from caroline:

Crary argues that vision can be controlled by external techniques, designating the realm of visuality as a disciplinary regime of attentiveness. Attention creates perceiving bodies that are productive and orderly, which connects nicely to what Foucault calls the production of docile bodies. Envelopped by an endless stream of information, the social subject must remain attentive to make sense of the world around him/her. (This relates to Heidegger’s argument about how the subject sets himself in relation to the world as picture so that he himself can be coherent.) He/she isolates certain contents of the sensory field, which marks attention as a mode of separation. Here I see the thread which Crary points out, going through Foucault and Derrida, extending also to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic. The modes of visual separation that are prescribed for the subject (are they really absolutely determined already and always?) that Crary attributes to the new visual regime contribu!
te to the homogeneization of the social field. Foucault argues that bodies became controllable (as object of surveillance, by separating them into separate cells and watching them), Debord in Society of the Spectacle also argues for a certain technology of separation (that spectacle itself supports this notion), and finally H&A argue in the Dialectic that everyone is subsumed into the dominant forms of generality.
(Is attention itself an action? H&A argue that subjects react automatically to external stimuli in a capitalist, ideologically-inscribed fashion. Crary posits three variations on how attention emerges: it is a reflex, it is automatic, or it is voluntary.)
Interesting here I thought was that the irregularities (ie symptoms that arise from an impairment of attention) are made to seem irrelevant. An example of this would be what Nordau calls the hysterical or degenerate engaging in an unrestricted play of associations, which is not applicable to reality, as defined by disciplanary institutions.
Again here the notion that attention organizes the truth of perception comes into play. By organizing, selecting, isolating, knowledge is consumed by the subject. This necessarily, as Crary points out, creates a shrinkage of the visual field. He explains this also by comparing attention to a powerful filter, so as to say, that only certain, specific information reaches the consciousness of the subject as useful. This connects to Katti’s point that every act of surveillance necessarily produces its opposite, a blindspot. Because observation (in Crary’s terms this would mean attentive looking) is a distinction indicating a certain object of knowledge, the space of seeing is being limited. Certain physical boundaries arise.
Onto another point: I found the “accelerating sequence of displacements”, which characterizes the perceptual experience for Crary interesting. This connects to Katti’s point on the different orders of observation. There can never be a final observer or a total observation/knowledge of an obect, of the world. I liked the phrase concert of gazes which Katti mentions, which in some way demonstrates this apparent interactivity yet problematic unity of the visual field.
A point on Foucault Ernst mentioned perhaps relates also to our knowledge/action debate. The subject playfully accepts the guard’s gaze and this perhaps opens up a possibility for agency, as surveillance produces a “chance to display oneself under the gaze of the camera”.
Finally, more on the knowledge/action debate: Is the HOW really prescribed (how one takes in and interprets knowledge and processes it)? The subject forms itself in relation to an other, that other being the knowledge that makes up the world. Is how you set yourself in relation to the world controlled absolutely? It seems, from what we have read, that it is. But is this really true? Because subjectivity influences action, I was wondering how powerful the forces are that work on the attentive subject. Because if everything, all thoughts and reactions are prescribed, how does on resist or act independently? Also, does the source of the information influence whether or not a subject reacts or not?


posted by whkc at 9:22 PM

from nazli:

I agree with Crary when he draws a boarder line between attention and consciousness. One can attend to certain things without being aware since attention is more seen as an automatic activity with the progression of modernity. One could have attended to something but may not have been conscious about it. Since the mind has three levels according to Freud; unconscious, pre-conscious and conscious, not all the things we have attended to can be in our conscious level. So when one makes an observation in order to be able to surveille he/she may not be able to obtain all the information even though he/she attends to them all. In my opinion what Katti refers to, as the “blind spot” is what people attend to but cannot retrieve the information to their consciousness right away.
From the earlier reading I was really interested in the connection Davis drew between publicity and surveillance in her article. She took the photographs as a means of surveillance and she tried to show how they affected one’s public image.
In Ernst’s article I also was not sure whether or not he was making Internet seem better than it is without taking its limitations into consideration?

posted by whkc at 9:20 PM

Now for part 2:

In “Publicity and Indifference,” Keenan situates the “humanitarian crisis” with respect to publicity and surveillance. He begins by asking what difference surveillance makes in a situation like Bosnia in the ’90s, when “the surveillance was as complete as the abandonment” (2ish)*. He asserts that the comprehensive publicity of the genocide that occurred, a direct effect of media surveillance, and the “knowledge” (pictures, reports, etc.) that circulated in the “public” about the events failed to elicit a public response capable of changing these events. But not only did the surveillance-imagery-turned-publicity fail to elicit action, it also served to “interrupt, to render impossible, to actively block or prevent those actions” that would have ended the genocide. It “opened the possibility of a political discourse that...did not have to justify itself in political terms” (4ish). He describes cameras—and the resulting public surveillance images—as having the ability to shape a war because of our most basic assumptions about the “public sphere” that acts rationally with the right knowledge. “Bosnia is an idea or an interpretation—and a practice—of publicity, of the public sphere as the arena of self-evidence and reason... an idea which now must be challenged, not to put an end to the public sphere but to begin reconstituting it” (10ish). Keenan continues that the public is not the sphere where information (surveillance images) gets "properly acted upon" but rather the sphere in which images get interpreted, abused, or appropriated, as the case may be (11ish).
* i think my page #s may be different.

