Resistance In Foucault: A Summary and Gesture Toward Future Theoretical Directions

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault aims to “try to study the metamorphosis of punitive methods on the basis of a political technology of the body in which might be read a common history of power relations and object relations” (24). To do this, he opens his inquiry with a graphic description of the torture and execution of Damiens the regicide that demonstrates the type of public justice that has been replaced by the kind he is concerned with. Public punishment, he argues, has been replaced with an “abstract consciousness”  and public trial (9), both of which wield a control role and have less hold on the body which, he notes, has become the intermediary in the the new “‘non-corporal’ penality” (11). In this new system, pain and spectacle are even removed from execution. He points to the improved technology of hanging, which kills someone instantly, to demonstrate this.

He further says that no longer is a criminal subjected to torture equal to that caused by his crime. The only torture remains that of deprivation, of the loss of liberty and rights. One is now either deprived of one’s rights or one’s right to exist.  The change Foucault is describing is not only to the operational method; it is also to the object of the punishment. The new emphasis is on “judging something other than crimes, namely, the ‘soul’ of the criminal” (19). This means that  the heart or soul is the object of punishment, and while crimes such as murder are still treated as criminal, it is the desires, drives, perversions, and intents that become the focus of judgement and object of change (17).

Important to this process is that the new punitive system is coterminous with a new system of knowledge and truth, or as Foucault says, “a corpus of knowledge, techniques, ‘scientific’ discourses is formed and becomes entangled with the practice of power to punish” (23). In trials, for example, an estimation of the criminal is attained through the testimony of psychiatrists and other advisors whose expertise discerns the accused’s conformance to expectations of action. Because of this new knowledge system and its employment in the punitive system, subjects receive an assessment of normality leading to a punishment aimed to be a “prescription for possible normalization” (21). In other words, the experts show how the accused is not in conformance to norms and morals and punishment is  devised to bring him back into compliance with it. This system of judgement is not just a series of “‘negative’ mechanisms” however: it is inlaid in a collective whole with a “whole series of positive and useful effects” (24). The soul, Foucault claims, becomes constituted by these new methods of control and restraint. Power, then, is wielded not in blunt force but through its diffuse manifestation throughout all aspects of the social life.

Foucault makes a final telling point of the aim of his inquiry. He is “writing of the history of the present,” and in particular the historical context of the prison revolts he witnesses in his own time (31). He sees these physical revolts or revolts “of the body” as against “the body of the prison” or of the whole system that has controlled the prisoners. This point of resistance is central to Foucault, and he further emphasizes it in his article “The Subject and Power,” where he calls for analyzing resistance in order to understand the manifestations of rationalized control and advocates for “taking forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point” (780). He calls these entrenched struggles “agonisms,” which suggests a constant provocation between forces of power and resistances to them (790). In fact, he says, power only needs to be exerted as a totalizing force because freedom exists: without options and possibilities that can be realized, there is no need to attempt to dampen these possibilities. Foucault claims that this ultimately limits power because it opens up the possibility of it being overturned, but the struggle also provides power an opportunity to overcome the insubordination and reassert itself. Both need to be analyzed, Foucault concludes, because they expose aspects of each other.

The focus on resistance is an especially important point for anthropologists, and particularly those who study post-colonial societies. One can easily take colonial forces as a concrete demonstration of the totalizing force Foucault articulates. The strategy and effect of subordination of some colonizers has, in fact, been described this way by Comaroff and Comaroff in Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, where they demonstrate how the Tswana of South Africa were forced into a subjective role the Europeans both imagined and imposed (1993). They propose a dialectic of mutual creating of the Tswana and the colonials due to the encounter, something they call “the colonization of consciousness.” And while their analysis is not wholly Foucauldian, their formulation of the power-resistance dynamic in the cultural encounter seems to articulate Foucault’s point of their mutual independence quite well. Foucault’s focus upon resistance, therefore, is an important locus of analysis for such anthropological subjects because, as he says, the forms of resistance show both the nature of and the fissures in the body of power that is being resisted. An ethnographic description of such a resistance can thus portray the power system that is vital to the situations but often so abstract as to be resistant to depiction in ethnography.

