Forwarded Message:
From: SOC POSTGRADUATE LAB - PC1 <j103@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 16:12:58 BST
Subject: Re: Re[4]: what is bio-power? (fwd)
To: foucault@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Re: bipower/surveillance
Isn't the point not so much that we 'all' accept
surveillance, but that to object is to implicate oneslf.
Here in the UK we don't yet have identity cards, but there
are proposals to introduce them 'voluntarily', with the
explicit qualification that 'only those who have something
to hide' would object to them. The legitimate citizen
becomes the subject of continuous acquiescence, who cannot
say no to reasonable authority because to do so would be to
remove oneslf from the realm of legitimacy. There is indeed
a certain 'comfort' in this (which could perhaps be related
to the current nostalgia in Russia for 'the old days')- I
think we're all trying to recapture the old certainties of
modernity through technological exclusion of the
consequences of the collapse of its project. Of course, what
we get is empty, and our attempts are thoroughly
paradoxical. Virilio has written recently of how
surveillance of public space forecloses on the legal as well
as the political subject (The Vision Machine). Anonymity
itself has become subject to surveillance -and isn't it
interesting that in public surveillance its not the
anonymous figure that is suspect, but the one that can be
identified? Once, 'Stadtluft macht frei', but now even
anonymity has been stolen from us!
I think what we're left with (pun intended) is *government*,
in the sense Foucault abstracted and genealogised, which
constantly adjusts itself to operate upon its constituted
objects, which thereby become one with its ends...In the
case of liberal governance, this means the interests of
individuals, both as a flock and as each and every one.
Mike Drake
UEA
>I don't know about you, but I pretty much assume that I
>might be under
>some form of electronic surveillance at any time.
>And following Rodney King, who isn't aware of the
>possibility of
>unexpected videotaping?
....
>My point is that we are now so accustomed to this that we
>welcome it.
>I'm not saying that that's a good thing, but I don't think
<it's so easy
>to say it's a bad thing, either. It just is the case;
>there is a
>certain comfort in such surveillance for modern subjects.
....
> So...I'm not sure that we ought not to be wondering what
>other form of power besides disciplinary power is now being
>used, i.e.,
>a form of power that we are not aware of. I know Deleuze
>talks about
>some of this stuff, but I just wondered what others think.
>Blaine Rehkopf
>York University
>CANADA
--