On Drones and the Panopticon

Thomas L. Lynn, Jr.

This past Friday (19 February 2016) marked the deadline for owners of so called private drones to register with the FAA, a moment which passed with little fanfare, but which at least grants us opportunity for some thoughts on the significance of drone technology and its proliferation over the past two or so decades. While originally attaining prominence for use in an explicitly military context, of late it is increasingly installed in other ‘applications’ seemingly more benign, or even amusing. This development though is not simply an accident, but indeed flows with an almost organic logic from drone technology epitomization of a more deeply situated technology - that of the Panopticon.

The Panopticon...an ominous word corresponding to a portentous notion. Originally, an architectural schema of Jeremy Bentham for the ideal construction of a prison, the principle underlying the logic of its construction would render it a blueprint for more than a building, but for the basis of a disciplinary society. Hence Michel Foucault remarks in his seminal consideration of Panopticism,

...[T[he Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form: its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use. (Discipline and Punish 205)

But what is that political technology? To recapitulate the outline of Bentham’s first casting of the project, we can echo Foucault’s own description well enough, namely, “...at the periphery, an annular building; at the center, a tower…” Within the “periphic buildiing” cells are so arranged as to enable them and their inhabitants to be viewed from the central tower, though in a manner whereby they are precluded from seeing back into that tower, or, if you like, from watching the watcher. (ibid.,200)  “Hence, the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” (ibid., 201)  The basis of that automatic functioning then is surveillance, and, moreover, a particular sort of surveillance in which, again as Foucault puts, it the seeing/being seen dyad is severed. “...in the periphic ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.” (ibid., 202)

The significance of this dissociation is thrown into sharper relief by a consideration of the relationship instantiated by gazing, or the Gaze itself. To render the matter after a roughly Lacanian fashion, the gaze of another represents the compromise of one’s experience as a free, as an unfettered subjectivity. The encounter, though, of the perceived, fixed look of another constitutes an experience of, if not one’s outright objectification, at least that very possibility. That such an encounter can arise not only with regard to other “uncontroversially” sentient beings (e.g., people, cats, or octopi), but also ‘mere’ objects (e.g., paintings, televisions, a gaping elevator shaft) proves to render this significance of the phenomenon all the more unsettling. Yet what marks these various occasions of the gaze is at least a capacity to relate with the onlooker in a manner that can aspire to a reassertion of one’s subjectivity, one’s freedom. Yet among the salient features of the panopticon is its annulment of this capacity for relationality. By contrast, the watcher remains invisible and thus immune to the defiance of the watched, at least inasmuch as that defiance is manifested through their own gaze, their own fixed return of the searching stare  of the overseer. In virtue of this, the negation of the person as a subject within the panopticon is radicalized. And, maybe even more remarkably, this de-personalization extends not only to the watched, but even to the watchers. For, in contrast to how their position might be seen as an exhibition of sovereignty or power under a different more monarchical dispensation, within the disciplinary society enacted by panopticism, they are merely functionaries of a power which is decentered from affiliation with any singular individual.

For, as Foucault notes, “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 Panopticon is  a marvellous machine which, whatever use one many wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power.” (ibid., 202) Now, the ramifications of this protean adaptability of the panopticon extend beyond its capacity for the subjection of individuals to also its suitability for the thematic coordination of historical processes that might otherwise be conceived as heterogenous, or even disparate: the economic, juridico-political, and the scientific. By means of this coordination, the disciplinary society is brought into being. (ibid, 218 ff.).

It will be salutary to recall also here in what discipline consists. For it would be natural enough to identify it with a specific institution such as the police, or a broader framework, such as the State. Yet, Foucault is quick to resist such an identification, marking it as a mistake, Rather, he avers,

‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; is is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures levels of application, targets; it is a  ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology. (ibid., 215)