More Colder for the Homeless

For my Master’s thesis at the University of Chicago, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at a homeless resource center I had interned at through the U of C’s Summer Links program called Southwest Chicago PADS (Public Action to Deliver Shelter). In order to engage with the material further, spread my ideas to a wider audience, and have some way to give back to the organization and people who let me learn from them, I created a short documentary film they continue to use for fundraising, volunteer training, and advocacy.

My thesis proposed that homelessness is a situation composed of three distinct elements, two external and one internal. The first is the physical discomfort and material deprivation that comes with the deepest level of poverty :

PADS attempted to confront this through what they called “emergency services”: sessions aimed to help people living on the streets meet their survival needs:

No one reaches such dire physical conditions without losing one’s social network. Social isolation, I proposed, constituted the second external aspect of the homeless condition. It includes not only having no one to fall back on for support but the cumulative effect of being perceived by the world as destitute, vulnerable, and worthless:

PADS attempted to provide the community people living on the streets lacked primarily through dinners served and prepared by volunteers. While PADS stopped being able to host their “guests” overnight due to conflicts with neighboring businesses, these dinners served as a few needed hours of refuge, particularly during Chicago’s brutal winters:

The final aspect of the homeless condition, I proposed, was internal, and thus the most difficult for PADS to address. Addiction and psychological disorders tend to be co-terminal. People often self-medicate when they can’t or don’t seek psychological services or develop psychosis due to extended substance abuse. While some people I talked to rejected the label of homeless and all of its associations, others articulated and wholeheartedly identified with it. In my brief time at PADS, I saw people escape the “web” of the homeless state primarily through making a clear break with their substance use and often the community they joined on the streets. I also attended funerals for those who didn’t:

I hope to use visual means in all of my future work. Libraries have been filled in pursuit of capturing the world in all its complexity, and while I still believe in the power and the possibilities of the ethnographic method and of research as a worthy end in and of itself, I was never able to express on the page what I could through successive images synced to sound. Perhaps, since the conversion rate of words to images is one thousand to one, and my digital camera captured 24 of those pictures in a second, it was never a fair contest.

Waking Back Up

Between downloading the WordPress iPhone app and training myself extensively in web design last year, it’s time for me to build this plot of land in the grand world wide web into the home base for my thoughts (casual and scholarly), my videos (slapdash and refined), and any other experimental projects or serious endeavors.

Stay tuned.

Marriage Ritual: A Cross-Cultural Meditation

In America, a man needs to buy a woman an expensive piece of jewelry in order to marry her.  It’s a ritual infused with social history, based on a tradition of dowry payment but imbued with social significance and a uniquely modern (and western) consumer culture.  It’s proof to her, to her family, to society as a whole that he can fulfill a traditional marriage role: if he can buy an expensive thing, he can provide for his intended wife and their eventual children. Like other cultural traditions, we don’t know quite why we do it or who started it and its meaning is often oblique, but we observe it nonetheless, so she wears this token of his affection and financial virility through their engagement and throughout their marriage, displaying it for everyone (particularly at her bridal shower, an event planned exclusively for its celebration).  It’s a custom borne of affluence, out of one culture’s  economic superiority over the people who dug out these expensive rocks far away in places like Sierra Leone and South Africa, Tanzania and Timbuktu.

I thought about this ritual while I attended a ceremony Ugandans engage in called an introduction.  Or more precisely, I thought about it during the family meeting that followed a meeting that was one of many steps in an introduction and dowry negotiation process.  My best friend and co-worker in Uganda, Ben, took me up to Gulu for this meeting.  The Ugandan introduction is rooted in a tradition of arranged marriage, when two families came together to introduce themselves to each other and introduced the future husband to his future bride.  In reality, Ben had been dating his fiancée Nighty for more than four months and as we, his friends and family, approached her family’s house in a village outside Gulu town by rented car, we knew we were partly celebrating their engagement and mostly negotiating with Nighty’s family the terms of the dowry payment and the timing of the wedding.

Her family, though they obviously and elaborately prepared for our arrival,  having stuffed the main hut with so many doily-covered plastic chairs they barely fit,  killed and prepared two chickens and a goat, and purchased and transported a crate of bottled soda, acted like they didn’t know what had brought us.  Eventually, after chatting for a while (and requests for me to sing, which I politely declined), David, Ben’s friend  and our side’s representative, announced why we were there: Ben intended to marry Nighty and we wanted her family’s approval.  We then each introduced ourselves before David began answering the questions of Nighty’s older brother (the stand-in patriarch in the absence of her father, who died some years ago).  After this, we stuffed ourselves with meat and posho and millet paste and left.

