Topic 2

Foucault
Main purposes of this lecture:
To introduce you to Michel Foucault, whose
theories of history make him one of the principal
models for visual studies

To consider Foucault’s theory of the panopticon,

arguably the most influential concept for visual
arts

To introduce you to Guy Debord, a political

theorist influential on a range of writers
concerned with current forms of capitalism

To consider Debord’s theory of the spectacle, his

central concept

Note: this material was originally posted on www.jameselkins.com, under “Syllabi.” Send all comments to jelkins@artic.edu
Note: we use different translations and sources from
year to year in this class.Your text might not have quite
the same numbering, wording, etc. as what is cited
here.
Foucault’s panopticon: principal concepts

Panopticon
Jeremy Bentham
panopticism
discipline-blockade
discipline-mechanism
Two kinds of “discipline”* before the Panopticon model: discipline-mechanism,
discipline-blockade (¶ 23, beginning “There are two images, then, of discipline...”).

1. Characteristics of the discipline-mechanism (used, according to Foucault’s

source, during outbreaks of the plague).

- Space is “enclosed and segmented” (¶ 6, beginning “This enclosed...”)

- An “uninterrupted work of writing [reports] links the center and
periphery” (¶ 6).
- “[e]ach individual is constantly located” (¶ 6).

2. Characteristics of the discipline-blockade (used, according to Foucault’s

source, during outbreaks of leprosy).

- The “massive, binary division” between lepers and non-lepers (¶ 7,

beginning “If it is true that the leper...”).
- “Separation” rather than “segmentation” (¶ 7).

* Discipline is “a type of power,” not an institution; see ¶ after the three numbered
¶¶, beginning “‘Discipline’ may be identified neither...”
In the 19th c., all kinds of people excluded from society
were treated in the way that people had treated plague
victims:
- “the excluded” were individualized (¶ 8, beginning “They are different
projects...”).
- “individualization [was used] to mark exclusion” (¶ 8).

On the other hand, 19th c. institutions also treated

people like lepers:

- There was a “binary division and branding” into “mad/sane, dangerous/

harmless, normal/abnormal.”
- This was superimposed on the discipline-mechanism.

Examples of 19th c. (and 20th c.) institutions that operate this way:
- psychiatric asylum
- penitentiary
- reformatory
- “approved school” (? ¶ 8 -- same as the “Christian school” in the
paragraph Foucault numbers 2?)
- hospital (¶ 8)
- factories (”to supervise workers”; ¶ 17)
The new Panopticon model, combining both kinds of discipline, was a
symptom of more profound processes: (numbered ¶¶, after ¶ 23):

1. “The functional inversion of the disciplines”: that they were

now used to increase productivity, not merely to safeguard or
punish

2. “The swarming of disciplinary mechanisms.” (This is “swarming”

as in bee behavior, when the queen leaves the nest.) The
institutions go out into society.

3. “The state-control of the mechanisms of discipline.”

Note, for the Debord reading, how Foucault defines “society of the
spectacle” (from the ¶ about 3/4 through the document, which begins
“A few years after Bentham...”

Antiquity had been a civilization of spectacle. “To render accessible to

a multitude of men the inspection of a small number of objects”: this
was the problem to which the architecture of temples, theatres and
circuses responded. With spectacle, there was a predominance of
public life, the intensity of festivals, sensual proximity. In these rituals in
which blood flowed, society found new vigour and formed for a
moment a single great body.
The modern age poses the opposite problem: “To procure for a small
number, or even for a single individual, the instantaneous view of a
great multitude.” In a society in which the principal elements are no
longer the community and public life, but, on the one hand, private
individuals and, on the other, the state, relations can be regulated only
in a form that is the exact reverse of the spectacle: “It was to the
modern age, to the ever-growing influence of the state, to its ever
more profound intervention in all the details and all the relations of
social life, that was reserved the task of increasing and perfecting its
guarantees, by using and directing towards that great aim the building
and distribution of buildings intended to observe a great multitude of
men at the same time.”
 Surveillance sites and services

The next pages are examples of surveillance, from the

2004 class.

Questions in regard to these:

1. How well does Foucault apply?

2. Which elements of life are under surveillance? Which

aren’t?
 1. Spyware (computer surveillance)
www.readnotify.com
A site that allows emails to be traced, recipients to be located
geographically, and data to be obtained about the length of time the emails
were read, etc.
Visual Route 8 from Visualware
Software that allows graphical packet tracing: it shows the routes that
emails and URL requests travel across the world, and the names of each
server they pass through.
http://www.win-spy.com/?hop=allthebest
For spying on a co-worker’s computer. (found by Brendan Flanagan)
 2. Government surveillance

http://fly.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html
A report on the National Security Agency’s “ESCHELON” program, an
international surveillance program for monitoring phone conversations.
(found by Claire)
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/
Online journal, Surveillance and Society. (found by Claire)
 3. Satellite mapping
http://www.keyhole.com
An application that gives access to terabytes of satellite data, to zoom in on
different parts of the globe. (found by Autumn Ramsey)
http://www.landvoyage.com/
Another. (found by Rachel Klingoffer)
 4. Miscellaneous, parodic, goofy

http://www.fas.org/ahead/
Infectious animal and zoonotic disease surveillance. (found by Claire, who
has a suspicious ability to find sites that increase paranoia)

http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/users/bsy/coke.html
List of internet-accessible Coke machines. (suggested by George Sartiano)

http://www.caller2.com/multimedia/cams/ghostcam/main.html#
The Lexington Ghost Cam, monitoring the ship that is supposedly haunted.
(found by Margaret Burns)
http://www.123cam.com/online.htm
A business that sells access to a large selection of webcams. (found by
Dionne)
 4. Miscellaneous, parodic, goofy, continued

