantasy
- psychotic politics
- integral and indecent
"If there had never been a war, I would have made a very good architect."
- Ahmed Shah Masoud (Afghan opposition leader)
ideology of logistical space
- logistics is the preparation for war
- modernity is a world in motion
- governed by competing societies
- orthogonal logic of horizontals and diagonals
- history progresses at the speed of its weapons
- total war is omnipresent
- brands are operational fictions that become part of everyday life
there is only dromocracy not democracy
- dromocracy depends on the people
- political control of the highway using speed limits
- today information is architecture by other means
- planetary globalization
- accumulation of capital is a means to secure security not the inverse
- the city is a bunker (life created for survival) (a society of control) (security environment)
- integral accident may someday become our habitat
Posted on April 25, 2008
"The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest--the flock and each of its animals--but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or 'banks.'"
Stemming from Deleuze's statement about how individuals have become "dividuals," I did image research on groups of individuals who no longer matter so much as individuals, but have become a "dividual" of the group, faceless people who only function as part of the group.
Chefs
source: www.thechefsacademy.com/
Choir
source: www.stdavidchurch.org/Music/choirs.shtml
Firefighters
source: www.civics.unc.edu/ncccma/textrevised/chapter8.html
People Pyramid
source: www.sunrise-therapeutic.ca/employopps.htm
Synchronized Swimming
source: www.friendsvinp.org/archive/0182td.htm
Taiko
source: www.koyasan.org/nckoyasan/taiko.html
Ballet Students
source: www.aliciapatterson.org/APF2002/Bazan/Bazan.html
Group of Child Coal Miners
source: www.latinamericanstudies.org/immigrant-children-1.htm
Children Sorting Out Coal
source: www.latinamericanstudies.org/immigrant-children-1.htm
Chicken Factory Workers
source: www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=405105&in_page_id=1770
Child Mill Workers
source: www.tea.state.tx.us/student.assessment/resources/online/2006/grade11/ss/11socialstudies.htm
Exposure to Tear Gas: Military Training
source: swubird.blogspot.com/2007/12/gas-chamber.html
Remnants of the Holocaust Prisoners
source: markgorman.wordpress.com/2007/11/30/holocaust-nonsense/
Bodies Found at Pompeii
source: cti.itc.virginia.edu/~jjd5t/cww/1998/sup-rep2.html
Prison Life
source: latimesblogs.latimes.com/politicalmuscle/prisons/
Behind Prison Bars
source: selflaugh.wordpress.com/2008/01/27/
Mine Workers
source: Sebastiao Salgado
Children Saluting
source: www.aliciapatterson.org/APF2002/Bazan/Bazan.html
African Slave Ship
source: www.beyondbooks.org/slavery/gallery1.htm
Posted on April 24, 2008
1. Organized around interactions and within a hierarchy of interrelated subsystems.
In the family, the executive subsystem is that of the parents; the sibling subsystem is that of the children. Invisible boundaries--unspoken rules about who does what with whom--are drawn around each (and around the immediate family itself) so that each subsystem can carry out its family-stabilizing tasks while remaining connected to the others. One of the most common family problems is a weak boundary between subsystems. A woman making several calls a day from work to instruct her teenagers on how to dress for school, what to say when they turn in homework, and so forth indicates overinvolvement with the sibling subsystem; a man who calls or visits his mother every time he argues with his wife shows a weak boundary between the immediate and extended families.
2. Wholeness: the system is greater than sum of the parts.
In therapy it's quite common to see, say, a little boy suddenly make everyone laugh at precisely the moment the therapist is asking the uncomfortable parents how their marriage is going. Without knowing it, the boy, usually prompted by some subtle signal from his parents, protects the family by taking the heat off them and their fragile relationship. The therapist, seeing the family operating as a whole (self-preservation through distraction) rather than as isolated individuals (Mom, Dad, the son), might then comment on the behavior and praise the family for being so resonant and close-knit.
3. Each part of the system affects all others.
I've never seen a family with an alcoholic member, but I have seen alcoholic families in which the member who drinks controls the whole family with his behavior. His unavailability, bad health, violence, unpredictability, and self-contempt distort every interaction between family members. The whole family learns to (mal)adapt itself to his drinking--via maneuvers like denial, bailing him out of jail if he drinks and drives, calling in sick for him if he's hung over, walking carefully when he's drunk and angry, unconsciously nominating one child to stand in for him and parent the family...Family therapists use the term IP--Identified Patient--because a dysfunctional family member generally means a destabilizingd family system.
4. Interrelations emphasized more than components; systemwide ripples ("these cause each other") emphasized more than linearity (this causes that).
Whatever its components, unresolved stress between parents reverberates down through all family interrelations and normally results in coalitions, emotional parent-child alignments against the other parent and perhaps other children. Example: Mom is a rageaholic, so when she explodes, Dad and Brother console one another and perhaps agree that she's nuts. A linear approach would emphasize Mom's upbringing and lack of anger management skills and thereby ignore the coalition process itself and reinforce its tendency to scapegoat, whereas a systems approach would focus on the present-time context of Mom's explosions, looking at the interractions leading up to it and encouraging Dad and Mom to work out new, nonescalating ways to talk and negotiate--perhaps in couples therapy--rather than blaming her or him or failing to confront and defuse alliances forming elsewhere in the family.
5. Circular (mutual, reciprocal) causality: emphasizes present, process. Linear causality: emphasizes past, content.
When a couple in session argues about how it started, I let them know I'm more interested in where it's going: "How will you resolve this here?" With many alcoholics, inherited biology and family stress and low self-esteem and other dynamics all play a part; what counts for the alcoholic isn't looking for causes so much as cutting the feedback circles that maintain drinking. A good clinician will refer the client to AA, consider hospitalization, assess for suicidal intent, advise a physical, ask about weapons in the home, and work on both family and individual levels with interventions aimed at interactions (arguments, nagging, money problems, abuse) that presently maintain the alcoholism.
6. Calibration: setting of a present-oriented, systemwide range limit around a comfortable emotional "bias."
A typical situation: an unintense family with a cool emotional atmosphere unconsciously selects a member to turn up the heat; brother and sister start fighting. This turns into an argument between the parents, the drama escalates, and then, before it gets too hot, a child who plays the role of family ambassador calms everybody down. In that family the bias, the emotional level setting, is too low; a good dose of constructive intensity might recalibrate the bias and make explosions unnecessary.
