technical images and linear text

“I know I’m lookin’ for something, but I can’t even tell you what it is… I’ve had this feeling for a long time, and, it’s like I’m standing outside myself, watching me do things I don’t want to do. You know? Just seeing me like I’m somebody else, but never ever bein’ able to stop the show. I’m tired.” — Dennis “Cutty” Wise.

It should be pretty obvious to any informed viewer that the Wire is the most Foucauldian show on television. Of course, there are some cheesy reality shows which might enact some of the more paranoid visions inspired by Foucault’s work, but as a drama which undertakes an actual investigation of the problems he considered, especially in Surveiller et punir (S&p for convenience), The Wire makes a fascinating case study.

What exactly does this imply, though?

We can begin anywhere, really, but let’s start from a superficial reading: the wire represents a tremendously panoptic phenomenon. The metaphorical wire of the show’s title refers to phone taps, which are central to the show’s development, and although not particularly ‘optic’ they nevertheless mirror the ‘listening tubes’ of Bentham’s schema. On the whole, the show is a fantastic study in contemporary surveillance techniques and the functioning of the disciplinary apparatus that is the police department (For those unfamiliar, the show, on this same superficial level, is a fairly straightforward ‘police procedural’ show, but with standard HBO depth of character, production values, etc. The actual structure of the show will be examined in more depth as we proceed). The gaze of the Baltimore police department, though falling well short of the ideal implied by the ‘pan‘ of panopticism – and far more complex in its functioning – bears many other interesting similarities to that of the hidden watcher in Bentham’s prison design, and the ethic of ‘enlightenment’ from whence this ‘reformed’ penitentiary model was derived. Equally significant are its divergences from that model: the most obvious being the fact that while the surveillant gaze of the panoptic penitentiary is directed inward, at incarcerated criminals, the surveillance of the police department is directed outward. We can and should draw the standard conclusions here that modern technology has turned the entire society into a sort of panoptic assemblage, with the necessary caveat that, for the time being, the simple quantity of information which can be collected precludes any comprehensive monitoring.

As the show proceeds, however, one’s understanding of the main disciplinary assemblages featured in the show (the police department, the drug gangs and crooked stevedores they surveill and interpellate, the political sphere of Baltimore) grows deeper, in a manner which follows a more nuanced reading of Foucault’s work in Surveiller et punir. Two notes should be made here. Although I’m hesitant to start flipping through the book to recall his exact terminology, I’m fairly sure he would have called the police department and the city government institutions rather then assemblages, and he — as far as I know — never said much of anything about violent drug gangs. Institutions are certainly a form of assemblage, but by referring to them in general as assemblages, we can tie Foucault’s thought on institutions and discipline to Deleuze’s ideas about assemblages, and deLanda’s more recent developments of those ideas. Since I want to stick to Foucault for a moment, suffice to say that an assemblage is, roughly, any grouping of heterogeneous components. These groupings have more interesting properties which should hopefully become clear, but this definition will suffice for now. Second note: we ought to gesture at least briefly to the author’s intent: although we shall certainly depart from it to some extent, this reading is far from incompatible with the vision of the show’s creators. One of the show’s main writers, David Simon (a former police reporter), says that despite the show’s presentation as police procedural, it is “really about the American city, and about how we live together. It’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how… whether you’re a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.” Whether or not Simon knows his social theory, a quote like this shows that he is certainly interested in the same questions as Foucault takes up in S&p.

