Tactil gaze

This is Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s terminology, to whom the analytic gaze is the basis of instrumental reason: the one which intends to understand the world in order to use it. It acquired its full development in political regimes which carried out the conquest and control on remote territories; the journey as a colonizing and imperialist means. The mimetic gaze is the basis of a sensorial knowledge which seeks to be pervaded by what it observes and gives in to the resistance of the object; Horkheimer and Adorno saw in it a vehicle for non-alienated experience, open to the diversity of the world. We could also mention here the distinction between a knowledge (and a passage) based on the optical image, and one based on the haptic or tactile image, according to Alois Riegl’s terminology. The optical image needs distant perspective and global vision. It requires a separation between the subject and the world and it produces knowledge through the erasure of any material contingencies in the scene. In the second case, the knowledge based on the haptic gaze emerges from the contact with the observed objects and becomes infected by their textures, rhythms and temporality, in other words, by their material density. According to this, there are two possible ethnographies with regard to the other: a rationalist ethnography focussed on explaining the other, and a tactile, mimetic or haptic ethnography which, without renouncing to knowledge, does not erase the unknowable (what is present to vision but not to understanding), nor exorcises disorientation, which can be highly instructive as it states the limits of knowledge and makes unpredictable associations, an irregular line of thought which avoids predetermined paths.

This is the kind of ethnography – or the type of encounter with the other – which, since the beginning of modern anthropology has been practised by an obscure kind of authors who looked more like artists and fiction writers than like scholars: some examples are provided by the ethnographies made by surrealists and proto-surrealists such as the North-American Zora Neale Hurston, novelist and ethnographer, and Maya Deren, experimental filmmaker and expert on the Haiti voudon, or the French novelist and Africanist Michel Leiris, author of Afrique Fantôme and close to George Bataille and the group Documents. More recently, this way of doing ethnography, of facing the other without trying to reduce its alterity, can be found in the participative documents by Jean Rouch, Juan Downey or David and Juliet MacDougall, or in the deconstructive documents by Victor MAsevesva, Jr. or Thrinh T. Mihn Ha. These are works which do not make use of image and sound in order to talk about the other but, in Trihn’s words, to talk near the other. Besides, Rouch and the MacDougall came close to the other in order to let them speak, even to let them film without glossing or interpreting them, without reducing them to a label, a human type or a category.

http://www.pedrortu.com/textos/texto1_ing.html

Sensuous contact, explicit and ready tactility between viewer and viewed, exists as an optical unconscious, as a secret of perspectivalism exploited to the hilt by commodities in advertisements which rub up against the supposedly dislocated viewer every chance they get. Why must sensuous contact between viewer and viewed be disavowed? Why a “secret” of perspective? Why the realm of a collective optical unconscious? The separation of viewer and viewed is fundamental to capitalism. Like the historically gendered distinction between
producer and consumer (by which men get to produce and women get to consume), the (gendered) separation between viewer and viewed functions as a conceptual space for commodity exchange in which the viewer (male) is marked as separate, possessing desire for the sensuous (residing in the commodity, female).1 The separation between viewer and viewed institutes an insatiable desire across the divide by which the viewer has the desire, the product is the desired. Sensuous complicity, literal and immediate contact between seer and seen as always already operative must be disavowed to service the status of “desire for contact” which keeps commodities circulating. Tactility is deployed and simultaneously secret(e)d, becoming an optical “unconscious” as we are consciously habituated to a seemingly a-sensuous dislocation between viewer and viewed.

rebecca schneider - the explicit body in performance (the secret's eye) pag .89

In her writings, Marks highlights the concept of haptic perception, that is the union of tactile and cinesthetic functions that make it possible for us to experience physically the objects surrounding us. By applying these theories to the field of cinema, Marks distinguishes between a purely optical and a haptic visuality, by which the eyes act like tactile organs: where an optic vision suggests a distance between the observer and the image and thus forces the spectator to „work by imagination“, the haptic cinema aims to create a sensorial relationship between the spectator and the image. Thus, the target of a tactile gaze, is not an „object“; more the idea is of a dynamic of subjectivity between the observer and the observed.In order to create his tactile cinema, Scott Hayes has involved the visitors of the gallery in two different „experiments“: in the first ( live cinema 1) he proposed a vj-set in which the fast ongoing of various videos prevented an involvement in the narration and would induce the public to search for other levels of fruition; furthermore he has preferred the disturbed and husk images of the video, to the clear cinematographic ones: the video images, exactly because of their inferior quality, would return in an approximative way that what the human vision picks in detail, and would activate a different visual perception. In the second experiment (live cinema 2), Hayes has immersed the public into what he himself defined a sensation-thought, by which the visitors would be able to perceive, in the almost total darkness, the presence of objects, without nevertheless ever being able to understand their real nature nor their definitive location. The primary intent of the artist was, as a matter of fact, not to decodify the object-space relationship in terms of sculpture or environment, but to stimulate a sensorial and imaginative perception as an alternative path to knowledge.

