LECTURE 1 // SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY

Aims:
Understand the principles of the panopticon
Undertsand Foucaults concept of a disciplinary society
Consider the idea that disciplinary society is a way of making idividuals 'productive' and 'useful'
Understand Foucaults idea of techniques of the body and docile bodies

1791 - The panopticon. A prison designed by Jeremy Bentham  which metaphorically represents heirarchy and a symbol for society.

Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984)
Wrote:
            - Madness and Civilisation
            - Discipline & Punishment: The Birth of Prison

It was in the 1600's idea's of what madness was started to change, "The Great Confinement", this was where 'Socially unproductive' people locked away in confinement.
(Mental illness, criminals, single pregnant women etc)

There were soon Houses of correction - to curb unemplyment and idleness - People made to work in an attempt to teach them to be 'normal' amoungst society.

These houses also used to keep the socially unproductive from public view. The houses did not work, Instead residents would make each other 'worse', corrupting each other.

The disciplinary society at the time was not just these correction houses but had Pillary & execution - Deviance is publicly shown and punished.

The birth of the asylum

There was an emergence of forms of knowledge - biology, psychiatry, medicine, etc.
Foucault looks at how these can be forms of knowledge are being used to affect human beings in such a way to alter our consciousness.

Panopticism-
Disciplinary Society
and
Disciplinary Power, working to create a better society.

Discipline is a 'technology. 'How to keep someone under surveillance, how to control his conduct, his behaviour. Improve.


Panoptic prisons, circular design first proposed in 1791. Several still exist today, but not in use. Different to typical prisons at the time, where you would be locked away and forgotten about, like a dungeon, the Panopticon is the opposite.
-Panopticons make sure that people are always being watched, the physchological effect being that the prisoners end up Self Regulating themselves, completely aware of their actions.
It was so effective, guards would no longer even need to look, as the fear that they were being watched was enough.

Panopticons no longer exist as prisons - seen as psychological torture.

Panopticism is still used in contemporary society and seen in many things such as-
Open plan offices, boss can see, makes the employed have to work.
Bars/pubs, keep control.
Google maps (seen as panoptic in theory)

It is how modern society organises its knowledge, its power, its surveillance of bodies and its 'training' of bodies.

It is because of this constant surveillance, it forces us to self regulate behaviour which keeps the world under easy control.

Relationship between power, knowledge and the body:
Panoptic power/ surveillance physically affects the body not just mentally.

'Power relations have an immediate hold upon it [the body]; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremnies, to emit signs' (Foucault 1975)

Disciplinary society provides a "Docile Body" according to Foucault:
- Obedience
- Easy to control
- Self monitoring and self correcting.

It is how you conform to how people want to see you in society, 'how you should be in society'.

You can see the nazis used this idea of the 'perfect body' to make sure docile bodies were well kept.
Healthy, both physically and mentally, people means they can work and remain productive, remove useless people, keep only those to help the world progress and be perfect society.

"Institutional Gaze" - another description for panopticism in action

Key points

-Michel Foucault
-Panopticism
-Techniques of the body
-Docile bodies
-Recognition that institutions 'work' on us in a variety of ways.

LEVEL 05

SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS

The first text I have chosen is a poster for the exhibition ‘Sensation’ held at the Royal Academy of Arts, we can see the image is split by two different photos of similarly shaped objects – a tongue and an electric iron. Appearing to mirror each other, there is a central point in which the two meet. Sat directly below this middle ground is the word ‘Sensation’.

The front cover of the magazine, titled ‘Appetite’ is the second text I have chosen. What we can see is the models face of a woman with her tongue outstretched and very long. The word appetite floats above the tongue, followed by the translation of the the word in both French and Spanish, as they repeat they grow smaller. Adbusters issue number 44, called ‘Appetite’ was published in 2002.

What I immediately recognise as a Sign in the denotative sense is the stuck out tongue featuring in both images, ‘Sensation’ and ‘Appetite’. This signifier for this is infact the photographs of them and they inturn signify on a connative level, touch, taste, speech and are both sensual suggesting sexual representations. The two images with tongues outstretched, one from a side view whereas ‘Sensation’ heads the tongue facing the audience. The sign connotes as a myth to be of sexuality. This is all shown through a Social Code, what we see within culture.

The tongue itself connotes human interaction, part of the body it gives us taste and touch- two of five senses, and when any sense is stimulated gives sensation. The phrase mother tongue holds direct correlation to the tongue as language and therefore  a culutural viewpoint. In Adbusters, it is quite clear the focus of the tongue is to represent through the word itself appetite and seems to be primarily the only reason the tongue has been featured to denotative in this way. Whereas in ‘Sensation’ the direct purpose is touch.  

Contrasting to the two different pieces, each design has an opposing item to the personal perspective  of the tongue. In ‘Sensation’ the electric iron stands opposite the tongue in a similar shaped fashion but the iron connotes feelings of technology, temperature and danger. The iron has been chosen in the design to be directly inhuman, not sensual but  connotes potential danger. The iron as we know exceeds a high temperature and is possible to damage our senses and cause pain. Just as ‘Sensation’ juxtaposes with the personal, we see the same in ‘Appetite’ where there is a denotation of a side profile of a female model mannequin, this connotes the article to be fake and industrialised. This contradicts and detracts from the human side of how the tongue appeared sensual.

