Foucault: his theories and applications's topics - tribe.net

the truth/power of HIV AIDS

GORdon — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:41:50 GMT

it takes a few paragraphs to get to michel, but he's in there ...
http://gordonlove.blogspot.com/

please post comments on the blog!

thanks!

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 8 replies

New Members???

TigerBalm — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 23:09:49 GMT

i remember the days when we only had 4-5 members, (speaking of which, anyone know WTF happened to Beth?) so it's cool we've ballooned to 22.

please introduce yourselves if you want...after all this tribe thing is as much creating a network of people as well as sharing ideas.

also, i've found anyone linking themselves to Foucault is either a pretentious intellectual buffoon or a crazed sociopath. i fit into the former.

also, anyone wanting to add my to their "friends list" is more than welcome since i have no friends. i know...i've had a tough life.

~hjh.

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 12 replies

Foucault - Chomsky debate

Mish — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 01:38:15 GMT

I found bits of the famous Foucault - Chomsky debate on YouTube, here's the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbUYsQR3Mes (Part I)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXBfOxfmSDw&mode=related&search= (Part II)

When I saw it, I was more convinced than ever of Foucault's genius... Chomsky just couldn't hold up...

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 2 replies

Birth of Clinic : I gots questions

droppingscrews — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 21:30:50 GMT

please,
1. I am having difficulty understanding Sydenham's 'Constitution'. Any explanation or addition of context perhaps would be helpful.

2. Also, what does Foucault refer to specifically as "medecine of species?"

thank you

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 2 replies

Irresistable Foucault Joke....

TigerBalm — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 09:56:07 GMT

i can't resist this one..as some of you might have heard, Keith Richards claims he mixed his dead father's ashes with a little blow and snorted it.....of which i think Foucault would retort:

"Why Not? Knowledge is Powder!!!"

Keith Richards: 'I Snorted My Father'

The Associated Press
Wednesday, April 4, 2007; 5:39 AM

LONDON -- Keith Richards has acknowledged consuming a raft of illegal substances in his time, but this may top them all. In comments published Tuesday, the 63-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist said he had snorted his father's ashes mixed with cocaine.

"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father," Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.

"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared," he said. "... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."

Richards' father, Bert, died in 2002, at 84.

Richards, one of rock's legendary wild men, told the magazine that his survival was the result of luck, and advised young musicians against trying to emulate him.

"I did it because that was the way I did it. Now people think it's a way of life," he was quoted as saying.

"I've no pretensions about immortality," he added. "I'm the same as everyone ... just kind of lucky.

"I was No. 1 on the `who's likely to die' list for 10 years. I mean, I was really disappointed when I fell off the list," Richards said.

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 0 replies

A simple introduction from a Foucault newcomer

Kai_le_Flaneur — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 02:48:42 GMT

I've gone back to school after many years, to study philosophy, particularly of language, and I'm only now getting into Foucault - and my first impression is wow- where the fuck have I been all these years?

It's paragraphs like this that got me interested:

"I prefer the very specific transformations that have proved to be possible in the last twenty years in a certain number of areas which concern our ways of being and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way in which we perceive insanity or illness; I prefer even these partial transformations, which have been made in the correlation of historical analysis and the practical attitude, to the programs for a new man that the worst political systems have repeated throughout the twentieth century." (p. 516, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth)

Or as Jean-François Lyotard put it: "incredulity toward metanarratives."

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 1 reply

Knowledge of the self.

Justin — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 00:26:29 GMT

Haven't seen a post on this tribe since joining - thought I would try and get something going. Bit of a rant, but I need a distraction.

An essential component of 'technologies of normalization' is the key role they play in the systematic creation, classification, and control of social ‘anomalies’. The advance of bio-power in the nineteenth century is in fact contemporary with the appearance and proliferation of the modern categories of anomaly – of deviants. A web of objective codification which makes possible the ‘measurement of overall phenomena, the description of groups, the characterisation of collective facts..." (D&P:190). It is interesting how the codification of social anomaly - the making or labelling of a kind of deviant or deviance - can have the incidental affect of creating a unified group, a group (or classification)-for-itself. The 'subject' as both known and knowing can re-present and resist the classification of them as a 'kind' of person - thus, “every power relationship implies, at least in potential, a strategy of struggle.” But the unfortunate(?) upshot of this counter discourse is that it in turn can re-create a political violence, a counter normalisation which is nontheless a discourse - a forced polemic of sorts. In other words, the creating of a codified or labelling 'other' can entail a counter creation - like the embracing of a formally derogatory term like 'fag' or 'nigger' and liberating the label with pribe, recasting the discourse - that resists the knowledge(power) or symbolic violence entangled with that classification from above. This act of resistance in time can create an equally debiliating (counter) discourse that starts off as liberating but later becomes something that the subject again feels constrained by. Does this imply that there is only discursive formations or presentations of the self/subject? Can we liberate ourselves from the tyranny of a normalizing gaze? is there a pre-discursive vision that people can have of themselves or others, unconstrained by the multiplicity of knowledge(s) about us a kinds of people?

