In dissecting the first volume of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, one encounters three salient theories that Foucault develops over the course of the text. The first theory that Foucault forwards is that the repressive hypothesis - the assertion that since the 19th century western societies have sought to repress human sexuality and sexual urges - is false. In it's place, Foucault offers that "... Rather than massive censorship... what was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse." (Foucault, 34).
The second theory presented by Foucault - the concept of biopower - supports his view on the true nature of the repressive hypothesis. Foucault explains biopower as, "... An explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations..." (Foucault, 140).
The explanation of how biopower - as an apparatus of power - subverts the repressive hypothesis can be found within the subtext of Foucault's third assertion: The Will o Knowlege. The will to knowledge, as Foucault forwards, is the form that the will to power has taken within modernity. Foucault postulates that power and the exercise of power has undergone a radicle transformation due to the emergence of global, capitalist economies. With the reification of groups of people into "populations" Foucault demonstrates how biopower works to instigate, then control discourse. Power and the institutions of power, "... Sociology, applied psychology, cybernetics, and semiology [ect.]..." (Debord, 42) incite members of a population to subject the intimate details of their lives to the quantifying machinations of said institutions.
Foucault's specific concern on the subject of sexuality being processed and commodified through the discourse of power stems from Sigmund Freud's equation of the sexual self to the essential self. Foucault challenges this belief - that ones true identity is the summation of their sexuality - by exposing the role that the institutions of power have played in the construction of "mainstream", or sanctioned sexual practices.
Foucault believes that "normative" sexuality and sexual practices are constructed cultural commodities that have been dictated to populations by the cultural institutions of power. The question that Foucault alludes to with this assertion can be specifically stated as, "How can ones sexuality represent ones essence when sexuality itself is a commodity of the discourse of power?"
The combination of these three theories raises the concern of an individual's place and function within a reified population. How does one enact agency in a world constructed by power?
There are many possible answers to this question.
I would like to forward one example that examines the nature of agency by comparing two styles of documentary photography. To do this I will examine the methodology behind Robert Mapplethorpe's 1978 X Portfolio in comparison with Peter Beste's ongoing documentary effort, True Norwegian Black Metal.
In X Portfolio Mapplethorpe presents images of the homosexual leather, bondage, and domination subculture as it existed in San Francisco in the 1970's. The prime photograph from this body of work is a self-portrait of Mapplethorpe that depicts the artist clad in black leather chaps and vest, anally penetrating himself with a bullwhip. The inclusion of this self portrait within X Portfolio contextualizes Mapplethorpe as a participating member of the gay leather community documenting himself and his peers from within. He is an insider, and as an insider he is giving "us" - the viewers of the photograph - an insiders perspective. However, as Mapplethorpe allows the outside viewer this voyeuristic glimpse into his exclusive clique, he retains an agency over what we see as well as how we see it. Mapplethorpe's X Portfolio offers a unique breed of objectivity which allows his subjects to enact agency in the making of his photographs by virtue of Mapplethorpe being a part of the "subject" he is documenting.
Peter Beste presents a method of documentation that differs from Mapplethorpe specifically in this regard. Originally from Houston, Texas, Beste has documented the music, lifestyle, and progression of the Black-Metal subculture in Norway since 2001. "...Leather, spikes, face paint, and brandished weapons are not only de-rigueur, but congenial with a clearly stated stanza of outsider-dom. Everyday Norwegians have responded with shock and loathing..." (Beste, 14).
Peter Beste is not a member of the Black-Metal subculture. He is an outsider who has gained access to this exclusive group by forming relationships and building trust between himself and key members of the genre. Beste's approach to representing his subjects is akin to the "New" or "Literary" journalism of Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer. The formative conventions in many of the photographs included in Beste's 2008 book True Norwegian Black Metal give the imagery the feel of an album cover or poster. However, these formative conventions function the same way literary stylization within texts like The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Wolfe) or In Cold Blood (Capote) did in the first wave of literary journalism. The performance-esqué quality of Best's photographs and subjects function primarily as a reminder to the viewer that the images are fact. What one sees actually took place.
I am interested in the space that exists between the methodology of these two styles of documentation. Where is the line that separates one from the other? How does a documentarian cross that line, and - once crossed - can one return? To fully and accurately represent the spectrum of documentary photography I suppose I should find a straight-journalism/hard-news photographer and add them to the far end of the spectrum from Mapplethorpe.
1.Beste, Peter (2008) "True Norwegian Black Metal" Vice Books: Brooklyn, NY, 2008.
2. Debord, Guy (1967) "The Society of the Spectacle." Rebel Press: London, 2004.
3. Foucault, Michel (1984) "The History of Sexuality Vol.1: The Will to Knowledge." Penguin Books: London, 1998.
Showing posts with label Guy Debord. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guy Debord. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Go on, get out of here. You're Free Now. Go on, GO...
Preface: You know in kids' movies when the kid has to let the animal go back into the wild?
