take us higher

gravity's a problem.

I had a conversation a little while back with Greg about imprisonment: the prisons we live in, the walls we build around ourselves, and the structures that limit and confound us. Suffice it to say, they're everywhere.

Modern theories of imprisonment stem largely from the French philosopher (as do most things I think about) Michel Foucault's seminal work Surveiller et punir [1975] (Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan, New York: Pantheon, 1977) in which he discusses the phenomenon of Panopticism, using Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon (in brief: a prison wherein the prisoners monitor one another...) to illustrate the social dynamics of surveillance as psychic bondage (not the sexy kind).


So what, if anything, does it mean to live in a world dominated by surveillance? Digital optics (cameras) are everywhere, social media allow us to "share" every detail we wish (though the politics of self-construction trouble those representations), and the private sphere has acquired the aspect of concealment rather than being taken for granted as the norm for our daily lives. We're all celebrities: Warhol was right and we're all getting our 15 minutes - and with a culture so accelerated as to tempt us away from ever sitting still (unless we're in the act of surveillance), those 15 minutes are all we may have left.

There's an interesting confluence between Foucault's work on surveillance and The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1972) which suggests that  the media industry over the last 60 years or so has systematically altered the West's social structure to champion the culture of luck. 


My assertion here (yes, I'm finally getting to my thesis) is that watching - as well as being watched - is part of the dialectic of a visual culture which values admonishment, shame, and ostracization as tools for perpetuating conformity. I think we're living in a techno-panopticon.

But there's good news too: there are still plenty of spaces in which we can escape from the gaze of peers and strangers: those dark, secret corners and places to hide in plain sight where we can recede into ourselves to connect with the things we think we truly feel. It's just too bad that that kind of reflexivity is such a solitary pursuit in our cultural milieu. Not all observation is imprisonment: maybe there's still something out there that allows us to be seen and still be different and valid at the same time.


I enjoy this peculiar video and remix of The Cardigans' "Junk of the Hearts" for the tension between proscribed behavioural spaces and human desire... (embedding disabled):

junk of the hearts [Nåid remix]

And this... well, it's a cover of All Along the Watchtower (Bob Dylan) by Bear McCreary and Katee Sackhoff that was used in Battlestar Galactica as an overture for the themes of the best sci-fi show since... ever. Lyrically and thematically it conveys the idea that we're either prisoners or we're crazy. Or both...