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 5 replies

Foucauldian

GORdon — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 17:20:32 GMT

i never thought i would use such a pretentious adjective. but i used it here
http://enjoythesign.com/tba/

what do you think?

does it fit?

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 3 replies

Censorship on Tribe!

Richard — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 06:22:28 GMT

Tribe today (12/18/06) censored my "face" pic !
Damn, I wish there were some way to protest within Tribe. Can't even send a message to multiple people/tribes at once!
Tribe is FUCKED!!!
RICHARD

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 0 replies

Other texts?

kyooverse — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 10:41:42 GMT

I haven't read this book by Foucault. I have read History of Sexuality vol.1.

Is there no space for it to be discussed? I mean, I understand, it is the Nike of Foucault. But don't you think the way to get people to read more is to let them explore what they have read with other people?

There are other Foucault books, too. I would love to read people discussing them.

Has a group about controlling masses, unintentionally, killed this Tribe?

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 4 replies

OT: shameless plug since your Mod will be on TV this saturday

TigerBalm — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 14:14:20 GMT

well, let me rephrase and say that my paintings that i bought last year will be on TV that will be aired on Discovery Channel this saturday.

in short, i bought these paintings that were created by Congo the Chimpanzee who was a student of legendary British author Desmond Morris (Naked Ape, Origin of Art and countless other videos/books about sexuality & evolution).

NPR still as the background story on it: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4712948

anyways, Channel 4 of the UK came by in April and shot a bit for their documentary that was aired in UK back in August...
it finally makes its US premiere this saturday on Discovery Channel:

http://dsc.discovery.com/tvlistings/series.jsp?series=25446&gid=0&channel=DSC

the listing time is EASTERN time so for all of you in the pacific, it will be

Episode 1 5pm
Episode 2 6pm

Re-air later in the evening:

Episode 1 9pm
Episode 2 10pm

free cookies for anyone who can make a connection between Congo's paintings and Foucault. lol

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 0 replies

Foucault & Sex

TigerBalm — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 16:11:04 GMT

as if there is nothing more sexier a topic than that!

anyways, i met a friend's friend yesterday from singapore and she spoke of how she was classmates with Annabel Chong the ex-pornstar-turned-web-designer.

apparently, she was a pretty bright gal during her academic years.

this quote tripped me out so i'd thought i'd share it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annabel_Chong

I did this interview where I just mentioned that I read Foucault. Who doesn't in university, right? I was in this strip club giving this guy a lap dance and all he wanted to do was to discuss Foucault with me. Well, I can stand naked and do my little dance, or I can discuss Foucault, but not at the same time; too much information.
—1999 Interview with Mark Penny

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 2 replies

"LOST" episode integrates Foucault's PanOpt.

TigerBalm — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 07:06:19 GMT

my friend sent me to this the other day. i'm not addicted to "LOST" yet becuz i missed the first 2 episodes and have always felt that if i started watching it from the middle, i would be confused and...errr..."lost" (sorry, coudln't resist that pun).

Since i was lucky to find the first 2 seasons on DVD in China for a mere $2, i will eagerly start watching from the beginning (the best deal was finding the first 5 seasons of 24 for only $4 which allows me to skip all the stupid scenes with Elisha "what-trouble-will-i-get-into-again?" Cuthbert.

all of you LOST fans, feel free to respond. in the meantime, i'll get my DVD player spinning again.

(btw, i find it interesting that "LOST" is taken SOOO seriously in an academic way. while this isn't necessarily a bad thing, i can't think of any other TV shows that warrants an academic-like approach. is the hype deserving?)

http://www.loststudies.com/1.2/discipline.html

Discipline & Punish: The Lost Experience as Panopticon

Introduction

Lost, Season 1

Season 2: The Pearl as Panopticon

The Viewer as Ambiguous Authority

Notes

Introduction

The most striking and resonant metaphor employed in Michel Foucault’s seminal Discipline and Punish (1975) was that of Jeremy Benthem’s Panopticon. The Panopticon was an architectural figure based on a central tower, within a ring-shaped building divided into cells. Each cell spanned the entire thickness of the building, to allow both an inner and outer window. Each occupant was backlit, and isolated, from his neighbor as he/she was from the singular occupant of the tower, who remained unseen and, if at all possible, unknown. “Toward this end, Bentham envisioned not only Venetian blinds on the tower observation ports but also mazelike connections among tower rooms to avoid glints of light or noise that might betray the presence of an observer."1

