[BRIEF NOTE] Taking Over the Panopticon
Mar. 21st, 2005 08:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldLast week, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rydel23 posted about the ways in which literacy has been used, by the Soviet Union and by Lukashenko's dictatorship. Universal literacy, he argues, is quite a useful trait in a population ruled by a state structure, all the more so if the population is fluent in the language preferred by the state.
Reading this brought to mind Foucault's famous panopticon, which, as he wrote in Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, was a mechanism existing to ensure this sort of homogenization of a subject population.
I'm a fan of Foucault. He has been challenged on his failure to pay necessary attention to details, but his paradigms remain attractive to me. I'd like to consider myself a Foucauldian of sorts, but an optimistic one. Foucault was concerned with discovering the mechanisms underlying the workings of society. Now that we know they exist, surely we can begin to manipulate them? A society's mechanisms are more diffuse and more flexible than those of a bureaucratized institution, after all. Once you know that they exist, all that you need to do to start unravelling things is a minimum of freedom.
Unravelling language and its complicity in oppressive situations would seem to be a relatively easier task than unravelling an ideology. Although the choice of language can reflect political choices (as in Belarus, for instance), language is primarily a system of communication, a medium not a message. There's some potential; or so it seems to me.
rydel23 posted about the ways in which literacy has been used, by the Soviet Union and by Lukashenko's dictatorship. Universal literacy, he argues, is quite a useful trait in a population ruled by a state structure, all the more so if the population is fluent in the language preferred by the state.In which language are citizens of Belarus literate? A majority of them is literate in two languages, Belarusan and Russian. But Russian was dominant in public life. Since the times of the tsarist Russian empire (when you couldn't even mention the words Litva or Belarus) and the oppresive Soviet rule, the dominant language in our land has always been Russian.
A contemporary philosopher from Belarus was commenting bitterly about Shushkevich losing to Lukashenka in 1994, saying something like: Russian is the language of power in Belarus, Russian is the language of control, and Belarusian is not, so when our population saw that Stanislau Stanislavavich Shushkievich speaks Belarusian, they said, man, you are doomed, and voted for Lukashenka instead.
Reading this brought to mind Foucault's famous panopticon, which, as he wrote in Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, was a mechanism existing to ensure this sort of homogenization of a subject population.
[The panopticon] is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. The ceremonies, the rituals, the marks by which the sovereign's surplus power was manifested are useless. There is a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants.
I'm a fan of Foucault. He has been challenged on his failure to pay necessary attention to details, but his paradigms remain attractive to me. I'd like to consider myself a Foucauldian of sorts, but an optimistic one. Foucault was concerned with discovering the mechanisms underlying the workings of society. Now that we know they exist, surely we can begin to manipulate them? A society's mechanisms are more diffuse and more flexible than those of a bureaucratized institution, after all. Once you know that they exist, all that you need to do to start unravelling things is a minimum of freedom.
Unravelling language and its complicity in oppressive situations would seem to be a relatively easier task than unravelling an ideology. Although the choice of language can reflect political choices (as in Belarus, for instance), language is primarily a system of communication, a medium not a message. There's some potential; or so it seems to me.