The question is begged as to who or what then wields the power which is exercised by the framework of the panopticon? Certainly, a straightforward reply is no longer possible here (if it ever was) in virtue of the structurally impersonal nature of the “all seeing” matrix. It is here that we can circle back to our point of departure, namely the question of the drone. Predominantly, it has been a technology available and controlled by the state apparatus until the past four or so years (speaking approximately). Broader commercial availability has undermined that monopoly somewhat. Thus the action instantiated in past Friday’s deadline to bring private owners within the registering mechanism of the bureaucracy. In this way, the drones, as the eyes of the panopticon, are at least implicitly subordinated to the logic of the broader disciplinary apparatus, even if loosely so. But the main thing to glean here is how this consolidation, and the particulars of the production, distribution and usage of the drone is, at all events are brought under the sway of a specifically capitalist array. And, in fact, this too is not accident, but is expressive of the connection between a disciplinary and a capitalist society.Again, we can turn to Foucault’s acuity. Following on a reflection on how the technologies of the disciplinary apparatus, and panopticism in particular enable capital to “solve” the problem of multiplicities, he goes on to say, “...the technological mutations of the apparatus of production, the division of labour and the elaboration of disciplinary techniques sustained an ensemble of very close relations...Each make the other possible and necessary; and each provides the model of the other.” (ibid., 221) So when are confronted by the question as to who or what exercises the power of the disciplinary apparatus, we are brought again to the spectre of not so much a class, as class society itself. That I proffer the latter derives from the circumstance that class society ultimately negates the agency of all within it, regardless of whether they might happen to be among the more ‘beneficially situated’. Or, at least, it conspires to produce the appearance of such negation.

Yet the drone assists our appreciation of this circumstance not merely in virtue of the happenstance of the political, economic and legal processes that have accompanied its emergence. Indeed, these are almost of secondary importance. Rather, it is of avail as precisely a concretization of the principle of the panopticon in a form which not only grants its a new and unnerving mobility, but which further radicalizes the objectifying power of its gaze. For by the drone, the onlooker is removed even further from an implicitly human subject. Indeed, in the ultimate instances of fully automated drones, the human subject is absent altogether. And thus one is brought under the fixed surveillance of a mere machine. Hence, the capacity for meaningful relationality disappears, and one is designated a mere object. Is this the world into which we wish to enter? If not, then shall we not do well to scrutinize the drone more cautiously? Should we not consider more particularly how complicit we are with this technology, and the technology of the Panopticon itself?  But what would this involve?

To draw my thoughts to a coda, it seems that one surprising possibility presents itself here. That possibility is to actually trust ourselves and each other to create a different, less mechanized world.

Work Cited:

Foucault, Michelle, (trans., Alan Sheridan).(1995) Discipline and Punish - The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.

The Vision of Mercy - Reflections on Thomas Merton’s Climate of Mercy

The Vision of Mercy - Reflections on Thomas Merton’s Climate of Mercy

Thomas L. Lynn, Jr.

In the preface to his most remarkable book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire comments that as a “handbook for radicals”, it is a work which will be dismissed by many, but nevertheless, will be read through to the end by “Christians and Marxists.” The remark is instructive for the surprise it may well elicit from readers in the United States in the early twenty-first century. For in this milieu Christianity is hardly thought of as a movement of the Left, leave alone a radical one.  Yet, the dominant impressions of our peculiar place and time notwithstanding, Freire is pointing to precisely the spirit of Christianity that designated it as a danger to the authorities of the first century: a spirit growing from not only a conviction, but perhaps an insight that the ground of the sacred is unfolded not in the worldly power of Rome, but an all redeeming Mercy which exceeds the bounds of mundane institution.This vision of this Mercy is recounted to us adeptly by Thomas Merton in an essay which he dedicated to Albert Schweitzer, The Climate of Mercy. And indeed from the outset, Merton points to the dramatic nature of mercy in a way that illumines its radical implications.

The mercy of God in Christ is more than forensic absolution from sin...Mercy is, then, not only forgiveness, but life...Mercy is, then, not simply something we deduce from a previously apprehended concept of the divine Essence...but an event in which God reveals himself to us in His redemptive love and in the great gift which is the outcome of this event: our mercy to others. (Merton 203)

In this characterization, one is immediately pulled out of the connotations of soap and water sentimentality which often attend the use of such words as mercy. Yet even more surprisingly, one is taken outside of the space where one considers mercy a mere virtue, or even a specifically moral sort of activity.Rather, Mercy is an event precipitated, to invoke the Christian language, by an action of Grace whereby one participates in God’s understanding  of ourselves.  Rather than it being an understanding of judgement, it is one of mercy. Merton elaborates,

God does not gaze with grim and implacable revulsion into the heart of the sinner to discern there is the “thing” or the “being” which He hates.He understands the sinner mercifully, that is to say, that His look penetrates the whole being of the sinner with mercy from within so that the inmost reality of the sinner is no longer sinfulness but sonship. (Merton 205)

That is to say, rather than being arrested by a conception of the human being as marred irrevocably by wrong or error, one is brought to understand the person born of the sacred itself. Participation in this vision then leads to a transcendence of alienation: “The sinful consciousness becomes capable of seeing itself face to face with the truth, without fear and without hate, because without division.” (Merton 205) That is, one is brought into a deep realization of communion...and that not merely with some divinity on high, but with one’s fellows, one’s brothers and sisters in Creation.