http://mcconch.com/hayes/pages/writing/haptic_cinema.htm

A commonly talked-up theoretical position these days is the idea of the ‘tactile eye,’ a sort of cinematic gaze that doesn’t establish the story and screen space; it more obviously follows the close-up thoughts and feelings of the characters. From Fish Tank to Somersault, from Morvern Callar to Blissfully Yours, this is a cinema where you don’t locate the shot but sense the character.

THE FINGERING GAZE

"It seems as if the problems arising in the natural philosophy of antiquity have not been discussed except in the categories of modern physics, mechanics or optics."13 Gérard Simon breaks with this convention against which, even before Thomas Kuhn,14 objections had been voiced by a historian of science, Pierre Duhem,15 and a poetic philosopher of science, Gaston Bachelard.16 With Simon, wever, unease with the prevailing exegesis of Greek authors turns into a competent and radical review of classical optics. The title of his book makes the intent explicit: It deals, not with classical optics, but
with the gaze, opsis:

What counts for the historian of optics is its localisation within the constellation of knowledge in a given epoch ... thus the archaeology of the gaze, man who gazes and this man's relation to the realm of the then visible.

Simon is a recognized Greek scholar; we can trust his conclusion that the object of optical treatises from Euclid via Ptolemy to those of the high Middle Ages is not light, but the ray originating in the eye. These ancient authors study the reflection of the gaze in a mirror, the refraction of the gaze when it hits the surface of water, the confusion of the gaze when it pursues a flying bird, and the illusion induced by paintings. These entrapments, seductions and distractions of the visual ray are examined because they constitute obstacles to right, fitting and honorable use of the visual sense. In this way the science of optics came to be understood as the basis and guide for a cultivated human activity, ultimately for ethics.

http://www.google.ro/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=64&ved=0CNUDEBYwPw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.davidtinapple.com%2Fillich%2F1998_scopic_past.PDF&ei=bGZ2TLzwNJGSswaS2-GIBg&usg=AFQjCNHZMHFFbEzEP7k4zZ0PCmo5zezuJQ&sig2=lUbr2dTNoWYIaEBmLDfUpg

One of the principal hypotheses at stake in these studies is that if we acknowledge that the discourse of philosophy is itself a historical construction and that it has often relied on a vision-
generated vocabulary and way of thinking (not only, for example, with words such as speculation, obseruation, insight, reflection, evidence, and intuition, and with metaphors such as minoring, clarity, perspectiae, point of view, horizon of understanding, and the light of reason, but also with certain methodological concepts such as totality, analysis, objectivity, reflective detachment, and representation), even to the extent, sometimes, of drawing on an ocular vocabulary and rhetoric for the construction of a system of thought at the same time that it has constructed a model of the gaze profoundly hostile to the testimony and claims of vision, then we
must also acknowledge that the use and the construction of this vocabulary needs to be examined, together with the discursive effects of such use and construction on the way of thinking that has dominated the history of philosophy.




Psychoanalytic film criticism relies on a conception of vision developed by theorists like Jean-Louis Baudry, who claims that cinema is merely the final and most perfected material realization of the return to the scene of the unconscious'
This realization began, he proposes' in Plato's cave' a prehistoric cinema that produced the first simulated and displaced dream state wherein the unconscious could represent itself. Thus, he
proposes, film's special function is to satis$ narcissism by Providing the subject with visual rePresentations that reproduce images from the unconscious, images that represent a world
ordired by active male subjects and passive females objectified by a controlling male gaze.

	Sites of Vision: The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy

Can't Take My Eyes Off You

You're just too good to be true.
Can't take my eyes off you.
You'd be like Heaven to touch.
I wanna hold you so much.
At long last love has arrived
And I thank God I'm alive.
You're just too good to be true.
Can't take my eyes off you.

Pardon the way that I stare.
There's nothing else to compare.
The sight of you leaves me weak.
There are no words left to speak,
But if you feel like I feel,
Please let me know that it's real.
You're just too good to be true.
Can't take my eyes off you.

I love you, baby,
And if it's quite alright,
I need you, baby,
To warm a lonely night.
I love you, baby.
Trust in me when I say:
Oh, pretty baby,
Don't bring me down, I pray.
Oh, pretty baby, now that I found you, stay
And let me love you, baby.
Let me love you.

