Empowerment of Visibility

Backtracking to Michel Focault’s Punishment and Discipline, I want to take a look at the notion of visibility of the observer and subject. According to Focault, being visible means one means one is the subject the one that is invisible holds the power through surveillance. To resist that power structure, the subject may seek refuge from the prying eyes; hiding in a school’s bathroom for example.

What about resistance by being visible instead of invisible?

There is a book called Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn written to raise awareness of gender inequality in developing worlds, bringing the invisible women to the eyes of the world. While visiting the border check point between India and Nepal, Nicholas was outraged when Indian border officers deliberately ignores trucks of trafficked Nepali girls going into India. Instead, the officers were focusing on cracking down pirated DVDs because America cares more intellectual properties than unknown women. Being invisible has dehumanized those trafficked girls, leaving their lives expandable at the hands of brothel’s owners. One way to combat against that is shining the spotlight upon the trafficked victims to encourage international awareness that would help discipline participators. The visibility works differently for the victim and perpetrator. While being visible strip the perpetrators their power to handle lives as merchandise, that visibility in turn empowers the victims because their stories are heard by others and so is their face accompanying those stories. According to Focault visibility makes a person a subject because the observer holds the power through surveillance and invisibility, but that visibility can also give the subject power when use appropriately. Humans have the inclination to sympathize with stories, especially when there is an actual person behind it. I think celebrity also works the same too.

The Panopticon in the Hidden Camera TV Show

In Michel Foucault’s essay “Discipline and Punish,” it is interesting to note the ways that surveillance and punishment work together in order to keep people organized, useful, and segmented. The concept of surveillance in regards to the Panopticon first reminded me of the prison in Kung Fu Panda because the leopard was at the bottom of a large pit, separated from others. The guards, who happened to be rhinos, watched him. The main difference between the two concepts, however, was the fact that the leopard was aware that the guards were constantly watching him because he was a very dangerous prisoner.

The second, and possibly more apt, example that came to mind were TV shows in the hidden camera genre. In these shows, people are usually caught on camera doing embarrassing things in reaction to a strange, planned situation that they know nothing about. The idea of being in a pulic place has people on guard because they know that they could be watched at any moment by a random passerby who expects them to the norms of society; however, the idea of being caught on camera and being broadcast to the entire world has different ramifications entirely. If one is caught, for example, picking his her nose in public, that person may get a strange look from those around him or her, which would deter the nose-picker from doing that in the future. However, if one is caught on camera picking his or her nose and broadcast to the entire nation, it could have seriously embarrassing repercussions that last longer than the one second sideways glance of an irritated stranger.

In this situation, the idea of possibly being surveilled at any moment causes many to be on edge. The fact that hidden camera shows exist causes many people to be more careful in public and to be skeptical if they see an uncommon or scary event that might inspire an extreme reaction happening nearby. Similarly, however, hidden camera shows have also been used to show how many people will help a person in need. Can it be said that this form of surveillance is positive because it inspires people to help those in need? Or, can it be can it be said that hidden camera shows have internalized a fear of possibly being watched and exerted power over people, forcing them to help those in need or act only in socially acceptable ways for fear of being on camera, rather than out of genuine care or desire to be socially acceptable? Are we truly all in the panoptic machine as “a part of its mechanism?”

In my opinion, hidden camera shows are being used to exercise some power over people and their actions. Although they may have a positive outcome at times, these shows are still trying to produce a desired result in people because of the fear of being watched. They try to keep people organized and useful to their environments by “inspiring” them to help others, and they segment other people by causing mistrust and skepticism of people and events around them.

Panopticon, Power, Visibility, and Code-Switching

Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment went into some really interesting of power in relation to visibility–especially when talking about the phenomenon of panopticon. The idea that power, in all its different incarnations, works in visibility and how/when/why a subject is being watched or seen immediately made me consider the ways different people actively work to appeal to a panopticon way of thinking through the way they present themselves. Specifically speaking: I was thinking about code-switching.

Code-switching is basically the act of a person adjusting the way he or she interacts with people in different situations and environments. Basically, it’s the idea that the way I talk to my roommates is completely different from the way I speak and present myself in class or at a job interview. This is a way, I think, that we as a society try to take some of the power back that we lose from constantly being watched. Just as “going off the grid” can be seen as a way of reaching a certain level of freedom and resistance, code-switching can be used to take control of the way you are being watched.

