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).

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.