Within the space of this new vision… which is the metanoia of Matthew…one is liberated from the project of self-redemption that had been so central within the prior vantage of alienation. Crucially, this translates into a fundamental shift in one’s relationship to the Law. For, within the horizon of a project of self-redemption, legal virtuousness stands as a preeminent stratagem to carry forth the designs of the ego. This virtuousness can assume a multitude of different forms, many of a quasi-spiritual aspect: ‘self-purification’, or ‘good works’, or ‘elimination of desires’ or ‘a cleansing of concepts, and still others besides. Yet the pursuit of these efforts is at incommensurable odds with the attainment of a genuine freedom. For they all subject one to a finite standard which underwrites the alienation that is the root of one’s sense of bondage. Nevertheless, their allure remains.The pattern is insidious, and obtains its seductiveness by offering a false sense of freedom in a twofold fashion. Acutely, Merton describes the pattern’s action:

The promises, menaces, and demands of the Law are ambiguous  because they point to self-possession and suggest two conflicting possible ways to autonomy: one by following the Law and the other by defying it. It is always possible for man under the Law, in his fallenness and confusion, to outline projects of liberty “against” the Law...The very Law itself perversely and cruelly seems to define this void as “liberty” and “realization”...Why this illusion? Because at the same time the Law offers a deceptive promise of fulfillment to the self-seeking self in legal righteousness...The Law offers the self-seeking self the spurious autonomy which comes from creating a place for itself in the minds of men by human righteousness and achievements... (Merton 208-9)

In no small way, that illusion is sustained by a sense of scarcity not only materially, but existentially, a sense rooted perhaps in a awareness of one’s own death, or, to use another phrase of Merton’s, one’s own radical contingency. Within the atmosphere of such confinement, certain categories show with a certain prominence, a calculus of debt imposes a general opprobrium, and the logics of dominance and servility by turn insinuate themselves into even our most mundane of interactions. Thus, also, Merton tells us,

In the climate which is not of life and mercy, but of death and condemnation, the personal and collective guilts of men and groups wrestle with one another in death struggle. Men, tribes, nations, sects, parties set themselves up in forms of existence which are mutual accusations. They thus seek survival and self-affirmation by living demonically...A demonic existence is one which insistently diagnoses what it cannot cure, what is has no desire to cure, what it seeks to bring to full potency in order that it may cause the death of its victim. Yet this the temptation which besets the sin-ridden Dasein of man, for whom a resentful existence implies the need and the decision to accuse and to condemn all other existences. (Merton 213-214)

By the phrase, “Dasein of man”, Merton is drawing most explicitly on the German thinker, Martin Heidegger whose own work can be read as emphasizing the sense of alienation which can pervade our lives and which we most frequently seek to evade rather than overcome. In this connection, the power of the event of Mercy to liberate one from a sense of obligation before such evasions, or even overcoming is seen as truly momentous, for the climate of acceptance which it imports effectively dissolves the structure of alienation which grounds that obligation. Thus earlier in the essay we find the explication, “When the sinful Dasein is aware of itself as understood mercifully, and is ‘seen’ full of mercy by its Creator and Redeemer, then the evil of sin, the curse of death, are ‘forgotten utterly’.” (Merton 206) The dissolution of that structure in turn gives rise, as noted earlier to the possibility of profound connection with our fellows. Rather than the climate of totalism which suffuses the vantage of the “Old Law”, one encounters in the climate of Mercy a ‘New Law’ which “liberates us from the tyranny of natural weakness and of existential demands for self-assertion” (Merton 210) Now, this Law of Mercy,

...is a “Law” in a broad and analogical sense, because it is governed not so much by fixed, and abstract patterns as by the existential demands of personal love and loyalty: demands of grace and of the heart which are defined to a great extent by our own history of personal sin, need, and forgiveness. (Merton 210)

The climate engendered thus is one of dramatic acceptance, and “...depends on the realization that all men are acceptable before God.”  This realization gives rise to an inclusivity at gross odds with the imperatives of the “Old Law” wherein self assertion and thus domination or exclusion are its character in both subtle and gross manners.

