Blogger arrests around the world

BBC NEWS | UK | Wales | North East Wales | Blogger fined for 'menacing' rant

BBC NEWS | UK | Wales | North East Wales | Blogger fined for 'menacing' rant:

"A blogger who 'let off steam' about the way he was treated by police has been convicted of posting a grossly offensive and menacing message.

Gavin Brent, 24, from Holywell, Flintshire, was fined £150 with £364 costs by magistrates at Mold.

The court heard Brent had been charged with theft offences - which have yet to be dealt with - and posted a message about a police officer's new-born baby..."

BBC NEWS | Technology | Blogger arrests hit record high

BBC NEWS | Technology | Blogger arrests hit record high:

"More bloggers than ever face arrest for exposing human rights abuses or criticising governments, says a report.

Since 2003, 64 people have been arrested for publishing their views on a blog, says the University of Washington annual report."

My honours presentation

I received the feedback sheets for my honours presentation yesterday. I just wonder how two of the examiners could observe the same presentation and come to such diverse conclusions. Here's a little of what they had to say.

On the matter of the presentation of a critical argument or rationale:

"Candidate does not appear to have fully absorbed some of the theoretical ideas he discussed."

On the other hand:

"Demonstrated a sophisticated grasp of the theoretical perspectives on the thesis topic. In particular, the ???? and limitations of Foucaultian concepts. Strong justification of critical theory to thesis question."

Then there was;

"[Supporting/substantiating material] not always clearly related to the argument" which was countered by "claims and assumptions made in the presentation were well supported by reference to concrete instances and cases, and the appropriate scholarly literature."

I'll take the feedback on board without making too much of either the negative or positive. For me it shows two things. First, there are no right or wrong answers, just different perspectives. Second, getting good grades in uni is a bit of a lottery. One person's advice is another's prohibition. Get over it, move on.

Started writing for real

I started writing today. A tentative beginning dipping my toe into powerful waters thus:

I turn my attention now to how Foucault’s theories of the emergence of power, found in The subject and power, help explain the processes which led to Armstrong being fired.

I'm planning to show how commercial and legal discourses provide explanations to her dismissal and then develop a more complex understanding of the emergence of the various power structures in and around her workplace.

I have 15 000 words to write and only wrote 56 today. If I can punch out 300 words a day I'll be on target to finish by mid-September. This will give me close to a month to complete final edits and prepare the introduction and conclusion.

Writing my thesis part two

While I'm on the subject I'll start with tidying up the introduction I've already written. At least if I know what I'm going to argue it'll make my job a little easier. I'll then tidy up the piece I wrote about surveillance and then move onto power and subjectivity.

Writing my thesis

I was going to take some time off between first and second semester. Now instead I'm going to start writing on Tuesday. My plan is to write a paragraph a day (about 250 words) for 5 days a week. In 12 weeks I'll have my thesis written. It's a simple plan but one I'm confident of achieving as it will allow time for research, reading, and other activities.

Technologies of the self

In Technologies of the Self Foucault states:

"[In ancient Greece] it was generally acknowledged that it was good to be reflective, at least briefly...Writing was also important in the culture of taking care of oneself. One of the main features of taking care involved taking notes on oneself to be reread, ...and keeping notebooks in order to reactivate for oneself the truths one needed. Socrates' letters are an example of this self-exercise" (p. 27).

Foucault continues:

"Taking care of oneself became linked to constant writing activity. The self is something to write about, a theme or object (subject) of writing activity...this is not a modern trait born of the Reformation...it is one of the most ancient Western traditions" (p. 27).

And then:

"This genre of epistles shows a side apart from the philosophy of the era. The examination of conscience begins with this letter writing. Diary writing comes later" (p. 30)

Foucault refers here to what he later describes as the hupomnema, the writing of the self into being.

Foucault, M. (1988). Technologes of the Self. In L. Martin, H. Gutman & P. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the self. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Press.

Theorizing surveillance: the panopticon and beyond

Link to a review and preview of Theorizing surveillance: the panopticon and beyond.

Comments about dooce on MetaFilter

Here's a link to a significant body of comments about Heather Armstrong's dismissal.

