Comparison of Two Readings - Report Example

Report on Two Readings (Foucault and Bogard) The work of Foucault is wide-ranging and complex, covering many disciplines, but one of the key concepts that underpins all of his work is the concept of power. In the essay entitled “Society must be defended” which was first delivered in a lecture series in Paris in 1975-1976, Foucault takes note of historical developments which characterize the industrial age and concludes that power in the modern world has taken on a new direction. This paper explains what that direction is, and compares this essay’s line of thinking with an article presented by William Bogard entitled “The Coils of a Serpent: Haptic Space and Control Societies” (Bogard, 2007). The two pieces are written in very different styles, but nevertheless a comparison of them is useful because Bogard, too, is concerned about the issue of power and control in society and how this affects individuals and groups. Foucault’s famous earlier work, Discipline and Punish (1995) sets the scene for this whole topic. The short work Discipline and Punish (1995) was about power and ways of exercising control over the physical body of each individual human being. In that text he pointed out how punishment in Western societies shifted from being an attempt to administer physical pain on the offender, in public and often gruesome spectacles, to being a much more institutionalised form of control. His theory was that institutions like prisons, and to some extent also organisations like hospitals and schools, subject the people to all sorts of limitations, such as not having freedom, and having to obey fixed daily routines, and that this is still a form of punishment despite all the rhetoric about rehabilitation that goes on. The point of prison, in modern times, is to exercise control over the physical body of the human being, and the only thing that has changed since barbaric medieval times is that it is done behind closed doors and with the help of science, and professionals like doctors and psychiatrists. The discussion in Society must be defended is also about control but in this case it is about “using overall mechanisms and acting in such a way as to achieve overall states of equilibration or regularity.” (Foucault, 1975.76, p. 246). The focus is not so much on the individual and his body, but on the whole species of human beings. He gives this approach the name “biopolitics” and explains: “Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, and as a biological problem and as power’s problem.” (Foucault, 1975/76, p. 245) In a way he has scaled up the issue of discipline and control into a system that takes care of the masses. We can see in historical events like the terrible scale of death and destruction in the two World Wars and the awful invention of the gas chambers at the start and middle of the twentieth century, what kind of results can come of power which is conceived and wielded on this mass scale, with the help of science to make the killing machine more efficient. Foucault analyses the Nazi atrocities from the point of view of a racist state, exercising power to purify itself and remove polluting influences so that it can exercise control on the population as a whole. People then become one entity, and the state makes decisions on their behalf. It is not so much this power to kill that Foucault is concerned with, however, it is the power to eliminate random events and create a fixed and secure set of circumstances in which people can be kept alive. In this scheme of things death becomes something shameful and taboo. The state takes over from the sovereign as the wielder of power, and this opens up the way to mass murder and genocide, as the desire to regulate and discipline is carried out at the level of a whole race. On first reading the article by Bogard appears to be dealing with an entirely different discipline and topic altogether. His description of sitting at a computer screen and touching the keys is part of most Western citizens’ everyday life, and most of the time people assume that they are interacting with their computers, mobile telephones and other hi technology gadgets out of their own free will. What Bogard argues, however, is that this dimension of physically being in touch with technology is yet another form of power. The power, however, is not the power of the human being using technology to impose his will on the environment. It is in fact quite the opposite, because Bogard successfully makes the reader imagine this relationship with technology from the other direction, in other words to see the technololgy as the wielder of power, and the user as the unwitting victim. The disturbing idea that Bogard wants to convey, is that these objects which make use of the sense of touch are yet another form of control of the physical body, and regularization of the population as a whole. Haptic technology (which means technology that people use through the physical sense of touch) is perhaps the most subtle and pervasive exercise of power that the world has ever seen. Bogard’s article builds on the foundations of Foucault’s work and predicts a world in which human beings are perpetually trapped an caught up in the “coils” of control. Instead of being herded into prisons, schools, and hospitals where control is carried out by so-called experts, modern human beings are always in the presence of the mechanisms that control them. Supervision is permanent, and escape is impossible, because there is no “place” in which this haptic control works. It is just the mode of being that people embrace when they become wired into the technological world. Because these machines map directly on to the physical body, human beings are in danger of being no longer aware of where their own bodies end, and where the control system begins. Some of this article reads like science fiction, and is reminiscent of the novels of William Gibson, such as Neuromancer (1984) which tells a tale of genetically and hormonally modified human beings who use a heady mix of drugs and technology to maintain life far beyond the natural life span of a human being, and who also periodically inhabit virtual spaces using technology. What Bogard appears to be doing in his article is explain how much nearer human beings now are to this frightening scenario. He leans on the ideas of French philosopher Deleuze, whose reflections on reality and virtuality raise new questions about human individuality. (Deleuze, 1994) The ultimate power lies then with machines, and with those who design and operate the very mechanism by which we feel the world. It is much more than control of what we see, as in the public flogging scenario of the middle ages, or how much freedom we have to move or make decisions, as in the discipline scenario, or even how much we have to submit to being treated as a mass population rather than as individuals, as in the biopolitical model. This is an even more extreme and nightmarish scenario, because it is the ultimate form of control: it manages the interface with reality, and enters into the mind. Bogard cites the postmodernists Virillio (1996) and Baudrillard (1997), and their analysis of the increasingly seamless interface between human and machine, which is becoming one of the identifying characteristics of the twenty-first century. These two articles have the ability to change the way that the reader understands everyday objects, institutions and occurrences. Foucault makes us look more closely at the machinery of the modern state, and see the elements of control that are lurking in systems and processes that have become part of modern life. Bogard problematizes even interactive video, one of the main vehicles of socialization for large numbers of adolescents, and reveals the deceptive nature of its influence. It is a lonely form of distraction from the real world, and this opens up the way for the state to step into the field of reality and disrupt the gamer’s hold on that dimension. Citizens who are fighting virtual battles with a screen full of pixels are not active, questioning citizens, and they are much easier to control, through the very machinery that gives them their intellectual and emotional sustenance. In other words, this vision of Bogard shows a scenario where humans have relinquished responsibility for their own actions, and are accepting without question whatever notions the capitalist state wants to peddle. Bogard and Foucault, in their different ways, present essays which are a form of wake-up call to a slumbering twenty first audience. The old visible control systems of class and race hegemony were difficult enough to deal with, as countless Marxist and Modernist philosophers and sociologists have pointed out, but the challenges of haptic control are in danger of distracting the human race to the point where resistance or even full awareness of reality is a distant memory. [1516 words] References Baudrillard, J. 1996. The System of Objects. London and New York:Verso. Bogard, William. 2007. The Coils of a Serpent: Haptic Space and Control Societies. 1000 Days of Theory. Online journal available at: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=581 Deleuze, G. 1994. Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum. Foucault, Michael. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Second Vintage Books. Foucault, M. 1975-76. Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France. Translated by D. Macey. London and New York: Penguin, pp. 239-264. Gibson, W. 1984. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Science Fiction. Virilio, P. 1997. Pure War. New York: Semiotext (e). Read More