For Foucault, the essence of power itself could be summarized by the ability to “see-without-being-seen,” to have knowledge of the Other that the Other could never obtain. Because the Panopticon ensured surveillance “both global and individualizing” it represented knowledge as power in its most sweeping aspect: the high-level overview of a subject/terrain/concept married to the detailed, analytic understanding of the telescope/microscope. 2 The Panopticon allowed both complete knowledge of any subject as well as knowledge of that subject’s environment, in the widest possible context. To quote the editor of Surveillance & Society, Foucault’s Panopticon represented a key system/mechanism in “the remaking of people (and society) in the image of modernity.”3

At the close of Lost Season 2, the series appears to be in scope and detail almost a textbook illustration of Foucault’s thesis, one that contains an ironic internal reflection of itself with Locke and Eko’s discovery of the Pearl panopticon at the heart of the island. The castaways, marooned on a desert island for almost two months (with diminishing hope of escape), find over the course of their struggle that they are not alone. Unseen voices, and mysterious captors that come in the night but leave no trace seem to be watching them, aware of their forays away from the beach to other parts of the island, interested in the children and the “good” castaways for some unknown reason.
Lost, Season 1

Before I critique the role of the ?/Pearl station to Lost, let me return to Season 1. In episode 9, “Solitary,” Sayid finally encountered an earlier survivor, Danielle, who occupied the island for, at their best guest, at least 16 years. Danielle was clearly a prisoner on the island, and convinced, without any concrete evidence, that she was not alone and was being observed. She claimed that her child Alex was taking while still an infant, and that her crew had contacted a disease, so horrible that it required her to kill them lest it spread beyond the confines of the island. “Panopticism,” the third chapter of Discipline and Punish, begins with the description of how authorities dealt with the appearance of the plague in a seventeenth-century town.

First, a strict spatial partitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death, the killing of all stray animals; the division of the town into distinct quarters, each governed by an intendant. Each street is placed under the authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance; if he leaves the street, he will be condemned to death. On the appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors: it is forbidden to leave on pain of death. The syndic himself comes to lock the door of each house from the outside; he takes the key with him and hands it over to the intendant of the quarter; the intendant keeps it until the end of the quarantine. 4

Each day the intendent, a lowly person whose death would not matter in the scheme of things, visits his charges to observe and records their health and action, based on a system of permanent registration. This document is exhaustive, and will be sent up the hierarchy from the intendent to the mayor. In turn, any decision to treat or even visit a sick person must come from above. “The relation of each individual to his disease and to his death passes through the representatives of power, the registration they make of it, the decisions they take on it.”5 Five or six days after the quarantine the buildings are completely stripped and decontaminated.

This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in l 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 centre and 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. 6

As if in opposition to this dream of perfect order, “omnipresent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even to the ultimate determination of the individual,” there arose a tradition of ultimate rebellion. Lawlessness, the wanton mingling of bodies “abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different truth to appear.” Against this festival atmosphere political regulation probed ever deeper, as though by the mere marshalling of facts disorder could be kept at bay.

The plague gave way to multiple separations between people, rituals of exclusion, the intensification of modes of control, and the further hierarchization of power. As Foucault elaborates, the exile of the leper and the dream of control bring different political dreams. “The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society. Two ways of exercising power over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous mixtures.” The plague-stricken town is the model of perfect governance. Although the society of the leper and the magistrates are wildly different, they are not incompatible, and this relation between the exile and social systems of control (psychiatric and medical hospital, reformatory, school) was central to the formation of modern society in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Seventeenth-century plague control thus developed methods of social control brought to bear on all aspects of later society. So too did the introduction of incurable disease and imperious “others” in Season 1 of Lost prepare us for the revelations of Season 2, in which we find that Ethan was only one of at least two sentries observing and recording the castaways, and separating them into “good” and “bad” according to, as yet, unfathomable criteria. Although we lack a definitive history of the others (relying on scattered dialogue and the webmaze for clues as to their identity and motives), we might imagine that the “sickness,” if not the sole reason for it, certainly contributed to our growing picture of the island as a dream of “perfect governance” as hierarchically-controlled mechanism.

