“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.

Allan Sekula proposes that ‘every proper portrait has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the police” (5), and thereby equates the idealistic representational mode of photography with the more repressive. Sekula’s “Body and the Archive” is a particularly provocative piece, insofar as it refuses to consider photographic practices in isolation: police photography and artistic photography are not two discrete modes of expression which coincidentally make use of the same apparatus, but rather, along the lines described by Flusser, the apparatus in effect produces both modalities of its use. “The freedom of the photographer is a programmed freedom;” thus, the program of the camera implies the contemporary artistic and penal programs alike. Following Flusser’s philosophy of photography even further into Sekula’s piece, we might state that the production of the categories of the ‘criminal’ and ‘ethnic’ other were only the beginning. Existence is defined by difference, and thus it would make sense that society should devote itself first to cataloguing its ‘others,’ by way of the photography of the criminal, the ethnic, and those other subaltern groups in opposition to which ‘respectable’ society forms its identity. And yet, with the world of ‘otherness’ thoroughly catalogued, it seems that Western society is now led inexorably on to the cataloguing of itself.

This is perhaps part of Flusser’s objection to amateur photography; the cataloguing of the other is certainly problematic, as Sekula’s piece outlines. This is not a new development, however. As Sekula states, “‘the potential for a new juridical photographic realism was widely recognized in the 1840s, in the general context of systematic efforts to regulate the growing urban presence of the ‘dangerous classes’” (3). The desire to regulate the other has been a human impulse for all of recorded history. It is only with the rise of modernity, however, that the instigators of social regulation realized that regulation could be far more efficiently implemented not through spectacular manifestations of power, but through surveying, cataloguing, and disciplinary institutions, as described by Foucault. The medieval was a time of myths, of symbols, and of men; modernity is a time of maps, of signs, and of subject-positions. This is why Sekula argues that ‘photography is modernity run riot’ (3). Photography is neither cause nor symptom of modernity, but rather the cultural practice which is most symbolic of the character of the modern age.

I am not referring to ’symbolic’ here in the conventional sense, so derided by Walter Benjamin is his ‘Origin of German Tragic Drama,’ by which one calls anything which represents another thing a ’symbol.’ For Benjamin, the ’symbolic’ mode of expression is one in which the ’symbolized’ object is immanent within the symbolic object; this sense of the ’symbolic’ is derived from a theological sense, and thus demands representation immanence along the lines of the immanence of the divine within the profane. Of course, with our growing uncertainty towards the divine, and the notion of divinity in general, this particular form of symbolism is in decline, supplanted by allegory. Allegory, by contrast to the symbolic, is a form of representation signification in which the ’symbolic’ objects only symbolize by way of their position within an ordered construction. As such, this would cover nearly any instance of ’symbolism’ as we moderns tend to use the term, since, lacking a belief in divine immanence, one only has the structure of language to appeal to for representational purposes.

I will return to the concept of the allegorical in a second. First, however, I should like to unpack why I propose, rather anachronistically, that photography is symbolic of modernity, and perhaps in the process make the distinction between these two modes more clear. The camera is a ’symbol’ of modernity in the conventional sense, that is, we can interpret the rise of photography as an allegorical representation for the character of modernity: as a modern technological apparatus, and one whose usage determined much of the character of modernity, photography is an allegory for modernity. However, modernity is also in some sense immanent within the camera. The rise of modernity would not have been what it was without photography, while photography would not have developed as it did in any context but the modern. Photography neither ‘represents’ modernity, nor ‘constitutes’ it, but rather, modernity is immanent to the program of photography, and vice versa.

This symbolic anachronism is paradoxically responsible for turning the world into allegory. When Sekula states that “‘for Bertillon, the criminal body expressed nothing” (28), he is in fact describing the allegorization of the human body. In the classical mode of thought, as evinced by discredited pseudosciences like phrenology, the human body was taken to be symbolic of the human character: one’s character was not determined by the slope of one’s forehead or the bumps on the skull, nor vice versa, but rather the criminal character was taken to be immanent within the cranial geography. With Bertillon’s allegorization of the criminal body, however, the body was no longer a symbol of the character: the character was in no way necessarily ‘present’ in the structure of the body. Rather, the body was merely a sign which, by way of its position within the structure of society and history, could point to any particular character type. No longer was there a general theory of the criminal physiognomy: on the contrary, the key to the criminal psyche took up residence in the particular. The only way to gain control of the criminal element within society was therefore to catalogue its position within the larger structure. Just as a dictionary catalogues the linguistic sign, so did Bertillon’s photography of deviance catalogue the ‘criminal sign,’ that is, the criminal body.