Panopticon.com: online surveillance and the commodification of privacy | Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media | Find Articles at BNET.com

Panopticon.com: online surveillance and the commodification of privacy | Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media | Find Articles at BNET.com

Detailed article about panopticism.

Surveillance and the capitalist state | Giddens

Giddens, A. (1995). Surveillance and the capitalist state. In A contemporary critique of historical materialism, 2nd Edn. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Giddens defines surveillance as two connected processes of accumulation of information and of the supervision of the activities of subordinates in a collective. He believes that information gathering is a prime generator of power.

Human beings are knowledgable agents acting within "unacknowledged conditions" and "unintended consequences" of their actions (p. 171).

Whilst he recognises that Foucault connected the abolition of the violence of the spectacle with the rise of capitalism, he maintains that Foucault's connection between the factory and the prison were too close to be sustained. Rather, he notes that workplaces are not, as with prisons, "total institutions" (a phrase he credits to the work of Goffman) in which resistance may develop. As a result Foucault's "docile bodies" become not so docile after all and become knowledgeable agents. (p. 173)

He notes that the freedom of labour in capitalist systems are really just a sham and create the exploitation of workers through more subtle means, but he points out that the rise of "mere bourgeois freedoms" have lead to the development of genuine gains in judicial reforms allowing and encouraging the formation of organised labour movements which have challenged the hegemony of capitalism.

Giddens maintains that Foucault's ideas about the sequestration of prisoners become more a comment about the parts of capitalist society that commodify, regulate, and smooth time, removing from our day-to-day lives those aspects which are directly connected to the ebb and flow of nature. (p. 173)

Despite his criticism of Foucault, Giddens recognises the importance of surveillance to studies of capitalism. He observes that "classical social theory" - and by that I assume he refers to Marxism - did not recognise the threat to personal liberties from systems of surveillance. (p. 174)

Finally he points to what he sees as the oppressive potential for a combining of a Taylorist supervision of workers with an information collection mechanisms that result in anonymous "technical control" (p. 176).

Blogging and employment law

Caslon Analytics Guide contains a useful section entitled Censorship in the workplace that contains a number of references to articles on blogging and employment law. These articles are situated within legal discourses and are supplemental to Bruce Barry's analysis in Speechless.

Dooced arhive | Armstrong

Didn't really need to do the last half dozen posts. Here's the dooced archives which contain all the main posts relating to Armstrong's dismissal.

About | Armstrong

In an "About" archive, Armstrong self-describes as "...that girl who lost her job because of her website."

Unemployed & Unrepentant | Armstrong

Armstrong created her own Unemployed & Unrepentant masthead. Indicative of struggle and contestation against her previous employer.

Tell it to Their Face for Christ's Sake | Armstrong

A post-dismissal explanation of the process of the firing providing some background about the Asian database administrator.

Interesting to notice the intransigent, defiant tone of Armstrong's writing.

Things I Don't Necessarily Need to Know | Armstrong

Here Armstrong explains that her work knew about a health problem she was having just before her firing. She also mentions again the Asian database administrator.

I mention this only because Armstrong raises the health issue in one of her post-firing posts.

Rant Rant Rant Rant Rant Rant, Part 2 | Armstrong

This is the first evidence in the archives of Armstrong being aware that management in her company had been made aware of the existence of her blog. I quote here the salient piece:

"You, the anonymous person who sent an email to each Vice President of my company, all 10 of them, informing them of my recent dissatisfaction, if you thought you were being all sneaky and shit, that you were exposing me and my evil ways, I just want to say, well, thank you. Now that everyone at my office knows I'm evil, including the CEO who was cc'd on the email, it's like a huge fucking weight off of my shoulders! Now it's just a matter of which VP I publicly crucify next!"

I have something to say | Armstrong

A more general post that complains about the failings of both herself and her colleagues.

Intimidation | Armstrong

Heather Armstrong rails against a fellow employee (it appears to be a supervisor) about the way she talks with her hands.

How to Annoy Me | Armstrong

Heather Armstrong ran a series of posts called How to annoy me and in this she continues her attacks on the Asian database administrator.

Armstrong's pre-dismissal posts

Here is a post from just before Heather B. Armstrong was fired in February 2002. It's entitled Reasons the Asian database administrator is so fucking annoying.

Understanding Deleuze | Colebrook

Deleuze insists "ask...not what a text means but how it works" (p. xxxii).