The textual codes in which the images can be seen are quite different. In ‘Sensation’ the type that has been used as main focus is simply ‘Sensation’. This is the signifier and signifies to us as th meaning of ‘perception associated with stimulation of a sense organ’, the denotation of the type includes the choice of Sans Serif and the colour of white to represent clean-cut and elegant. At the same time the font chosen is to once again mimic the shape of tongue and iron, and is pointed, this is made clear with the letter A situated in the middle, top of the iron, outlined in red.

In Adbusters, ‘Appetite’ the denotation of the type is handwritten and uses marker scrawled to connote and intended to address the mediocre, but always with intention for the type to connote good design. Black has been chosen for the typeface and it connotes the words to be able to sit strong and overpower what it is on top of.

Harrison, C. and Wood, P. (1997) 'Art in Theory: 1900-1990', Oxford, Blackwell, pp 125-9

At the turn of the 20th century, a new art was being formed to be as eminent as previous traditional art. Focussing on expression, avant-garde artists created authenticity and personal experience to be drawn into their work through a natural force. Through industrialisation and urbanisation, starting in Paris it internationalised throughout Europe. Cubism, Expressionism and Futurism individually showed different aspects of the reception to the modern. The modern consists of Modernisation, the rise and industrialisation of science and technology, Modernity, the social and cultural change of lifstyles, and finally Modernism as the relationship between the experience and development.

One side of the modern age was pessimistic, seeing human life starting to be controlled by the machine through urbanisation and industrialisation. Alternatively exhilaration was taking place, Italian poet Marinetti was creating a new response to the age, by break-through Symbolism, in turn Futurism. These two responses were due to the effects of modernisation, but a third relates, to seek the cause of the modern worlds condition. Social facts and relations of class, but also capitalist modernization. The working class both ‘feared and needed’ ideologies of social classes, as a shared nation created my capitalist production, known as Socialism.

Conflict started to arise within avant-garde art, Cubism in particular was attempted to be prised into two. This itself has created more tension and conflict between view points within art, art in respect to social factors and art as a practice. Artists have both striven to reconcile as well as affirming their argument – whether to translate and embrace the modern or art must therefore transform itself.

POSTMODERNISM

POSTMODERNISM

Modern

Modernity

Modernism -      Experimentation

                                Innovation

                                Individualism

                                Progress

                                Purity

                                Originality

                                Seriousness

Postmodern condition characterised by-

                                Exhaustion

                                Pluralism

                                Disillusionment with the idea of absoloute knowledge

Modernism –

Expression of:

 The modern life/ technology/ new materials/ communication

Post-modernism

Reaction to:

The modern life/ technology/ new materials/ communication

Origins of postmodernism

-          1917 German writer Rudolf Pannwitz

-          1964 Leslie Fielder

1960’s                   Beginning

1970’s                   Established as term

1980’s                   Recognised style

1980’s+90’s         Dominant theoretical discourse

Today                    Tired and Simmering

Postmodernism

-After modernism

-Historical era following the modern

-Contra modernism

-Equivalent to late capitalism

-Artistic and stylistic eclecticism

-Globalisation of cultures

Modernism died on the 15^th July 1972 at 3:32pm

Charles Jencks' joke-date

25^th  November

ADVERTISING, PUBLICITY AND THE MEDIA

Times Square, New York -Advertising is bombarding our contemporary world

1990’s estimate -11thousand new tv advertisements every year x4

-25million print adverts made every year

SLOGANS/ SIGNS/ MESSAGES, advertising is inescapable and invades our subconscious.

Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)

Wrote-

Communist Manifesto – 1848.

Das Kapital – 1867

Marxism/ Marxist

Critique of consumer/ commodity culture-

We construct our identities through the consumer products that inhibit our lives.

You shouldn’t define yourself with what you own, but who you are

Stewart Ewen terms ‘the commodity self’

Symbolic Associations

-Perfume adverts

-Sex Appeal

-Sophistication

Perpetuating false needs

-Aesthetic Innovation

-Planned Obsolescence – products designed to break

-Novelty

Commodity Fetisham-

Advertising conceals the background ‘history’ of products. In other words the content in which a product is produced is kept hidden.

Reification-

Products are given human association

They may be perceived as funny, sexy, romantic, cool

All to create a closer bond with the owner and the product, to become attatched

Advertising works in a fashion to trick people into consumption.

Herbert Marcuse, author of 'One Dimensional Man' (1964)

John  Berger (1972) "Publicity (advertising) persuades us by showing people whose lives have been transformed"

Advertising perpetuates stereotypes.

It seeks to make people unhappy with existing material possessions.

It potentially manipulates people into buying products that they don't really need/want.

It encourages addictive, obsessive and greedy behaviour.

It encourages unnecessary production and consumption therefore depleting the worlds resources and spoiling the environment.

BOOKS TO LOOK AT

Focussing on specific examples, describe the way that Modernist art & design was a response to the forces of modernity


1.

Barnard, M. [2008] ‘Graphic design as communication’. New York, Routledge.

2.

Ilyin, N, [2006] ‘Chasing the perfect: thoughts on modernist design in our time’. New York, Distributed Art Publishers, Inc and Metropolis Magazine.

(Library Reference - 745.4)

3.

Hellige, H. And Klanten R. [2009] ‘Naive: modernism & folklore in contemporary graphic design’. London, Die Gestalten Verlag.

(Library Reference - 741.06)

4.

Pare R. [2007] ‘The lost vanguard: Russian modernist architecture 1922-1932’. New York, Monacelli Press. 

(Library Reference - 720.947)

5.

Meyer, U. [2006], ‘Bauhaus’. Munich, Prestel Verlag.