The implicit demand which we formulate by asserting our own justice, setting ourselves up as a law by which to judge and evaluate other men, kills mercy in our hearts and in theirs. If I set myself up inexorably as a law to my brother, then I cannot help trying to interfere with his life by occult violence, malice, and deceit. I set myself up as a power to which I demand some form, be it only symbolic, of homage and submission…Nor is this power illusory. It is most real and most malevolent in strong collective groups whose ideologies can create a bad conscience and even a sense of guilt and self-hate in supposedly “lesser breeds without the law.” We have seen this at work in colonialism and racism, where arrogance and unscrupulousness and self-righteous power has deeply wounded the consciousness of millions of men...(Merton 213)

In addition, in our own society, the climate of the “Old Law” finds expression through the apotheosis of the financial. So it is is that, “...[t]he true “Law” of our day is the law of wealth and material power...It is the market that in reality determines the existence, indeed the survival, of all men and dictates the ideals and actualities of social life.  In our time the struggle of mercy is, then, not against rigid and inflexible morality but against a different and more subtle hardening of heart, a general loss of trust and of love that is rooted in greed and belief in money.” (Merton 217) We can see thus now why Freire casts Christians and Marxists has holding common cause. For they share a vision of a different world, one vivified by very different principles. Again, Merton:

The claims of mercy are demands in a totally new sense: demands not that the debt be properly measured and then generously paid, but that the whole root of indebtedness be laid open to the light “understandeth mercifully” and thus seen to be quite other than we thought. There can be no limit to pardon...We seek that divine mercy which, enduring forever (Psalms 106:1), and dynamically active as a leaven in history, has entirely changed the aspect of human existence, delivering it from its forfeiture to a syndrome of accusation, projection, resentment, and ultimate despair. We seek it not only in our hearts and minds but in man’s world, his common life on earth. (Merton 216)

The last phrase of this passage is crucial for it exhorts Christians to move beyond a merely personalistic theology to one which seeks social expression of an orientation of love and mercy. The remainder of his essay is an elaboration of that exhortation.

Now through the course of this reflection, the vision offered by Merton is offered in a thoroughly Christian vocabulary. However, it does not strike me as merely a Christian vision. For its most crucial point is one that has found expression in quarters around the world: the freeing and fulfilling power of mercy. By mercy, we are no longer bound by our past and thus are liberated to move into a new and different world, not only in the future, but in this very moment.

-------------

I encountered Merton's essay, The Climate of Mercy, in the collection, Love and Living on which I did a Youtube video here: Thomas Merton, Freedom, Love and Living

Sources Cited

Paulo Freier (author), Myra Bergman Ramos (trans.), Donald Macedo (introduction), The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic. 2000.

Thomas Merton (author), Naomi Burton Stone and Br. Patrick Hart (eds.), Love and Living “A Harvest Book”. New York: Harcourt, 1979.

On Gaston Bachelard and the Subversive Freedom of Poetry

On Gaston Bachelard and the Subversive Freedom of Poetry

Thomas L. Lynn, Jr.

That there is a temptation to dismiss the contemporary world as a dreary one stands as something of a cliché. This, though, hardly constitutes a refutation of the sentiment. In fact, it is an index of its veracity, though one to be read advisedly. To put the matter alternatively, the contemporary world is a prosaic one:  it seeks refuge in the corner of the ordinary, the expected, the controlled. Perhaps the most convincing evidence of this impulse can be found in the particular temporality that the cultures and institutions of our upbringing… at least here in North America... would have us embrace. The startling insights of Einstein’s theories of relativity notwithstanding - its realization that there is not a timeline, but that there are timelines, or, if you like, timeframes - we are still called to walk in lockstep with a Newtonian metronome of invariant pace, our gazes ever transfixed by the uniform motion of the clock’s hand. That colour almost naturally bleeds out of  our reflections on this world then is hardly surprising. Even the shadings of black and white prove almost too ebullient to describe it. For colour is surprising, and the maintenance of fidelity to this constriction of our Lebenswelt, or Lifeworld can scarcely tolerate surprise.  Or, to spiral back upon our initial note, the prosaic forbids the poetic.