"In order to begin to read and respond to an event we need to see its underlying problem" (p. xxxiv). The eye is the response to a problem of how to deal with light. A date in history is the confluence of all sorts of events and series of events.

"For Deleuze...we can only really really think or respond to problems if we do not accept the current terminology and orthodoxy of the problem" (p. xxxv).

Existentialism is a way of saying that there is no fundamental human nature but rather, human beings are nothing other than processes of decision" (p. xxxvi). We are "'radically free'" according to Sartre. In my words, we are defined by our decisions.

Phenomonolgy suggests that a human world only exists because humans make it a meaningful project and there is no world without language. We have language only because we have projects; human life is essentially creative.

On Deleuze being difficult to understand:

"If thinking and human life have no fixed essence, and if thinking is the effect of forces that are not decided by thought itself, then we need to produce a style of writing that constantly produces problems. Instead of just accepting the questions and terms within whcih a culture already operates, we need to look at (and transform) the assumptions, propositions, distinctions or differences upon which a system of thought relies."

True thinking must go beyond images of thought and overturn our terminologies and differences.

"All life is constant becoming...we need to do away with the idea that nature merely is while man decides his being" (p. xlii). All of nature is a constant process of decision in creative response to forces it confronts; as part of nature we are shaped by (a part of?) a multiplicity of forces that serve to create us. It is this shaping that we need to examine. How is our meaning and humanity shaped from pre-human forces?

Deleuze believed that "thinking out to be creative and affirmative" (p. xliii) and should be about creating new concpets and problems, not providing answers. It's not about disclosing some hidden meaning about art or literature but responding actively and creatively through allowing something to affect our established ways of perception.

Life is a plane of a series of signs which create lines of difference; and difference is life.

"Instead of finding a meaning behind events and texts, we need to ask hwo texts that appear as meaningful are created" (p. xliii).

A diagram of panoptic surveillance | Elmer

Notes from:

Elmer, G. (2003). A diagram of panoptic surveillance. New media and society, 5(2), 231-247. Retrieved June 7, 2008, from SAGE Publications database.

Not proof-read, read generously.

The development of a theory of panoptic surveillance is often hampered by an overly literal interpretation of the panopticon.

Criticisms of panopticism are made in three broad categories:

1. The shifting of architectures of surveillance from "carceral enclosure" to databases which plays to debates about invasions of personal privacy.
   
2. Questioning of the "automatic disciplinary effect of panopticism" and argues that people voluntarily participate in their own surveillance through exchanging private information about themselves for reward. These critiques miss the automatic nature of information collection on the web and the inability for opt-out.
   
3. Through new media technologies the panopticon is now a synopticon where the many watch the few. This critique relies on an understanding that panoptic power comes from corporeal observation whereas it is derived from the architecture of light which is suggestive of surveillance

Each of these critiques are useful in further developing the concept of the panopticon but each is limited by their "heuristic points of departure" (p. 233).

Elmer sets out to explicate the diagrammatic aspects of panoptic surveillance and to explain the continuous way consumers and their data selves are integrated into the collection of personal information processes.

The panopticon relies on the hegemony of light and vision as central to the development of Foucault's thesis of self-discipline and governance. The all seeing gaze is both marked and masked, visible yet invisible, by the architecture and arrangement of light. Thus, those subject to this unseen gaze assume its presence and modify their behaviour.

The panopticon is a "system of light and language" (p. 234) where the collection of information is foundational and essential to the operation of a system of classification and individuation. Deleuze in Postsripts points to this matter.

Foucault's theories of surveillance maintain a lingering reliance on a spatial dimension but it is equally important to note the data gathering aspects of the system which, in effect, begin before a person's incarceration within the confines of the panopticon. The customers were already classified and separated before their violent enclosure. Foucault was concerned with a generalisable system of power rather than the development of a specific architecture; but how might his system be imagined in the face of highly mobile modern subjects.

Elmer notes Foucault's development of theories of power through reference to the confessional which exposed inner-most secret self and which went unquestioned as a means for the assertion of power.

Criticisms of panopticism critique the technology rather than the technique (p. 235).