It is impossible, however, to catalogue one pole of an opposition. The attempts of penal reformers like Bertillon or Bentham were ‘flawed’ in that they restricted themselves to the criminal. The problem with this approach is that one can only catalogue deviance by simultaneously cataloguing that which is deviated from. In Sekula’s terms, “”for Bertillon, the mastery of the criminal body necessitated a massive campaign of inscription, a transformation of the body’s signs into a text” (31): note that the mastery of the criminal body necessitates a transformation of the body’s signs. In order to catalogue criminality, one must catalogue corporeality in general.

And thus, in perhaps the most telling proof of Foucault’s theories with regard to the ‘internalized gaze,’ we see in modernity a simultaneous explosion of photography for artistic and disciplinary purposes. As Sekula argues, photography constitutes “a system of representation capable of functioning both honorifically and repressively” (4); few other cultural phenomena fit this description. One does not go to a prison for recreation, or create art with an MRI machine: why, then, do we catalogue ourselves for fun? It seems this must necessarily be a consequence of the allegorization of the body. The categories which we create for the Other have a tendency of reproducing themselves in unwanted contexts: if the criminal body could no longer be symbolic of ‘evil,’ no longer could the law-abiding body be symbolic of ‘good.’ Allegory gives us a way to make sense of the world without recourse to divine organizing principles: we can interpret the allegory according to the laws of its own structure, rather than any externally-imposed order, and thus the objects within the allegorical constellation are elevated. The signification of the allegorical object lends it a certain secular sanctity, as in the “look up at one’s betters” Sekula describes (8); it also implicitly devalues the individual object, since it only signifies with reference to a larger whole. And thus we have the obsessive impulse towards systematization, cataloguing, categorizing. The only means by which the allegorical body can interpret itself is for it to perceive the structure of which it forms a part, and thus it travels around ripping fragments from reality to perceive the construction of the whole. The ‘public looks’ (Sekula of the photographic serve to situate our own subjectivity with regard to the subjectivity of others: we interpret our positions within the public sphere by determining who we stand above, and who stands above us. By cataloguing our reality with photographs, we can create for ourselves a hierarchy from these panoptic fragments, and thereby seize some provisional meaning from the absurd system that is the modern world.

 

“The reality shows are only side-effects, and moreover mystifying, because in indicting them as manipulation, the critics assume that there is somewhere an original form of life … This criticism is over, as is every Situationist criticism of the ’spectacle’ and the concept of ’spectacle,’ as also in substance all criticism of ‘alienation.’ Unfortunately, I would add. Because the human abstraction of the spectacle was never hopeless; it always offered the chance of disalienation. Whereas the operation of the world in real time, its unconditional realisation, is really without alternative. Radicality has changed, and all negative criticism, surviving itself, actually helps its object to survive.” – Baudrillard, “Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality”

1. Of the spectacular society, and why it demands our disobedience. 

Debord and the Situationists have revealed for us the spectacular society’s true character. The years have not dated their description of the spectacular society, but rather, society has grown into its description with the continued refinement of capitalism and its accessories. In the 21st century, far more than in the twentieth, ‘everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.’ No longer is there a ‘real’ life against which we can determine the nature of the ’spectacle.’ Representationalism is a basic human conceit, and yet the society of the spectacle exaggerates the primacy of representation to the point that it becomes absurd, it supplants the real. The map of mass culture no longer refers to, nor covers the territory, but rather it is the territory which lies in rotting tatters scattered across the map. All that once existed as free and fluid human creativity is undergoing a condensatory congealing into its inferior commodity forms. Commodity fetishism — the domination of human relations by the relations between things — ‘reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.’

