Wednesday, May 18, 2005
(8:31 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Post-Opticon
The model of the panopticon, proposed by Bentham and popularized by Foucault, is no longer operative. It is broken. It undoubtedly still has effects -- wide-ranging effects, as does every broken thing -- but they are neither intended nor predictable.Only in retrospect is it clear how essential the presense of a real person was in the panopticon. Simply knowing that some person was watching was the most important factor, starting the process of internalizing some presumed ethic. A person, by definition, wants something -- even if the prisoner or student misperceived what the guard or the teacher wanted, some kind of desire was operative.
Not so with the camera, perhaps. A camera wants nothing from me. It only wants to see, and it is able to fulfill that in itself. It is utterly indifferent to what fills its field of vision. Even assuming that there is a security guard somewhere watching the camera is not the same as having an actual living being see you with his own eyes. Indeed, the security guard is one of the most universally derided figures in our societ, a fat, balding, lazy failure, knodding off at the crucial moment in almost every movie in which security cameras play a role. He wants to be a cop, but then, cops are also proverbially fat and lazy, craving their donuts -- miserable people held up by their symbolic authority and nothing more. The admirable cop is the cop on the verge of retirement, taking on that one last case that could mean never attaining to that bliss of rest and relaxation, as though a screenwriter has to place a vast expanse of rest in front of the cop as a reward to distract the audience from the vast expanse of rest usually presumed to be behind the cop, punctuated by the occasional power trip of pulling over one out of the twenty people scoffing at the speed limit at any given point.
There is no one watching, just the watching itself -- and if there is someone watching, at some further remove, it is a pathetic person. Yet what if, still today, we are internalizing the demands of the one supposed to be watching us -- that is, the camera? What happens when a society is disciplined by the camera, disciplined into becoming the good citizens of the camera kingdom? It's as though we're cutting out the middle man here -- instead of emulating some presumed subject, we are emulating the real itself, the sheer unbiased observation of the real. And the real is, we all know, cruel. It is harsh. It is violent. We all know this. "Truth hurts," for example.
I'm sorry that I'm so tired that I can't connect this better, but: Everyone wonders why those American soldiers would tape themselves doing such horrible things in Abu Grahib. Perhaps we need to ask ourselves whether they were only enabled to do such things by the taping itself. What if the camera is what produces not cruelty itself -- it has always existed -- but the cruelty peculiar to our time?