Roger Clarke (Information technolgy and dataveillance, 1998) proposes that surveillance is enabled and augmented by technologies but he does not address the specific moments of data gathering. At the data gathering moment the process of collection of information and surveillance is automated in a way reminiscent of the panopticon.

Elmer notes the work of Tim Mathiesen who proposes the idea of the synopticon which inverts or locates a parallel panopticon enabling the many to watch the few via the agency of mass media; and discipline arises in this process from a disciplining of our consciousness through the media message. Elmer develops an argument that TiVo can be understood synoptically noting the way the system learns, recommends and customises (other systems such as Kwikflix perform similarly). These recommendations, based as they are on aggregates of anonymous viewing patters, raise questions about how they may may be imagined within panopticism. Elmer argues for a redrawing of the panoptic diagram.

Such a rethinking was specifically considered by Deleuze in Postscript on societies of control in which he noted that we had already ceased to be members of societies of discipline and had now become modulated by and within societies of control. Signatures and numbers which marked individuality and place within a mass had given away to a code which denies or permitted access to information and locations.

Deleuze's diagram describes a digitally languaged system of ever changing shape and size which described the decentralised movement and flow of information throughout a network.

Elmer mentions "simulation" a great deal in relation to technologies but I'm unsure if he means that technologies tend to simulate the corporeal flow. If anyone can help me understand this I'd appreciate the help.

Deleuze and Guattari introduce the possibility of mapping the continuity between light and language. Again, I'm not sure what this means. Help anyone?

In another work, Deleuze proffers the concept of the rhizome as a diagram which evokes a sense of the space between architectural drawing and built form.

One of the key claims of panopticism is its ability to function with little or no supervision as a mechanism for automatic and constant observation and data collection. (p. 243)

In the panoptic diagram consumers are both rewarded and punished for their behaviour. Rewarded with an all-too-familiar set of images and content that leads to the consumption of more of the same and punished with extra work when attempting to seek out the unfamiliar (p. 245).

Post-panopticism

I wrote a very brief post about post-panopticism recently but there's substantial development of the concept on Beyond Modernity which is well worth a read. These critiques appear not to throw panopticism out but propose a development of the concept that variously recognise the effects of new technology and a more fuzzy/messy understanding of the workings of power and surveillance.

I'm keen to work up a critique of panopticism using Deleuze's Rhizome.

Stay tuned.

A plague on the panopticon | Green

Further to my earlier, and very brief post about Green's A plague on the panopticon I'll add a few more detailed notes here.

Green argues that Foucault's concept of Panopticism is a defective metaphor that promotes misunderstandings about the way surveillance works in the real world. Green attests: "Despite Foucault's claims to the contrary, surveillance is ultimately conceived as the handmaiden of dominant power" (p. 27). He argues that the panopticon as a metaphor does not sufficiently address the complexities of power and misses an opportunity to recognise the benefits (lowering crime, provision of customised products and services) that flow from surveillance.

Green proposes the rethinking of Foucault's observations of the management of plagues and believes that a new and more fruitful way of understanding the workings - and the benefits - of surveillance is possible as a result. He opines that Foucault's concept of Panopticism invokes a form of totalising power from which it is impossible to escape. For Green, a failing by Foucault of not delimiting who is in power and who has power creates a paradigm that is difficult to sustain. He wants to see - and here he relies on Gramsci - a restoration of human agency and an essential freedom of the individual from power.

He dismisses observations of the applicability of Panopticism as being overly dismissive of the downgrading of "liberty, 'personhood' and resistance" (p. 30) and points to a "legion" (p. 31) of problems with the concept. Citing both Giddens and Lyon he critiques panopticism as tending to the technological determinist and claims that the individuation central to the panopticon, far from destroying individuality, provides a way for the individual to break free from the "mass of autonomy" (p. 31).

Suggesting plague response as a relevant way to conceive of surveillance, Green notes the utility of the categorisation of healthy and sick people during a plague event, and points to the integration of surveillance within the fabric of community. He points to the messiness of the plague form of surveillance - people were able to hide in dark corners - and this enables a degree of access to individual resistance that he believes Foucault did not permit within the panopticon. Such a messy understanding of the effects of surveillance is far more contemporary he suggests in that it provides for a clearer understanding of the uneven manner of the deployment of surveillance.

