chris at 1:02 AM |

Tuesday, July 29, 2003

 

Hold the FrancoPhone/NotPhone: All Notions from French Theory May Not Be Useless

Foucault & Big BirdAmong the Living Beings


Maybe begin by thinking Art. Or get more specific and just think Blog. Then go to question. Say Okay: to what does the following quote refer--or what many things are implicated?

"This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the center and the periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined, and distributed among the living beings, the sick, and the dead--all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism." M. Foucault, "Panopticism" (316)*


Why care what all those French philosophers had to say last century? I dunno. Really. They are like pop-up heads at carnival, ya kno? Ya take the hammer and just see how fast you are at knockin em out or back down into their formica pseudo neck holes. Maybe win a teddy bear to give away to someone who cares. So: have begun rereading Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Interesting again (now) because of new institutional formations (well, yeah, blogging is one), thus new modes of discourse and community--for socializing processes. Poor Foucault, though. So almost macabre, especially in the end with all that talaquepaquetalky about s+m. and he wasn't even hinting around. whattaguy. I'm teaching a theory and writing course for fall semester, so am re-questioning the terms of such concepts and paradigms as Foucault's. And why they hold so much sway. The answers are probably obvious, but maybe not--maybe something will, um, pop up...

Foucault is interesting--that sixties Parisian radical teacherly icon. His students loved him--or were terribly devoted and I mean terribly in a very literal sense. Check out the 60s interviews with him and his students. Or, not interesting. Perhaps the better term of reference should be that M. Foucault, given his moment, was useful in the extreme. A la Extremely Influential. Not unlike Big Bird. He really was the Big Bird of the theory crowd, at least over here on these hallowed US shores, land that we love (i hope you hear the familiar tune in there). He was Just Different from other teachers, dynamically, surprisingly, so that like Big Bird, he has the finite exigence of a moment but some other yellow or feathery things that carry over. Yeah, hugs (Big Bird mythos) were wanted right along with the rest of the critical mind stuff (FrancoPhone crit-mythos). Is that even possible, having both hugs and crit? Sure. Do these have to be compatible or continuous or seamlessly melded? No, not if this is the example. But anyway, I want to say that M. Foucault's presence via his work is still "useful" (as in use value)--both for critical thought and for meta critique, such as I am hinting at here (only hinting--not quite ready to go there exclusively). There is something abouy that neat set, the mechanisms of meta and critical thought, as having use value: does the phenomenon have or can it really afffect/effect, and how? Is influence even something that can be decided? Why care?

So, on the learned-acquired (though also inherently genetic or set up to be?) mechanism of the disciplining gaze, M. Foucault pronounces:

"Inspection functions ceaslessly. The gaze is alert everywhere. ... Everyday the intendent visits the quarter of his charge, inquires whether the syndics have carried out their tasks, whether the inhabitants have anything to to complain of; they 'observe their actions'." (315)*

Well it's sounding a little like blogging, no? And a little like there might also be a need for some kind of feathery, pseudo winged disciplinarian or teacher, say a Big Bird? Just to smooth over the edges of stark discovery: what Elizabeth Bishop means (sorry, I know it's the second time I've cf'd her in 24 hours, but some days are just EB days around here) about knowing what it causes in the form of lack and what we miss and what we want really bad sometimes in life, especially the life that seeks to know important and interesting things like how to get off this planet, or how to take care of it. She writes this in "The Moose" :

"It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing and flown."--Elizabeth Bishop, "The Moose"**

Ya know?
Myself? I rarely make it past those terrrifying "rocky breasts" of knowledge. Gee. Why didn't someone tell me it was going to be like that, I have to wonder every time. So, yes, a little feathery yellow is our due: there is a Big Bird huggy function, thank goodness. But how much of that do we need, and how much before it becomes stiffling so that we become incapable of seeking what ever else we need or want to know? Well it is the Foucault function that fills in the blank number 2 circles on that test page.

But this panopticonic version of what ails us does go on, and I should say here that these quotes refer to institutions such as prisons, asylums, schools (not to leave out schools of thought, either):

"Every day, too, the syndic goes into the street for which he is responsible, stops before each house: gets all the inhabitants to appear at the windows (those who live overlooking the courtyard will be allocated a window looking onto the street at which no one but they may show themselves); he calls each of them by name; informs himself as to the state of each and every one of them... if someone does not appear at the window, the syndic must ask why. ... This surveillance is based on a system of permanent registration: reports form the syndics to the intendents, from the intendents to the magistrates or mayor..."

And so on goes the bleak creepy story of a centralizing, hierarchical power relation. Is it always so secretly planned out, so hideously centralized, so bleak? Obviously not for many: lots of folks are plenty satisfied (they suppose) and happy as pigs in heaven (a marked cliche, or not), for instance, merely to watch TV--decidedly a hierarchical, centralizing mechanism--for their world view which informs, then, their critical thought (if any). World's just fine that way, right? And oh boy!--do those folks ever vote...

But when is it bleak? (some say always)--in what modes, ways, what to do about it? Many say recognizing it is beneficial. Is it? If recognizing means being then equipped to change the mechanism and perhaps the mode, then okay. But does that happen? It's obvious to me that mechanism and mode in blogging are similar or seem to fit these same characteristics. Foucault goes on, famously (many think infamously), to offer no opinion of his own in this matter of the hegemony of the panopticon as symbolic social structuration. He is the cipher, the one who describes from a distance. So, in blogging what mechanisms discipline the meaningfulness of blogging? What is included and what excluded as a result?

Not to forget: objective distance is supposed to be a prime state of being--self constructed (best case scenario is when it results from self-discipline)--but is it expected at levels which are just not possible in reality? How to manage (supposedly) objective distance? Don't we sense this dfficulty?--especially with this new mode, blogging, where writers are on the line, literally online, using sitemeters, technorati, linking and checking in and out for reception and response which in turn structure community, thus disciplinarity.

How much critical distance is necessary? Too much would require stopping the inherently personalizing, often wildly subjective flow--even given that bloggers use, they invent and make useful, personae from which to write, just like every kind of writer does.

So here are some contradictions to think on for a while--the limits of blogging as mechanism and mode involving the uses of and affects from an inherited and socially sanctioned disciplinarity.

I'm just thinking it may be useful to give Big Bird due credit if he's been functioning, and more functional, than is M. Foucault--in ideas and human connections--all this time.

*Quoted from Ways of Reading: an Anthology for Writers, David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, eds. Fifth Edition (Boston: Bedfor St. Martins, 1999).

**Quoted from Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1989) 66.