As viewers we are privy to the mechanism on some intermediary level; we know more than any of the castaways – indeed, than all of them put together – but we are yet manipulated by the producers, who reveal only enough of the political machinery at any one time to keep us returning to our glowing screens/cells for more. According to Foucault, the panoptic mechanism reverses the dungeon principles to “deprive of light,” and to “hide,” preserving only “to enclose.” So does the island supply light everywhere (even in the forlorn Swan Station), with nowhere to hide, while keeping the castaways not only on the island but also on their beach, insecure and in the dark.

Although we suspected, with the permanent unease of the paranoid schizophrenic, that someone was watching the castaways besides ourselves in season 1, we could not be certain that Walt’s or Claire’s abductions were planned, or that there was any resident camp on the island, much less an organization with an interest in controlling its inhabitants. With Desmond’s introduction, and that of the tail section survivors, followed by the discovery of the medical station and the food drop, we came to realize that there was an active, all-encompassing presence on the island, one that sought to manipulate the survivors for its own ends.
Season 2: The Pearl as Panopticon

Foucault’s model of the panopticon, as stated above, has proved a durable metaphor that has been employed to shed light on all manner of modern social practices, from telecommunications, to genetics to food preparation. But Season 2 of Lost appears to move beyond the Panopticon as metaphor, adopting Foucault’s expansion of Benthem’s structure as both a structural and dramatic device. In The Ambiguous Panopticon: Foucault and the Codes of Cyberspace, Mark Winokur chooses to align the internet with panopticism, as both

construct space with a special attention to the subject's internalizing a particular model of space, and a particular notion of how people are distributed throughout space in relation to one another, and with a special attention to the defining of the individual through the space she occupies. Further, both are intensely interested in the construction and distribution of authority over and within the subject. 7

I will return to a discussion of the internet as panopticon below; here I want to focus on the idea that from its very first frame, Lost has focused on the island as a delimited area. As the camera roams the island, and the castaways map their destiny, Lost deliberately locates each individual in a distributed space (beach, caves, hatch, etc.), and fixes authority over the master of each region. Those in charge of each space – Jack in the cave, and then in the hatch, Ana-Lucia at the opposite end of the island – exert their most profound authority when they order others to vacate their habitat for another. Claire is the lowly single mother who collects information on all those who perished in the crash, and organizes a funeral for them, but Sawyer ends up with the manifest. On the beach, Hurley is the lowly note-taker who compiles a comprehensive list of castaway names and origins, reporting to Jack as final arbiter when he discovers that Ethan is a spy. Under the aegis of a team leader, the castaways appear to move freely within the confines of the island. Yet as they stumble upon traps, lose members of their expeditions, and face hallucinations and signs wherever they turn, they realize that those in charge (Jack, Sawyer, Sayid, Ana-Lucia) may unwittingly serve higher masters.

They castaways continue the task of pushing the Swan station’s button every 108 minutes with apparent free will. But that very act of pushing the button carries the insidious implication – as did Charlie’s murder of Ethan, or Michael, Jin and Sawyer’s shift of the raft to pursue the seabillies – that no act is truly free on this island. Locke serves as a model of the conflicted individual, whose inner nobility is stifled by a gnawing sense that he is but a pawn in the service of others (the welfare system, a disturbed mother, a conniving father, an abusive boss, a mute and inscrutable island entity).

I was never meant to do anything. Every single second of my pathetic little life is as useless as that button! You think it's important? You think it's necessary? It's nothing. It's nothing. It's meaningless. 8

If Locke could but be certain that any one of his actions were truly his, it would no longer be contingent, no longer be “nothing.” But the revelations of Pearl Station shake him to the core. There her is reminded that Boone died so that he could discover Swan stations. There he views an Orientation film that seems to invalidate everything done in Swan station, where countless secrets have festered, men have come to blows, his leg was reinjured, and two women have died. And there he finds a surveillance system at the center of a radiating system of hatches, with instructions from a mysterious Doctor with at least two “illuminated” names to record in minute detail the actions of those observed on the camera for each station. Thus the Pearl Station seems to be the apex of the Island’s panopticon of stations, and those passively recording the results of the psychological experiment in Swan station (the only one visible) in a sense control and exert power over those who are unwittingly observed.

During the Orientation film for station 5, the Pearl, we are told, “Karen DeGroot herself has written, ‘Careful observation in the only key to true and complete awareness.’” Spoken as a true student of Benthem, our narrator tells us that the nature of the experiment that the observer must record is completely immaterial.

What do these subjects believe they are accomplishing as they struggle to fulfill their tasks? You, as the observer, don't need to know. You, as the observer, don't need to know. All you need to know is the subjects believe their job is of the utmost importance. Remember, everything that occurs, no matter how minute or seemingly unimportant, must be recorded. 9

Yet we viewers note a “third eye” up above, a camera trained on the inhabitants of Pearl station, as well as discrepancies in the Sony u-matic 3/4" tape that cast doubt on both orientation films (those observed by Locke and Eko in both Swan and Pearl stations, which appear to invalidate one another, if not be part of some elaborate, Rabelaisian joke).