He points to the inversion of surveillance through technologies such as digital cameras and video recorders that captured the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989 and astutely observes the way resistance movements such as the Chiapas, Zapatista Army, and other change advocates use technology to maintain surveillance over authority. Green believes such an inversion of surveillance was not contemplated in Foucault's panopticon.

Green, S. (1999). A plague on the panopticon: surveillance and power in the global information economy. Information, Communication & Society, 2(1), 26-44. Retrieved June 7, 2008, from Informaworld database.

Thesis question revisted - again

My previous post outlined a new provisional thesis question.

A friend suggested a variation with the aim of being more "...explicit about which Foucauldian theories/modes of analysis you will be using."

Here's the suggestion (with thanks to S.):

"What do the application of Foucault's Panopticist theory reveal about the employment tensions found in and around dooce and QueenofSky?"

I'll be covering some of Foucault's other theories so here's my edit:

What do Foucault's theories on power and subjectivity reveal about the employment tensions found in and around dooce and QueenofSky?

I think I'm onto something.

Again, thanks S.

Thesis question revisted

Will I ever tire of re-working my thesis statement? I already am, but I'm going to continue.

This is what I outlined in my honours presentation:

• Examine the tensions arising from the publication of personal blogs by employees
• Employing a Foucauldian analysis
• Of contestation located around two prominent personal bloggers

I want to work it into a more concise question.

What would a Foucauldian analysis of the contestation found on and around dooce and QueenofSky reveal about the tensions arising from the publication of personal blogs by employees?

It seems clunky. How about:

What do Foucault's theories say about the contestation found on and around dooce and QueenofSky?

I dropped the last part because that's really something that may come out of the analysis rather than what I'm doing.

And then:

What do Michel Foucault's theories indicate about the employment tensions found on and around dooce and QueenofSky?

This last one is more concise. I like.

Best I run off and get some feedback from super coach M.

Databases as discourse | Mark Poster

The following are my notes from reading:

Poster, M. (1995). Databases as discourse, or electronic interpellations. In The second media age (pp. 78-94). Cambridge: Polity Press.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Descartes famously states: "I think therefore I am". By these few words he articulates a dividual, a binary human-thinking divided within. I am nothing - I don't exist - without my thoughts. My thoughts precede my being. There are thoughts and there is an Other. The two is established; in Descartes and later by Kant in the Enlightenment. The human subject is born. Now that I am separated from my thoughts, I am also born into a world of objects separate from the I.

The subject is interpellated or "hailed" thus reconstituting themselves as a subject. The teacher, when calling on a student to answer a classroom question, presupposes the student as an "autonomous rational agent" and the student, in answering the question, must "stand into" this position firstly to answer the question and secondly in declaration of their being a student. "Linguistic interpellation" operates through the subject complying with the configuration of their subjectivity without question and reflection (p. 80). Such a configuration can be at the level of race, sexuality, class, age, gender and presupposes the individual as a subject. The process of interpellation is conducted at the level of language.

The interpellation of the subject is always incomplete. One interpellation does not deny the existence of another. For example, I could be interpellated (invited to act) as a student, a husband, a male, as straight; each of which I am free to reject but each of which appear in their formation as a certain conclusion, as if already answered by me, the subject, in the affirmative. In each instance of interpellation the subject is fixed and frozen into the state of subjectivity, an end, a conclusion; the finished product so to speak. How quickly we lose our childhood.

It is important to understand the post-structuralist relationship of language to the development of the subject which helps to us understand the nature of databases as discourse. Foucault employed the term discourse to counter those who claimed writing as being a reflection of a human subject; we can't hear or read words and deduce from those words a consciousness. Rather discourse is an exterior totality in which a subject is dispersed and formed. Discourse is not the manifestation of the unfolding of a thinking subject but rather it is a totality of the discontinuous planes through which the subject is variously enunciated. In other words the subject is created through discourse rather than the creator of discourse. (The blogger as subject is often created through legal and capitalist discourses). Discourse and power become imbricated upon one another.

Our culture creates, through discourse, a subject as a rational, autonomous individual. Foucault managed to point to the problematic of the assumption of a preexistent rationality; rationality is historically constructed. According to Foucault there never was a founding, universal, or sovereign subject but rather the subject is produced through "practices of subjection, or in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation..." (p. 83). Discourse then has a power effect on "...the subject even in movements of "liberation"" (p. 84).