Throughout the meeting, an emphasis was placed on doing the tradition correctly, respecting the ancestor’s acts, preserving the culture.  I thought back to an introduction ceremony I attended in Kampala, celebrated by members of the large, central Baganda tribe, between two families of obvious wealth and high social status.  I thought of the women in elaborate, new dresses, the men in white shirts reaching their ankles with suits on top, the sound system, the photographers, the hundreds of attendees.  The cultural traditions, I noticed then, were done winkingly, all of us aware the marriage would be allowed, but the bride’s patriarchs gave the groom’s representative a hard time, making him show the groom’s degrees and answer question after question about his character and family.

I wonder if here, in Acholiland, perfecting the actions and fulfilling the roles was more serious and deliberate.  After 20 years of civil war, there was a fear of losing their culture.  So many Rwots, or Acholi chiefs, and other elders had been deliberately killed and so many monuments to elders had been destroyed in Joseph Kony’s attempt to destroy and rebuild the Acholi people.  My Ugandan supervisor had provocatively told me that at the height of the war he started studying Jewish culture and the Holocaust because he feared his culture was being destroyed the way Jewish culture was nearly obliterated during World War II.  In this context, doing everything just right seemed of greater consequence, more dire, more necessary.

After spending the afternoon at Nighty’s house, we went back to to Gulu to the house of Ben’s aunt, whom he grew up with, as happens in Uganda when one’s aunt and uncle are more able to provide for you than your own parents.  We sat between her long metal-roofed house and her scattered grass-roof huts, the women on a mat, the men on chairs, illuminated by a full moon.  My brain was fried from translating the last few hours in my head, so luckily the meeting was summarized to me by Ben and David.  Nighty’s uncle had requested a partial sum of the dowry, which along with the money David had given at the previous meeting and a number of household items, we were to present at another meeting a month from now.  At that time, Nighty’s family would announce the full dowry amount.  The size of this sum would determine how soon the wedding would be held.  If we, Ben’s friends and family, could produce it relatively easily, the wedding could take place within the next few months.  If they asked for a lot, everyone would scrimp and save as long as it took to compile it.  Ben’s sister was marrying soon, so the dowry paid for her would contribute to Ben’s being able to marry.

It occurred to me throughout the discussion how tied to the marriage everyone instantly became.  More so than gift-giving, the extended family and friends invested (quite literally) directly to the relationship, often giving them a greater stake in it’s maintenance than if the groom alone saved up to purchase a token of his affection.  And more so than in the American wedding ritual, Ben’s whole family, I felt, was showing its ability to support the couple.

I wondered what it might be like if we did the same in America; if instead of buying an engagement ring, I had to make a large bank transfer to my intended bride’s father’s bank account.  I first thought it was a beautiful thing, that the family and friends all contributing from what little they had to purchase much-needed items and to pile up cash was a lot more sensible than buying an expensive rock.  But it smacks  a bit of patriarchy: it conjures images of polygamy, of a wealthy man’s “purchasing” many wives to assure his progeny.  I also thought of the prevalence of domestic violence in Uganda and across the continent, of how women were often required to wait on their future in-laws for months to prove their capacity to fill a gendered, restricted role and eventually endure further backbreaking labor.  I knew the relationship I was supporting by my presence was respectful and egalitarian: Nighty, after all, supports herself as an elementary school teacher, so I felt somehow that this dowry payment made more sense to me: that passing money between families was a lot more practical than passing chunky, shiny objects.  And the ritual of it seemed more urgent, more meaningful.  It seemed like great thought was taken in considering why we did what we were doing, which is not the sense I get when I see engagement rings.

As I sat there, struggling to translate it all in my head, I felt that after all the atrocities this whole society suffered since Joseph Kony declared war on the central government of Uganda headed by President Musevini, that this place was finally at peace.  I hoped that the Acholi people, after colonization and conscription, after insurgency and internal displacement, could finally peacefully celebrate what linked them together.  I hoped, above all, that they could simply enjoy their traditions after two decades of barely safeguarding them from annihilation.