7. Self-regulating via feedback loops--negative (toward stability) and positive (toward change)--that maintain the bias.
Every seasoned drug and alcohol counselor knows that when one member of the family stops drinking or using, the family will subtly try to push him back into his old vices--not because they want him sick, but because families, like other organisms, naturally resist changes that might further destabilize the system. So one day the husband says to his abstaining wife, "Why not skip your AA meeting tonight so we can catch a movie?" Or the mother of a teen who's quit using congratulates him on finding a job--in a head shop. Introducing positive (= system-changing) feedback loops into these families might include warning them about enabling, relapses and resistance to change and examining what family members gain from having a malfunctioning member (control? A scapegoat? Distraction from other conflicts? Someone to rescue?).
8. Synergy: interractions and feedback loops add to each other as they combine (a dynamic expression of wholeness).
Battery normally begins with emotional or verbal abuse (name-calling, shouting, intimidation, shaming) and escalates over the years from pushing and shoving to beatings and even murder. Abuse gives rise to more abuse, violence to more violence: destructive synergy. In constructive synergy, however, a batterer uses a batterer's group to learn and master rage-control techniques; those enhance his self-esteem; his wife praises his efforts and trusts him more; he feels good about that and shows her more empathy; the two get problems out on the table instead of hiding them; both grow; their affection deepens; their children carry the resulting relationship blueprint into their own relationships. Therapists prime this process by helping clients consciously relate and capitalize on growth-producing thoughts, feelings, and interactions ("Now that you stopped drinking, he feels safer telling you about his sadness; you empathized, so he is listening to you more often and with greater care...good work! How will you keep this rolling?")
9. Equipotentiality ("equal in the beginning"): things with the same original conditions can go different ways; members of the same family system can share a very similar upbringing but turn out to be very unlike each other.
Even twins eventually take different roads, grow into individuals with their own insights and values, habits and preferences. Consciousness guarantees that what we choose to make of our original conditions is more important than the conditions themselves. The abuse survivor who owns the pain moves on; the one who won't becomes a chronic victim and will probably get into revictimizing situations. Therapists who realize this assume that a client can and should take full responsibility for the work of healing no matter how dangerous or abusive that client's environment may have been.
10. Equifinality (equal in the end): things with different original conditions can turn out the same.
I'm an adoptee who grew up with one sister and Lutheran parents, still together, of North European descent; the man who mentors my work with batterers wasn't adopted and grew up with a brother and Catholic parents, both Italian, who divorced; and yet our values, professional goals, criticisms of traditional therapy, and counseling philosophy are very similar and in all important points the same. When I work with clients, I never assume that a violent survivor who grew up in South Central L.A. will be less serious about growth and change or less capable of working toward it than a more "adjusted" client raised in a good home by loving parents. In the end, we are what we make of what we were given.
11. Living systems and all they bring with them--equipotentiality, equifinality, wholeness, feedback loops, and all the other system-enhancing processes--move forward through key "horizontal" (brought about by time and change) transitional stages. Symptoms occur when vertical stressors (old issues, past mistakes, emotional legacies) impinge on the system during a transition.
Families are likeliest to be conflicted and symptomatic when key horizontal transitions like marriage, the birth of children, children going to school, children moving away from home, changes of jobs, etc. coincide with a resurfacing of vertical stressors like old emotional baggage. Example: a workaholic husband driven to succeed by high internalized standards (Rogers's "conditions of worth") that equate esteem with production (vertical stressor) puts in even more overtime to stuff the loneliness he feels when his eldest son leaves for college (horizontal stressor). Worried about his health, escalating stress, and increasing distance from her, his wife suggests that they see a family therapist. Part of the therapeutic agenda would include giving the family tools for negotiating the "empty nest syndrome" while helping the husband get in touch with his mourning, examine his expectations of himself, and reconnect with his family.
12. First-order changes are those that help the system stay at its current level of functioning. Second-order changes restructure the system to bring it to a different level.
Teaching family members how to use "I" statements and listen empathically demonstrate first-order changes that enhance the family's current functioning. Coaching a widow through the loss of her husband, helping a couple let go of the last child to leave the nest, and restructuring an alcoholic family to eliminate drinking are second-order changes that alter the family fundamentally, bringing it to an entirely new structure and psychological place.
13. Overall, human systems tend to work best when subsystem boundaries are clear (neither too open nor too closed), interactions are clear and nonrepetitive, lines of authority are visible, rules are overt and flexible, changing alignments replace rigid coalitions, and stressors are confronted instead of pushed onto scapegoats.
Yes, there really are families--and extended families and neighborhoods and even companies--that work this way: members are clear about what to expect from one another and neither intrude nor distance themselves, they speak openly and affectionately to one another, they know who's in charge of what, they know and can talk about what is permitted and what isn't, their roles and favorites are flexible and changing, and they feel comfortable and safe getting problems and hurt feelings out in the open where everyone can work on them. When enough families succeed at this, perhaps the systemic impact on whole nations will become irresistible. As Confucius noted long ago:
If there be righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character.
If there be beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home.
If there be harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation.
If there be order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.
Reference:
Craig Chalquist. A Paradigm Shift From Lines To Circles: Twelve Characteristics of a Family System.
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/complexity/Chalquist2.html
Posted on April 17, 2008
The following are excerpts from this book:
Like churches, schools certainly do stand for ideas, beliefs and values not all of which could be said to be locally produced. Like hospitals, schools bring into a community highly developed expertise and knowledge beyond the capacity of the locality to sustain alone. Like shops, schools have to market their wares in ways that will be acceptable to the consumers. Like prisons, schools are institutions provided out of general funds to more than local purposes. But schools have distinctive purposes of their own, the full meaning of which is inevitably contested. Like those other institutions schools do represent a larger than local presence in their communities. The historical connection of schooling with the churches reminds us of the evangelical tradition, still strong, under which schooling is seen as the spreading of light into the outer darkness, a light spread by clergymen and schoolmasters trained elsewhere and under quite similar regimes. The development of medical services in close association with a religious organization and a protestant ethic reminds us that behind the evolution of the Welfare State and the technical services it offers there lies a set of assumptions about the status of the sick and those who treat them, assumptions all too readily visible in the workhouse appearance of many of our hospitals to this day, and more importantly, in the supplicant status still afforded the patient in his dealings with the medical condition.