The society of the spectacle demands our disobedience because it assumes our obedience as given. The spectacle in-itself ’says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears.” In a society beholden to the spectacle, to be other than a spectator is to be deviant, to subject oneself to reproach, punishment, retribution. Why should we take issue with a society that makes us all into spectators? Because when the only ability is to spectate, the act of creation fades off into the mists of the memory. To be human is to create; thus to spectate is to be inhuman. The attitude demanded by the spectacle ‘in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.’ To rage against the spectacle is to be human, to affirm one’s humanity in the face of its constant televised refutation.

2. Of situationism and the worker: preposterous pandering to a past proletariat.

Even as the Situationists recognized the cultivation of proletarian idiocy on the part of the spectacular, they remained blinded by dogma. The spectacular breeds passivity, and the countless screens of spectacular capital are at the ready to drown out the pitiful yelps of theoretical solipsism. Why, then, are these students and intellectuals so caught up in the ‘emancipation of the proletariat?’ The spectacle has already ensured that the proletariat have no interest in their own emancipation, nor at they aware that they need to be emancipated (or that they are proletarian). Debord and his contemporaries called for revolution — a fine and noble goal, to be sure. But every revolution is but a rotation. How could the Situationists deluded themselves into hoping for revolutionary change, when such change could only but be built on the mass mobilization of the spectacle’s dupes? Indeed, how could such a mobilization ever take place but by the deployment of the spectacular? The backwardness and self-contradictory nature of the Situationists’ Marxism is clear: the worker is the slave of the spectacle, therefore to mobilize the workers one must speak the language of the spectacular, and yet the spectacle is inherently an incitement to passivity.

A postmodern situationism takes the Society of the Spectacle as its point of departure, and necessarily (but reluctantly) leaves the proletariat behind. We have no interest in inciting revolution, nor in pandering to a proletariat that has long ago been induced to no longer identify itself as such. 21st-century workers have all but lost interest in the patently conventional ‘workers’ union,’ much less in violent struggle against some supposed capitalist oppressors who provide them with all they (believe themselves to) need. This is not to say that we have forgotten the worker, but merely that we have accustomed ourselves to the worker’s having forgotten us. Nor do we lay the blame upon the shoulders of the worker! Being continuously admonished in the workplace, the last thing we might expect the worker to respond to would be further admonishments to revolution in the leisure-place. Such incitement might seems noble to the naïf bourgeois, but to the ‘real’ worker (such that this hypothetical construct even can be said to exist) the revolutionary is merely a new boss, and one who pays poorly at that. A postmodern situationism must forget its ‘negative criticism’ and seek its own positive jouissance before it can hope for acceptance.

3. Of the revolution, and its infinite postponement.

The revolution is at once impossible, inevitable, and irrelevant. It is impossible in that we will never be able to incite its occurrence; it will begin when it begins, and it will end when it ends, and that will be that. It is inevitable because we can be sure that it will begin, even if we might not be sure of when or what form it might take. And it is irrelevant, in that a full revolution always returns from whence it came: ‘the vision comes to life in the moment of uprising – but as soon as ‘the Revolution’ triumphs and the State returns, the dream and the ideal are already betrayed.’ Revolution, when it does come, will as likely as not speak the language of the spectacle, and it will replace one set of spectacles with another. Of this we cannot be a priori certain, but only ex posteriori vindicated. It is not our concern to incite yet another rebellion which will more deeply enshrine the dominance of the spectacular, but to reshape our relation to the spectacular so that if and when the revolt does arise, it will be a productive one. As Vaneigem tells us, ‘Hierarchical power, which has been with us for millennia, furnishes a perfectly adequate explanation for the permanence of rebellion, as it does of the repression that smashes rebellion.’ In order to reshape this repressive interaction, we must remake our idea of revolution.