FAUSTUS: My First Documentary

I made this short documentary starring James Snyder as a project for my first documentary video class. The film shows James’s attempt to mount an elaborate production of Christopher Marlowe’s classic play ‘Faustus’ for the University of Chicago’s Festival of the Arts (FOTA). As he toils to bring his elaborate conception of the play (employing a life-size pop-up book set) to life, his experience begins to mirror the plot of the perennial story of man reaching beyond his earthly abilities.

Silly YouTube still limits posts to 10 minutes, so I had to split it up a little bit.  Here’s part 1:

Here’s part 2:

Enjoy!

Best Pictures as Cultural Objects, Part Three

The Blind Side

I’m going to go all Hugh Jackman in last year’s Oscar opening number and just straight up admit I didn’t see one of the Best Picture nominees. Jackman hadn’t seen The Reader and and I didn’t see The Blind Side. The Academy expanded the Best Picture category to ten nominees this year supposedly to let movies like The Blind Side (mass-appeal financial successes) in. It was an attempt to make the Oscars themselves more accessible and to make up for the embarrassment (and loss of ratings) due to The Dark Knight not being nominated. The aim is to make the awards ceremony itself more accessible by letting in more films that have played outside of art houses. This year, though, the equivalent of The Dark Knight is Avatar and it’s hard to imagine such a game changer (like Star Wars before it) not being nominated, though, with no acting or writing accolades, it’s also hard to imagine it winning. And since, as I argued in my first post, the Oscars are more a reflection of how the film industry perceives itself than anything else, it makes sense for more films like The Blind Side to be let in. After all, the film industry is more business than art and a film’s success, in the eyes of the industry, is more its appeal and its profit than its critical reception. The Oscars seem incapable of deciding whether to reward artistic or magnetic achievement and they never reward anything too ahead of its time or outside the mainstream. Since film is an art form whose costs inherently pits business and art against each other, the industry and its awards will never resolve its struggle to reward Blind Sides or Basterds, feel-goods, flicks, or films

Up

The smartest children’s films have the deepest themes and are therefore the most able to entertain adults who need to watch them over and over with their children. It’s difficult to imagine what sense kids made of the story of a man who, at the end of his life, tries fulfill some vestige of his youthful dreams. It takes him the whole film to see himself in the boy scout looking for adventure and yearning for a father in the absence of his own. It’s a film for kids about the most mature experience possible: assessing one’s whole life. Pixar is the Apple-fication of animation, with design so beautiful that kids and adults alike are entranced, and Up is their coming of age: a premise hard to imagine working in live action or traditional animation and themes of childhood contrasted with maturity.

Inglorious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino relishes his persona of the consummate film geek, the man who throws a hundred genres and images he absorbed as a video store clerk, throws them into a blender, and splatters them across the screen. He dazzles viewers with gruesome images and crackly dialogue. With Basterds, he takes on World War II and World War II films. There’s nothing new about making a World War II movie. This is a film, though, where the human interactions provide more suspense than the gun shots. It’s a film about war where the most chilling scenes take place in a fancy restaurant, a rural homestead, and a basement bar. The only battlefield scene takes place in the lull following the chaos, when Brad Pitt and his “basterds” interrogate live Nazis and scalp dead ones. As war films go, it’s more Grand Illusion than Saving Private Ryan. But Tarantino breaks the ultimate taboo, the cardinal sin of war films: he changes the ending. The Nazis are lured to a theater and whipped into hysterics by a film where a German gunman kills dozens of American soldiers. And then, [SPOILER ALERT!], Tarantino feeds us what we salivate for: a bloody massacre of hundreds of Nazis, Hitler on down. In an era of post-modern warfar, where America is trapped in urban conflict with non-states and abstract entities, Tarantino gave us the ultimate cinematic catharsis and fed our bloodlust and our compulsion for revenge: a handful of Jews massacring the biggest baddies of them all, ending the war early, and branding any Nazis left alive.