Sharp and Green's acerbic study of a primary school concluded that 'modern child-centered education is an aspect of romantic radical conservatism which involves an emotional turning away from society and an attempt within the confines of education to bring about the transformation of individual consciousness which is seen to be the key to social regeneration
Because schooling - especially at the college level - is heavily subsidized by the general taxpayer, those children who attend school longer have access - for this reason alone - to a far larger amount of public resources than those who are forced out or drop out early. But social class inequalities in public expenditure on education are far more severe than the degree of inequality in years of schooling would suggest. In the first place, per-student public expenditure in four-year colleges greatly exceeds that in elementary schools; those who stay in school longer receive an increasingly large annual public subsidy. Second, even at the elementary level, schools attended by children of the poor tend to be less well-endowed with equipment, books, teachers and other inputs into the educational process. Evidence on the relationship between the level of school inputs and the income of the neighborhoods which the schools serve indicate that both school expenditures and more direct measures of school quality vary directly with the income levels of the communities in which the school is located.
Inequalities in school are not simply a matter of differences in years of schooling attained or in resources devoted to each student per year of schooling. Differences in the internal structure of schools themselves and in the content of schooling reflect the differences in the social class compositions of the student bodies. The social relations of the educational process ordinarily mirror the social relations of the work roles into which most students are likely to move. Differences in rules, expected modes of behavior, and opportunities for choice are most glaring when we compare levels of schooling. Note the wide range of choice over curriculum, lifestyle and allocation of time afforded to college students, compared with the obedience and respect for authority expected in high school. Differentiation occurs also within each level of schooling.
The differential socialization patterns in schools attended by students of different social classes do not arise by accident. Rather, they stem from the fact that the educational objectives and expectations of both parents and teachers, and the responsiveness of students to various patterns of teaching and control differ for students of different social classes. Further, class inequalities in school socialization patterns are reinforced by the very inequalities in financial resources documented above. The paucity of financial support for education of children from working class families not only leaves more resources to be devoted to the children of those with commanding roles in the economy; it forces upon the teachers and school administrators in the working class schools a type of social relations which fairly closely mirrors that of the factory. Thus financial considerations in poorly supported working class schools militate against small intimate classes, against a multiplicity of elective courses and specialized teachers, (except disciplinary personnel), and preclude the amounts of free time for the teachers and free space required for a more open, flexible educational environment.
Ben Cosin and Margaret Hales. Education, Policy and Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983
source: www.aliciapatterson.org/APF2002/Bazan/Bazan.html
Posted on April 17, 2008
Jana L. McQuay
Dance, study, sleep. Dance, study, sleep. That's what ballet dancers do five days a week and into the weekend at the University of Utah. Like many performers in the arts that jump into physically intensive four-year programs along with general education courses, ballet dancers at the University find themselves exhausted by day's end with little or no time to nurture a social life.
"I come here at 9:40 a.m. and I stay until after 5:00 p.m.," said Christopher Bender, a ballet student who will graduate this spring. The only thing on his mind is rest. "Get back home and eat, go to sleep, get up and do it again," he said. In years past, however, Bender's schedule included two additional early morning general education courses. He remembers long days and late-night study habits. If that's not enough, some dancers completely max out when they double major to assure better odds of employment after graduation.
Bene Arnold, honored as Distinguished Professor in 1996 for her contributions to the arts at the U of U, remembers what it was like to be a ballet student. "By the end of the day, you're not only physically tired but you're mentally tired." Arnold has much to share from experience. Earlier in her career, she was a professional dancer and ballet mistress for the San Francisco Ballet and Ballet West. Since then, Arnold has taught a myriad of upper level and advanced ballet classes at the U and is currently a graduate advisor. But, more importantly, she knows what it is like to be a student and a dancer. That's exactly why she gave up a professional career to become a student at the U years ago. To see what it was like.
Arnold will leave, not retire, this May after 26 years of teaching in the department of ballet. "I don't call it retiring. I call it leaving because I still feel that I have a contribution to make out there," she said. Just a few months away from saying goodbye, Arnold shares her personal perspective on the dynamics of a ballet dancer's social community. She is concerned that dancers may find it difficult to verbalize their emotions because they spend the majority of the day actively engaged in class where they seldom speak, which can affect relationships.
Unlike actors, who express art through speech, dancers use movement. "Dancers are rehearsing, but they're not verbalizing," Arnold said. "The only person verbalizing is the teacher or director, who is making corrections or giving combinations." It could be the sustained movement of an adagio or the perfectly balanced arabesque. All eyes connect and ears tune in to the instructor in an effort to physically translate movement into precise form and style. "It's mostly visual learning," Arnold said.
Yet, with limited time to converse and nurture friendships inside and outside of class, most ballet dancers say that their friends are dancers. "All the friends that I really have are mostly in the ballet department," said Martine Nelson, a freshman in the ballet program. "I have a lot of friends, but then I also have a lot of people I just know and say 'hi.' I love it."
The secret is in taking advantage of prime-time moments – before class, during a break or lunch. "If you watch them at the beginning of class, they're warming up, usually stretching, but they're talking to each other," Arnold said. Groups of dancers stand at the bar and have conversations before class. There may be a group of them sitting outside the rehearsal studio taking a break or having a bite to eat, but they'll also be talking with each other and having discussions. "I think that they do that quite often, especially when they have to wait." Today, Arnold will call all of the men for a special rehearsal. Most of the girls will likely sit outside. They may sew ribbons and elastics on their pointe shoes, work on homework, or maybe just talk about the weekend. Call it prime time social hour for dancers. This is when friendships are made.
But Arnold sees it both ways. Some dancers develop relationships outside of the department through other courses. They may participate in another person's career choices and social likes. "For instance, I think that a lot of dancers like to go out in nature. A girl might find a boyfriend that likes to go hiking in the mountains on the weekend because we're inside the same building for a long number of hours." And sometimes they like to swim, attend a gymnastics meet or go to a movie.
In Bender's case, he doesn't have time to climb mountains because he is booked. Right now, however, he sits in a hall across from Studio 60 at the Alice Sheets Marriott Center for Dance. Studio 60 is where the most advanced dancers of the University's Utah Ballet Company rehearse. Bender is a member of the Utah Ballet Company and rightful occupant of Studio 60. A guest choreographer is selecting three couples to perform in the Spring Gala. He apparently isn't one of them. Bender has three unexpected hours to kill before his next class, something he isn't familiar with. He sits next to Nelson, who has a few minutes between classes. Nelson chats with danseur Bender. She dances in the upper division level II, but aspires to Studio 60 life. "I would love to be in the Utah Ballet," Nelson said. "It's the highest place you can be here. It's quite a privilege to be in that class." She and Bender talk and laugh together like they are good friends, but according to Bender, they're more like hall friends.
