[-empyre-] Vigilar y Castigar

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all


I'm reading Gabriela's post and Marc's further elaborations on Foucualt (Vigilar y Castigar) with great interest, 
and am quite prepared (as this month's discussion comes at the right moment for me) to reflect on what Gabriela
calls the "everyday effects of surveillance in our lives", 
and what Marc picks up in his analysis of the increasingly
efficiently mechanized/administered processes (the  "complex mix of objects, agents 
and networks exploiting and connecting via functional means with mediums 
such as digital networks, social media and the Internet across the board") that have become the 'physics of
power.'  

i probably (not sure what others here think?) will need to reflect on my own behaviors vis a vis networked
communications, and whether it's sustainable to to be online at all times, and why there is such pressure
to be accessed (by mails and information) at all times, and whether it's good for the health to be 
accessible at all. 

Gabriela's students chose to perform a panopticon situation, and we watch the watchers watch two men
performing eating, working, having leisure time, sleeping, and repeating. one dies at the end and is dragged
off stage,  Gabriela can you tell us more about why students wanted to "perform Foucault" and how they
understand their investigations (of their lives? or of the panopticon in your country?) and the "upload" to youtube? 

and while reading i wondered, Marc, what "netbehavior" you find politically meaningful as a mode of
sharing ideas or information or as a mode of counter-surveillance or self policing 
(i tried to read http://www.netbehaviour.org/  but on my possibly cracked 
browser it is only an empty yellow page.... but after some search i stumbled across Alan Sondheim's flickered
writings and some else's reporting on the experience of being "kettled" by police in the London student
demonstrations (December 9). 

are we thinking that social networks or the internet are becoming a form of kettling?  are we then doing
our own kettling by participating in a sustained unsustainable cynical darwinism that will wreck us?
does the netopticon only concern the accessed/accessible?


with regards
Johannes Birringer