You're just too good to be true.
Can't take my eyes off you.
You'd be like Heaven to touch.
I wanna hold you so much.
At long last love has arrived
And I thank God I'm alive.
You're just too good to be true.
Can't take my eyes off you.

I love you, baby,
And if it's quite alright,
I need you, baby,
To warm a lonely night.
I love you, baby.
Trust in me when I say:
Oh, pretty baby,
Don't bring me down, I pray.
Oh, pretty baby, now that I found you, stay..

Michael Haneke from an interview

The simultaneously eye- and ear-occupying intensity of the film medium, the monumental size of its images, the speed at which its images demand to be viewed, its capacity above all other art forms to render or simulate reality virtually in toto, to make it tangible to the senses– in short, the medium’s capacity to overwhelm– downright predestine it for a narcotized, that is, an anti-reflexivereception. In contrast to literature and the fine arts, even the morally conscious and responsible depiction of acts of violence is bound to move into controversy. The moving image
requires other criteria than the still image – from the image’s viewer as well as its producers: The still image generally shows an action’s result, whereas the film shows the action itself. The picture usually appeals to a viewer’s solidarity with the victim, while film often puts the viewer in the position of the perpetrator. (Upon, say, looking at Picasso’s Guernica, we see the suffering of the victims frozen for us to behold for all eternity. By virtue of the time allowed for becoming conscious of and contemplating the represented subject, our path towards solidarity with them is portrayed without any moral stumbling blocks. With the carnage in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now supported by Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries,” we are riding along in the helicopter, firing on the Vietnamese scattering in panic below us, and we do it without a guilty conscience because we – at least in the moment of the action – do not become aware of this role.) This guiltless complicity is also that to which violence in film owes its all-overpowering presence. The surrogate action banishes the terror of reality; a mythical narrative mode and an aestheticizing mode of representation allow a safe release of our own fears and desires. The hero on the screen transcends the helplessness and power-lessness of the viewer with his accomplishments.

As we all know, the cinema is celebrating 100 years of existence this year. For more than half of this time period, it was the sole ruler in the realm of moving pictures, a period during which it tried to develop a grammar intended to enable this completely new organ of speech to speak in its own terms. Two devices, the camera and the tape recorder, offered the possibility of reflecting and simulating an almost complete impression of reality. The reports of the incredible effect of the new medium are well known and range from the panic of the Parisian audience with regardto Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat by the Lumière Brothers to the terrified reactions of South American jungle inhabitants upon their first confrontation with film projections half a century later.

For the viewer, the boundary between real existence and image was difficult to establish from the beginning, which is precisely why the medium won a great deal of its fascination. The oscillation between the disconcerting feeling of being present at a real event and the emotional security of seeing only the image of an artificially created or a found reality was what enabled the emergence of the genre described above.

The scene changed with the appearance of television. The documentary element entered the foreground. (In the cinema, it had become – at least with regard to its acceptance by viewers – a marginal area shortly after its inception.) The speed by which electronic media conveyed and disseminated information led to a shift in viewing habits. The impact of the impression exerted by the larger-than-life image on the screen during a single trip to the movies was matched and then eclipsed by the sheer mass of impressions and their permanent presence in the living room.
Building on the dramaturgical and aesthetic forms of the cinema, television changed precisely these forms by permanently deploying them.

The cinema tried to counter the overwhelming omnipresence of the electronic media by intensifying its own means, which television – as much as it was technically able – then immediately integrated into its system again. The compulsion to trump one another led to the permanent paroxysm of attempted intensity and, thus, indirectly to the further blurring of the boundary between reality and image as well.

The Panopticon’s ‘potential’ for surveillance nurtures self-discipline (causing individuals to ‘gaze upon themselves’) and self-discipline replaces torture as the ‘paradigmatic’ method of social control. Thus where persons themselves and their bodies are turned into ‘objects’, self-surveillance emerges as a practice of control. This practice is reflected in language (‘Watch yourself’), architecture and power relations. When people are treated as objects they see themselves as objects and tend to torture their bodies and desires to fit instructions and specifications. They evaluate their own behaviour and tend to become either docile subjects or rebellious subjects.

