aro0823, foucalt

“Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchanged, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies” (101).
The Foucalt quotation I chose, assumedly the longest one in the reading, connects to almost all of our theorists from CMC 300, and even from some in CMC 100. To begin, the first clause directly contradicts a theorist we discussed in CMC 100, Guy Debord. Debord argued that we live in a “society of the spectacle.” Debord’s argument was based in contemporary Marxism: obsession with the spectacle, materialism, and commodity fetishism has replaced anything of actual significance. Debord argues that our society functions on images; there is no depth to it.
To continue, the next section which focuses around the circuits of communication and centralization of knowledge, relates to Marx and Althusser’s notions of ideology and its hegemonic producers. Because, as Chomsky would argue, “mass media inculcates individuals… into the institutional structures,” the ISAs and RSAs are able to achieve methods of surveillance by controlling the methods of ideology. They “carefully fabricate” individuals into the framework of ideology so subtly that no one consciously realizes they are living within it. Various “forces and bodies” from all directions work together to interpolated the population.
Macherey, de Saussure, and Barthes’ concepts of intertextuality, signs, and signifiers are all applicable because it is this “play of signs [which] defines the anchorages of power.” The situation of various semiotic structures in modern discourse leads the populace to unquestionably obey the status quo. Thus, the quotation enumerates the conflicting zone we are in between modernism and postmodernism. There is a constant pull between totality and the individual. We want neither a society where the public sphere and private sphere are completely intersected, nor one where they are completely polarized. Foucalt discusses a world of the former, where the government has full access to each individual’s private life. The passage of the Patriot Act after 9/11 brought about some of that, and it will be interesting to see where the Obama administration takes our society in terms of surveillance and security.