The discovery of Pearl station marks the point in Lost’s trajectory where metaphor meets literal transcription: Benthem’s creation of the ultimate scientific workstation, one which could simultaneously carry out both social, medical, pedagogical, psychological, philosophical and evolutionary experiments. “The Panopticon is a privileged place for experiments on men, and for analyzing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them.” 10 And, as our observation of the Pearl station avers, the panoptican even provides “an apparatus for supervising its own mechanisms.” 11

An inspector at any level of the hierarchy may at a glance observe all those below him. The panopticon replaces the plague-stricken town model with an ideal model of control, one that may, and has (perhaps even on Lost island) been detached from any specific use. As have Locke and Eko, “anyone may come and exercise in the central tower the functions of surveillance.” Theoretically, this alleviates the immediate threat of tyranny, providing the central tower is accessible. Such was not the case on Lost island, however, and such may never be the case, as long as the Brazil-like pneumatic tubes of information function to consolidate power in a higher, as yet undiscovered turret.

The panopticon provides a fertile model for critiquing Lost not because of its insular manifestation in the flesh, in episode 21 of season 2, but because it grounds the entire series with a compelling explanation for why the castaways may have been lured to the island, and what the Dharma Initiative, or its corollary Hanso Foundation, may want with the island and its inhabitants. The panopticon as theorized by Benthem was a means to spread and institutionalize discipline, in all its facets, throughout a society. Foucault traces the "Benthamite physics of power" from the classical age onwards, noting how individual highly disciplined armies, colleges and hospitals became models for Enlightenment Europe. In this process the act of discipline itself replaced the original function of discipline (e.g., military discipline was no longer a mere means of preventing looting or desertion, but a basic technique to enable an army to exist). Once trained in a discipline, a particular institutional model was transferred to other areas, and disseminated throughout society, to be administered in a detached manner by the state. So may our castaways have been assembled and manipulated for the purpose of internalizing and replicating the island’s disciplinary procedures, as they represent in themselves a society in microcosm: criminals, scientists, businessmen, soldiers, mothers, fathers, doctors, teachers, psychologists and the (formerly) infirm..

Slavoj Zizek writes of the contemporary panopticon as a place where the original authority has been twice displaced. Where once there had been an identified overseer, that authority figure had become fictive. The horror or “radical uncertainty” of not knowing whether or not we are being observing is quashed if we but internalize the role and regulate ourselves.12 If the process of pushing the button is, in Eko’s words “more important now than ever,” it is as just that: a means by which to make that horrifying discipline their own, to efface the fictive overseer with a new boss. In so doing Locke and Eko raise the discipline of button-pushing and hatch maintenance to a fait accompli, liberated from the need to “mean” anything beyond the exercise of discipline for its own sake.
The Viewer as Ambiguous Authority

I return now to Winokur’s discussion of the panopticon, namely his useful division of research spawned by this enormously popular notion. Writing in 2003, Winokur notes that the thousands of discussions of the panopticon on the internet focus almost exclusively on visible surveillance. In that they follow Neo-Foucauldian discussions of surveillance society as an Orwellian, top-down phenomenon “in which power is invested in the powerful if invisible.” 13 Studies that focus on how invisible control increase the unease of the observed certain have much to say about our increasing fear of losing control and civil liberties to information-gathering over the ‘net. I would not want to discount the acute relevance of such a position to Lost, where an increasing sense of frustration and powerlessness afflicted the castaways as they slowly realized that they were being observed, tracked, and classified (witness Locke’s shocked expression when the faux Henry Gale admits to him that “I was coming for you.”14)

But Winokur is interested not in how the internet deploys information to “just” know us, but in how it “deploys information to create us.” Her reminds us that the panoptic gaze is initially “unidirectional and fictive”; television is an easily identifiable panoptic institution in that its discourse is defined by variations on the themes of entertainment, desire, and consumerism, with each genre’s rules constituting one discourse among several. Although it is an accepted tenet of media studies that film is more “spatially panoptic” than television, surely Lost breaks that mold with its ever-widening sphere of influence, one that embraces print interviews, podcasts, official and unofficial websites, official and unofficial literature tie-ins, multiple forums for discussion, and a multi-media, cross-institutional “game” that promises to span all forms of twenty-first century communication technologies.