"My friends are pretty much all in the company because that's who I hang out with all day long," Bender said. He believes that he is one of the few people in the company who knows dancers from all levels, partly due to the demand for male ballet danseurs to partner with ballerinas. Bender and Nelson haven't partnered together in ballet, however, and won't compete for parts because they are of the opposite sex. Within genders, however, relationships must endure the competitive edge of auditions and casting calls.
Although Bender admits that competing against fellow male danseurs can strain a relationship, he can't remember a friendship lost. "The friendship will probably be strained only if their attitude changes," he said. "But I don't really see that I am competing with them," he said. "I'm competing against myself."
Edie Kochenour, program manager at the University's Counseling Center, makes no exception to keeping confidential what is discussed behind closed doors. But she will say that her experience in theater and the arts tells her that anyone in the performance areas have different pressures on them than other people do.
"Inside the field, they socialize with those they compete with," Kochenour said. Dance, music and sports participants are out there in front of people performing and competing and don't get to develop their skills in private. "There are people around them all of the time, and those are added pressures," she said. When you take any kind of pressure issue in which dancers have had some sort of tragedy, or they're not feeling well, it's not being verbalized, according to Arnold.
The recent accidental death of a Ballet West ballerina has Arnold concerned. The ballerina's boyfriend and his parents were also killed. They leave behind sibling dancers and ballet company friends and acquaintances who must face this tragedy. Arnold was ballet mistress for Ballet West from its inception until 1975 and continues to direct the children for Ballet West's "Nutcracker." In this capacity, Arnold remembers the ballerina's last performance. The shock of a sudden death can be difficult for anyone, but even more difficult for dancers who may find it difficult to verbalize their emotions. "It's an extremely difficult situation," Arnold said. Counselors helped Ballet West dancers to talk about their feelings. Similarly, the University's Counseling Center does the same for students on campus. The loss of a teacher in the department of ballet prompted the aid of professional counseling from the University's Counseling Center last year.
One of the major contributions that Arnold says she makes, as an instructor, is to encourage stronger socialization and communication with students. "As instructors, we are more tolerant of their needs," Arnold said. "As time has progressed, we have emphasized through courses the importance of communication and relating to instructors exactly how they feel and what is going on."
Barbara Hamblin, chair of the Ballet Department, co-teaches Ballet Fitness and Care of Injuries. The course targets nutrition, anatomy and psychology of dance and injury prevention. In this course, a Counseling Center professional talks to students about the importance of communicating and offers them a place to share their problems if they don't want to talk to faculty. "We try to make the atmosphere friendly and supportive," Hamblin said. Intelligent and talented dancers fall prey to the unspoken philosophy that in order to succeed, they must be physically and mentally tough, leaving problems outside the door. Anything less signifies weakness. "We don't tell them that, but they think that," Hamblin said.
Arnold's door is open to dancers to discuss any kind of problem day or night. "I must have no less than three dancers a day come up and knock on my door just to come in and tell me they have a problem, a question or any kind of thing," Arnold said. During her tenure, the department also has established counseling sessions between instructors and students. At the end of every semester, especially with the incoming students, at least two instructors meet with each dancer on an individual basis.
Generally speaking, dancers are unassertive, according to Arnold. "I think it's improving because there is a lot written about it," she said. It's not unusual for Arnold to tell her students to buy a pocketbook on assertion and, periodically, loan them her own collection. Dealing with unassertive behavior isn't anything new to Arnold. "In my day, you said very little. You took everything from what the director said."
Consider then that most dancers don't have much time to socialize, they are generally unassertive and may find it difficult to verbalize their emotions. Add to that package the competitive environment where dancers develop relationships.
"The nature of the Ballet Department is competitive," Arnold said. Whether it's a showcase where students choreograph on students, a ballet ensemble where faculty choreograph on students, a Character Dance Ensemble Company or a Utah Ballet Company production, dancers must endure the picking and choosing process.
"If you're at an audition for a piece that everybody's auditioning for, the competition gets higher," Nelson said. "Yes, I get mad if my friend gets a part, but I usually just shrug it off," she said. "We accept it and congratulate them so it doesn't put a strain on the relationship because there is a point when you just don't need to lose a friendship over a part."
Arnold is currently the artistic director of the Utah Ballet Company. "I have something coming up that's enormously difficult." The company is invited to perform in Taiwan in May, but there isn't enough money to send everybody, according to Arnold. "It's going to be difficult, and it's going to be hard on the company. It will affect relationships." Only four of the class of 28 dancers in the Utah Ballet Company will be left behind. "It's a huge dilemma."
As a dancer in the Utah Ballet Company, Bender is aware of the Taiwan situation. "We don't know who is going, but we're supposed to know by the end of January," he said. The buck stops with Arnold, who will have to set a specific set of criteria to determine who will be
invited based on talent, scholarships, service record, working relationships, etc. "I have to be able to answer if they question what the decision is," Arnold said. The Utah Ballet performance in Taiwan, scheduled for May 23-24, will include repertoire from the Spring Gala performance on April 19-21. "I've got to balance it so that the dancers who don't get to go also feel like they had a great year with a good opportunity to dance in the Spring Gala."
Bender said he'd like to go to Taiwan, but would concentrate on upcoming auditions with professional dance companies if he doesn't make it. "I, hopefully, will have a job lined up so it won't matter," he said. "I'll be flying to San Francisco in a couple of weeks to audition for the San Francisco Ballet and Boston Ballet companies." Bender had an additional three or four auditions lined up during spring break.
One month later, Bender reports that he is, indeed, going to Taiwan. Hallelujah. But the competition doesn't end there. Now he's waiting to hear the news about his San Francisco auditions.
Like other ballet dancers graduating this spring, Bender is jostling for a position with a professional dance company. "The thing that's happening in America, and particularly in the ballet and dance world, is that we have now developed so many fabulous dancers," Arnold said, "but there are not enough companies in relationship to the number of dancers we have developed, so the competition is very high." Two hundred dancers could audition for an opening that may not even exist. Some of the major ballet companies may even suggest that dancers enroll in its most advanced ballet class for a year or so before making any kind of commitment to hire, according to Arnold. Dancers could invest two years and perform with a company's corps de ballet before getting the boot. "That's happening in major companies in the United States."