Simon’s words speak to a deeper reading of Foucault than the previous focus on panopticism. Surveillance is central to The Wire and Foucault alike, but in a sense the English translation of the title as ‘Discipline’ does help to elucidate the original intent of both. The necessary emphasis in the first season on the outward gaze and ’surveillant’ qualitites of the police department gradually gives way to a deeper study of the internal dynamics of the disciplinary institution itself. Every character in the show — except for, on the most part, the drug addicts (but we’ll return to that later) — is part of at least one cohesive institution or assemblage. They are attracted to these institutions for varying reasons, but once they enter, they are taken up by a regime of training and progress which seeks to shape their subjectivity according to the imperatives of the institution. The genius of the show is that it dissects the overwhelming power of the disciplinary institutions without failing to show the equally ‘powerful’ loci of resistance: both in the form of standard human impulses and overt forms of counterpower practised by ‘individuals’ and competing assemblages. Unlike those of the standard police drama, characters in The Wire are rarely motivated by ‘good’ or ‘evil’ impulses. Rather, they are motivated by standard human drives — greed, will-to-power, horniness, laziness, and so on — which are channeled in various ways by disciplined institutions. The young hoodlums enter the drug gangs out of a basic laziness and greed bred and compounded by a general lack of opportunity. The seeming ‘hero’ of the show in its early stages, Detective McNulty, joins the police department out of what appears to be a basic fascination with pursuit and dominance, a will to exert his own ostensibly ’superior’ intellect over the criminal underworld of Baltimore. McNulty is no model police officer, however, and his drives express themselves in constant resistance to the impulses of the institution, echoed by a general self-destructiveness in his love for beer and women. Other police officers — the successful ones — exhibit far greater self-restraint, and indeed ‘compromise’ their own desires far more readily in order to ’succeed’ according to the standards set out by their institution. McNulty is driven by a fantasy of the ideal case, which will somehow ‘prove’ his dominance over the criminal mind; in the process he constantly runs into conflict with those whom he calls ‘the bosses,’ career-focused professionals who are themselves driven by a general desire to uphold the status quo, and thereby rise in the ranks of the department. Foucault discusses at length the essential role of this sort of ranked progress in a military and educational context as a means of ‘administering’ and constructing subjects. The Wire, however, constantly enacts his maxim that ‘Where there is power, there is resistance,’ not only in the dialectical battle of the police and criminal institutions, but in the resistances of individual subjects to the exigencies of their chosen (and less chosen) institutions.

These theoretical questions lead nicely into the question of how Foucault’s concepts might generalize to other forms of assemblage; conveniently, the fourth season of the show, which I am starting into at the moment (much to the woe of my course reading), directly sheds some light on these issues. In this season, the conflict of police and criminal recedes to some extent, although the disciplinary power of the Department continues to unify disparate elements of the plot. The show’s gaze seems to zoom out, focusing less specifically on these two ‘institutions’ and examining more generally the various interconnected assemblages which constitute the city of Baltimore. The seeming difficulty of characterizing drug gangs — assemblages which are, at least towards the bottom levels of their loose hierarchy, quite informal and deterritorialized — as ‘institutions’ makes clear the usefulness of a Deleuzian concept of the ‘assemblage’ (recall: a grouping of heterogeneous components) as a more general way of thinking about institutions. The addicts themselves are the most interesting examples of assemblages, since they are the essential consumers for the capitalist assemblage of the drug trade, but have themselves generally turned away or been driven away from all of the other assemblages in their lives: family, community, the law, etc. (by contrast, Bubs — the show’s main addict character — is always trying to form a kind of substitute assemblage for himself: taking younger addicts under his ‘apprenticeship,’ teaching them the ways of petty theft and con games, and thereby constituting a little two-member ‘community’ of his own). By thinking of the groupings into which individual – or, following one of Deleuze’s more poetic turns of phrase, ‘dividual’ – subjects are gathered as ‘assemblages,’ we can begin to make sense of the various new assemblages which come into view in the fourth season, as well as their many reciprocal and promiscuous interactions. The introduction of a plotline following an even younger generation of children growing up in the extreme poverty of Baltimore’s ‘Western District’ makes an already fascinating drama even more remarkable. As a counterpoint to the relatively well-formed assemblages of organized crime and the police department, we see a loose group of eighth-graders, and we begin to understand some of the dynamic processes at work by which we choose assemblages and make sense of the ones which are in a way ‘pre-chosen.’ These children — even more ‘larval’ than the ‘larval subjects’ which Deleuze argues we all remain — are caught between the conflicting impulses of every assemblage previously featured on the show, and a few new ones. They have to negotiate their identities in the spaces between (generally single, always poor, and often drug-addicted) parents, the underfunded school system, their friends, and the gangs and police at war in their neighbourhoods. Each of these assemblages form ‘attractors’ of sort in a space of interconnected assemblages, with sympathetic and oppositional effects: the children of drug addicts, for instance, are likely to become addicts themselves, while the child of one incarcerated gang member in this season is put out on the street by his mother with a ‘package’ and forced to take up where his father left off. This concept of assemblage makes the process by which poverty and circumstance creates dropouts and criminals painfully clear, without resorting to the standard ‘moral’ arguments of conservatives. For a wealthy child, the sympathetic effects of educated and well-off parents guide children relatively smoothly into the educational assemblage and then on to some sort of productive capitalist assemblage; for the children of impoverished parents who place little to no value on education, and for whom the most prominent productive assemblage in their neighbourhood is the drug trade, the force of that trade as ‘attractor’ can be overwhelming. Conversely, some children are driven by their own internal drives to fight against these sympathetic effects and break off into other ‘basins of attraction:’ either way, they choose certain assemblages for themselves, for whatever reasons, and are then guided down a certain path largely predetermined by the structure of that assemblage.