Certainly we as viewers are less centralized than the traditional film audience, with Tivo™, videotape, iTune™ downloadable shows and free internet marketing further liberating the viewer from any specific time, place or even modality of viewing, as witness the free streamed episodes at ABC's website. And among the community of Lost viewers, the sense of one overriding authority is muted by both the scope of internet and press discourse on Lost and conflicting messages from those associated directly with its production (is J.J. Abrams the true force behind the mythology, despite his day-to-day absence from production? Or is it Carlton Cuse, voice of Hanso Foundation commercials and podcasts? But hasn’t Damon Lindelof been the most ubiquitous voice heard in print and televised interviews?)

The internet – and the diffusion of Lost information through it – seems to constitute an “anti-panopticon,” an environment that empowers the user, and allows for bi-directional discourse, creative expression, and true choice. Yet as the internet expands, more and more institutions and sites are brought under the control of huge umbrella companies such as Time-Warner and ABC Disney (who own Lost). And the increasingly expensive real estate in cyberspace is made possible with more sophisticated and ubiquitous consumer identification and targeted marketing.

Lost: the Experience is the official name of the overarching game launched by ABC on May 2, 2006 and it suggests, indeed, that the combination of Lost: the series with its cross-platform accouterments represents a total entertainment experience unparalleled by any single previous media enterprise. Every one of us who has invested in Lost: the series is asked to invest further in the Experience, despite the passively-worded claim in the official press release to the contrary.15 As the panoptic experience is – at base – a virtual one, so the virtual Lost Experience is a panoptic one Foucault’s notion of absolute authority was the equivalent to Zizek’s internalized uncertainty: the individual who absorbs the discipline of the overseer participates in every aspect of the panopticon: he/she is participant, observer, punisher and punished. By internalizing the discipline we immerse ourselves in it; we seek to create our own Lost Experience by following the clues scattered like breadcrumbs through small print on false press releases, oneiric images that momentarily populate game websites, or newspaper ads that prompt us to purchase Bad Twin or be left behind. Like Foucault’s panopticon, we have let the ideology of Lost permeate our being, so that the Lost Experience is but the next logical step for every loyal fan of the show. At the bottom of the hardcore Lost fan lie the message board lurkers and those who watch the show but once or twice, following at a distance those bloggers immersed in daily pursuit of the game. Like Foucault’s panopticon, we have let the ideology of Lost permeate our being, so that the Lost Experience is but the next logical step for every loyal fan of the show. At the bottom of the hardcore Lost fan lie the message board lurkers and those who watch the show but once or twice, following at a distance those bloggers immersed in daily pursuit of the game.

Those with the means to afford iPods, broadband access and cellphone internet support wield more power than those restricted to more prosaic modes of information access (in this case, our multi-tasked computers). They lead the rest of us down the rabbit hole, and we follow at various distances, some concerned in our increasingly archaic, late-20th century worldview only with the show as broadcast, others lurkers marking the progress of the game from a distance. As Eko has internalized the discipline of Dr. Mark Wickman, so we have internalized the discipline of the rather hazy but insistent producers of the Lost universe to watch, listen and record, as we analyze screengrabs, translate obscure Latin phrases, and trace every visual, audio and literary reference back to its origin, as a prelude to very observation and analyses. We may never meet the mysterious “him” that so terrified Mr. Friendly in the Staff station or Faux Henry in the Swan munitions bunker. But we need never worry about “him” if we can internalize his authority – and those of the show’s producers - as our own masters of the Lost Experience.

Namaste.

Amy Bauer

Notes

Ben F. Barton and Marthalee S. Barton. "Modes of Power in Technical and Professional Visuals," (Journal of Broadcast Telecommunications 7.1, 1993, 140-41.) back

Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977, Ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 148. back

David Wood, Surveillance & Society 1 (3) Editorial, 235; [http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/] back

Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan (NY: Vintage Books 1995; © 1977),195. back

Foucault, Discipline & Punish,196ff. back

Foucault, Discipline & Punish,196ff. back

Mark Winokur, “The Ambiguous Panopticon: Foucault and the Codes of Cyberspace,” Ctheory Article 124 (3/13/;2003), [http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=371] back

Lost, ABC, ?, written by Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse, transcript by spooky [http://www.lost-tv.com/transcripts/Question_Mark_Lost.htm] back

Lost, ABC, ?, transcript. back

Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 200ff.back

Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 200ff.back

Geert Lovink, "Civil Society, Fanaticism, and Digital Reality: A Conversation with Slavoj Zizek," Ctheory Article A037 (2-21-1996), [http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=79]back

Winokur.back

Lost, ABC, Two for the Road, written by Elizabeth Sarnoff & Christina M. Kim, transcript by spooky [http://www.lost-tv.com/transcripts/Two_For_The_Road_Lost.htm]back

"You don't need to be one of those hard-core fans who've memorized every episode, [Mike Benson, senior vice president of marketing for ABC Entertainment] said. ‘We wanted to make it so that if you watched 'Lost' from the beginning or if you've never watched the show before you can get into this.’