"The smaller regional companies are, in a way, a great benefit to the art because they come in and audition and look at the dancers, and if they have a position open and like a dancer, they will hire that dancer for their company – period," Arnold said. "They are actually hiring the dancers, whereas your big major companies are not doing that." That is something that did not happen during Arnold's day. "I was in the San Francisco Ballet School, and I went directly into the company."
So, while Bender sweats it out competing against the best in the majors, Nelson will continue to climb the ladder to Studio 60. But for now, two hall friends share a few simple moments to laugh and giggle about a book called "The Secret Language of Birthdays." Nothing better than small talk amidst the highly competitive world of ballet.
Copyright 2001,
CTLE, University of Utah
Vol. Two, No. 2 Spring 2001 pp. 14-17
source: www.aliciapatterson.org/APF2002/Bazan/Bazan.html
Posted on April 17, 2008
Lois Shawver
People disagree as to whether Foucault was postmodern, but if we use Lyotard's compelling definition of postmodernism, then Foucault makes a distinctly postmodern statement at the beginning of his book, The Birth of the Clinic. Lyotard (1993) defines postmodernism as an incredulity towards metanarratives. A metanarrative is a theory or story that passes itself off as a truth without exception, generalized truths that pretend to be true for all objects in a category, such as all Priests are pure, all people in a certain country think a certain way, or science is the best approach to solving all human problems. Metanarratives, it seems to the postmodern, are myths belonging to modernity, myths that simplify and blind us to subtleties and exceptions around us, myths that are often more false than true, but seldom completely true.
In the following quotation, Foucault expresses such a postmodern skepticism early in his book, The Birth of the Clinic, by challenging such a myth of modernity. The "Revolution" he speaks of is the French Revolution. It is generally understood that the French and the American revolutions are powerful events helping to launch modernity with its new breed of myths, although modernity had been breeding more than a century before that. Articulating an postmodern skepticism, Foucault says:
The years preceding and immediately following the Revolution saw the birth of two great myths with opposing themes and polarities: the myth of a nationalized medical profession, organized like the clergy, and invested, at the level of man's bodily health, with powers similar to those exercised by the clergy over men's souls; and the myth of a total disappearance of disease in an untroubled, / dispassionate society restored to its original state of health. (p.31/32.)
The study of these particular metanarrative myths form the centerpiece of The Birth of the Clinic. According to these myths, Foucault tells us...
the first task of the doctor is ... political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government." Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated...p.33.
The idea was that the doctor was such a remarkable sage that he could lead the community to a utopia.
Foucault rejects these myths saying:
All of this is so much day-dreaming; the dream of a festive city, inhabited by an open-air mankind, in which youth would be naked and age know no winter,...--all these values were soon to fade." (p. 34)
But here is a puzzle that will take us back into Lyotard's definition of postmodernism:
How can modernity be credulous? Modernity emerged during the Enlightenment era (17th century) when moderns rejected the superstitions of medieval time. Modernity billed itself as the "enlightenment," and saw itself as having finally awakened from dark superstitions.
Now, Foucault's postmodern complaint is that although the moderns threw off the yoke of medieval superstitions, they developed their own myths, and the moderns bought these new myths with equally little critical questioning.
Foucault tells us, one of those myths had to do with the wisdom of doctors. According to the myths of modernity, doctors were amazingly wise. They could see past distractions into the truth of things. We could tell them our problems and their wisdom would lead us to a better life. The relationship between a good life and good health blurred, and the doctors became the carrier's of cultural wisdom.
But how could this be? The Enlightenment rejected medieval superstition. How did the physician escape the Enlightenment rejection of esoteric knowledges? Foucault put these questions like this:
How can the free gaze that medicine, and, through it, the government, must turn upon the citizens be equipped and competent without being embroiled in the esotericism of knowledge and the rigidity of social privilege?" p. 45
The answer, Foucault explained, had to do with this notion of a "gaze,". Gaze is a technical term for Foucault. He calls it a "clinical gaze" at times, and an "observing gaze" at others. The people of modernity thought that with this powerful gaze the physician could penetrate illusion and see through to the underlying reality, that the physician had the power to see the hidden truth.
But how did the doctor acquire this remarkable ability? Not from books. Books still had the quality of esoteric knowledges of the elite, something the moderns had rejected. No, this remarkable wisdom of the doctor was to have been acquired through his observation of patients. The wisdom was a practical wisdom that was supposedly learned through internships and apprentiseships not by dipping into the texts that told of professional secrets.
Once the doctor acquired this ability to look with a clinical gaze the doctor could diagnose problems, design solutions, and speak about all things wisely. There was no way for anyone to challenge the doctor's experience. It just was. The doctor could only tell us the truth and what to do about it. With such powerful wisdom, it was not possible to be wrong.
There were a number of supporting stories that testified to the power of doctor's clinical gaze. If the doctor had no such a clinical gaze, one might ask, why was modern medicine so much more powerful than ancient medicine. Did the ancient doctor not have such a gaze?
Foucault said that the modern myth was that the ancient doctor did have such a gaze and the ancient doctor was also wise. It was only the theory behind the gaze that changed with modernity. But the belief in the doctor's gaze, that had not changed. In Foucault's words:
Medicine had tended, since the eighteenth century, to recount its own history as if the patient's bedside had always been a place of constant, stable experience, in contrast to theories and systems, which had been in perpetual change and masked beneath their speculation the purity of clinical evidence. The theoretical, it was thought, was the element of perpetual change, the starting point of all the historical variations in medical knowledge, the locus of conflicts and disappearances; it was in this theoretical element that medical knowledge marked its fragile relativity. The clinic, on the other hand, was thought to be the element of its positive accumulation: it was this constant gaze upon the patient, this age-old, yet ever renewed attention that enabled medicine not to disappear entirely with each new speculation, but to preserve itself, to assume little by little the figure of a truth that is definitve, if not completed, in short, to develop, below the level of the noisy episodes of its history, in a continuous historicity. In the non-variable of the clinic, medicine, it was thought, had bound truth and time together. (p.54/55)
But how did modernity foster this notion of clinical wisdom in an era of devoted to dispelling non-scientific superstition? It shifted the mythology of the gaze away from scientific knowledge, into another category, that of practical knowledge. Foucault says:
It presented [the practical knowledges of medicine] as the restitution of an eternal truth in a continuous historical development in which events alone have been of a negative order: oblivion, illusion, concealment. In fact, this way of rewriting history itself evaded a much truer but much more complex history. It masked that other history by assimilating to clinical method all the study of cases, in the old sense of the word; and, therefore, it authorized all subsequent simplifications whereby clinical medicine became simply the examination of the individual. (p. 57)
By saying that this clinical wisdom had always existed behind the screen of superficial knowledges, the Enlightenment glorified the clinical gaze and convinced itself of its penetrating ability and thus promoted this exaggerated trust in the wisdom of the doctor. How easy it was to recast this belief in the doctor's gaze over to the psychiatrist who, even in modernity, was then seen to read minds and souls.