Our postmodern situationism abandons not the ‘hope-for’ a social revolution, but the ‘attempt-at.’ We seek no abstract revolution, but rather to enshrine rebellion as an essential social value. Why have we abandoned revolutionary ideology? The western Marxist has been repeatedly confronted with the paradoxes of proletarian revolution. Where its seeds have taken root, true revolution has necessarily been thwarted by those states and traitorous ‘leftist’ organizations still deeply invested in capitalist oppression. And where ‘socialism‘ has truly flourished, we have seen the development, not a workers’ free states, but quasi-fascist oligarchies, socialist in name alone. Since roughly Gorky, even the most dogmatic of intellectual Marxists have affirmed by their patterns of residency that they would much prefer the bourgeois legality of a comfortable democratic-capitalist state to a repression which masquerades as proletarian. And yet many of these same intellectuals go on proclaiming the ideals of revolution, as though this proclaiming in-itself was somehow sufficient to bring about a true Marxist revolution. Only a fool blinded by spectacular society could hope to enshrine Marxism through the force of idealism, of all things! Today, the revolutionary is even less likely to succeed: watched, heard, and scrutinized by an assemblage of hidden cameras and microphones, the overt revolutionary has only the repressive state apparatus itself as audience.

4. Absurd responses to an absurd society: Dérive, détournement, déconstruction.

Vaneigem tells us also that ‘anything that does not kill power reinforces it, but anything which power does not itself kill weakens power.’ All of this development leads to a central concern: what is the radical alternative to revolution?  The spectacular society is necessarily an absurd one; it accepts no logic not of its own. We live in ‘a topsy turvy world where people do the opposite of what they wish, pass the time away in self-destruction and venerate that which destroys them, obedient to abstractions and sacrificing their real lives to those abstractions.’ Marxism in a spectacular society is no different. Revolutionaries agitate when they would rather be playing, sleeping, making love. They venerate their ridiculous idols in the fetishized author-personae of Marx, Trotsky and Mao. They are obedient to the abstraction of Marxist dogma, and their lives are certainly sacrificed to that abstraction. Leaving dogma behind, we have constructed against this pattern our irrevolutionary response to a society that refuses to recognize the possibility of revolution.

We refuse to enslave ourselves to unfree labour of any sort which does not beget immediate, tangible, and comprehensible benefits to ourselves; where we are compelled to labour within the theft-structure of capitalism, we will replace our surplus labour with our own play. We will appropriate the technologies of capital to suit our own ends: in an originary coup, this manifesto was covertly written in a workplace for pay. (The ideal act of disobedience is performed on company time!) In short, we accept capitalism as fundamentally enshrined in the Western ego, and yet we refuse to obey the structures which capital provides for our work and for our leisure.

Through situationist détournement, we reappropriate the undifferentiated mass of cultural commodities to suit our own ends. We wish to express ourselves with pastiche, reinterpretation, parody, and satire; nevertheless, this postmodern collage, ‘far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original.’ Indeed, we wish to recognize the fact that the spectacle has become the simulacrum: the question of ’the original’ has become irrelevant. Nor do we consider détournement as a hermeneutically-sealed, artistic project. Indeed, we refuse to recognize these bourgeois distinctions between art and labour, between labour and leisure; our labours are both art and leisure. Nothing could be more anathema to our art than a gallery! This institution of the oppressor cannot be tolerated: our gallery is the street and the sidewalk, our canvas, the high-rise and the highway! If art does not provoke a repressive response from the institutions of capital, then it is little more than a dessicated husk, a throwback to a previous order of simulacra.

The dérive is an implicit refusal to accept the categories of spatiality imposed by capital. Our geography is to be a dipole interaction between our psyches and our lived environment; we refuse to allow this intimate psychogeographical awareness to be mediated by consumerism, or by the structures of industrialism and commercialism. We will treat the shopping mall as a park, the industrial plaza as a shopping mall, and the park as a canvas. Through psychogeography, we will uncover and transgress those hidden, soft boundaries of urban existence and break free of the tyranny of a corporate-administered habitus: “We must replace travel as an adjunct to work with travel as a pleasure.” Instead of travelling in the traces of capital, we wish to forge through its ‘extended and indistinct bordering regions’ and recover the geography that is rightfully public.

In both of these (and other) relations to capitalism, there is an implicit deconstruction of its dictates. We strive to carry this deconstructive spirit with us always; this is the essence of the irrevolutionary struggle! Culture is a socially-made and individually-performed decision. Capitalism persists by the individual free choices of an mass citizenry unfree in its ideology; in the face of this, we wish always to reaffirm the freeness of our choices. This is the paradoxical revolution at the core of our irrevolutionary manifesto. By never accepting the dictates of a capitalist culture as given, and by questioning always the hidden assumptions of an oppressive economic régime, we hope to institute a new paradigm in the citizen’s relation to capital. As deconstruction speaks from within the text to uncover its inherent contradictions and excluded conclusions, we speak from within a spectacular society to unearth its contradictions: its basic unreality and its hegemonic function.