Foucault saw the development of psychoanalysis as a further repression of the self rather than as ‘a liberating step beyond the human sciences’. To Foucault (1981: 67), psychoanalysis was the ‘culmination of a normalising confessional technology’ first used by the early Catholic Church and which ensured that ‘sex’ as well as the ‘body’ became medicalised, psychiatrised, psychologised and hygienised. One could enter the ‘illness’ world and ‘disordered’ world via a variety of ‘new personages':

the nervous woman, the frigid wife, the indifferent mother — or worse the mother beset by murderous obsessions.. . the hysterical or neurasthenic girl, the precocious and already exhausted child ...
(Foucault 1981: 110)

Surveillance of the family under the gaze of the new professionals of psychiatry and psychology could turn up a variety of ways of ‘disturbed being’. Foucault (1981: 111) argues that the family from the mid-nineteenth century was compliant in this process:

the family broadcast the long complaint of its sexual sufferings to doctors, educators, psychiatrists, priests and pastors, to all the experts who would listen . . . [it] engaged in searching out the slightest forces of sexuality in its midst, wrenching from itself the most difficult confession, soliciting an audience with everyone who might know something about the matter and opening itself unreservedly to endless examination.

http://www.academyanalyticarts.org/eckerman.htm

Tim Dean - Unlimited Intimacy:

Working from a different methodological approach, the German sociolo-
gist Ulrich Beck has identified risk as the defining feature of postmodernity.
His account of the “risk society” emphasizes how environmental damage, ter-
rorism, and other instances of “manufactured risk” have saturated everyday
life during the past several decades. Because the risks of nuclear catastrophe
or global warming exceed temporal, geographic, and institutional boundar-
ies, we now live in a world where risk cannot be contained. This characteristic
of contemporary life reorients social theory from its preoccupation with the
distribution of social goods to a new focus on the distributed effects of social
“bads.” More than a decade before 9/11, Beck was arguing that the engine of
the risk society was fear or anxiety:

The dream of class society is that everyone wants and ought to have a share of
the pie. The utopia of the risk society is that everyone should be spared from
poisoning. . . . The driving force in the class society can be summarized in the
phrase: I am hungry! The movement set in motion by the risk society, on the
other hand, is expressed in the statement: I am afraid!

We witnesses can't escape ourselves - J.G. Ballard

So how does one approach a diversity of works, made for cinema, television and the gallery, in light of this? The condition of being a subject of surveillance is clearly omnipresent and television has happily hooked itself into what might be called the 'panoptical imaginary'. Consider the extraordinary success and popularity of 'Reality TV' shows such as Big Brother (the British equivalent of Loft Story), for whose first series more people voted than did in recent elections in the UK (to which fact nothing, and everything, need be added). Surveillance is a given condition of debates about law, order and social control. All of which is only to state the obvious, to invoke a national variation on a global theme. So much so, in fact, that between October 2001 and February 2002 the Zentrum fur Kust und Media (ZKM) in Karslruhe, Germany devoted a major exhibition to the subject: CTRL Space: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. The catalogue that accompanied the show has been an invaluable companion in researching this letter and must surely stand as a key work of reference on the subject if one begins to approach surveillance not only as a means of externally-imposed social control but also as an increasingly internalised condition. From which it's only a short step to asking: what are the conditions of this internalised self-surveillance? What are its aesthetics and its rhetorics as visible in the UK? One place to start from is the assertion made by Ursula Frohne in her essay for the exhibition catalogue: “The unforeseen success of docu-soaps such as Big Brother indicates that we are on the threshold of a transition from the bureaucratic-institutional tactics of surveillance to the medially-staged spectacle of the individual's total surrender to the media's regime of the gaze.” (3) Cinema, and other moving-image art forms, occupy a privileged position in this transition, existing between the bureaucratic-institutional and the medially-staged spectacle and are able to recruit, represent and possibly even détourne the apparatus by which internalisation takes place. In so doing, certain works provide valuable meditations on the aesthetics and rhetorics of the condition of internalised surveillance.

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/25/letter_london.html

The Objectification and Dismemberment of Women in the Media

Kilbourne (2002) pointed out that advertising is a 100 billion dollar a year industry. Each day we are exposed to more than 2000 ads. Advertising can be one of the most powerful sources of education in our society. Many women feel pressured to conform to the beauty standards of our culture and are willing to go to great lengths to manipulate and change their faces and bodies. Kilbourne suggests that women are conditioned to view their faces as masks and their bodies as objects. Through the mass media, women discover that their bodies and faces are in need of alteration, augmentation, and disguise. In addition, women are taught to internalize an observer’s perspective of their own bodies. This phenomenon is called objectification (Fredrickson & Noll, 1997). Advertisements are loaded with objectified women, and only recently have the effects of objectification been explored. However, the effects of the dismemberment of women in advertising have been neglected. Dismemberment advertisements highlight one part of a woman’s body while ignoring all the other parts of her body. Dismemberment ads portray women with missing appendages or substitute appendages. Of course the ads are only symbolic of dismemberment, but the symbolic imagery creates nearly the same effect. This study highlights the nature and implications of objectification and requests a similar exploration of the nature and implications of dismemberment advertisements. It is important to note that advertisements are not the cause of the problems, per se, but they contribute to them by fostering an environment in which the selling of women's bodies is seen as acceptable.

