After all, what academic uses the word snarky in an academic publication? (I may get to quote such words in my diss, but in a published academic text, as regards other academics?) Yeah, this dude is totally and completely my hero.
*Anyway.*
Quotes + responses (because I’m feeling rushed and lazy, I may finally get a cell phone that doesn’t short out when people call me today, yay!):
“…the mode of disciplinary power is much more ‘intense” precisely because of its ubiquity–which isn’t necessarily to say that that discipline hurts more or that each individual feels its oppressive presence much more sharply. Quite the opposite: Power’s increasing inetnsity suggests a kind of abstraction from the wounded boyd, from the stultifying and oppressive presence of physical compulsion. One might say that as power becomes more virtual, it also becomes more intense….” (35).
Biopower vs. discipline is a very interesting topic for me, one that should send me scurrying back to Foucault, because it gives me some theory with which to think about internet power structures with. For example, it might be easy to assume that the folks behind the Chanology project would primarily be employing biopower to achieve their goals (silence cyberfeminists, drown the church of scientology) I’m not so sure. After all, they asked a few feminists to appear naked from the waist up with signs saying how sorry they were on the main page of their site “or else”–that sounds an awful lot like discipline to me. However, the way they wield power (despite their panopticonic pretense of being “everywhere”) seems to be a lot more biopower-optical. (Yes, now I’m officially making up words.)
“And so the dominant modes of power shift, extend, and abstract their targets and tactics: from force oming to bear on the subject primarily through a series of discontinuous (but linked) institutional training exercises, (birth, school, work, death) to force coming to bear primarily on that subject more ubiquituously through her very lifestyle; from policing the act to policing the norm; from discipline to biopower” (49).
So, Anonymous functions somewhere between these two realms. They are lifestyle police, attacking those that use the Internet for serious purposes, attacking lifestyle choices like feminism, and enforcing a “norm” online. However, their attacks themselves sometimes speak more of discipline. A biopower style attack might include hacking and DDoS. But by following this up with public humiliation and in person surveillance and harassment? That doesn’t seem very much like wielding biopower to me.
This might be one way to break down the affects of such groups–if we can recognize that their enforcement of “status quo” power structures is stretched between two different systems of power, then perhaps that split can be used to break those systems apart.
On the other hand, Nealon later points out (on page 68) that “societies of control extend and intensify the tactics of discipline and biopower”… in other words, it is not at all unusual for these two to work in accordance with one another. However, he still believes that discipline has been stretched to its limit.
Despite this, I wonder if this combination of using discipline in addition to biopower (in the way that Anonymous and other similar groups of hackers function) adds something back to discipline that was previously absent. Any thoughts?
[...] is a matter of progression and intensification rather than succession. As Jill addresses in her recent post on Nealon’s text Foucault Beyond Foucault, perhaps there is a means by which we can consider [...]