5. The revolution of everyday play.

There is, deftly concealed in our ‘irrevolutionary’ manifesto, a revolution (or perhaps we had better say, a ‘rebellion’ or ‘revolt’). Baudrillard and others have demonstrated the incoherence of supposing to criticise the society of the spectacle from some privileged position outside its symbolic order. The futility of negative criticism against the spectacle, however, requires us to make some positive contribution to our lived experience of the spectacle. Our sanity demands it! We cannot incite revolution against the spectacular, but must first radically reshape our relation to the spectacle. By adopting our deconstructive stance toward the spectacle, one takes the first step in performing the long-awaited revolution.

Marxist theory after Marx has often reified capitalism to an unfortunate extent. Capitalism is portrayed by Marxists and capitalists alike as monolithic, powerful, and external to society (for it is in the interests of both to do so). “Capitalism” has dictates, and “society” has to accept them! This is a portrayal that suits the purposes of those who would maintain or undermine capitalism, but which has precious little correspondence to our lived reality. Indeed, it is this very myth which allows capitalism to persist. By avoiding it, we hope to avoid complicity in the continued dominance of a regressive economic system. The truth is: capitalism is chosen by you! Like any social structure, it exists, develops, changes, and (or!) persists on the basis of choices made by the individuals who find themselves in that structure. If we persist in obeying the dictates of the structure, then we are in effect ensuring its continued dominance. But what if we don’t? This is the proof that capitalism is up to us.

What if, like me, you go to work and write a manifesto for six hours? What if, far from contributing to the surplus labour pool of your employer, you fail to perform even that labour which is ostensibly ‘necessary’? Does that not undermine the basic principle of capitalism from within? And what if your overseers have no way of knowing that this fundamental tenet of oppression is being quietly phased-out? What if you sell a product to a customer for its use-value, or steal something and give it away? What if you cease to regard the dictates of capitalism as natural, or given, but you begin to question their basic premises and find them to be nonexistent?

Apart from the obvious — that you are reaffirming your fundamental human freedom and revelling in an oppressive regime’s deserved disobedience – you are also starting the rebellion. The radical nature of our irrevolutionary manifesto is thus: capitalism has colonized your life-space, stolen your labour and humanity, and removed any possibility of meaningful change within its structures . . . so you are to take it for all it’s got! Study its repressive mechanisms, its disciplinary apparatus, its cameras and its gatekeepers, and take advantage them all! Concern yourself with its asymmetries and its blind spots! Play with capitalism, and teach others to share in your playfulness. This is how the revolution will take place — not through the obscure jottings of a flaccid intelligentsia, but through the decisive example of those who refuse to accept repression as a given!    

6. Indebtedness.

Although a neo-situationist manifesto needs no repressive citation-apparatus to justify its intellectual pastiche, we recognize in this manifesto a debt to Guy-Ernest Debord, of course, as well as Raoul Vaneigem, Jean Baudrillard, Hakim Bey, and the students of U.N.E.F. Strasbourg, 1968, amongst many others. This manifesto was produced while its author was being compensated by one Sykes Canada Corporation for services-not-rendered. The radical tendencies outlined in this manifesto are not our invention, nor even particularly original. Rather they constitute an uncanny manifestation of an attitude toward the spectacle that is already long familiar to anyone who lives and works as a subject of the spectacular. Consider it a positive formulation of ironic detachment and postmodern sarcasm.

7. Onward!

You’re not still reading, are you?

This is a text to be performed, not contemplated.