Fredrickson and Roberts (1997) coined the term, objectification theory, which suggests that our culture socializes girls and women to internalize an observer’s perspective on their own bodies. When young girls and women internalize an observer’s perspective of their own bodies, they live much of their life in the third-person. This is called self-objectification. In other words, females learn to be more concerned with observable body attributes rather than focusing on non-observable body attributes such as feelings and internal bodily states. Fredrickson and Roberts (1997) suggest that appearance monitoring, which is present in self-objectification, can increase shame and appearance anxiety and diminish awareness of internal bodily states. These experiential consequences may contribute to the development of several mental health risks, including eating disorders, unipolar depression, and sexual dysfunction. The subsequent studies attest to the negative implications of objectifying the female body.

In relation to intimacy and sexuality within male and female relationships, Brooks (1995) discussed the effects of the centerfold syndrome that is defined by five principal characteristics: voyeurism, objectification, trophyism, the need for validation, and the fear of true intimacy. Brooks mentioned several possible causes of the centerfold syndrome such as biology, instinct, and survival of the fittest. However, it is exceptionally interesting to note that of all the possibilities mentioned, Brooks found the socio-cultural explanation to be the most probable. Brooks claimed that the centerfold syndrome is a product of the way in which men have been taught to think about and experience relationships, intimacy, and sex. The widespread sexualization of women in our culture easily lends itself to the adoption of the Centerfold Syndrome. Men are not the only ones who have adopted this harmful attitude towards relationships, intimacy, and sex. Women can just as easily adopt a negative self-image and attitude, perpetuating the negative stereotypes about women, sexuality, intimacy, and relationships (Brooks, 1995).

Indeed, the objectification of women is evident in our society where women are constantly sexualized, but the dismemberment of women has yet to receive the consideration and exploration it deserves. Kilbourne (2002) suggested that the dismemberment of women is a monstrous problem in advertising. Dismemberment ads focus on one part of the body, e.g., a woman’s breasts. Typically, dismemberment ads employ female body parts for the purpose of selling a product. Dismemberment ads promote the idea of separate entities. These ads overtly and covertly encourage a woman to view her body as many individual pieces rather than a whole. Dismemberment ads leave many women feeling that their entire body is spoiled on account of one less than perfect feature. If a woman has less than satisfactory legs, then her potential for beauty is spoiled. In other words, if every body part is not flawless, then the possibility for beauty is ruined. As previously mentioned, girls and women are conditioned from a young age to view the body as a “work in progress” or something in constant need of alteration. Instead of being satisfied with their body as a whole, they concentrate on what separate entities they lack. Many women compare their bodies and sexuality to the eroticized images that are plastered on billboards and television and in magazines and movies (Kilbourne, 2002).

Undoubtedly, the sexualized portrayal of women in the media has significantly negative outcomes. These negative outcomes are not only affecting adult women but also young girls. Females are buying cosmetics and beauty products at increasingly younger ages. Recently, researchers have begun exploring self-surveillance, body shame, and disordered eating tendencies in preadolescent females and found that girls as young as seven are showing signs of disordered eating and self-surveillance (Good, Mills, Murnen, & Smolak, 2003). The media affects some women in subtle ways (unconsciously), and other women are affected in a more direct way (consciously). The problematic representations of women in the media deserve our immediate attention, consideration, and research. Future studies should include: further exploration of the relational barriers between men and women, the centerfold syndrome and its effect on human intimacy, the appeal of physical sex to women and its relationship to the dismemberment of women in the media, the relationship between dismemberment ads and body shame and body dissatisfaction, the relationship between dismemberment ads and eating disorders, and the relationship between dismemberment ads and depression.

http://www.kon.org/urc/v5/greening.html

"self surveillance"

One central tenet of Foucault’s conception of power is that it cannot be located; it is everywhere and therefore also inside us (Foucault, 1997b: 108). Power relations produce the subject or, to be more precise, they instill in the individuals a historically determinedrelation with themselves (Rose, 1999: 243). In fact, any practice of surveillance entails self-surveillance as its historical counterpart and it is this simultaneity that accounts for the acceptance and legitimization of power relations.

The enlargement of the concept of self-surveillance implies associating it with practices of the care of the self. These practices require the stipulation of the part of the individuals that must be cared for and worked upon, a movement which corresponds to the production of an ethical substance (Foucault, 1985). In other words, self-surveillance is also based on the cultural postulation that certain thoughts and actions are dangerous or unwholesome to the constitution of the individual as a subject.

