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.