The power effect of discourse is to bring the subject into a position in relation to the structure of power so as to then apply and exert influence; and this is done in a way that disguises the constitution of the subject as a subject until after the subject becomes such.

The panopticon "...is not simply the guard in the tower but the entire discourse/practice that bears down on the prisoner, one that constitutes him or her as a criminal" (p. 85). The panopticon subjectifies and normalises.

A database is a discourse because it constitutes subjects. Poster proposes that databases produce subjects who are to a lesser or greater extent willing participants in their own surveillance. The combination of infrastructure and commerce combine to produce a far lighter and easier maintained panopticon - the super-panopticon - which is a never ceasing machinery of surveillance. The super-panopticon works beyond the reach of individual agency and makes a mockery of concepts of rational autonomy and social action. The super-panopticon interpellates the subject through the discourse of databases. The database produces subjects that are multiple and decentred and in contradistinction to the hegemonic concept of the subject as a rational, autonomous, centred agent.

Databases are the perfect "grids of specification" in that they divide and contrast, group and classify; and they constitute objects of which they speak. (Worth noting here that most blogging software is database driven; and the possible relationship to RSS feeds, feed readers and archives).

Unlike the panopticon where the subjects became interiorised, conscious and aware of their own self-determination through an awareness of the presence of surveillance, subjects produced through databases are dispersed and diverse and often unknown to their embodied counterpart. How can we resist the development of these subjects? Our bodies no longer provide a refuge against the incursion of the discourse of the database.

Surveillance of blogs isn't always high tech

Surveillance of blogs may not always be the result of high-tech capabilities. Blogs can come to the attention of management through the personal association of colleagues with the blogger. Once the blog is thus brought to the attention of management then a variety of methods might be used to keep watch on the blog.

Importantly blogs can come under retrospective surveillance. Internet archives often reveal the complete contents of a blog despite attempts by the author to delete the blog. As an example a quick Google search can locate the archive of the Washingtonienne; a blog that resulted in the dismissal of its author despite it being deleted prior to the dismissal.

Panoptic surveillance in potentia

The panopticon automatically collects information about subjects. It is its reason for existence; to observe and collect information. Light, gaze, collection of individualising and normalising information.

The surveillance of a specific blog is not automatic. An institution must make some form of assumption about sovereignty over that which is potentially contained within any and all blogs. This assumption leads to a surveillance of everything on the Internet in the hope of detecting the presence of words that match keywords or watchwords, for example the names of their products or that of their key executives. Delanda calls this observation of all the Panspectron. On the appearance of a keyword or watchword match, then, and only then, is the subject of specific surveillance formed. Until such time as a subject is formed panoptic surveillance does not exist but rather it exists in potentia.

A plague on the panopticon | Green

Green provides a refreshing view of the democratisation of surveillance technologies showing that, since Foucault's Panopticism, surveillance has become a two way effect of power that runs in and on multiple dimensions through society. On an initial reading the article is both a useful critique and a worthwhile advance on the "docile bodies" envisioned by Foucault (although it's worth bearing in mind that Foucault effectively developed his own critique in this regard).

Green, S. (1999). A plague on the panopticon: Surveillance and power in the global information economy. Information, Communication & Society, 2(1), 26-44. Retrieved June 9, 2008, from Informaworld database.

Post-panopticism | Boyne

Boyne provides a significant critique to Foucault's Panopticism but concludes that the model requires some adjustment rather than being discarded. Worth a more thorough read.

Boyne, R. (2000). Post-Panopticism. Economy & Society, 29(2), 285-307. Retrieved June 9, 2008, from EBSCO Host database.

Panopticism in business

Article posits that panopticism is used in business via meetings and management by objectives which keep employees under constant surveillance. It sounds more like Postscripts than Panoptics too me.

Akella, D. (2008). A Question of Power: How does Management Retain It? Vikalpa: The Journal for Decision Makers, 28(3), 45-56. Retrieved June 8, 2008, from Ebsco Host database.

What I learned from my honours presentation

I conducted my honours presentation today to a group of fellow students, three examiners, and my supervisor. Here's what I learned.