Enlarging the concept of self-surveillance also entails assuming that there is no neat line distinguishing power from care. The crucial point is that individuals usually problematize their thoughts and behaviors through beliefs held as true in their historical context. Hence, those who exercise power attain legitimacy by presenting themselves as helping us in caring for this part of ourselves that threatens our constitution as subjects. After all, they only intend to prevent us from straying away from the ‘correct’ path (Foucault, 1997d). Moreover, as the part of the self that demands care is ‘problematic’, one’s constitution as a subject entails an adversarial relation. Individuals must struggle against themselves in order to act according to ‘truth’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 480-482). Once again, if beliefs depend upon the context in which they are generated, struggling against the ‘problematic’ portion of the self in order to act according to ‘truth’ can be viewed as behaving as a given culture expects one to behave.

Our argumentation begins by highlighting a theoretical difficulty found in the usual reading of Foucault’s description of the Panopticon. The difficulty lies in how to conceive the nature of self-surveillance induced by the panoptic tower. We contend that self-surveillance does not depend only on an “invisible but unverifiable” power (Foucault, 1979: p. 201), but also on normalizing judgment.


The majority of authors that deploys the panopticon as a historical background for new surveillance techniques quotes or rephrases passages in which Foucault defines the major effect of the panoptic tower. One often cited passage refers to the major effect of the Panopticon: “(…) to induce in the inmates a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault, 1979: 201). In another passage, Foucault wrote:

He [sic] who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection (Foucault, 1979: 202).

The Panopticon can be conceived as technology, first, because as an architectural arrangement, it substitutes human surveillance by an opaque but visible tower; and, secondly, because it renders power automatic by promoting self-surveillance.

The decisive question lies in how to conceive this self-surveillance. The nature of the compliance with power rules and values is what is at stake here. We believe that the strange proximity between the Panopticon and the “Big-Brother” is rooted in the understanding of self-surveillance not as care of the self, but as self-monitoring (Lyon, 2001: 114) or, as Norris and Armstrong ingeniously put it, as “habituated anticipatory conformity” (Norris and Armstrong, 1999: 6).

Putting ourselves in the prisoners’ situation may be the best way to shed light on the theoretical problems posed by these readings. What would it mean to comply with power through “anticipatory conformity”? We would certainly try to act according to what power expects from us, but we would only do so because we would be aware of the possibility of being observed. We would act differently if given the opportunity to escape power’s eye. We would resemble “docile bodies”, but our docility would only be apparent, a mask that we carried as long as we thought we were being observed.

To put it differently, we would internalize power’s eye but we would not identify with its values. In reality, instead of an unfolding of ourselves in consciousness and its object, our conduct, we would experience a threefold partition of our interiority. We would distance ourselves from our behaviors and look at them with power’s internalized eyes. However, there would be an additional detachment: a part of ourselves constituted by our consciousness and desire would be sheltered from power’s eyes.

Concretely, we would act considering the possibility of observation and posterior punishment and objectify our conduct accordingly, but we would not believe that by acting thus we would be doing what is best for us. Self-surveillance would be, in fact, experienced as surveillance of an internalized, but identified, other upon us. Although normalizing judgment can be understood as an infra-penalty that partitioned an area that the law had left empty – the vast domain of gestures, attitudes, quotidian activities, tasks, discourses, uses of time, habits, etc. – its real novelty resides in the fact that these micro-penalties are not addressed so much at what one does, but at who one is (Foucault, 1979: 178). Besides constructing the dangerous bridge between fact and value and thus associating knowledge with power, the normalizing judgment also operates the passage from action to being, extracting from individuals’ behavior the identity of each and everyone. The norm is an immanent law – an observed regularity and a proposed regulation (Foucault, 1979: 179). In schools, for instance, the average time spent by students to conclude a task is first observed and later becomes a rule: those who are too slow fail. This failure does not concern only the inobservance of a rule; it also concerns the value of individuals, conferring upon those who have failed an identity that can vary from the bad student to the abnormal.

Douglas’ analysis is insightful. It allows us, for instance, to make sense of a series of social movements directed against the tobacco industry and fast-food companies. The arguments deployed for holding these industries accountable for individual suffering are well known and fit well both Douglas’ analysis and the nexus here proposed between risk and addiction: in order to protect their interests, these industries knowingly put individuals at risk by exploiting frailties in their self-control. Still, there are two major differences between Douglas’ thesis and the arguments here developed. The first is straightforward: risk related to lifestyle is also and principally a means of placing the burden of caring for the future on individuals’ shoulders.