“…we might now contemplate aesthetic actions which possess some of the resonance of terrorism (or “cruelty,” as Artaud put it) aimed at the destruction of abstractions rather than people, at liberation rather than power, pleasure rather than profit, joy rather than fear. ‘Poetic Terrorism.’ Our chosen images have the potency of darkness–but all images are masks, and behind these masks lie energies we can turn toward light and pleasure.” - Hakim Bey 

Modern society, particularly modern American society, is endlessly patting itself on the back. It thinks of itself as a spectacular society, a fantastic society which is more or less the most fantastic place which there is or ever has been on Earth to make one’s home. These things are partly true. What does it mean, though, that these are the adjectives which we employ to denote ‘goodness’? Why is it that we consider ’spectacular’ and ‘fantastic’ to be synonymous with “good,” indeed, to be the superlative forms of ‘goodness’? Is it not the case that they mean simply, “in the manner of a spectacle” or a “fantasy”, respectively? Indeed, this is the case — and this is why we believe these terms to denote positive attributes. In a society enthralled by an endless parade of spectacles, to be considered spectacular, is the highest of compliments. As Guy Debord writes:

“The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears.’ The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance, which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance” (12).

I have always been intrigued by Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, in that it seems to present a somewhat oppositional reading of history to that undertaken by Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas, two of the most prominent figures in critical theory. Both Foucault and Habermas propose that in preindustrial societies, power was primarily deployed through spectacular imagery: torture, public executions, shamings, and the cultivation of an image of monarchic omnipotence. In industrial societies, however, they propose that societies are governed by different principles: in Habermas’ case, the public sphere, and in Foucault’s case, the institutions of social discipline. And yet Debord is arguing — quite persuasively, I think — that in contemporary society, “all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles” (1). I find all three thinkers to be quite convincing, and yet, it is quite difficult to figure out how these divergent accounts can best be reconciled. It is for this that I appreciated Peter Weibel’s article, “Pleasure and the Panoptic principle.” Other theorists read thus far in this course have generally presupposed that the objects of surveillance are in a more-or-less adversarial (or at the very least, indifferent) relationship to those who are conducting the surveillance. Weibel, however, looks at surveillance with an eye to uncovering the voyeuristic, scopophilic tendencies which quickly become apparent when considering visual culture and surveillance.

He writes that, “as Foucault has already revealed, behind the mechanisms of surveillance lie the mechanisms of power, which are likewise supported by libidinal mechanisms. These power mechanisms are formed from psychological mechanisms” (208). It would be a mistake to construct surveillance as a force of social control imposed on humanity by a nameless, faceless bureaucracy; surveillance does not form in a vacuum, but rather is the product of certain specific psychological mechanisms in the human consciousness. The Panopticon, and by association surveillance in general, are the product of a human assumption that visibility deters delinquency. The mechanisms of power are less ‘behind’ the mechanisms of surveillance in contemporary society than they are one and the same. To be seen is to be the object of power, for the gaze always holds some authority. This is the significance of Weibel’s discussion of luggage-screening and passenger checking procedures at airports (208). By subjecting oneself and one’s belongings to the gaze, one is thereby subjected to the discipline of the airport authorities. Passengers and their luggage pass “through zones of visibility” (Weibel 208) which in themselves constitute the disciplinary authority of the airport security.

And yet the disciplinary elements of ’seeing’ are indissociable from its scopophilic elements, just as the imposed elements of being-seen are indissociable from its exhbitionist elements. Recall, for example, in the “Working Rules” text, where it is noted that male operators tend to look at women through CCTV overwhelmingly for voyeuristic rather than disciplinary reasons. Conversely, consider a phenomenon like American Idol, in which contestants offer themselves up ostensibly for ‘judging,’ but more importantly for ’seeing.’ Indeed, is ’seeing’ not in itself a type of ‘judging’? Weibel writes that, “since desires cannot be satisfied by reality, they are satisfied through images that function like hallucinations. The result is post-real satisfaction. The images of the mass media show the social unconscious, the repressed collective desires and fears” (210).

Weibel’s article does well to consider the ‘reality-tv’ phenomenon. Most of the theorists studied thus far have considered pop-cultural conceptions of surveillance society primarily in their dystopic forms, as assorted riffs on the theme of 1984. However, with the rise of ‘reality’ television, Orwell’s “Big Brother” is reappropriated by the culture industry (without a trace of irony) as the moniker for a television show, the ‘hook’ of which is the scopophilic pleasure one finds in watching surveillance footage of the young and beautiful. As we can see by the contemporary youthful obsession for constructing online video archives via MySpace, YouTube and the like, surveillance has passed from the realm of ‘frightening spectre’ to that of ‘pleasant recreation.’ Webel calls this “the panoptic principle turned into the pleasure principle” (218).