Most of my experience with the idea of code-switching has been interconnected with Black literature and culture. In my experience, I’ve had to code-switch in ways that were directly connected to me race (spoiler alert: I’m Black). But before I get into that, I’d like to further my argument about code-switching as a way of resistance.

I think we can all agree that what makes this force of power so intimidating is the idea that we are CONSTANTLY being watched, and therefore judged, as long as we’re participating in society. Some people may argue that we’re being watched when we’re alone–either by some kind of God or higher power or even an intrusive government. Either way, the power is embedded in the fact that we do not necessarily have control over who is watching us, or even when they are watching us–which means that we have no control over how they see us, how they treat us, or how they inspect us in every and any intrusive way they see fit. And of course the ominous “they” makes this threat of visibility all the more terrifying. We as the subjects, as the ones being watched and seen, may have no idea who is watching us, or if we do, we do not have the power to make them stop watching us. We cannot possibly be on our guard all the time–and yet we are allowed some small forms of resistance, and code-switching is a powerful one.

If we consider the ways we are at a loss of power and on the receiving end of judgment, it seems that there is no way to escape panopticon: you’re always being watched, and there is a clear tilt of power in who is being watched and who is watching. However, code-switching works to not only resist this, but to use this as a cloak as well.

Here’s where my experience as a Black woman comes in, so brace yourselves. Personally, at a place like IU where I tend to be one out of two Black students in my core classes, I’m almost hyper-aware of being watched. Let’s be real here–“diversity” in an IU classroom tends to be maybe 4-5 people of color in a class of 100 (so diverse! much impressed!), which makes me feel as if I have to be very careful in how I allow myself to be seen. (Quick disclaimer: I’m not saying there’s not a solid number of people of color, particularly Black people, here at IU, I’m saying that it’s still very disproportionate and no one needs to be patting themselves on the back on how diverse their classes are when there happens to be the odd Black kid in a class full of white people.) Anyway, my point is, even if no one is actively making me feel watched, even if no one is staring at me with binoculars or recording my every twitch with their phone, I still feel as if I am in a powerless position as a minority woman surrounded by people, who in this society, have power where I do not. And there’s no way to ignore this feeling, it’s something that’s embedded in my psyche, and beyond that–it’s something that’s exacerbated with every “harmless” joke or microaggression I encounter. So if I can’t ignore it, I try to resist it by code-switching. If I adapt the way I allow myself to appear by speaking or acting a certain way, I can take back some of the control I lost within panopticism. I’m already aware of being watched, so now I have a way through code-switching to be more conscious and therefore more in control of the way people are receiving me. At the end of the day, there is no way a subject can completely take control back within the politics of visibility, but code-switching allows a person to at least retain SOME power in their own visibility.

Code-switching, in all of its variations, can be used to resist or comply with panopticism. Whether consciously or unconsciously, there are times when I feel like my code-switching or lack thereof between my personal self (which is of course heavily influenced by my ethnicity and culture) and my professional self takes people by surprise, and if we learned anything from Bourdieu it’s that people have a complicated relationship with discomfort–a.k.a bliss! So I get a surge of pleasure in making people feel at a loss in this way, it allows me to gain some power in the way I am being seen, and now in the way I am watching and judging others. Code-switching can also be used as a way to comply with panopticism, though, particularly at the university level. We all know there is a certain level of professionalism and tact we’re supposed to exhibit as students. As students, we’re being watched by our peers and competition in class, as well as by our professors. So in this setting, it’s imperative for me to have control over the way I present myself. I’ve slipped up my code-switching in class before and my professor reprimanded me–taking away so much of my power as an individual and gaining so much for herself as a person of power. So sometimes I use code-switching to blend in with the way society expects me to behave–it’s safer and still allows me to feel some sort of surge of power. It’s almost as if I’m cheating the system by being aware of that the almighty “they”  are watching me and adjusting myself in a way that is almost meant to fool them.

Either way, I think that code-switching is an interesting way to contend with panopticism and the struggle of power within visibility, especially as a Black woman. There’ s no way to take complete control over visibility in our society, but I do think code-switching allows for a bit of leeway in that we as subjects are aware of that power dynamic and have the ability to adjust or adapt ourselves in way that give us some kind of control over our personal experience with panopticism.

