ms3305

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ms3305
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Aims of the lecture

• To engage with Foucault's concept of

• Knowledge/Power
• And apply it to the information society debate

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Knowledgecertainty gtgtgtgtgtgtgtgtInformationuncertaint
y

• We live in a world where there is more and more
  information, and less and less meaning. Jean
  Baudrillard, 1981 p. 79

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From Warren Weavers Introduction toClaude
Shannons The Mathematical Theory of
Communication1949

• The concept of information at first seems
  disappointing and bizarre--disappointing because
  it has nothing to do with meaning, and bizarre...
  Because the two words information and
  uncertainty find themselves to be partners

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A shift

• Lecture 1
• From knowledge certainty
• a visual culture defined by language

• lecture 2
• To information- uncertainty
• an information culture defined by
  events

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From the Nobility of Sight to the Inverted Eye of
the Panopticon
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Perceiving the World

• We could say that our knowledge of the world is
  determined by our senses

• Sight
• Hearing
• Touch
• Smell
• Taste

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A worldly perceptual process

• starts with unprocessed information chaotic
  environmental stimuli
• enters the perceptive field - low-level sensory
  organs of the body
• then organized into high-level mental
  representations at the cognitive level (see
  Chalmers et al, 1992)

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Bass Cleff language
Bass frequencies
Sensory organ
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central nervous system
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Idealism versus Empiricism

• Idealism
• internal perception comes before sense data
• form comes before information
• Idea of bass precedes bass frequencies

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Idealism versus Empiricism

• Empiricism
• sense perception is the sole source of human
  knowledge
• We are informed about the world
• bass frequencies lead to the concept of bass

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Forms or Informs?

• How sensory data becomes a shared language is
  something of a black box
• Robots cant do it yet!

• Low frequency Bass
• Bass fish

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Despite the debate - Western philosophy has
broadly agreed that there is a hierarchy of
the senses

• See Martin Jay, 1994

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hierarchy of the senses

• Touch
• Smell
• Taste
• Hearing
• Too close to the objects we observe

• Top of the hierarchy
• The distancing function of sight

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Ocularcentricism

• dominated by vision

• Understanding of the objective world by the
  all seeing eye

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Ocular permeation of language
The mirroring of perception and language
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Ocular permeation of language

• The ability to visualise something internally is
  closely linked with the ability to describe it
  verbally. Verbal and written descriptions create
  highly visual memory, and specific mental
  images. The link between vision, visual memory,
  and verbalisation can be quite startling
  (Riven and Gravelle in Jay, 1994 p. 8)

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• Read the next slide and tell me how it relates to
  the link between vision, visual memory, and
  verbalisation

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• If we focus our attention on the object in front
  of us, we can keep an eye out for any useful
  insights that may enlighten our worldview. At the
  same point in time, we might develop an outlook
  that is blinded to the truth of the matter.
  Nevertheless, as we further inspect the world
  around us we might at least be able to set a few
  foreseeable goals. There is scope for added
  scrutiny of the facts, despite the slight dimming
  of our senses.

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Around 15 visual metaphors
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The Nobility of Sight

• All the management of our lives depends on the
  senses, and since that of sight is the most
  comprehensive and the noblest of these, there is
  no doubt that the inventions which serve to
  augment its power are the most useful that there
  can be (Descartes,
  Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry and
  Meteorology in Jay, 1994 p. 71)

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The Nobility of Sight

• The eye of a philosopher on the diverse actions
  and enterprises of all mankind
  (Descartes 1637)

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Language, the senses and the intellect

• Rene Descartes (1596-1650) maintained that false
  perceptual judgments are ultimately the result of
  confused ideas (Descartes in Jay, 1994 p. 73)

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Ocularcentric Discourse

• Renaissance 1400-1600s
• Perspectivalism
• the rationalisation of sight
• The visual rendered to a set of coordinates

• Enlightenment Rationalism 1650s-1790s
• (Jay, 1994)
• elevated the Ocularcentric notion of reason to a
  universal truth

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The Enlightenment

• What is an idea? It is an image that paints
  itself in my brain Ive ideas only because I
  have images in my head
• (From Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary in Jay,
  1994 p. 83)

Author and Philosopher 1694 - 1778
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Ocular technologiesTechnical enhancement of the
eye (Jay, 1994)

• Extension of the the range and power of our
  ocular apparatus
• Camera obscura
• Microscope
• Telescope
• A trip to Titan

• The improvement of our ability to disseminate the
  results
• Printing press
• Visual media technologies
• The Web

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Recap

• Ongoing debate about perception
• Senses, ideas and images are linked mirrored in
  language
• Development of ideas linked to the dominant sense
  of sight

• Representations are images of the mind that
  underpin our understanding of the world

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A challenge to the Ocularcentric Discourse
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Michel Foucaults Ocular discourse

• Discourses are practices - Not just
  conversations, linguistic systems or texts
• They situate the speaker and the listener
• They can constrain action control truth

• Psychiatric discourse
• Makes link between criminal and pathological
  behaviour
• Classifying criminal behaviour as madness

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Michel Foucault

• With Foucault the Nobility of Sight not so much
  rejected as inverted

• The visual as a means of domination
• The hegemony of the eye

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Empire of the Gazeapparent in the growth of
ocular technologies

• The dominant discourse of observation
• Prisons
• Schools
• Clinics
• Factories

• Evident in
• Open plan office space
• Learning spaces
• CCTV
• Road cameras

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The Birth of the Clinic An Archaeology of
Medical Perception
Power relations function in the construction of
images painting, photography etc - images work
within specific institutional practices .

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Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison

• Panopticon
• an ocular technology of power
• A prison designed with a central observation
  tower
• The prisoners visible at all times

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The Panopticon

• The permanent visibility that assures the
  automatic functioning of power (Foucault, 1979
  p. 201)

• The inmate of a prison internalises the
  mechanism of surveillance which the building
  establishes (Foucault, 1977)

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Panopticon Surveillancein the Information
Society

• Applied to the network society by Robins and
  Webster (1999)
• Dystopian approach counters McLuhans global
  village utopia
• Managed networks
• Surveillance technologies
• Transactional surveillance
• Cybernetic control

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The dark side of information revolution (Robins
Webster, 1999 p. 92)

• Two interrelated parts of the information
  revolution
• mechanism for social management, planning and
  administration
• surveillance and control
• knowledge/information and power are always
  interrelated
• The Ambiguous Panopticon Foucault and the Codes
  of Cyberspace by Mark Winokur
• http//www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick371

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Another challenge to the Ocularcentric Discourse
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The problem with representation

• Objects and the environment
• We return to the problem of environment
• A worldless or worldly sense of it all

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Self-referential
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"The fascination here is that the drawings are
interpreted as representing objects, but the
objects represented could not be constructed
because the spatial constraints of the
environment have been contravened.
Wade, 1980 Visual Allusions Pictures of
Perception. Lawrence Erlbaum
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http//www.lipsons.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/escher/asc
ending.html