1. There's a bunch of very smart people doing honours. The intelligence and insight of my fellow students borders on intimidating. Beware world when this group starts work.
2. Focus is everything. The tighter the focus - to the point of being insanely narrow - the more useful and meaningful will the thesis become.
3. Explain why you're choosing what your choosing. I'm analysing the contestation found on and around two private blog sites. I didn't explain why I chose these sites and guess what?: that's the question I was asked. What lead me to chose these blog sites? Where are they located? Why chose US blogs? My style at times borders on arrogance by choosing a field of analysis and not respecting the reader enough to help them undertake the same journey of discovery I've undertaken by justifying my choices.
4. Put the exact question of the research project front and centre; and be honest about it. I've been saying that I'm researching the tensions around personal blogs; but that's only part of the story. What I'm really doing is analysing the tensions found on, and around dooce and QueenOfSky, through the critical application of the theories of Michel Foucault.
   
5. Criticism is useful for the development of a coherent argument. Sure it's nice to hear platitudes and nice things being said about us, but there's a lot that can be learned from constructive criticism.
   

So that's about it for the moment. There'll no doubt be something else that comes to me as the days go on; and I'll probably post to this blog some of the feedback that I received from the examiners.

Critical application of Panopticism

In applying Foucault's concept of Panopticism to the surveillance of personal blogs I will use Deleuze's critique found in Postscripts. I should also use Foucault's own critique based on his development of the concept of pastoral power as set out in Subjectivity and Power. Pastoral power is much more modular and smooth then the exercise of power through the spatially bound panopticon. Pastoral power retains a sense of the authoritative gaze that is more reliant on the revealing of a person's inner thoughts than is found in the gaze of the panopticon. Pastoral power involves a greater level of participation by the subject although the aspects of internalisation of governance have similarities.

Problematisation

How did blogs - a 'new' object in the early 2000's - come to emerge in the discourses in which they are prevalent? How is it that they have become "owned" by legal and human rights discourses? These are questions I hope to answer in my thesis.

The cult of the self

That we (society) want to be seen as individuals plays into the hands of those in power. Power is strengthened through processes of individualisation and normalisation. As we buy into the belief that we possess something within ourselves that makes us an individual we reference the normal as something against which to stand out. This desire for individuality - the cult of the self - that ties this individuality to own our identity and employs it thus as a means of control and power.

Productive power relations

Foucault believed that power was productive. In this matter he stood opposed to the Marxist view that power was something against which the proletariat must resist. Class struggle was not viewed by Foucault as fundamental. But I wonder what he means by productive. Perhaps it was linked to his observation that power, in addition to constraining and limiting, also seduced and induced. By this observation would we be able to assert that relationships between lovers were relationships of power? How is seduction productive?

Governmental rationality | Colin Gordon

Foucault defines government thus: "'the conduct of conduct'" (p. 2); in Gordon's words "a form of activity aiming to shape, guide or affect the conduct of some person or persons." Sounds suspiciously like Foucault's definition of power - actions taken on actions of others - I wonder if he saw any difference. In all likelihood this is Foucault saying that power is diffuse and dispersed throughout the social body. Power and government come, not from one external source that is supra the social body but from within its very nexus (Subject and Power). Power is not violence or force and relies on a free subject - in my words it's a two way multi-directional process. Power is an "endless and open strategic game" (p. 5).



Gordon, C. (1991). Governmental rationality: an introduction. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (pp. 1-52). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

On governmentality | Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault traces a genealogy of governmentality from feudal systems, the sovereign ruler, to the development of the art of government through the agency of the economy.

Foucault is interested in the state and how the state might, through multivalent means, put effect to government. He traces the way the feudal system gave way to this art of government with the interstitial manifestations of the art represented through the family as a metaphor for the economy. The family soon came to be seen as a thin, poorly structured means by which one might theorise the economy, and thus was born the notion of the population which could be observed and measured and assessed. Population then became the end game, the final outcome, for government, which must firstly consider the ways in which the wealth, well-being, and growth of this population might be effected. The family became a mere instrument in the collection of data and was lost altogether as the central unit for the economy.

"The population now represents more the end of government than the power of the sovereign; the population is the subject of needs, of aspirations, aware, vis-a-vis the government, of what it wants, but ignorant of what is being done to it" (p. 100).

