"The More You Know"

By referencing Foucault, it seems Robins and Webster made available wider implications for their argument on how education (re)produces social class. By using Foucault’s relationship between knowledge and power (which for Foucault, are reciprocal and contingent upon one another, I believe) they actually turn the rhetoric surrounding the value of “knowledge” on it’s head.

Embodied in public service announcements we are all familiar with, knowledge, i.e. skills, is advertised as the ultimate in empowering solutions, a way to individualize one’s self and realize autonomy. Knowledge is power for the student.

By using Foucault, Robins and Webster, quite nicely, I think, flip this rhetoric, “making visible” the fact that knowledge is indeed power, but power over the subject – a disciplinary system shaped to reproduce social class, and thus, in the larger picture, maintain capital relations.

Knowledge is power in a more straightforward sense: knowledge of people’s practices, patterns, behaviors, etc. But one must also conceive of knowledge not as a collection tool but as a system – a system that naturalizes, sometimes explicitly and sometimes tacitly, capitalistic values, a system that categorizes people based on their perceived aptitude (the criteria of which are market-driven).

This is not a "pipe"

Incidentally, the disorder with the highest treatment success rate for cognitive behavioral therapy is panic disorder with agoraphobia (~95%). Clinical agoraphobia is defined as a set of avoidance behaviors that develops in response to panic situations (I stop walking down the street because I had a panic attack once when I was walking down the street, for instance).

As the title to this post indicates, I'd like to reply to both Perry and Niko. I think there's a profound link between desire and surveillance that has perhaps been left undertheorized this semester. The current success of cognitive behavioral therapy is related to the decline of symbolic efficiency: the "other-supposed-to-know" that was once represented by a flesh-and-blood doctor has been externalized into a set of autonomous processes. This goes hand-in-hand with our wish to understand the mind increasingly in terms of computer processes. It is comforting to have a model, a sense of mastery. If an impersonal structure can carry this out, so much the better--less chance for error. But this is only part of why CBT works.

There is also what I am tempted to call "claustrophilia," the opposite of agoraphobia, the pleasure of encapsulation. The fantasy of cyberspace is not to be able to go anywhere, do anything, etc. We were already able to do all that stuff if we really wanted. Truth is, most of it is boring. The fantasy of cyberspace is to do everything just as we have always done it, but from the comfort of our own homes. I want to shop, converse with others, read, write, be entertained, etc.--the totality of quotidian life--without leaving my bedroom. Why?

Surveillance and Enclosure can be very enjoyable. As Joe Pantalioni said, "Put me back in the Matrix!" Niko is right, there really isn't anyone saying that material reality is disappearing. And the fact that one finds the same straw man argument repeated over and over again is proof positive of the argument he runs in the second half of the post: that reality is organized as a matrix of circulating images. Noticing this should in no way lead us to claim that this is not a fantasy--a symptom strategy--that keeps a trauma from emerging fully into consciousness. What is that trauma? Niko says it is "the desire for structure" but I would rephrase it slightly as "the terror of structurlessness" (the difference is minimal: in each case we recognize the social as lacking). We DO have structure, but it is threatened by a rapidly accelerating culture that exceeds all attempts to impose regulation. In order to stave off the disintegration of humanity we believe on behalf of the structure (the big Other), we act as if it's still there (God is dead, but no one told Him). And sometimes acting like something is there is good enough, like a psycho who thinks his dead mother is still alive. Why don't I run stoplights when no one is around? Why don't we use discarded abortions for stem cell research?

After reading all this stuff I still can't come up with a good reason why one wouldn't want to be put back into the Matrix. I don't care if it isn't a pipe, as long as I can smoke it. "Claustrophilia" is a powerful fantasy.

Robins, Webster and Cheney

Not Dick, but Lynne. The Harvard core currliculum report was intended to refocus the American educational system on the "classics" as the insurgence of post-modern academic practice in the post-war and Vietnam periods. The issue of credentials in the American context is political, for Cheney and others involved with the report anti-vietnam course work, deconstructon, poetry and a host of other things were destroying the basis of American identity, which was apparently really unstable in the 80's, I guess the Wonder Years didn't work. Robins and Webster clearly are writing about the British context, their history flows from a "skills" movement in the 80's. This is quite different from the culture war context in the US, however it is similar in that the meaning of education is definitely in flux. My question seems to roll this way, the university systems of England were apparently creatures of capitalism by the 80's, the problem with the post-modern university as such is that it's flux is part and parcel of capitalism. To use a really obtuse argumentation term, there is no uniqueness for this argument. What is the real danger if the forces of capitalism have already gotten control?