What do we know about this powerful observing or clinical gaze? What is its character? How were doctors behaving when they were seen to use this special gaze?
The observing gaze refrains from intervening: it is silent and gestureless. Observation leave things as they are; there is nothing hidden to it in what is given. The correlative of observation is never the invisible, but always the immediately visible, once one has removed the obstacles erected to reason by theories and to the senses by the imagination. In the clinician's catalogue, the purity of the gaze is bound up with a certain silence that enables him to listen. The prolix discourses of systems must be interrupted: 'all theory is always silent or vanishes at the patient's bedside.' (p. 107)
So, the physician may study the esoteric and privileged texts during schooling, but all of that is put aside at the patient's bedside. Here the wisdom of the gaze interrupts and replaces all other systems of knowledge.
This belief in the gaze is, therefore, a rejection of the overly intellectual and, at the same time, a glorification of the sensible and practical. Foucault says:
The clinical gaze is not that of an intellectual eye that is able to perceive the unalterable purity of essences beneath phenomena. It is a gaze of the concrete sensibility, a gaze that travels from body to body, and whose trajectory is situated in the space of sensible manifestation. For the clinic, all truth is sensible truth; ' (p. 120)
[T]he gaze implies an open field, and its essential activity is of the successive order of reading; it records and totalizes; it gradually reconstitutes immanent organizations; it spreads out over a world that is already the world of language, and that is why it is spontaneously related to hearing and speech." p.121
Another way this myth of the gaze was perpetrated in the nineteenth century was by creating a supporting myth that held that prior to the nineteenth century doctors should not examine corpses and thus were denied any real observation of bodies. Any failure in their gaze, therefore, was attributable to their lack of ability to dissect the human body. This revision of history, Foucault tells us, was a falsification.
[T]here was no shortage of corpses in the eighteenth century, no need to rob graves or to perform anatomical black masses; one was already in the full light of dissection. This reconstitution is historically false....By means of an illusion widespread in the nineteenth century, and one to which Michelet gave the dimensions of a myth history painted the end of the Ancien Regime in the colours of the last years of the Middle Ages, confusing the upheavals of the Renaissance with the struggles of the Enlightenment. p.125
And the prestige of the clinical gaze was enhanced, too, by the the invention of a nosology and science of nosography, that is, a system of disease description that made it appear that all illnesses fit within a definitive network of disease classification.
Hence the appearance that pathological anatomy assumed at the outset: that of an objective, real, and at last unquestionable foundation for the description of diseases: 'A nosography based on the affection of the organs will be invariable.' p.129.
This new nosography, supposedly, not only informs the wise physician of the sick patient's problem, but it also enables the mortician to discern the cause of death just by looking at the corpse.
In order to overcome the first series of objects, there did not seem to be any need to modify the structure of the clinical gaze itself: was it not enough simply to observe the dead as one observes the living and to apply to corpses the diacritical principle of medical observation: the only pathological fact is comparative fact? p.134
And so, whereas for centuries, disease had been mysterious and followed obscure and esoteric paths, during the Enlightenment period of pre-modernity, the physician was seen as able to penetrate the body's secrets just by looking, and to diagnose and to speak wisely about its treatment. Moreover, not only physical ailments, but all misfortune yielded is secrets to the clinician's gaze.
In the depths of its being, disease follows the obscure, but necessary ways of tissue reactivations. But what now becomes of its visible body, that set of phenomena without secrets that makes it entirely legible for the clinician's gaze: that is, recognizable by its signs, but also decipherable in the symptoms whose totality defined its essence without residue. p.159
And the glorification of this medical gaze was also fostered by the invention of new tests and signs, or the belief that these signs and tests were new. These new tests and signs allowed the physician to gaze upon the naked body, to place the hand upon the heart, to listen with an instrument, to examine the urine of the patient. These new doctors
"...criticized ... 'false modesty', ...[and] 'excessive restraint' (p.163)
New rules were invented that allowed the patient to be touched and prodded in the name of our culture's belief in the physicians' diagnostic wisdom. (164-5)
And so, with the nineteenth century invention of the clinical gaze:
What was fundamentally invisible suddenly offered to the brightness of the gaze, in a movement of appearance so simple, so immediate that it seems to be the natural consequence of a more highly developed experience. It is as if for the first time for thousands of years, doctors, free at last of theories and chimeras, agreed to approach the object of their experience with the purity of an unprejudiced gaze. (p.195)
And this new belief in the power of the medical gaze to expose the hidden truth, became the myth, or metanarrative, that allowed for the Birth of the Clinic as modern day seer.
References:
Foucault, Michel. (1975). Birth of the Clinic, The : An Archaeology of Medical Perception (Vintage). (A. M. Sheridan Smith, trans.) New York: Vintage Books.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. (1993). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Theory and History of Literature). Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press. (Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, trans)
Shawver, Lois. Notes on reading the Birth of the Clinic. 16 May 1998.
http://www.california.com/~rathbone/foucbc.htm
Posted on April 14, 2008
Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Antonio Negri
Negri: The problem of politics seems to have always been present in your intellectual life. Your involvement in various movements (prisoners, homosexuals, Italian autonomists, Palestinians), on the one hand, and the constant problematizing of institutions, on the other, follow on from one another and interact with one another in your work, from the book on Hume through to the one on Foucault. What are the roots of this sustained concern with the question of politics, and how has it remained so persistent within your developing work? Why is the relaÂtion between movement and institution always problematic?