The Text:
The salient point within chapter two of Guy Debord's 1967 Society of the Spectacle can be read within the subtext of aphorism number fifty-three, in which Debord states, "...this project is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making." What Debord calls into question here is the value of a human life.
Debord establishes earlier in chapter two that within the discourse of the society of the spectacle, the usefulness of a given quantity is explicitly proportional to that quantity's ability to participate within, and thereby perpetuate the discourse of the spectacle. He also establishes that for any "thing" - be it an idea or a solid object - to be of use to the machinations of the spectacle, the qualities of a substance must first be quantified. This quantification serves to transmute the essence of an idea or object into a product: a commodity that fits within the spectacle's discursive specifications. The quantification that Debord concerns himself with throughout Society of the Spectacle, and is specifically addressing in aphorism fifty-three is that of the human as commodity.
The scene is set for the fruition of human reification by the actualizing of Michel Foucault's concept of biopower. When he (Foucault) describes "...an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations..." (Foucault, 140) Foucault is describing a tactic of power that politically quantifies the human body. This alchemy of discourse is a method employed by the society of the spectacle which Debord specifically names in aphorism forty-two when he says, "...domination is broken down into further specialties such as sociology, applied psychology, cybernetics, and semiology..."
These institutions, like the people that fill them, are products of the culture that produced them. Debord identifies these quantifiers of human life and consciousness as the internal way in which the society of the spectacle regulates its participants á la biopolitics.
The total commodification of human life that Debord identifies as the final expression of the spectacle is taken one step further by Jonathan Crarcy within his text Techniques of the Observer. Cracry first identifies that despite culture producing the way which one experiences the world, as human beings our primary form for perceiving objective reality is through sight. Historically, Crarcy argues, seeing has been believing. Humanity has evolved with the implicit constant that to see something - an object or an event - is to experience the fact of that things existence objectively.
Crarcy believes that this ability to implicitly trust the world we see in everyday life will soon be a thing of the past. When he states that, "... the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a 'real,' optically perceived world..." (Crarcy, 2) he is not alluding to the suspension of disbelief that one engages in when reading a novel, or the consensual illusion entered within the walls of a movie theatre. Instead Crarcy refers to the creation of an environment that we interpret as reality, but has never, and could never exist in any physical form: cyberspace. The acceptance of imagery that only exists in a digital, non-real space is a concern for Crarcy because it effectively quantifies reality.
The codification of experienced reality into "... millions of bits of electronic mathematical data..." that Crarcy is describing seems to breach the last bastion of human experience that until the "digital revolution" had been out of reach for assimilation into the discourse of the spectacle. To appreciate the potentiality that Crarcy envisions for cyberspace, first imagine an Appalachian coal-mining town at the turn of the twentieth century.
Commonly referred to as "company towns", these communities were owned in totality by a given coal company. Employees labored in the company mine, bought company food from the company store with company money that they also used to pay for their company house situated on company land. Children went to company schools and parents filled their company cars at the company service-station.
Company Towns were in effect a precursory microcosm of what Guy Debord would later describe as the society of the spectacle. The spectacle being the coal company and the society - the coal miners - being the entire world. Debord's vision of a global economy beholden to the doctrines of reification and total commodity that extends into all aspects of human life in the same way that coal companies dominated the lives of their employees. However, the spectacle as described by Debord was not yet a closed system. The global commodification of resources - vegetable, animal, mineral, and ontological - into the cultural product of the spectacle still had gaps and inconsistencies in 1967.
What Crarcy is describing "... [an] equivalent sensation and stimuli that have no reference to a spatial location..." (Crarcy, 24) is the effort of the system to close itself. Debord related a future history that warned where we were headed, Crarcy is describing the way in which we have gotten there.
The value of human life that Guy Debord is concerned with within Society of the Spectacle focuses on the quantitative - or monetary - value of a person's labor within a system that equates value with the perpetuation of the system. The quantitative ubiquity of the cultural object designated as "money" confers power through perceived value into a system that, once adopted, required its participants to perpetuate.
However, not all action in the system described by Debord engage - and by definition - perpetuated the system. An individual may have been produced by and exist in relation to the spectacle, but the singular act of existence does not implicitly engage with the spectacle directly. This is where Crarcy's admonition of the quantification of reality reminds one that the spectacle, as an expression of power, has only grown more complex since Debord gave it a name in 1967.
Crarcy's premonition of an augmented, codified, and quantified reality turns the very act of existing into a commodity. This closing of the system makes the participants completely beholden to the discourse of power and effectively neuters any potential for true resistance. If the spectacle can produce a closed system in which the world we experience in real time is totally physically constructed by the discourse of power, the resultant commodity will be denied even self-contemplation.
1. Crarcy, Jonathan (1990) "Techniques of the Observer." MIT Press: Boston, MA, 1992.
2. Debord, Guy (1967) "The Society of the Spectacle." Rebel Press: London, 2004.
3. Foucault, Michel (1984) "The History of Sexuality Vol.1: The Will to Knowledge." Penguin Books: London, 1998.
The Text:
The salient point within chapter two of Guy Debord's 1967 Society of the Spectacle can be read within the subtext of aphorism number fifty-three, in which Debord states, "...this project is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making." What Debord calls into question here is the value of a human life.