The game is specifically designed in a manner that is not dependent on information from season one or season two.” ABC Press Release, April 24, 2006 “'Lost' Game Lets Fans Hunt for Clues” [http://www.abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=1881142]back

Respond to this essay

Lost Online Studies 1.2

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 0 replies

fantastic resource for foucaultians...

podp — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 18:15:29 GMT

hello deep tribe thinkers,

http://www.generation-online.org

i discovered this amazing resource as i was researching may 68 and chris marker.
this interview with deleuze - On Control and Becoming -
mentions his work on foucault and is highly illuminating
re: our current social dilemmas:

http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze3.htm

and here's the foucault page:

http://www.generation-online.org/p/pfoucault.htm

btw this is a wiki supported site, so anyone doing some serious work in these fields
can contribute !! read more here:

http://www.generation-online.org/other/discussion.htm

salut!

podp

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 1 reply

Sooo panopticon, the triber edited himself out...hehe.

podp — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 03:48:42 GMT

Greetings Foucault fans,

I was in fact myself interested in this theme of Tribe as
extended or expanded Panop. , so i did a search and found yur tribe...

Of course i knew Foucault would be a likely subject to pop up.
But what was a very nice discovery was that this very question
was brought up so recently , and unfortunately ended in a myserious cul de sac .... hehe...
no no, i have no conspiracy theory about that, but interesting of course...

Howie your response is curious to me for a couple of reasons.
( re: Tribe as Panopticon)

One, in the subject matter of this tribe the internet is omitted as a subject for Foucaultian
investigations. And it seems to me that's where conversation on these themes would get really interesting.

Two, and this is just a spontaneous and subjective take, anyone who does Not edit themselves
in public or a public forum is likely to end up an outcast, dead, in prison, or in an insane asylum... well in the latter case,
since the Reagan era that's not always an option in the US, so let, say homeless. Well, ok there are other scenarios, but i'm going for the hyperboles for the fun of it.

Of course there's any number of people who don't Need to edit themselves, because they have already downloaded a good dose of the social programs and maybe don't get Outside much... ( outside, say as in Andrei Codrescue's "Disappearance of the Outside" ). Or rather, the so-called "unedited subject" is in a bit of ego and id self-suppression and/or has strangely arrived at the conclusion that world is running along just fine, imperilaism, violence, and devastation unchecked et al. And then lets say there's a number of avatars out there doing a dance, i'm sure.

Now with that said, my, there certainly are a lot of wild and uninhibited thoughts streaming thru here... you might say.

Now i'm hardly a well-read Foucaultian, so i have really no idea how his legacy might reflect on these matters...
would love to hear some opinions out there.

But from my own bricolage of philosophical readings , sc-fi, sociological interests, art (brut) worlds, new media explorations, etc... I have come to a wide range of serious questions regarding net behaviours juxtaposed to "the incredibly shrinking realtime" and the ugly denominator of the State.

all for now,
good to see a Foucault tribe in action!
salut!

podp

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 2 replies

foucault and psychoanalysis

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 11:55:40 GMT

i'm reading 'dream, imagination and existence' by foucault and also a couple of other things on foucault....it strikes me that foucault's works are constantly termed as 'anti-psychoanalytic works' and that he himself didn't think much of psychoanalysis. yet, i cannot help but think his thoughts often come very close to psychoanalysis and could even go as far as terming him a object-relations theorist since he writes that the subject only tryly discloses itself by relations with/to others. i'd very much like to talk with someone about this. thoughts?

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 1 reply

heterotopia

cc — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 21:13:00 GMT

can anyone help me understand foucault's notion of the heterotopia...and how it influences/functions (if at all) in identity formation.

i have been reading alot about his ideas of heterotopia and utopia but it's still really unclear to me. i understand how he divides the two but how he sees them effectively functioning is a little vague (and why they emerge).

is academia (ie institional) a heterotopia? is "cyberspace"? can the heterotopic / utopic space be explained (or the explanation augmented by) the Situationist's notion of what constitutes a situation (a la debord, via sartre)?

any discussion would be helpful and appreciated.

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 2 replies

Tribe as Panopticon?

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 06:57:08 GMT

I am not prepared right now to delve right into this, nor do I have the time,
but I am wondering what Foucault would say about digitally-mediated communities like tribe.net.