Deleuze: What I've been interested in are collective creations rather than repÂresentations. There's a whole order of movement in "institutions" that's independent of both laws and contracts. What I found in Hume was a very creative conception of institutions and law. I was initially more interested in law than politics. Even with Masoch and Sade what I liked was the thoroughly twisted conception of contracts in Masoch, and of institutions in Sade, as these come out in relation to sexuality. And in the present day, I see Francois Ewald's work to reestablish a phiÂlosophy of law as quite fundamental. What interests me isn't the law or laws1 (the former being an empty notion, the latter uncritical notions), nor even law or rights, but jurisprudence. It's jurisprudence, ultimately, that creates law, and we mustn't go on leaving this to judges. Writers ought to read law reports rather than the Civil Code. People are already thinking about establishing a system of law for modern biology; but everything in modern biology and the new situations it creates, the new courses of events it makes possible, is a matter for jurisprudence. We don't need an ethical committee of supposedly well-qualified wise men, but user-groups. This is where we move from law into politics. I, for my own part, made a sort of move into politics around May 68, as I came into contact with specific problems, through Guattari, through Foucault, through Elie Sambar. Anti-Oedipus was from beginning to end a book of political philosophy.
Negri: You took the events of '68 to be the triumph of the Untimely, the dawn of counteractualization.2 Already in the years leading up to '68, in your work on Nietzsche and a bit later in Coldness and Cruelty, you 'd given a new meanÂing to politics—as possibility, event, singularity. You 'd found short-circuits where the future breaks through into the present, modifying institutions in its wake. But then after '68 you take a slightly different approach: nomadic thought always takes the temporal form of instantaneous counteractualization, while spatially only "minority becoming is universal." How should we understand this universality of the untimely?9
Deleuze: The thing is, I became more and more aware of the possibility of disÂtinguishing between becoming and history. It was Nietzsche who said that nothing important is ever free from a "nonhistorical cloud." This isn't to oppose eternal and historical, or contemplation and action: Nietzsche is talking about the way things happen, about events themÂselves or becoming. What history grasps in an event is the way it's actuÂalized in particular circumstances; the event's becoming is beyond the scope of history. History isn't experimental,3 it's just the set of more or less negative preconditions that make it possible to experiÂment with something beyond history. Without history the experiÂmentation would remain indeterminate, lacking any initial condiÂtions, but experimentation isn't historical. In a major philosophical work, Clio, Peguy explained that there are two ways of considering events, one being to follow the course of the event, gathering how it comes about historically, how it's prepared and then decomposes in history, while the other way is to go back into the event, to take one's place in it as in a becoming, to grow both young and old in it at once, going through all its components or singularities. Becoming isn't part of history; history amounts only the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to "become," that is, to create something new. This is precisely what Nietzsche calls the Untimely. May 68 was a demonstration, an irruption, of a becoming in its pure state. It's fashionable these days to condemn the horrors of revoluÂtion. It's nothing new; English Romanticism is permeated by reflecÂtions on Cromwell very similar to present-day reflections on Stalin.4 They say revolutions turn out badly. But they're constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and peoÂple's revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Men's only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable.
Negri: A Thousand Plateaus, which I regard as a major philosophical work, seems to me at the same time a catalogue of unsolved problems, most particularly in the field of political philosophy. Its pairs of contrasting terms—process and proÂject, singularity and subject, composition and organization, lines of flight and apparatuses/strategies, micro and macro, and so on—all this not only remains forever open but it's constantly being reopened, through an amazing will to theorize, and with a violence reminiscent of heretical proclamations. I've nothing against such subversion, quite the reverse . . . But I seem sometimes to hear a tragic note, at points where it's not clear where the "war-machine" is going.
Deleuze: I'm moved by what you say. I think Felix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways, perhaps, but both of us. You see, we think any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capitalÂism and the ways it has developed. What we find most interesting in Marx is his analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that's conÂstantly overcoming its own limitations, and then coming up against them once more in a broader form, because its fundamental limit is Capital itself. A Thousand Plateaus sets out in many different direcÂtions, but these are the three main ones: first, we think any society is defined not so much by its contradictions as by its lines of flight, it flees all over the place, and it's very interesting to try and follow the lines of flight taking shape at some particular moment or other. Look at Europe now, for instance: western politicians have spent a great deal of effort setting it all up, the technocrats have spent a lot of effort getting uniform administration and rules, but then on the one hand there may be surprises in store in the form of upsurges of young peoÂple, of women, that become possible simply because certain restricÂtions are removed (with "untechnocratizable" consequences); and on the other hand it's rather comic when one considers that this Europe has already been completely superseded before being inaugurated, superseded by movements coming from the East. These are major lines of flight. There's another direction in A Thousand Plateaus, which amounts to considering not just lines of flight rather than conÂtradictions, but minorities rather than classes. Then finally, a third direction, which amounts to finding a characterization of "war machines" that's nothing to do with war but to do with a particular way of occupying, taking up, space-time, or inventing new space-times: revolutionary movements (people don't take enough account, for instance, of how the PLO has had to invent a space-time in the Arab world), but artistic movements too, are war-machines in this sense.
You say there's a certain tragic or melancholic tone in all this. I think I can see why. I was very struck by all the passages in Primo Levi where he explains that Nazi camps have given us "a shame at being human." Not, he says, that we're all responsible for Nazism, as some would have us believe, but that we've all been tainted by it: even the survivors of the camps had to make compromises with it, if only to surÂvive. There's the shame of there being men who became Nazis; the shame of being unable, not seeing how, to stop it; the shame of havÂing compromised with it; there's the whole of what Primo Levi calls this "gray area." And we can feel shame at being human in utterly trivÂial situations, too: in the face of too great a vulgarization of thinking, in the face of tv entertainment, of a ministerial speech, of "jolly peoÂple" gossiping. This is one of the most powerful incentives toward phiÂlosophy, and it's what makes all philosophy political. In capitalism only one thing is universal, the market. There's no universal state, precisely because there's a universal market of which states are the centers, the trading floors. But the market's not universalizing, homogenizing, it's an extraordinary generator of both wealth and misery. A concern for human rights shouldn't lead us to extol the "joys" of the liberal capitalism of which they're an integral part. There's no democratic state that's not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery. What's so shameful is that we've no sure way of maintaining becomings, or still more of arousing them, even within ourselves. How any group will turn out, how it will fall back into history, presents a constant "concern."5 There's no longer any image of proletarians around of which it's just a matter of becoming conscious.
Negri: How can minority becoming be powerful? How can resistance become an insurÂrection ? Reading you, I'm never sure how to answer such questions, even though I always find in your works an impetus that forces me to reformulate the questions theoretically and practically. And yet when I read what you 've written about the imagination, or on common notions in Spinoza, or when I follow your description in The Time-Image of the rise of revolutionary cineÂma in third-world countries, and with you grasp the passage from image into fabulation, into political praxis, I almost feel I've found an answer. . . Or am I mistaken ? Is there then, some way for the resistance of the oppressed to become effective, and for what's intolerable to be definitively removed? Is there some way for the mass of singularities and atoms that we all are to come forward as a constitutive power, or must we rather accept the juridical paradox that conÂstitutive power can be defined only by constituted power?