http://www.vivalasvegasweddings.com/livevideofeed.htm
Las Vegas wedding chapel webcam. (found by Jean Potter)
 5. Home and business security
http://www.icepick.com/
A service that allows you to track the number of times your toilet has been
flushed, your icebox opened, your garage door opened... (found by Zoe
Weisman).
http://www.safetynow.com/spycam.htm
Nanny cams, security cams. (found by Rachel Klingoffer)

http://www.spylife.com/
Spying equipment for sale. (found by Maria Merchenkova)
 6. Surveillance of the government
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html
NASA TV, allowing viewers to watch “agency activities.” (found by Rachel
Klingoffer)

http://www.appliedautonomy.com/isee.html
The Institute of Applied Autonomy, allowing users to avoid police webcams.
(found by Tim Ivison, and thanks for the song)
 7. Self-surveillance (?)

http://www.igs.net/~spykitten/livecam.html
Canadian girl who has installed a webcam in her house.
 8. “Surveillance” as advertising

http://www.poppies.net/cam/restcam.html
Restaurant in Bali with a webcam. (found by Nicolette Maniaci)
 9. Surveillance of landscapes, inanimate
objects...

http://dsc.discovery.com/cams/cams.html
Discovery Channel webcams: video of volcanoes, penguins, etc. (found by
Dionne)

http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/southpolediaries/webcam.html
University of New South Wales’s South Pole webcam

http://www.buckeyetraffic.org/webcams/nosvg/
Webcams of highways in Ohio. (found by Phia)
 10. Surveillance of media (?)

http://www.gomobilebroadband.com/systems.html
Selling mobile dishes for broadband satellite access. (found by Melea)

--
--
 11. Private investigation

http://find-someone.com/nd/ga.asp
Net Detective, a PI service that tells you if a person is marrried, where they
live, if they have a mortgage, if they’ve adopted, if the FBI has a file on them...
(found by Rachel Klingoffer)
http://www.listguy.com/netspy.html
Another one, which is geared to business that need to create mailing lists.

http://www.efindoutthetruth.com/due_diligence.htm
FindOutTheTruth.com. (found by Brendan Flanagan)
Debord: principal concepts

society of the spectacle

(distinguish it from Foucault’s
society of the spectacle)
Be able to gloss the Thesis on
the following pages.
 A selection of Debord’s theses, from The Society
of the Spectacle (various translations)

Thesis 1:

“The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of

production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.
All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.”

[Note the difference between “mere representation” here and Jean

Baudrillard’s simulacrum: the latter is an image, with a realiy accessible
behind it. This is a systematic condition of society.]
Thesis 3:

“The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of

society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal
point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this
sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false
consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language
of universal separation.”

[Note “false consciousness,” from Marx: the condition of any class

consciousness—the illusion that the government and state are “natural.”]
Thesis 4:

“The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship

between people that is mediated by images.”

[Definition of the spectacle: not the image itself, but the social relationship
that results.]

Thesis 5:

“The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced

by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been
materialized.”

[Worldview = Weltanschauung, first defined by Wilhelm Dilthey.]

Thesis 6:

“Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the outcome and the goal
of the dominant mode of production.

It is not something added to the real world—not a decorative element, so

to speak.

On the contrary, it is the very heart of society’s real unreality. In all its
specific manifestations—news or propaganda, advertising or the actual
consumption of entertainment—the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing
model of social life.

It is the omnipresent celebration of a choice already made in the sphere of

production...”

[This goes to the question of whether the media are pressured or coerced,
for example by people like Rupert Murdoch. Passive acceptance is more
what Debord has in mind: everyone collaborates, and there is no need for
censorship or guidance.]
Thesis 10:

“The concept of the spectacle brings together and explains a wide range of
disparate phenomena.

Diversities and contrasts among such phenomena are the appearances of

the spectacle—the appearances of a social organization of appearances that
needs to be grasped in its general truth.

...any critique capable of apprehending the spectacle’s essential character

must expose it as a visible negation of life—and as a negation of life that has
invented a visual form for itself.”

[There are echoes of Friedrich Nietzsche in Debord, especially when he

identifies the spectacle with negations of life; note the epigraph to the
book, which is from Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity. Nietzche was
a prominent critic of the ethics of Christianity in the later19th c.]
Thesis 11:

“In order to describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions, and the
forces that work against it, it is necessary to make some artificial
distinctions. In analyzing the spectacle we are obliged to a certain extent to
use the spectacle’s own language, in the sense that we have to move
through the methodological terrain of the society that expresses itself in
the spectacle. For the spectacle is both the meaning and the agenda of our
particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical moment in which
we are caught.”

[Debord thrashes around like an animal caught in a trap: he knows that the
spectacle can’t be easily described from the outside. There is a parallel here,
without the angst, to Dilthey, who acknowledged the entanglement of the
subject in the worldview.]
Thesis 12:

“The spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and

beyond dispute.

All it says is: ‘Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.’

The attitude that it demands in principle is the same passive acceptance

that it has already secured by means of its seeming incontrovertibility, and
indeed by its monopolization of the realm of appearances.”
Thesis 19:

“The spectacle inherits the weakness of the Western philosophical project,

which attempted to understand activity by means of the categories of
vision, and it is based on the relentless development of the particular
technical rationality that grew out of that form of thought. The spectacle
does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality, reducing everyone’s
concrete life to a universe of speculation.”

[Compare this to Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” Jay’s proposal

that Western history can be divided into different “scopic regimes” is
optimistic in comparison to this, not least because it assumes that we can
stand outside out categorization. Debord is far more pessimistic, and his
idea of “categories of vision” is more destructive.]