Best Pictures as Cultural Objects, Part Two

The Hurt Locker

The Vietnam generation had The Dear Hunter, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and Apocalypse Now. The Iraq war has had…well, Brothers, I guess, but now it has The Hurt Locker. It’s not a fair comparison because all of the classic Vietnam films were made well after the war had ended, but going by the accolades so far, The Hurt Locker is the first classic to emerge about America’s debacle in the Middle East. William James is hooked on the adrenaline kicks he gets defusing bombs as a specialist in Iraq. He approaches his work with almost reckless fearlessness and with a compassion rarely shown in depictions of the war. In one scene, he won’t give up on removing a bomb from the innocent man it’s strapped to until the absolute last second. In another, he’s emotionally torn apart by what happens to a young Iraqi boy he’d bought DVDs from and played soccer with days before. The ambiguity of war in an urban space and against an insurgency rather than an army gives the film most of its tension, and we’re given the soldiers’ perspectives as they struggle to distinguish spectators from enemies during their missions. This ambiguity is furthered in the relationships we see among the team of bomb defusers and the locals. They rarely have a translator on hand, their hummer is pummeled with rocks by children in the streets, and they nearly fire upon a group of British soldiers looking for help with a flat tire. “If he wasn’t an insurgent before,” Will remarks about a man violently wrestled to the ground by soldiers, “he is now.” When he returns home, Will seems more lost looking down a cereal aisle than he ever does during any of his missions, and while the film opens by telling us there are 39 days left in the Bravo Company’s tour, it ends with Will with 365 days left of his new tour. The ambiguous mess being waged in Iraq is simply the precursor for the personal tragedy yet to befall a generation of veterans.

Precious

In the Obama era, supposedly we’ve entered a post-racial age, but Precious took all the darkest and grimiest aspects of inner-city life and shoved them at us. Incest, absuse, puking up buckets of fried chicken, failing schools: it’s a horror show, a pastiche of American urban pathology. And at the center of it is Precious, a large, quiet girl who imagines herself a glamourous star one moment and a skinny white girl the next. Despite it all, she seems to escape and even starts to confront her own prejudice when she finds her favorite teacher lives with her gay partner. Precious seems to be breaking the cycle: she’s succeeding at an alternative school and runs away from her mother with her children. We’re left to wonder, though, how much has changed in the decades since the film’s 1980′s setting.

Up in the Air

George Clooney seems to be making a career of playing corporate garbage men, first as problem solver Michael Clayton and now as Ryan Bingham, a man who fires people for a living. While he justifies his work to his apprentice saying, “There’s a dignity to what I do,” and that his way affords people a human interaction her proposed web video update won’t. He later admits to her, though, that he never follows up on any of the people he fires and he gets rattled when he learns later that a Detroit woman made good on her promise to both Bingham and his protégé to jump off a bridge after getting fired. Up in the Air shows the ease with which Bingham can live a disconnected life and contrasts the post-industrial down-sizing he carries out with the corporatized and branded hospitality of the new service economy. He loves and indulges in the comodified hospitality of the airports and hotels he lives in and measures himself by his benefit status achieved by brand loyalty. Yesterday’s company man had a country club membership; Bingham has rewards cards. When he ultimately reaches his goal of earning ten million miles and the pilot enters the fuselage to congratulate him, though, Bingham has nothing to say about achieving the milestone. He has dedicated his life and alienated his family in pursuit of an intangible currency. He’s the ultimate self-made man of new-age capitalism: earning intangible incentives for work on the backs of the languishing proletariat. He’s proof we can travel swiftly and connect instantly across the country and the globe but still manage to be more isolated from and vicious to each other than ever.

An Education

How far feminism has brought us. Carrey Mulligan’s Jenny can’t bear the pressure her father places on her academic performance, so when she meets Peter Sarsgaard’s David, she finds the chance to both quench her thirst to live and learn and escape what she comes to see as the stifling constraints of her current private school and eventual Oxford education. With David, she gets to see Paris, she gets to dress glamorously, she goes to horse races and clubs, and she manages to stomach the dubious actions David takes to afford it all. But she’s not the only one seduced by David. His distinguished tastes and silver tongue lead her father to abandon his pressuring of her. An Education shows the position of women in a liminal state. While birth control is available enough that Jenny doesn’t end up “in the family way,” as one character puts it, marrying up is just as viable an option to making the social climb up the rigid British class system as getting a university degree is. It’s not just a film about a young girl’s coming of age and coming to her senses about what she can be, it’s a depiction of a whole culture’s gradual struggle to redefine the role of women.