Deleuze: The difference between minorities and majorities isn't their size. A minority may be bigger than a majority. What defines the majority is a model you have to conform to: the average European adult male city-dweller, for example ... A minority, on the other hand, has no model, it's a becoming, a process. One might say the majority is nobody. Everybody's caught, one way or another, in a minority becoming that would lead them info unknown paths if they opted to follow it through. When a 'minority creates models for itself, it's because it wants to become a majority, and probably has to, to survive or prosper (to have a state, be recognized, establish its rights, for example). But its power comes from what it's managed to create, which to some extent goes into the model, but doesn't depend on it. A people is always a creative minority, and remains one even when it acquires a majority^ it can be both at once because the two things aren't lived out on the same plane. It's the greatest artists (rather than populist artists) who invoke a people, and find they "lack a people": Mallarme, Rimbaud, Klee, Berg. The Straubs in cinema. Artists can only invoke a people, their need for one goes to the very heart of what they're doing, it's not their job to create one, and they can't. Art is resistance: it resists death, slavery, infamy, shame. But a people can't worry about art. How is a people created, through what terrible sufÂfering? When a people's created, it's through its own resources, but in away that links up with something in art (Garrel says there's a mass of terrible suffering in the Louvre, too) or links up art to what it lacked. Utopia isn't the right concept: it's more a question of a "tabulation" in which a people and art both share. We ought to take up Bergson's notion of tabulation and give it a political meaning.
Negri: In your book on Foucault, and then again in your TV interview at INA,6 you suggest we should look in more detail at three kinds of power: sovereign power, disciplinary power, and above all the control of "communication " that's on the way to becoming hegemonic. On the one hand this third scenario relates to the most perfect form of domination, extending even to speech and imagination, but on the other hand any man, any minority, any singularity, is more than ever before potentially able to speak out and thereby recover a greater degree of freedom. In the Marxist Utopia of the Grundrisse, communism takes preciseÂly the form of a transversal organization of free individuals built on a techÂnology that makes it possible. Is communism still a viable option? Maybe in a communication society it's less Utopian than it used to be?
Deleuze: We're definitely moving toward "control" societies that are no longer exactly disciplinary. Foucault's often taken as the theorist of discipliÂnary societies and of their principal technology, confinement (not just in hospitals and prisons, but in schools, factories, and barracks). But he was actually one of the first to say that we're moving away from disÂciplinary societies, we've already left them behind. We're moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication. BurÂroughs was the first to address this. People are of course constantly talking about prisons, schools, hospitals: the institutions are breaking down. But they're breaking down because they're fighting a losing battle. New kinds of punishment, education, health care are being stealthÂily introduced. Open hospitals and teams providing home care have been around for some time. One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as anothÂer closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful conÂtinual training, to continual monitoring7 of worker-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students. They try to present this as a reform of the school system, but it's really its dismantling. In a control-based system nothÂing's left alone for long. You yourself long ago suggested how work in Italy was being transformed by forms of part-time work done at home, which have spread since you wrote (and by new forms of circulation and distribution of products). One can of course see how each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine—with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermo-dynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies. But the machines don't explain anyÂthing, you have to analyze the collective arrangements of which the machines are just one component. Compared with the approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites, we may come to see the harshÂest confinement as part of a wonderful happy past. The quest for "uni-versals of communication" ought to make us shudder. It's true that, even before control societies are fully in place, forms of delinquency or resistance (two different things) are also appearing. Computer piraÂcy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nineÂteenth century called "sabotage" ("clogging" the machinery) .8 You ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resisÂtance that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the "transversal organization of free individuals." Maybe, I don't know. But it would be nothing to do with minorities speaking out. Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They're thoroughly perÂmeated by money—and not by accident but by their very nature. We've got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something difÂferent from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.
Negri: In Foucault and in The Fold, processes of subjectification seem to be studied more closely than in some of your other works. The subject's the boundary of a continuous movement between an inside and outside. What are the political consequences of this conception of the subject^ If the subject can't be reduced to an externalized citizenship, can it invest citizenship with force and life? Can it make possible a new militant pragmatism, at once a pietas toward the world and a very radical construct. What politics can carry into history the splenÂdor of events and subjectivity. How can we conceive a community that has real force but no base, that isn't a totality but is, as in Spinoza, absolute?
Deleuze: It definitely makes sense to look at the various ways individuals and groups constitute themselves as subjects through processes of subjec-tification: what counts in such processes is the extent to which, as they take shape, they elude both established forms of knowledge and the dominant forms of power. Even if they in turn engender new forms of power or become assimilated into new forms of knowledge. For a while, though, they have a real rebellious spontaneity. This is nothing to do with going back to "the subject," that is, to something invested with duties, power, and knowledge. One might equally well speak of new kinds of event, rather than processes of subjectification: events that can't be explained by the situations that give rise to them, or into which they lead. They appear for a moment, and it's that moment that matters, it's the chance we must seize. Or we can simply talk about the brain: the brain's precisely this boundary of a continuous two-way movement between an Inside and Outside, this membrane between them. New cerebral pathways, new ways of thinking, aren't explicable in terms of microsurgery; it's for science, rather, to try and discover what might have happened in the brain for one to start thinking this way or that. I think subjectification, events, and brains are more or less the same thing. What we most lack is a belief in the world, we've quite lost the world, it's been taken from us. If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volume. It's what you call pietas. Our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move. We need both creativity and a people.
Conversation with Toni Negri Futur Anterieur 1(Spring 1990), translated by Martin Joughin.
Reference:
Deleuze, Gilles. "Control and Becoming." Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972.
Posted on April 14, 2008
Gilles Deleuze
( I. Historical / II. Logic / III. Program )
I. Historical
Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing convicts."
Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.
We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an "interior," in crisis like all other interiors--scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It's only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. "Control" is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.
II. Logic
The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one is supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn't necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.
This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of "salary according to merit" has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.
In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything--the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it's because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest--the flock and each of its animals--but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.
Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines--levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker's familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner--state or private power--but coded figures--deformable and transformable--of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.
III. Program
The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position--licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation.
The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of "substitution," at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain ho