And again, importantly I believe for my thesis:

"Interest at the level of the consciousness of of each individual who goes to make up the population, and interest considered as the interest of the population regardless of what the particular interests and aspirations may be of the individuals who compose it, this is the new target and the fundamental instrument of the governement of population: the birth of a new art, or at any rate of a range of absolutely new tactics and techniiques" (p. 100).

Foucault notes the impact of the emergence of the population as central to the governance of the state. Far from sovereignty being replaced by the political science of governance he notes its continued centrality through an attempt "to see what what juridical and institutional form, what foundation in the law. could be given to the sovereignty that characterizes a state" (p. 101). My interest here is on the word 'state'. Foucault refers to a nation-state but equally the state could refer to a corporate-state against which bloggers are opposed. Corporate-states seek their own sovereignty from the laws of commerce and employment from which they derive the exercise of power over a personal blogger. In other words, a network of systems, agreements, and political aspirations stand opposed to the hoped-for right of free expression of the personal blogger. Sovereignty therefore is distributed, diffuse, multivalent.

The management of a population reinforced the centrality of the disciplines to governance through the arrangement and aggregation of things - assets, artifacts, people, groups.

Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (pp. 87-105). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Aesthetics as Ethics Part 2

Came across a couple of neat definitions today in McNaly (1994).

Autonomy: "a process in which the interrogation of the established limits identity leads to an increased capacity for independent thought and behaviour (p. 145)." This constant interrogation fights off the individualizing and normalizing effects of power. Foucault retained an Enlightenment notion of which McNaly describes as a state of "positive liberty": an "individual's ability to exercise critical judgement free from the influence of dominant beliefs and desires" (p. 144). I wonder what is meant by a dominant belief. How does a belief become "dominant"? Does my belief that I feel tired and need to sleep become a dominant belief that disables my autonomy?

Subject: is subject to another through dependence and this normalising view of the self is tied to a person's own identity through "conscience or self-knowledge (p. 142)." I think here of the way that psychology and psychiatry create a normalised view of a person, or at least encourage people to become normal. Foucault cringed at the thought of this normalisation and instead wanted scholars to fight normalising power so as to allow for the development of the pure aesthetics of the self.

Freedom from normalising forms of individuality come from exploring the limits of our subjectivity; and these limits can come from our sexuality or any other number of normalising structures. (p. 145)



McNaly, L. (1994). Foucault. Oxford: Polity Press.

Aesthetics as Ethics

Correction: The following post refers to Lois McNaly and should properly read Lois McNay. My apology to the author.

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In the book, Foucault, Lois McNaly (1994, p. 149) critiques Michel Foucault's notion of aestheticism or the aesthetics of the self/existence as being overly reliant on the heroization of the self.

Foucault utilised Baudelaire the Dandy as a way to exemplify the way an individual might bring themselves forth into the world; a way of producing oneself as a work of art. This work of art is said to have a non-productive quality and by that I believe Foucault was suggesting the production of art for arts sake, not the production of art in some attempt at communicative reason. It sounds as though he was attempting to be elitist by having people create themselves as pieces of high art that served 'no' purpose. But in reality he was attempting to bring art to the grasp of all individuals. We can each create our own lives as a work of art without first finding some form of hidden existential being lurking deep below the surface. Foucault, I believe, was simply attempting, through Baudelaire the Dandy, to demonstrate that self mastery was immanent and immediately available for all human beings. No need to wait for the shrink, just start producing art.

But McNaly's critique is leveled against what she sees as the underlying gendered tones of the invocation of Foucault's heroic male artist. McNaly believes that the subtext of Foucault's Dandy is unaddressed and therefore the aesthetics have become fetishized; given more meaning and power then they deserve.

I don't share McNaly's criticism. Foucault might have employed any other of a myriad illustrations to explain and demonstrate his notion. Instead he chose a Dandy artist who become heroized by academics; and its regrettable this occurred. For me, Foucault was simply attempting to provide a sense of the now available to each of us. In the same way as an artist stills the mind in the creative moment, Foucault was attempting to explain something difficult, if not impossible, to understand at the level of the intellect.

McNaly, L. (1994). Foucault. Oxford: Polity Press.