The generalization of the risky self provokes the emergence of a new relation between past and future. Human genetic mapping and life habits make it possible to anticipate, among the countless illnesses/diseases that may affect an individual and among the multiple ways of dying, those that are more probable, as well as the means we may dispose of to avoid their emergence. In presenting itself as anticipation of accidents and turbulences that may abbreviate our journey in this world, this scientifically defined possible determines limitations to be observed in the present. Life now depends on knowing how to behave in the distance between everything that may happen and what is more probable of happening; it depends on the restriction of possibilities – and not upon their invention and posterior realization. The aims of human action have indeed changed since the time in which terms such as progress, revolution, liberation or even cure organized the sense of the future.

from: link

Sousveillance

Sousveillance (pronounced /suːˈveɪləns/ soo-VAY-ləns, French pronunciation: [suvɛjɑ̃s]) and inverse surveillance are terms coined by Steve Mann to describe the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant in the activity,^[1]

Inverse surveillance is a subset of sousveillance with a particular emphasis on the "watchful vigilance from underneath" and a form of surveillance inquiry or legal protection involving the recording, monitoring, study, or analysis of surveillance systems, proponents of surveillance, and possibly also recordings of authority figures and their actions. Inverse surveillance is typically an activity undertaken by those who are generally the subject of surveillance, and may thus be thought of as a form of ethnography or ethnomethodology study (i.e. an analysis of the surveilled from the perspective of a participant in a society under surveillance).^[2]

Sousveillance typically involves community-based recording from first person perspectives, without necessarily involving any specific political agenda, whereas inverse-surveillance is a form of sousveillance that is typically directed at, or used to collect data to analyze or study, surveillance or its proponents (e.g., the actions of police at a protest rally).

wikipedia

REBIRTH OF THE CRITICAL (1st draft)

And your surface is hard. And I can’t get through. Voices speaking as if under bed sheets. I can’t get through. Sounds disappearing before they are registered. My ears tickle. I can’t get in. I can’t get through to you. You are closed land. Fence after fence across your spine. Your body is closed off. Your legs pound against the floor in rhythms that won’t be changed. Your eyes flicker, your jaws clatter. I can’t get though.

It pours out of you. Words and feelings of ‘it’s like this it’s like this it’s like this’ and I lean towards you to meet your ocean of words washing over me. I can’t get through to you. I start at your feet and work my way up. I turn your feet, while words pour out of you. I pinch your legs, and scratch and penetrate the soft skin around your thighs and kiss your tummy. All the voices hollow melodies.

Your fences are strong and it gets harder and harder for me to get close, I can’t get through, I can’t stop your all endeavoring words. You appear from all sides with lulling streams of sound and meaning that make my eye lids unbearable. It has to stop, you will listen. My ears tickle. It has to stop.

And your surface is hard. I try to keep your mouth shut, I try to scream so lightly that we have to close our eyes and I kick and I strike your neck. Because I can’t get through, I can’t get through, I can’t get through.

The fences grow like trees that surround you and I begin to speak.

Faster and faster. I wrench your body and I get hold of your hands, brake your fingers and I pull your hair and ever so gently I push my fingers into your eyeballs. I lick your cheeks and your forehead. Your pouring words become little husky hisses. Coughing conclusions which seem obscure. Your throat dries out. My teeth pinch through the flesh of your tongue. You have to stop, it has to stop. The fences and harbors tremble. You rattle. Your hard body shivers of strain. And the fences shudders and the harbors sway all the way down your spine. Ears tickle. Your muscles surrender like heavy and exhausted animals and while my words, softly creates melodies your chest trembles as if it were of a birds’. I can’t get through. The rhythm is within you, and I can’t get through. I can’t reach this mechanical inner even though I repeatedly pound my fists into your chest. You have to stop, you have to stop because I have something to say. I can’t get through, I can’t get through.

Private Logic

Griffith and Powers (2007) explain, Private logic, a term Dreikurs and H.L. Ansbacher each adapted from Adler’s “private intelligence,” describes the fictional line of reasoning proceeding from private meaning, that is, meaning premised upon the person’s private and unique valuation of self, others, and the world, and what life requires of him or her. Private logic, as if reasoning that dysfunctional, erratic, and anti-social behavior is necessary, is the fiction of a hidden argument. Private sense in a pattern of conviction is not conscious. It is an artifact of the psychotherapeutic transaction, revealed by indirection, as if particular thoughts and ideas were operating to require self-defeating or otherwise damaging behavior….In Adlerian therapy an individual’s behavior (thought, feeling, and action) is explained to the client, as if it were a conclusion required by a private logic, as client and therapist uncover the private meaning which the client has relied upon for answering such questions as: (a) What kind of person am I? (b) What kind of a world is this? (c) What must I, as a person such as I am, do in a world such as this is in order to make a place for myself? In sum, the effort to clarify the private meaning asks, “What would have to be true to make an otherwise particular, peculiar, and socially senseless pattern of behavior, intelligible.” The Individual Psychologist thus assumes that the person is acting as if the behavior were an intelligent response in the situation, according to a private logic, answering the requirements of a private meaning. (p. 81)

