South Park, Britney Spears, and Foucault

When I was watching the new episode of South Park last night it made me think about discipline and punishment. The episode is about how the media, the tabloids, and in general the paparazzi harass Britney Spears and document and intensively monitor her every movement, especially the more embarrassing, less flattering ones, and how the general public is completely engrossed and fascinated by all this information, and in particular the information that documents her self-destruction. Towards the end of the episode the parents of Kyle and Stan inform the kids that the whole society is part of this cruel torture, from the paparazzi to the media consumers, and announce that "Britney Must Die" and explain that killing celebrities through the media and harrassment is the modern form of torture and human sacrifice. The basic premise is that someone special is choosen and admired and then torn apart and killed for sacrificial reasons (in the episode's case, to enhance the coming year's corn crop), similar to older rituals of human sacrifice. This made me think about the changing form of torture and how perhaps the means may have changed but the ends are the same. A great deal of people still take pleasure in other's pain and misery, but now the form of it makes it more bearable and less explicitely cruel, like the punishment of prisoners. Does anyone else have thoughts about this or other examples of how torture has changed?

Burma

This is kind of an abstract post but I wanted to bring this question about the legitimacy of the state in terms of style of sovereign or disciplinary forms of rule into a more contemporary context. Foucault seems to keep juxtaposing between two hundred years of history as if everything had been turned on its head and no vestiages of the old forms of rule still existed when in fact throughout much of the world, the rule of the sovereign remains claiming authority in the divine. Foucault seems to suggest that these two forms of rule, while inherently different, seem to not change the amount of freedom we have but the cooperation of this freedom with the state. What then would be an analysis of the type of repression the people face in Burma verses the repression we face here?

The Origin of Discipline

I have a question that may betray my lack of understanding of Foucault, but here it is: he seems to be saying that the discipline that began to be imposed in prisons in the 1800s has caused us who are not incarcerated to also discipline ourselves in similar ways, and that this is "dangerous".  My question is haven't we always had to discipline ourselves to do what we know to be beneficial, even when we don't want to do it?  I am thinking of trivial things like brushing one's teeth or cleaning one's house.  It could also include for many of us doing our jobs even though we don't enjoy them.  My point is that the need for self-discipline seems to have been with us for a long time.  Is Foucault saying that we have simply become more conscious of it, or perhaps that we are disciplining ourselves in areas where it's not even necessary (e.g. the intro scene in American Psycho), or what?  

In my reading of him I always get this ominous feeling like some terrible transition has occurred where we all now police ourselves somewhat unconsciously and that in the past the policing came from external sources.  I guess I am just unsure about how much this has really changed or in what ways this has changed, and furthermore what I am supposed to make of it.  Is Foucault merely documenting the change or does he want to incite some kind of feeling in us and possibly move us toward action?  I am a bit perplexed.

"Why you buggin' about being monitored if you ain't doin' nothin' wrong?"

The Patriot Act, which resembles the idea of the Panopticon in its pervasive monitoring, came to my mind while reading Foucault. Among most of the people that I know, the reaction to the Patriot Act has been negative—it is seen by many as a threat to privacy and liberty. While I am personally not comfortable with the idea of being monitored, I can understand fairly clearly the argument for a constant monitoring, namely that it is a powerful tool in preventing unwanted activities (specifically coordinated terrorist activities in the case of the Patriot Act). It does, however, clash with the idea that the State should remain out of my hair unless I do something to harm someone else. As far as I understand, though, two arguments of those in favor of constant monitoring would be that 1.) Why wait until after the harm is done? Should we not try to prevent harm? And 2.) If it is known that we might be monitored at any given time, we may be deterred from doing what we think might get us in trouble.

Number 2 is straightforward enough, even if it results in a general unpleasant residue of worrying over whether my behavior and actions are appropriate. Number 1 is tricky, because it’s unclear how successfully harm is prevented when someone is arrested for something that they did not yet do. While reading Foucault, I also thought of the movie Minority Report (I haven’t read the book), wherein people are arrested, shaved, and stored in tubes for the rest of their lives BEFORE they commit any crime. In the movie, the murder rate drops to zero, which is a pretty clear indication that their methods worked. There was the implication that some people were put away even though they were not going to actually kill anyone, but that was not very bothersome, as the number of people saved from being murdered was higher than those unfairly put away in a tube forever. Now, this “Pre-Crime” system happened to be able to utilize supernatural siblings that could see into the future. That’s something that we are lacking (for now).

Foucault writes of the various failures of the prison system in the 19th century, which, as far as I can tell, are still problems today. The main point seemed to be that, as the prison was an area for desperate, angry “delinquents” to congregate, and since the lives of these delinquents were made very difficult after release from prison (e.g., not being able to get a job due to ex-con status), the whole prison system seemed to breed more crime. The implication is that this kind of prison system makes enemies, and so the vicious cycle of recidivism grabs hold.

So then perhaps classical Liberalism puts the people in too much danger as they sit and wait for harm to be done to them before the criminal can be dealt with. Perhaps the State should be involved at all times, constantly monitoring or being thought to be constantly present so that we, the people, mind ourselves better. Perhaps people who are brought to prison should be treated more nicely, educated, and helped back onto their feet while being constantly monitored so that they don’t wind up back in prison.