posted by Jackie at 7:46 PM

Sebastien picked a selection from the Ernst that I also had trouble with- the idea that voting someone off of a reality television show shatters the individual’s privacy. I think that my problem with the formulation is that the voting-interactivity is not all that more intrusive/implicating than using a remote control. (It does not produce a meaningful “dialogue” that many take to be the hallmark of interactivity) Also, is casting a vote on the internet leaving “private” and entering “public,” or is it something else altogether?

I was interested in where Ersnt took the notion, in his formulation that “when coupled with the Internet, broadcasting approaches...being transformed from a distribution apparatus into a communication medium” (462). That is, the participant’s interaction with the TV show forces the broadcast to be transformed into communication. He goes on to discuss the individual (and therefore privacy) becoming bound up in calculable digital space, with any notion of memory or historical time traded for virtual, archival data. Ernst asserts that this virtual data gets mapped onto the physical body and ultimately obscures it. I’m not sure I see enough justification for many of his final conclusions (“When bodies become mathematically addressable, they enter digital, non-visual space” (463)). He seems in the end to be saying that our bodies will disappear into this virtual, non-visible, archive of data, just as Bin Laden disappeared into the “dark caves of Afghanistan,” no longer able to be “spotted by iconic satellite surveillance” (463). Before we willingly subjected ourselves to iconic surveillance, at least the participants of Big Brother did, in order to playfully “experiment with the location of the self” but now we are somehow

Questions: Is Ernst really saying that the creation of the virtual archive renders the physical body invisible? Is he using the body as a metaphor for subjectivity in some way (or conflating one with the other-It’d be great if someone addressed his arguments about the “subject”)? Does he really see voting someone off “Big Brother” as such a powerful disturbance in the privacy of the individual TV viewer? Can we even separate out the physical and virtual body in the way that he does in his conclusion?
Second part soon...

posted by Jackie at 6:19 PM

From Adrian:

In the fifth full paragraph on page 52 of Candid
Camera, Virilio includes Fred Wiseman's account of
filmaking. Wiseman describes the process of
documentary filmmaking as analogous to flying--a
particularly relevant analogy given the importance of
both World Wars in developing documentary films.
Specifically, Wideman says that editing "makes him
feel like he is sitting in a plane." The ABC News Clip on
Iraq seemed to very deliberately seek to reproduce this
exact same feeling. In the opening part, the camera
zooms across a map of the Iraqi landscape towards a
virtual wall of the American flaps, on top of which are
superimposed the casualty figures. The cameras swift
canvassing of the virtual mapping, the way it swooped
down slighly, all of it had the effect of placing the viewer
inside of an aircraft. This is obviously particularly ironic
not only since this coverage is about a war as well, but
specifically because the story was covering an attack
on an American helicopter. Wiseman's analogy to the
plane was not a random selection of images, but rather
was created from a context in which war played a
profound role in shaping the construction of images in
film and media. The parallels to our own time,
specifically the ABC news clip shown in class, seem
incredibly sharp and relevant.
I re-examined the work by bell hooks as I considered
some of the issues touched upon in class yesterday.
The first three issues addressed in Professor Chun's
email seemed particularly applicable to the reading
and our discussion of it in section. The coming together
of publicity and surveillance to produce "information" is
an interesting subject in the hooks example, precisely
because it examines the power of images in the most
private of spheres, the home. These processes are
very interesting in discussig African-American history,
since publicity had, and still has, a different meaning for
African-Americans in American society. The effort to
limit and, when not excluded, control the behavior of
African-Americans in the public sphere created spaces
in which the same material spaces had different
meanings for different groups of people. As hooks
points out, it was precisely these restrictions placed on
African-Americans in the public sphere that made the
private sphere so important. The greater affordabillity of
the camera empowered African-Americans to create
their own definitions of publicity and information. In
some ways, it enabled many African-Americans to be
the force behind, rather than the subject of,
surveillance. Hooks notes how power structures within
her household, patriarchy, created another set of power
imbalances. However, for African-Americans as a
group, the camera revolutionized the way in which
publicity and surveillance came together to produce
information. It provided them with another way in which
they could create their own depictions and reality in
contrast to the negative images of them produced by a
white supremacist society. The importance of the
camera, and the meaning of these photographs to her,
also allow for exploring the notion of liberation as linked
to the rendering of the image as object. I already
alluded to this idea at a couple of points, but it is
basically the way in which the images of
African-Americans had to be frozen in time, enabling
them to examine themselves, that provides the very
basis for the liberation that hooks describes.
posted by whkc at 5:26 PM