Self-efficacy and Advertisements

In Wednesday’s class we focused on the idea Foucault stressed regarding visibility as a trap. This stood out to me in the discussion because the idea of being surveillance and the power it has on everyone. This leads me to think about media and the fact that technically we don’t need to be on surveillance to have people judge us because we already judge ourselves. In class I remember someone asked, what if we were in our room alone and not in public? I think the power still affects us. For example, if I were at home alone, not on social media sites, however, I was watching TV and an Ad came on supporting some type of “want to have beautiful smooth skin try…”. Even though it’s just an Ad, studies have shown that Ads do affect self-esteem and the way we perceive ourselves. Therefore, self-efficacy is highly impacted even when we aren’t with family, friends, in public, or on social media sites. In other words, even when we think we’re “safe” because obviously TV doesn’t talk back to us, we still think about ourselves to ourselves which makes Foucault’s theory of this panoptic system of power very complicated. Overall, instead of visibility trapping us, I think to some degree, we allow it to trap us because we too can have power over that.

Below is a quick example of how advertisements NEVER shows what the average woman looks like, so, instead, we start to believe we have to be like this.

“I’ll be Watching You”

Today in class we discussed the importance of Foucault’s statement that “visibility is a trap” (554). In other words, the surveillance of prisoners, students, patients, and so on creates a power dynamic in which the mechanism of surveillance exercises a sort of power over the subjects that fall within that gaze. However, Foucault complicates his argument when he refers to Bentham’s belief that “power should be visible and unverifiable” (555). If we are discussing panopticism in terms of a prison, then the prisoners should not know exactly when they are being watched, but they should also know that they might be watched at any moment.

I agree with this last statement. The whole power through visibility idea makes me think of stalking, which is a good example of how an individual uses surveillance to purposefully exercise power over another person. In many crime television dramas and documentaries, investigators often tell the victims of stalking that the stalker only continues to harass them because he gains power by doing so. In these cases, the victim acquires a constant fear of being watched, even when the stalker may not be present. Although the victim isn’t sure that the stalker is watching, it’s always possible, which ties into Foucault’s argument that visibility needs to be unverifiable. Furthermore, there might not be anything about the stalker’s build, personality, appearance, or status that implies a position of power. Rather, the power is only achieved through the gaze. Foucault expresses this idea when he says, “Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes” (555).

I think the importance of discipline also comes into play with regard to stalking. The power that the stalker exercises over the victim results in a change in the victim’s behavior and lifestyle. Many victims find themselves unable to sleep. Some begin to shut all of the blinds and curtains, as if locking themselves inside their own homes. Others do not even leave their homes for fear of being harmed or followed. These behaviors don’t necessarily remind me of the kinds of discipline that Foucault describes, but they do show how the power of surveillance affects the subject’s actions.

Since a majority of stalking cases involve a female victim, I wonder if Foucault would analyze this issue in terms of sexuality… I can’t help but think of Scotty in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Even though following Madeleine is part of his job as a detective, the way in which he watches her without her knowing reminds me of stalking (which, I admit, might be a stretch). I also wonder if our identification with Mulvey’s male gaze (which surveys the female object) places us within the mechanism of power while watching film… but in this case, we are the ones who exercise power over the female characters.

The Panopticon of Social Media

While reading Foucault, the idea of being watched and the Panopticon struck me as a powerful image for how we conduct ourselves on our social media sites. Most everyone these days has a Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or something of the sort. The reason we post on these sites, unconsciously or consciously, is for people to approve of the things we are doing and to feel like we have an audience. (The amount of likes someone gets on Facebook seems to really be important for some people these days.) In the prison Panopticon, there are guards (doing the watching), and there are inmates (the ones being watched). With social media though, we serve as both the guards and the inmates because we are actively pursing other peoples posts and posting things of our own. This endless cycle of being the guard and then being the inmate is  what keeps so many people crawling back to social media to fulfill a desire to have an audience, but to also know that they have the power to see what someone else is doing. Sure, a lot of people just get on social media because they are bored, but they are still continuously acting as the guard of the social media prison, while others are continuously acting as the inmate of the social media prison, performing for an audience because they know they are being watched, hence a social media Panopticon.

The internet and social media can be seen as a sort of all-seeing eye, watching everything you do:

“Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the ventral tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.” (555) The unverifiable, in this example, definitely exists in social media. When you’re posting something on Twitter, you’re not entirely sure if someone is going to see your post, or even care about your post, but in the back of your mind you know that someone COULD see it, and that possibility is what determines what you choose to tweet about.