Dreikurs (1973) saw private logic globally, saying “it comprises all unconscious ideas, concepts, intentions and goals upon which the individual acts.” He said, “The fundamental interpersonal conflicts are reflected in the intrapersonal conflict between the conscience, which recognizes the social obligations, and the personal desires, which may stand in the way of cooperation. The conflict between the individual’s private logic (private sense) and his conscience (common sense) may be resolved in three ways”: as neurotic, psychotic, and psychopathic.

Private logic is the particular, orderly way a person thinks and thus acts in keeping with his or her ideas, concepts, perceptions and apperceptions, intentions and goals, held knowingly or not.

link: http://carterandevans.com

Alexander McQueen Spring 2010

from the minute 1.30

Oren Ambarchi - Alma (possible music)

Image-World

Though these two attitudes, the aesthetic and the instrumental, seem to produce contradictory and even incompatible feelings about people and situations, that is the altogether characteristic contradiction of attitude which members of a society that divorces public from private are expected to share in and live with. And there is perhaps no activity which prepares us so well to live with these contradictory attitudes as does picture-taking, which lends itself so brilliantly to both. On the one hand, cameras arm vision in the service of power-of the state, of industry, of science. On the other hand, cameras make vision expressive in that mythical space known as private life. In China, where no space is left over from politics and moralism for expressions of aesthetic sensibility, only some things are to be photographed and only in certain ways. For us, as we become further detached from politics, there is more and more free space to fill up with exercises of sensibility such as cameras afford. One of the effects of the newer camera technology (video, instant movies) has been to turn even more of what is done with cameras in private to narcissistic uses-that is, to self-surveillance. But such currently popular uses of image-feedback in the bedroom, the therapy session, and theweekend conference seem far less momentous than video's potential as a tool for surveillance in public places. Presumably, the Chinese will eventually make the same instrumental uses of photography that we do, except, perhaps, this one.

Our inclination to treat character as equivalent to behavior makes more acceptable a widespread public installation of the mechanized regard from the outside provided by cameras.
China's far more repressive standards of order require not only momitoring behavior but changing hearts; there, surveillance is internalized to a degree without precedent, which suggests a more limited future in their society for the camera as a means of surveillance. "


"A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. "

"Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires· the unlimited production and consumption of images. "

"Our oppressive sense of the transience of everything is more acute since cameras gave us the
means to "fix" the fleeting moment. We consume images at an ever faster rate and, as Balzac suspected cameras used up layers of the body, images consume reality. Cameras are
the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete."

Susan Sontag - The Image-World

Dancing in general - Coreographic the public, making asamblage - Rudi Laermans

In his study AbweJ>entheit ('Absence'), subtitled 'A performative aesthetic of dance', Gerald Siegmund {2006) demonstrates at length that contemporary choreographers such as William Forsythe, Jerome Bel, Xavier Le Roy and Meg Stuart regularly emphasize in their work the absence of the real dancing body in its doubling self-representation. These and other contemporary dance makers often highlight the constitutive split between the real and tbe sensory body observed by means of technical devices, sucb as microphones and video images.

Particularly tbe possibilities offered by video-technology, such as the enlarging of body fragments or tbe delayed, even refigured representation of an already seen movement, are a favourite means to create a fissure in the spectator's gaze. The fissure not only destabilizes the spectator's panoptical point of view but also
makes visible that one doesn't see what one thinks one sees, i.e., the presence of a real body.

Hey Vlad and Gabi,

So I might have a proposal for a residency here i Copenhagen. Would you be interested in that Vlad? Or should we try somewhere outside both of our countries?

Anyways I was talking to a really good friend om mine about the idea regarding "how can video expand choreography and how can choreography expand video". I was thinking it could be cool maybe to project something very subtle on the other three walls of the theater : the two side walls and the wall behind the audience. This way the audience could find itself INSIDE the performance, instead of being spectators from the 'outside'.. The material should not be something that's noisy or contains a lot of movement..just something that can create a space around the audience...hmm. It could perhaps also be a way to include the 'crowds'..the people we need to create that revolution.. Is it possible to have three projectors playing the same videomaterial at the same time? Not nessecarily connected to you. But on its own? What do you think?

ida

(Not that this structure is the same as ours, but it gives a feeling of being inside the projection I guess..)

Nam June Paik - TV Buddah