A second ticky-tacky thing, is there really that much of a difference between an appreciation of disorder and post-modernism? These folks want to play the Goldilocks and the Three Bears game with order to get the best of fragmentation while keeping fundamentalists and other various capitalists out in the woods. To conclude I want to invoke Nilo on the death drive issue, a conversion to some variant of radical democracy is boring. Embrace the possibility of destruction, the capitalists don't play fair in any democratic dialog, so why even try to live with them? The hard Zizek answer that would come out to most of these questions can be found in his reasoning, only by doing the hard, painful, delicious work of total refusal of capitalism in as much as it will destroy us with apocalyptic fantasies. So a few things to take away from this argument; first that anti-post-modern arguments are often quite similar to those on the right, that revolutionary marxism is interesting and that we need to pass plenty of cool points around.

More google...

I hope this isn't getting redundant, or obsessive. This is just another useful article on Google and data collection - "As Ask Erases Little, Google and Others Keep Writing About You"

Practice at Self-Surveillance

Okay, while it is true that more people go to school than to psychotherapy, you probably know more about your own behavior than do your teachers. Just when did you start working on that paper, anyway? So while Robins & Webster make a good argument for education as a method of social control, psychotherapy is an even better example. Cognitive therapy, both with a live therapist and through self-help books, teaches its clients how to use self-surveillance to become more "rational" and, therefore, happier. Classical psychoanalysts sit behind and out of sight of their clients, then debate whether or not it is proper therapeutic procedure to apologize to your patient if you fall asleep during the session--put that in your Foucaultian panopticon and smoke it.

I wanted to post a cognitive therapy "mood log" here so that everyone could download it and begin working on their own self-surveillance immediately. As you will note from my previous posts, however, my best protection against anyone ever figuring anything out about me via surveillance of this blog is my technical incompetence, which prevents me from linking half the stuff I want to put up.

I will bring everyone their own cognitive therapy mood log to class tomorrow, so that self-surveillance and rationality may reign supreme during this exciting time of the semester.

This is not a "post": materialism and other "weightless" fantasies against "post"-modernism

This is a late post from last week's reading. Forgive this basic distinction, but it begs to be made evident:

I realize that the Huws piece is perhaps somewhat of a straw person argument, a bit easy to pick apart and therefore not in need of a corrective. However, there are small curious slippages that we grad students fall into sometimes and the devil of poor theorizations seems in these details. Huws performs this problem I think. Specifically, Huws notes, as some other commentators do, that "a consensus is emerging;" this agreement is one about the postmodern condition of the economy and our reality. Huws notes, "the world as we know it is becoming quite dematerialized..." Obviously, Huws is right to critique this. To say that the world is becoming dematerialized is absurd on its face. As Mark and others point out, "real" material reality exists... planes, trains, automobiles, etc...

However, I would like to know who utters the specific phrase that material reality is "disappearing." This is the "real" straw man argument. Postmodernism, if there is such a "thing," does not hold this view. It is far more accurate, ethical and productive to aver that "postmodernism" (or theorists writing in this vein) claims that people increasingly understand the world as becoming dematerialized, or rather, through the conceptual matrix of an understanding which is perhaps so mediated it is ontologically removed from reality. This is not to say that reality does not exist.. just like say "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" is not to say that there was no attack, death and destruction. Obviously there is; the point is the organization of reality not just through imagery, but as imagery itself. This is the more literary postmodern perspective (Lyotard, Baudrillard, etc...). Postmodern economists, those believing optimistically in a post-fordist economy, might exalt the dematerialization of labor; Huws might have an argument there. But to lump these people into the academic guild of postmodern theorists is highly suspect and shows little regard for theoretical distinctions (obviously, the postmodernism of Baudrillard is somewhat different than Danny Quah's of the London School of Economics).

The real desire "beneath"all this is of course the desire to preserve the groundwork of "beneath-ness" itself (Mark, this shout out is for you and the other materialists out there). How else do we explain Frederick Jameson's contradictory reading of the post-structuralism of Derrida and others? We have with Derrida, an account of the ever "present" logical gap of the structure of inquiry that produces the center term at its root - deconstruction in a nutshell; "the center will not hold and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." Though this radically questions the possibility of depth hermeneutics to produce a truth, a depth and a center through structure, Jameson and others read Derrida and post-structuralism as symptomatic of our postmodern era. In another nutshell I suppose, Jameson reads Derrida and says: "a ha, I see what you are saying, you are a product of the postmodern times and I am getting at the structure that produces people and work such as you." In effect, Jameson reads the critique of depth hermeneutics in terms of a depth hermeneutics. Fascinating, frustrating and flabbergasting.

So why might someone pull such a stunt? Why would someone perform such a basic contradiction? Perhaps we should start turning more inward and apply this problem of a paradox to the problem of a tautology (Derrida once echoed Lacan - "as always, coherence out of contradiction expresses the force of a desire"). What is the desire of stating the tautology? "It goes without saying"... why are you saying it then? "The real is real, it is really real." Really? Because "really" implies like the real, not qua real. What is your investment in stating something should be more like what it is?