And, it is here we arrive then at one of the great values of Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space (La Poétique de L’Espace). For sometime now, it has been received as a work whose offerings can powerfully inform architecture, and indeed this is the case. For through Bachelard’s thoughts on the house as a space of evocative potency, through his drawing of its lines, its corners and curves, its verticality, its doors and windows, even its furniture, the architect is reminded of the profound responsibility of his task: it becomes not merely to serve the ‘function of reality’, but to blend that service with the ‘function of unreality’ to elicit an entering upon our freedom.  But these reflections have a relevance not only for the architect, for they point to a shift not merely in the imagining of buildings, but in our imagining of the world, or, indeed, even ourselves.  The Newtonian metronome has set us into a rationalist trance that has forgotten what may prove to be of greater moment to the human nature than ratiocination - imagination. Counterposing the lesser significance attributed to this faculty by Henri Bergson (who stands as a representative of Rationalism more generally), Bachelard relays,

I propose, on the contrary, to consider the imagination as a major power of human nature… By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from reality; it faces the future.  To the function of reality, wise in experience of the past, as it is defined by traditional psychology, should be added a function of unreality, which is equally positive...If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee. (Bachelard, xxx)

The full import of this revaluation becomes apparent when it is considered in connection specifically with the question of poetic imagination. For the imagination is also called forth to subsidiary or less momentous purposes, such as in the outlining of memory, or the task of  mimetic productions. But in its poetic aspect, what is witnessed is not mere recollection, or reproduction, but creation.  This unfolds in a twofold wise. It occurs through the action, the utterance, the writing of the poet. But it also recurs in our encounter with the poem, where the reverberation with being it evokes in turn compels personal resonances, personal repercussions such that one is left with the impression that it is a piece that one could have composed oneself. Or, to recall Bachelard again,

...The reverberations bring about a change of being. It is as though the poet’s being were our being. The multiplicity of resonances then issues from the reverberations’ unity of being. Or, to put  it more simply, this is an impression that all impassioned poetry lovers know well: the poem possesses us entirely.

...The image offered us by reading the poem now becomes really our own. It takes root in us. It has been given us by another, but we begin to have the impression that we could have created it, that we should have created it. It becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is as at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being. Here expression creates being…

...When considered in transmission from one soul to another, it becomes evident that a poetic image eludes causality. (Bachelard xviii-xx)

The trans-subjectivity of this experience has dramatic consequence. For one, it suggests that the touchstone of empathy or solidarity is not a conditioned affectivity, but rather a kinship in being itself. The human adventure is an adventure in a creative being, or, better yet, a creative becoming. The connection with that process then is embodiment of freedom.

The prosaic understanding would stunt that embodiment, confining the implications of the reverberations of poetic experience to what can be drawn from the antecedents of an arid biology, or tangled personal narrative. Yet Bachelard avers that this is but an inversion of what is occurring, an inversion which is revealed when we approach the poetic experience phenomenologically, when we allow the image to speak for itself. It is in this allowance, this openness  that the reverberations of being unfold, a reawakening to the elan vital enabled. Thus, Bachelard also conveys,

The phenomenological situation with regard to psychoanalytical investigation will perhaps be more precisely stated if, in connection with poetic images, we are able to isolate a sphere of pure sublimation; of a sublimation which sublimates nothing, which is relieved of the burden of passion, and freed from the pressure of desire. (Bachelard xxv)

And in this space, to quote from Bachelard’s sequel work The Poetics of Reverie (La Poétique de la Rêverie), “...like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.”

-------------

Here is a video reflection upon Gaston Bachelard and The Poetics of Space of greater scope:

https://youtu.be/vFSpeD2GVtw

Sources:

<iframe frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="border:0px" src="https://books.google.com/books?id=tN3bAwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&dq=poetics%20of%20space&pg=PP1&output=embed" width=500 height=500></iframe>

<iframe frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="border:0px" src="https://books.google.com/books?id=yNT0MhVmakMC&lpg=PP1&dq=poetics%20of%20reverie&pg=PP1&output=embed" width=500 height=500></iframe>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page