This analysis is beginning to sprawl to an almost absurd extent. To punctuate this discussion, I shall lay out, as best as I can recall, the general line of reasoning taken, and then in best Deleuzian fashion gesture towards a more productive statement of the underlying Problem at hand. The Wire is such a great show for reasons which extend far beyond the standard critic’s glosses on production values, conventional ’social commentary,’ ‘realism’ and the like: it sets out to undertake a serious critical analysis of the dominant processes by which our modern social life is structured. It plays with many of the same issues laid out in Foucault’s work on institutions, but has developed even further into something which can best be described in Deleuzian terms: as a meditation on the city as social assemblage. The show is incredibly entertaining for a critically-minded viewer, dramatically compelling in itself and for all of the ‘theoretical’ reasons cited. It also gestures beyond itself, however, to a fundamental problematic of the assemblage: The Wire investigates assemblages from the lowest (hierarchically-speaking) and least formal ‘larval’ assemblage of a group of teenage boys, to the high-flown rhetoric and gamesmanship of the city’s political sphere in which city councillor Tommy Carcetti maneuvers his way into the mayoral seat. How are all of these assemblages connected, however; how do they interact with each other and create new emergent assemblages; and indeed, how do these assemblages emerge at a base level from physical and biological assemblages? These problems imply numerous questions for further investigation, and numerous tentative hypotheses. It seems obvious in The Wire that each stratum of assemblage interacts with the assemblages immediately above and below, or those to which they stand in direct opposition; assemblages can also interact, however, in even more complex and nonlinear ways, facilitated by the technological assemblages of communication and transport. Reversing McLuhan’s rudimentary usage of the terms, we might think of human subjects as the extensions of these assemblages, or as assemblages formed in reciprocal interaction with all of these other extensive assemblages. The questions of a theory of assemblages are the essential questions of our time, and perhaps of any time; put differently, the essential questions of our time all fall under the purview of a generalized theory of assemblages. In closing, this Deleuzian hypothesis or problematic as a gesture to the breadth of this fundamental problem: the mind and body are heterogeneous assemblages of human cells, microbes, and microcosmic assemblages of communication and transport; the mind is a virtual assemblage which emerges from the actual assemblage of the body, and which incrementally reconstructs, constructs and is constructed by actual social assemblages in the external world.

Phew. That’s more than enough for now.
Acknowledgements:
Though lacking in direct citations, this piece evidently works from the texts cited in the body, as well as Deleuze’s early philosophical work and expositions of his ideas in deLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy as well as A New Philosophy of Society.