Debord establishes earlier in chapter two that within the discourse of the society of the spectacle, the usefulness of a given quantity is explicitly proportional to that quantity's ability to participate within, and thereby perpetuate the discourse of the spectacle. He also establishes that for any "thing" - be it an idea or a solid object - to be of use to the machinations of the spectacle, the qualities of a substance must first be quantified. This quantification serves to transmute the essence of an idea or object into a product: a commodity that fits within the spectacle's discursive specifications. The quantification that Debord concerns himself with throughout Society of the Spectacle, and is specifically addressing in aphorism fifty-three is that of the human as commodity.
The scene is set for the fruition of human reification by the actualizing of Michel Foucault's concept of biopower. When he (Foucault) describes "...an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations..." (Foucault, 140) Foucault is describing a tactic of power that politically quantifies the human body. This alchemy of discourse is a method employed by the society of the spectacle which Debord specifically names in aphorism forty-two when he says, "...domination is broken down into further specialties such as sociology, applied psychology, cybernetics, and semiology..."
These institutions, like the people that fill them, are products of the culture that produced them. Debord identifies these quantifiers of human life and consciousness as the internal way in which the society of the spectacle regulates its participants á la biopolitics.
The total commodification of human life that Debord identifies as the final expression of the spectacle is taken one step further by Jonathan Crarcy within his text Techniques of the Observer. Cracry first identifies that despite culture producing the way which one experiences the world, as human beings our primary form for perceiving objective reality is through sight. Historically, Crarcy argues, seeing has been believing. Humanity has evolved with the implicit constant that to see something - an object or an event - is to experience the fact of that things existence objectively.
Crarcy believes that this ability to implicitly trust the world we see in everyday life will soon be a thing of the past. When he states that, "... the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a 'real,' optically perceived world..." (Crarcy, 2) he is not alluding to the suspension of disbelief that one engages in when reading a novel, or the consensual illusion entered within the walls of a movie theatre. Instead Crarcy refers to the creation of an environment that we interpret as reality, but has never, and could never exist in any physical form: cyberspace. The acceptance of imagery that only exists in a digital, non-real space is a concern for Crarcy because it effectively quantifies reality.
The codification of experienced reality into "... millions of bits of electronic mathematical data..." that Crarcy is describing seems to breach the last bastion of human experience that until the "digital revolution" had been out of reach for assimilation into the discourse of the spectacle. To appreciate the potentiality that Crarcy envisions for cyberspace, first imagine an Appalachian coal-mining town at the turn of the twentieth century.
Commonly referred to as "company towns", these communities were owned in totality by a given coal company. Employees labored in the company mine, bought company food from the company store with company money that they also used to pay for their company house situated on company land. Children went to company schools and parents filled their company cars at the company service-station.
Company Towns were in effect a precursory microcosm of what Guy Debord would later describe as the society of the spectacle. The spectacle being the coal company and the society - the coal miners - being the entire world. Debord's vision of a global economy beholden to the doctrines of reification and total commodity that extends into all aspects of human life in the same way that coal companies dominated the lives of their employees. However, the spectacle as described by Debord was not yet a closed system. The global commodification of resources - vegetable, animal, mineral, and ontological - into the cultural product of the spectacle still had gaps and inconsistencies in 1967.
What Crarcy is describing "... [an] equivalent sensation and stimuli that have no reference to a spatial location..." (Crarcy, 24) is the effort of the system to close itself. Debord related a future history that warned where we were headed, Crarcy is describing the way in which we have gotten there.
The value of human life that Guy Debord is concerned with within Society of the Spectacle focuses on the quantitative - or monetary - value of a person's labor within a system that equates value with the perpetuation of the system. The quantitative ubiquity of the cultural object designated as "money" confers power through perceived value into a system that, once adopted, required its participants to perpetuate.
However, not all action in the system described by Debord engage - and by definition - perpetuated the system. An individual may have been produced by and exist in relation to the spectacle, but the singular act of existence does not implicitly engage with the spectacle directly. This is where Crarcy's admonition of the quantification of reality reminds one that the spectacle, as an expression of power, has only grown more complex since Debord gave it a name in 1967.
Crarcy's premonition of an augmented, codified, and quantified reality turns the very act of existing into a commodity. This closing of the system makes the participants completely beholden to the discourse of power and effectively neuters any potential for true resistance. If the spectacle can produce a closed system in which the world we experience in real time is totally physically constructed by the discourse of power, the resultant commodity will be denied even self-contemplation.
1. Crarcy, Jonathan (1990) "Techniques of the Observer." MIT Press: Boston, MA, 1992.
2. Debord, Guy (1967) "The Society of the Spectacle." Rebel Press: London, 2004.
3. Foucault, Michel (1984) "The History of Sexuality Vol.1: The Will to Knowledge." Penguin Books: London, 1998.
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