My stance is a resounding I Don’t Know. I don’t see very much public or government interest in the matter regarding prisons, beyond the comment that the prisons are getting very full. I did appreciate Foucault’s attempt to grasp the complexity of the matter, though I myself don’t feel that I have enough of a grasp of how and why people today end up in prison to gauge how fully he grasps the matter.

Panopticon

Foucault suggests that the most effective prison would be one of a Panopticon. He proposes its design would lead the prisoners to keep themselves in line. That after they had been caught red handed a few times, the prisoners would assume that they will be caught every time
and thus would stay out of trouble on their own. There would not even be a need to monitor all the prisoners at any given time as long as they believed they were being constantly watched. Since his proposal, only three panopticon prisons have been constructed. It seems that in practice, although the prisoners stayed in line, they enjoyed their stay a little too much compared to normal conceptions of prison stays. They found they had more freedom than in a normal prison. My question is whether this is a bonus of a panopticon prison or a defect. There are innocent people in prison, but do we want the guilty ones to look forward to their stay at all?

The Life of the Panopticon

Foucault argues that the invention of the Panopticon brought into being a whole new type of society, a transition from a society of spectacle to one of surveillance. We now live in the "panoptic mahine" by which we are disciplined and by which we discipline others. In reading about the Panopticon I am often struck by fear of this impersonal "all-seeing eye", yet I remember that the Panopticon is not to be controlled by any one individual, but is supposed to be open to the public: "any member of society will have the right to come and see with his own eyes how the schools, hospitals, factories, prisons function" (p.207). There is admittedly something terrifying about the feeling that one is always being watched, but does the fact that surviellance is regulated/monitored by the public serve to alleviate some of these fears, or is it perhaps even more troubling to think that we are all engaged in policing one another?

foolish question...

This question may appear foolish, and I may be misinterpreting the reading but in going over the text, the section on the formation of the disciplinary society, (218-228) I Noticed that in the second formation, through the juridico-political structures, the disciplinary panoptic modality of power, though it seems to rely on the juridial structure of society, nonetheless appears to be undermining the basic juridical structure. Through the panoptic disciplinary structure's instantiation into social networks and institutions, they become what Foucault referred to as a "sort of counter-law" that suspends the actual laws of the juridico-political structure. How then can this panoptic modality be a form of support for the juridical structure if it is in some ways undermining its authority and maintaining it's own semi-independent existence?

Panoptical Society

Foucault promotes the discipline-mechanism – like the panoptical society – image of discipline, where discipline tries to "improve the exercise of power" by making it cheaper and more productive over the discipline-blockade that encloses and keeps everything out. In what way would a panoptical society be most efficient? Would you have different institutions working towards individual goals and observe each under a hierarchal system? Would you need specialists to observe specific institutions and how could you be sure that they are effectively observed? How would these different institutions be able to effectively share information? Can order be easily maintained by such small enforcement?

Normailization

Foucault talks about the penal punishment system working to normalize the prisons. He says they are "compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes."(183) Foucault really stresses the moral education aspect of penal punishment that has faded into the background in recent times. Professor Jerome Neu offered a reason for this being that it disrespects the agency of the actor. That to assume the person committing a crime needs moral education is to assume he is not acting rationally. But is a society wrong to demand actors living within it must not only act rationally but reasonably (in a Rawlsian sense)? Is it not the case that an actor has shown some inability to act reasonably when they broke the laws of the land instead of finding a way to accomplish their goals through social co-operation? Cases of civil disobedience would have to be handled differently, but is their not some cause to say that Foucault's Normalizing effect is a good thing, and the proper goal of punishment to re-integrate the criminal into society? Not to say Foucault comes out on either side, but after everything he's said about the contingency it of happening in just this way, do you think that normalization is the proper goal of punishment?

The rule of common truth

Foucault discusses the notion of power operating under certain rules involving the types of knowledge-claims it makes. "The verification of the crime must obey the general criteria for all truth. In the arguments it employs, in the proofs it provides, legal judgment must be homogeneous with power in general." (p.97) What sorts of mechanisms does this "rule of common truth" take on in order to both reveal and obscure knowledge about the crime, the criminal, and the punishing power? How did the rise of Enlightenment thinking affect the establishment of this sort of notion of legislative truth? How are knowledge-claims about law and punishment (both transparent and concealed) justified in the modern legal and political world? Are they transparent? Do they in fact follow the same rules of evidence and proof available to common reason?

Private Space: Freedom or Discipline?

My view before reading Foucault was that individuals have the right to have private space in society (such as their homes) in which they are free from interference from the public sphere. However, on p.143 Foucault states that the "principle of enclosure" works to "establish presences and absences, to know where and how to locate individuals, to set up useful communications, to interrupt others, to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits." After reading this passage I realized that the idea of dividing people up into enclosed places is a way of maintaining discipline in society and it allows the public sphere to supervise and regulate individuals more effectively and efficiently. To what extent do you think that we discipline ourselves and maintain the public sphere's control over us by upholding this ideal of private, individual space? Is there anyway to avoid this? Is this even a bad thing?