The social media Panopticon traps us with the power of visibility, knowing that we are being watched and being able to do the watching. We are able to get the best of both worlds in the social media Panopticon, and some people are able to balance that out, but yet some people are still always going to share too much, no matter who is watching.

Panopticon and Super Sad True Love Story

During Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish,” I was really fascinated by his idea of Panopticism as the function of power and his line, “Visibility is a trap” (554). In the context of the Panopticon, this is a literal trap for those who are watched since they are enclosed in a tower, placed on display for the supervisors of higher tower to watch. The system confines prisoners to behave through the higher tower’s ubiquitous gaze (or, in a societal context, people are confined to conform to embedded social standards). But the higher watch tower functions as a trap for the watched prisoners of the lower towers because the higher tower’s visibility tricks the prisoners in the lower tower to always assume that the supervisors within the higher tower are watching them. But, in fact, the way that power functions in the panoptic system is as “visible and unverifiable” (555). The watched will be able to see the tower looming over them but never know when the supervisor of the tower is actually watching them. The supervisors do not posses power in their own right but exercise it through the omnipresence of the high tower. This is a really fascinating contrast to a more capitalistic idea of one group possessing/acquiring power over groups that lack any ownership of power. Instead, power becomes exercised and regulated through a “machine” that may be operated by someone, but that operator can easily be changed to someone else since the operators do not physically manifest power in themselves but instead implement power through a system they regulate.

This panoptic system of power made me think of Gary Shteyngart’s dystopian, Super Sad True Love Story, where the system of technology that (almost) everyone participates in functions as a way of controlling them. The protagonist, Lenny, is obsessed with needing to “rank” well in his intelligence, looks, credit, and career. In dystopian New York, almost everyone cares about what his or her ranking is online. Rankings of others are conducted by anyone through a technological ranking system called F.A.C. (Form A Community), which sets up standards of human-worth in deciding who is worth associating with. In one scene, when Lenny is at a bar, it is interesting how the function of bars remain the same (i.e. scouting the place for someone to hook up with) but the dynamics of how this validation of others occurs shifts from direct interaction to rating them through F.A.C. It is the technological rating system F.A.C. that governs power over how someone is validated, which the rankers merely regulate. Everyone in the bar is aware of being seen and being seen shapes the way they act/appear so that they may be perceived well. F.A.C. maintains particular standards people must live up to, and each person doing the ranking serves as a momentary operator of power over the person they are ranking/watching. The bar provides the visibility of those who rank and those who are ranked.

The complication I find, however, is that those who are being ranked do know who ranks them and what their ranking is. In this case, the power is verifiable (i.e., when someone is officially ranked on F.A.C., the ranked are technologically verified). Also, each person at the bar oscillates between ranker and ranked, watcher and watched. There is no clear distinction between who is doing the watching and who is being watched. This differs from Foucault’s idea of the Panopticon where “one is totally seen without ever seeing” in the lower tower while “one sees everything without ever being seen” in the higher tower (555). Although within the story, Lenny’s boss, Joshie, holds power in his own right as a CEO and because he refrains from engaging at all in the ranking system. For Joshie, he does not need to be ranked by others because he holds the agency to define his worth as superior to everyone else. In this case, privacy and invisibility becomes a source of power for Joshie who maintains the privilege to completely position himself outside the spectrum of seeing/being seen. So my question with the Panopticon is that can people be outside the system of seeing/being seen and would this in itself be considered the ultimate position of power (e.g. to have transcended reliance on the very machine that exercises power over so many)?

Foucault’s Tower, AKA Santa Claus

Foucault’s major point in his Discipline and Punish essay is that an organization’s discipline has power because its members internalize the rules and control of the organization. Because members think that the organization has power over them, they give it power. We can apply this logic to our own government’s rules and laws: we follow them because we think the government has the power to discipline us for breaking those rules.

Foucault calls this concept ‘Panopticon,’ where the major effect is “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”

In Western mainstream culture, I think that we could call it something else: Santa Claus.

While reading the essay for today, I kept being reminded over and over of the popular Christmas song, “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.” The lyrics express my understanding of Foucault’s Panopticon theory:

You better watch out
You better not cry
Better not pout
I’m telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to town

He’s making a list
And checking it twice;
He’s gonna find out
Who’s naughty and nice
Santa Claus is coming to town

He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been good or bad
So be good for goodness sake!
The song warns to follow the rules, because “He sees you when you’re sleeping/
He knows when you’re awake/He knows if you’ve been good or bad/So be good for goodness sake.” Children self-regulate their behavior, even though they never actually see Santa or know when he is watching them, on the off chance that he might see them misbehave. One December, I remember being too scared to sneak a cookie while my mom and I were baking, not because my mom would catch me, but because Santa might see.