The desire here is one for structure, similar to the one Jameson did not want to cede. But desire is not a fantasy one can cast away, and this forever complicates the structure we seek to know apart from our own desire to know it. You cannot desire the real, have it and then be done with it. The desire is the constitutive force manufacturing the real as it moves. This is why fantasy is more real than real - it is the manner in which reality becomes to us. This is the sublimated or forgotten link to Althusser and ideology that is constantly omitted; we have an imaginary relationship to the conditions of our reality. The desire for the real, to have the real as ground and solid structure, expresses the desire to rescind our fantasy structure, to rid ourselves of ideology and get beneath the world of appearances. Speaking like Kant's double from the other side of noumenal realm does not accomplish this though.

Much like the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the knowledge of others' experiences of exploitation will never be fully known or appreciated at the same time. It is somewhat foolish to stop the atomic theory of individualism and say "But I see this individual particle and see its tragic trajectory right here." Yes, but the speed, its history, is lost. We cannot know it all at once. We do not feel another fully but can only imagine or fantasize that we might one day in a fuller, better, more literary (not literal) mode of real yet uncertain kind of experience.

Immoral, Illegal, or Fattening?

When Robins and Webster discuss the effect of ICTs on panoptic control, the language is very reminiscent of the move that Bogard makes with the ‘simulation of surveillance’: “What the computer has achieved is the extension and intensification of panoptic control; it has rendered social control more pervasive, more invasive, more total, but also more routine, mundane and inescapable. On the basis of the new technologies, surveillance becomes continuous and encompassing, a diffuse panoptic vision...We can speak of ‘a cybernetic society, in which the moral principle of democratic societies – individual autonomy – becomes more and more anachronistic and is replaced by technical imperatives handed down from the administrative economic spheres’”(Robins 180). This seems taken straight from Bogard, particularly this shift from individual autonomy and authoritarian, centralized prescriptive control to a more diffused, preemptive, soft control: “A landscape of surveillance without limits – everything visible in advance, everything transparent, sterilized and risk-free, nothing secret, absolute foreknowledge of events...Surveillance without limits is exactly what simulation is all about. Simulation is a way of satisfying a wish to see everything and to see it in advance, therefore both as something present (or anticipated) and already over (past)...Dreams of omniscience, omnipresence, mastery, and security – in short of control – are of course nothing new in the history of technology” (Bogard 15).

This is similarly echoed later on when charting a shift from intuitive to prescriptive to algorithmic thinking: “This approach privileges rational procedures, goal-directed behavior and cognitive structures. It emphasizes that problem-solving skills entail solving problems through ‘algorithmic thinking’, which according to one writer ‘is the third stage in problem solving that began to succeed the intuitive and prescriptive stages even before the computer era’” (Robins 188). I wondered if we can map intuitive thinking and individual autonomy to sovereign power; prescriptive thinking to disciplinary societies, and algorithmic thinking and soft control to the “societies of control.” This might be a bit of a stretch, especially considering that this last ‘stage’ entails that always elusive concept of biopower.

But both Robins and Webster as wells as Bogard use language that is highly suggestive of this biopower. When Robins and Webster speak about the ‘therapeutic state’, the language was very reminiscent of what Hardt calls, “the power of the creation of life; it is the production of collective subjectivities, sociality, and society itself” (98). “Such areas of life as physical and mental health, childcare, moral behavior and even sexuality are subjected to surveillance and administrative documentation. Lasch described the shift from an authoritative to a therapeutic mode of social control" (Robins 179). If soft control and the simulation of surveillance were to require initial programming that allows for complete surveillance (and, ideally, predictability); it would seem to necessitate some very particular ways to create life and train/educate (ultimately what Robins and Webster are arguing in Chapters 9 and 10).

I then thought a bit about ways to resist, if such a thing were possible. Which brought me to this quote from Bogard that has really been bugging me: “And that’s why labor organized by Capital is always a deterred death, a graduated, measured violence against the worker, a managed economy of little deaths, even as the logic of Capital propels it toward a totalization of death. Engineering the death of living labor, always however with an eye to reproducing it minimally, is Capital’s constant preoccupation” (102). I started to think about biopower and the ability to govern and maintain life and/or defer death. Is the best way to resist Capital to undermine this deferral of death and this strict governance of our bodies? I thought of that random quote: “All the things I really like are either immoral, illegal, or fattening.” Are doing these unhealthy things which bring pleasure a possible way to undermine Capital?

I’m not sure if this makes sense. Perhaps I’m just looking for a way to justify what I’ve done this weekend.