The central lesson of Weibel’s article is that surveillance and exhibitionism are intrinsic to our visually-focused culture. We live in a society of ‘the gaze;’ except, where Sartre could once write that “my fundamental connection with the Other-as-subject must be able to be referred back to the permanent possibility of being seen by the Other” (306), now we are presented with a plethora of scenes in which we can see without being-seen. This, I think, is the ultimate source of scopophilic pleasure: as voyeurs, we see, without being seen. The result of this peculiar uneven visibility is that we see ourselves in relation to others in a fashion reminiscent of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. The voyeuristic subject — the master — need never acknowledge the subjectivity of the object being-seen, for the object cannot perceive the subject who gazes upon them. In short, if it is true that “my apprehension of the Other in the world as probably being a man refers to my permanent possibility of being-seen-by-him” (Sartre 306), then if we cannot be-seen by the Other, then we need not acknowledge the Other as a subject.

And yet, new forms of discipline beget new forms of resistance. Bentham’s panopticon, and the concept of surveillance which it spawned, was predicated on the Enlightenment idea that total visibility accomplished through the illumination of dark spaces (en-lighten-ment) would deter all forms of delinquency. The Enlightenment mind could not, however, grasp the concept of a delinquency which occurs because of and through visibility. This delinquency is terrorism, in the broadest sense: this being the reasoning behind the assertions of Baudrillard and other theorists that contemporary terrorism constitutes some sort of rebuttal to the Enlightenment in general. Terrorism in fact exists because of visibility; it confronts surveillance with the ultimate dilemma. How does one use visibility to deter a violent crime which is done “for the cameras”? The World Trade Center was not a ’strategic’ target in the conventional sense – the actual damage done to the United States by the events of 9/11 is practically negligible. The symbolic damage done to the United States by the photos of 9/11, however, is irreparable. As Weibel observes, “terrorists, who understand the logic of this world, don’t seek out the dark; they seek the light” (214). Why else does a terrorist group inevitably ‘claim responsibility’? Terrorism without visibility is merely absurd violence; it is because an act is seen, and its image reproduced, that it becomes capable of breeding terror.

Works Cited

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Available on-line.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. Washington: Washington Square Press, 1992.

Weibel, Peter. “Pleasure and the Panoptic Principle.” In CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance. 206-223.

]]> http://supplem.net/2006/10/of-a-spectacular-society-surveillance-exhibitionism-and-scopophilia/feed/ 0 http://supplem.net/2006/10/of-control-spectacular-disciplinary-and-panoptic/ http://supplem.net/2006/10/of-control-spectacular-disciplinary-and-panoptic/#comments Thu, 05 Oct 2006 00:12:34 +0000 ali http://supplem.net/blog/?p=6

Deleuze’s ‘postscript’ raises some interesting questions about the contemporary validity of the kind of disciplinary, panoptic model of social control outlined in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Deleuze posits that these kinds of disciplinary societies, having succeeded the ‘societies of sovereignty’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are now undergoing a transformation into what he calls ‘societies of control’ (3). The substance of this claim is not immediately obvious. If anything, contemporary society in the West seems less overtly ‘controlled’ than in previous centuries. Sovereignty and discipline are quite clearly different, to be sure; their respective ends, to “tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life” (3) are quite clearly distinguishable. Deleuze’s ‘society of control,’ however, seems less distinct from its predecessor. Both theoretical forms of society involve the interaction of a series of disciplinary institutions, both state and non-state, observing and cataloguing individual behaviour for the purposes of social administration.

And yet, in examining Deleuze’s argument and Haggerty & Ericson’s piece, the salient points of this distinction become more clear. In a disciplinary society, the institutions of discipline operate along a distinct linear timeline, in a concrete and sequential fashion, and according to their own unique — but generally consistent — logics. In the factory, for example, “individuals are constituted 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” (Deleuze 5). Discipline, in the form of managerial supervision, is in this case explicitly deployed to construct a population of useful bodies for the purposes of material production.