Santa Claus became my version of Foucault’s imposing watch-tower.

Foucault and Religion

While reading Foucault’s theories about the body and self-discipline, I couldn’t help but apply Foucault’s ideas to religion. He talks about how, as humans, and specifically Westerners, we feel an overwhelming urge to “internalize the social control that monitors society and maintains the disciplined efficiency of the social system (549). In other words, we feel compelled, even in the absence of authority, to monitor our own actions and exhibit an certain amount of self-control and self-regulation. As I was reading his work, an example of this internal self control came to mind: religion. Foucault says that our desires to control our own bodies do not stem from our own ideas, but rather we continue to hold ourselves to the standards that authority figures, or society as a whole, have created for us. The same is true for religion. A higher being (or some would argue merely a group of individuals) creates a code of living that followers must obey.

 

“A body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body” (549). This idea could be seen through a religious lens; a “productive body” in the sense that a person is actively proclaiming one’s religion. Religion’s continue to thrive because its members continue to increase interest. A “subjected body” is important to religion because if someone is not open to being subjected to the ideals of it, religion, by its own definition, is ineffective. Many have argued that the appeal of religion does not lie in the promises of an afterlife, but rather in the structure and feeling of control in adhering to a religion’s strict rules. The opposite of power and control is anarchy; as humans, we internalize this knowledge and thus consent to control by higher authority, be it a deity or a governing body. But, as Foucault states, it is important to remember that this control is not enforced merely by the governing body, but by our own internal self-control and the overall fear of anarchy.

 

Foucault also talks about an idea of power that I completely agree with; he states that power is not greatest when it comes from one individual, but rather when it is distributed over many surfaces, both concrete, as with our physical bodies, and abstract, as with our thoughts, feelings, ideas, and aspirations: “Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up” (555). A good example of this is a dictator or radical religious leader; one individual may create a small following, but the large numbers are not generated by the ideas of just one person, but rather by the knowledge that others have first bought into the ideals. Said another way, it is not one person’s ideas that create a following, but rather the knowledge that others before them have followed.

 

 

Discipline and Punish: The Mechanism

Disclaimer: This reading was pretty difficult to take in, so I could either be spot on or way off with my thoughts–but I’m shooting for spot on–so here we go.

I found the most intriguing part of Foucault’s piece the aspect of looking at punishment and discipline as a machine rather than an occurrence. By “occurrence,” I mean something that simply happens, has its influence, and ends. For example, a father tries to teach his son a lesson by sending him to his room. But, when applied to the machine instead of just an occurrence, this discipline is actually something that works to internalize itself “throughout the whole social body” (557). Applied to the father’s discipline, let’s say the family has five children, and the one son is being “taught a lesson.” While initially you could think of this as a singular action, Foucault’s application of panopticism in the “discipline-mechanism” would say that the other five children also learn their lesson because the discipline takes place in “movement from one project to the other, from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized surveillance…” (557). The discipline isn’t one occurrence, it is a mechanism that teaches the entire “social body” (all of the children) how to act under multiple circumstances rather than only the one child learning his lesson for the one action he is being punished for.

As the mechanism is applied to society through the economy, businesses, and various industries, it’s incredible to realize that discipline and punishment are internalized into all of our lives. Discipline and punishment dictate how we act and how mass industries act, which is kind of scary to think about considering both discipline and punishment hinge on their ability to inflict power over us. While the mechanisms work, what I pull away from Foucault is the fact that the power not only influences, but it passes on to others as well. This keeps the mechanism in a revolution that continues to work and reapply itself continuously. While we can acknowledge that all of this happens, I think we should consider a couple of questions regarding the mechanism: Should we consider the mechanism a good or bad thing in society? Is there a way we can break away from the mechanism either as society or individuals?

I’m unsure what I think about both of these, meddling in the middle for both of them. I think the most important part is acknowledging that the mechanism exists, rather than having a strong standpoint on the two questions. If we realize that the mechanism works and that we are all influenced by discipline and punishment, we can at least understand the importance of the two and try to properly incorporate them in our lives…whatever “properly” may be.