I got an MA in Digial Media Studies, and I at least touched on Foucault's panopticon. I wrote on how the panopticon can function as a metaphor for digital community and control. I have recently been thinking of such things as the" terms of use" here recently.

I have not read "Discipline and Punish" though I know not to get excited as "The History of Sexuality" was hardly erotic, yet very fascinating and stimulating. I know it is time to renew my personal Foucault fund of knowlege.

There is a link to an old grad school piece on my profile but it gets kind of rhetorically long-winded and could have been tightened up a bit.

I will try to get back in the groove again after I read D+P. I've forgotten how much joy I got from reading the brilliance of this man.

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 1 reply

Need Help on a New Foucault Challenge

TigerBalm — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 16:00:57 GMT

Hi Everyone,
I did something insane Monday...haha.

In short, can someone help me apply Foucault's theories to the following news items?

I tried to somehow include Foucault's theories when I was speaking to the press but coudln't find any application....
perhaps the breakdown of epistemology (art world) as we know it?

i have a few more interviews i'm suppose to respond to.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4712948

http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2005-06-20-monkey-warhol_x.htm?csp=27&RM_Exclude=Juno

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1662527,00.html

yes...i was the stupid American that purchased it.

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 3 replies

What does Foucault mean to you?

Tue, 10 May 2005 15:09:27 GMT

I'm fascinated with epistemology, so, to me, the crux of Foucault's work is in the notion that there is a "politics of truth" (to quote the title of a posthumous collection of Foucault essays)--that what we know is dependent on history and social/cultural forces.

What is his work about to you?

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 5 replies

Evelyn Fox Keller and Foucault's andocentrism

Nick — Tue, 17 May 2005 21:03:30 GMT

Hi all,
I was reading the description of this tribe, and the reference to Foucault's Knowledge/Power caught my eye in relation to a philosopher I'm currently readin named Evelyn Fox Keller. Keller, a feminist primarily, has a theory that she says shows an inherent androcentrism in many of the paradigms that we associate with knowledge and the persuit of it and "truth" (whatever that latter term means). Is anybody familiar with this author? One of her points is that masculinity, as a social construct, is necessarily connected with looking at things in terms of power, heirarcies, and dominance. She argues that comparisons of these natures are insufficient to describe relations between beings. Do you think that Foucault was talking about power in the same way? What about knowledge?

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 5 replies

Thompson

2huhandbacK — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 05:31:01 GMT

Hunter has died.

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 8 replies

???

Unsubscribed — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 04:44:41 GMT

what howard, i had no idea you were interested in such things. let's talk!

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 8 replies

Foucault & high schoolers

TigerBalm — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 12:33:10 GMT

if Foucault were introduced to HighSchoolers

interesting...based on my question of how/when people got introed to Foucault it seems all of us were exposed to him undergrad or grad.

as many of you might feel, his theories are sort of a revelation once u can digest them.

my question is, what would happen if kids were exposed to his stuff at a younger age? would it cause a riot amongst all "screenagers" knowing how oppressed they have been? would it result in an overthrow of the education system as we know it? would they stand up and sing some bad Pink Floyd song?

i almost feel there's a conspiracy that his theories aren't read until college...lolz.

oh, quick side note: i helped my younger cousin write his college application essay last year. he applied to an ivy league school and had above average GPA & SAT but nothing mindblowing..anyways, the point is, i spit out ideas about Foucault, panopticon and how TV/Media/Internet have functioned as modern day "prisons" (something we discussed in a previous tribe posting) as well as this link here: www.surveillance-and-society.org/j...alv1i3.htm

in the end, the dude gets into 2 ivy's liberal arts studies and i'm guessing that damn essay might have somewhat of a difference.

which made me wonder today's subject line...

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 3 replies

derrida.R.I.P.

2huhandbacK — Sat, 09 Oct 2004 20:38:31 GMT

he really was quite charming.
taught at the u of c
has a film on ifc
watch it if you
can. he liked
my book...
only 100
pages.

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 2 replies

tonight europe: foucault documentary

Toni — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 16:20:11 GMT

Sorry I just found this today:
TONIGHT german/french channel
ARTE 23.35-0.40 (CET) "Foucault par lui meme"
focusing on his work, not on his life.

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 2 replies

applications?

Toni — Thu, 27 May 2004 18:58:46 GMT

So there´s not much happening here. Questioning the name of the tribe: Do you really think there are "applications of foucault"? And if so, where/how?
I think you cannot somehow apply foucaults theories and then make a revolution from it or free your self or change the world. You can just study, dig the archives, be aware, think around corners, dig the dirt, and study, study and study. And discuss, of course...

*bing*
round one!

posted in Foucault: his theories and applications - 4 replies