With rapid cultural and technological change following the Second World War, however, the institutions of social control have become more decentred and heterogeneous, even as the processes of control have become more tightly integrated. As Haggerty and Ericson note, some theorists have tried to extend Foucault’s concepts of panopticism and disciplinary society, perhaps ‘beyond recognition,’ to account for these changes (607). Deleuze, however, draws from a completely different set of concepts to account for the different objectives for (and practices of) contemporary social control. Social control in modern societies, on his interpretation, is accomplished by a ‘surveillant assemblage,’ consisting of a multiplicity of loosely affiliated observers.

By virtue of electronic communication, however, these ‘loosely affiliated’ observers are in fact more closely tied to each other than the institutions of disciplinary society. Where once institutions were insulated from each other to some extent by physical barriers, now the knowledge contained within formerly discrete institutions is digitized and interoperable. Even the term ‘institution’ itself becomes questionable, as surveillance increasingly becomes the province of small businesses and individuals.

The shift from state-run to corporate-run surveillance is also indicative of a shift in the emphasis of surveillance itself. The Panopticon was designed to ensure compliance with certain specific disciplinary norms. Its intent was to ensure that the prisoner caused no disturbances to safety or to public morality; as long as these conditions were satisfied, the observer had no real cause to enquire as to how each prisoner’s time was occupied. The surveillant assemblage’s purpose is more or less the opposite. Being businesses, the vast majority of observers within the assemblage care little about one’s compliance with societal norms, except insofar as such compliance may affect profitability. The Nielsen rating system doesn’t prevent the viewer from watching shows it deems inappropriate, nor do the cameras in a shopping centre try to direct shoppers to specific stores. Indeed, except in cases of shoplifting and/or other egregious lawbreaking, the surveillant assemblage very rarely intervenes explicitly in the lives of those it surveills. Instead, surveillance data is compiled into an archive of one’s transactions for use in directed marketing and enhancements in productivity and profitability.

Thus, it seems perhaps that Deleuze was mistaken to call the society of the surveillant assemblage a ‘society of control’ in his ‘postscript.’ Yet, when we consider further the object of the surveillant assemblage, the nature of the ‘control’ inherent to such a society becomes more evident. Under such a society, as Deleuze states, “the operation of markets is now the instrument of social control … control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit” (6). Control in such a society is not accomplished by controlling the desire of the subject. Instead, it is effected by ensuring that a product is available to satisfy any desire the subject may have, and that desires which cannot be satisfied through consumption are commensurately devalorized. This form of control may lack the ‘long duration’ of disciplinary forms of control, but it is ‘without limit’ in the sense that it does not grant the observed any real sphere of self-determination. While the prisoner of the Panopticon was free to act however they chose in a disciplined manner, the observed subjects in contemporary society are administered and guided in every aspect of their conduct.

The weaknesses in Deleuze’s ‘postscript’ are those found in the majority of his work: he frequently puts more emphasis on rhetorical effect than basic logic, and in the process is often too ready to make sweeping generalizations based on limited evidence. His claim that, today, “the corporation has replaced the factory” (4), is one particularly notable instance. Corporations can in no sense ‘replace’ factories; in the history of institutions, corporations developed right alongside factories, and indeed, factories are an essential part of corporations and their activities. In a broader sense, as well, one might dispute the idea that ‘societies of control’ have wholly supplanted the disciplinary societies. Though society has indeed greatly changed since the development of the disciplinary society, the sheer prominence of the basic disciplinary institutions (the school, the church, the armed forces) in contemporary society should constitute evidence enough that Foucault’s model is not completely outdated.

Nevertheless, Deleuze’s analysis of the inherent differences between contemporary societies of control and the disciplinary societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a particularly useful one. Foucault’s insights in Discipline and Punish remain profound, but Haggerty and Ericson rightly note that he “fails to directly engage contemporary developments in surveillance technology” (607). Electronic communications and the characteristics of modern capitalism have greatly changed the mechanisms of social control and the ends to which they are applied. Though the institutions of disciplinary society still play a prominent role in social structures, Deleuze’s concepts of the surveillant assemblage and the society of control provide us with a useful model for social administration in the postmodern era.

Works Cited

Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”

Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, “The surveillant assemblage”