EXIBITION IN ZABLUDOWICZ COLLECTION

Emotional Supply Chains explores how a fluid sense of self is fabricated in our digital present via a supply chain of objects, ideas and experiences. Although we increasingly interact within 'virtual'  space, this remains bound to tangible locations and circumstances. The exhibiting artists reflect on the tensions between confinement and escape, happiness and anxiety, and presence and absence. The exhibition is structured into three parts, each exploring aspects of contemporary identity: the dualities of self, the performed and networked self, and origins and renewal.

prominant pieces include:

• SIMON DENNY
  

  On 20 January 2012, on the request of the FBI, New Zealand police raided the Auckland mansion of Kim Dotcom, founder of file-sharing websites Megaupload and Megavideo, who stands accused by US authorities of copyright infringement, amongst other charges.

  The fulcrum of the exhibition The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom is the list of items taken in this raid, which is pinned to the gallery wall. Here are 110 items: including bank accounts, luxury cars, artworks, TVs, computer servers, video cameras, and domain names. Each of these items is represented as an A0 digital print, produced by Simon Denny in collaboration with designer David Bennewith. The gallery is also filled with 3D representations of the items: toy versions of the luxury cars, wooden sculptures of the TVs, real TVs, copies of the seized artworks, and similar versions of the jet ski and motorbike.

  Much of Denny's recent work has circled around the evolving rhetoric and culture of the technology industry. The very title and focus of the exhibition, based on the fact that Denny simply downloaded the list of items off the Internet and Dotcom?s enthusiastic collusion with the media, highlights the issues as stake. The Personal Effects mines the Dotcom narrative for its morphing relationship between the physical and digital, and the increasing tendency of digital technologies to erode the borders of an original 'thing? as well as the concept of ownership.

  
• KORAKRIT ARUNANONDCHAI
  Korakrit Arunanonchai recently opened an installation at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, which tells the story of the formation of a painter. Themes of identity, history and the cultural impact of globalization and technology are united in his bold exploration of the commonalities found through artistic expression.
  I particularly liked the seating arrangement for the video, which comprised of massives piles of painted cushions, where the viewers comfortably lay.
  ?a project to redefine and start a new art practice. Each part ? Death, Purgatory and now Rebirth ? I actually carry out in real life...? The work consists of two parts: ?The Body? and ?The Spirit.? ?The Body? is made up of large denim body paintings that are only fully visible from a bird?s eye view. ?The Spirit? is a video in which the artist converses with the protagonist of the story, Chantri.'
  
  

'The one thing we share?exhaustion?makes us an inoperative community, an exhausted community, or a community of the exhausted.' Jan Verwoert

Use/User/Used/ is an exhibition that explores the effects of 24/7 working culture and questions societal pressures to continuously perform. The show presents works from the Zabludowicz Collection alongside new live performance and dance commissions. Together these examine the exhaustive and depletive consequences of a network culture that emphasizes increasing productivity and efficiency in both work and leisure time. Collectively, the works reflect on what it means to be exhausted as a physical body, as a mental state, and as a material resource.

The fate of groups is bound up with the words that designate them.
(Bourdieu, 1984)

Aust[ralian] election public sick of public sector workers and phony welfare scroungers sucking life out of economy. Others nations to follow in time.
(Rupert Murdoch tweet 2013)

Benefits Street, made by Love productions, is a six-episode reality television programme first screened on the 6th of January 2014 on Channel Four. The ten-second opening sequence begins with a camera panning over the rooftops of a row of terraced houses, a generic ‘view from above’ which establishes from the outset ‘the voyeurism of one class looking at another’ (Higson 1996:152, see also Lovell 1996 and Tyler 2011). As the shot pans across the roofs, a woman’s voice calls out the word ‘unemployed’ in a soft Birmingham (Brummy) accent. The shot then cuts to street-level, a young woman, dressed in a hooded top, jeans and a baseball cap appears, filmed from behind she is walking down a street, pointing to individual houses, while she chants in unison with a man (who is off camera),  ‘unemployed, unemployed, unemployed’. Then an elderly male voice with a Caribbean lilt begins speaking off camera, ‘You see this street here, James Turner Street’. The film cuts again, and the camera pans across the street revealing three men, two of them are smoking in the doorway of a house, a third, his face pixelated, approaches them in a hooded sports top. This is followed by a rapid cut to a shot of a large pile of domestic waste in the street, split black plastic rubbish sacks lie under a tree spilling their contents across road and pavement as children play nearby. Chants of ‘unemployed, unemployed’ punctuate this sequence of visual shots. The elderly male narrator then appears in the frame, speaking directly to camera in extreme close up, he finishes his sentence ‘this…used to be one of the best streets …. now…one of the worst’.

Henry Giroux argues that the contemporary life is characterised by a `biopolitics of disposability` in which `poor minorities of color and class, unable to contribute to the prevailing consumerist ethic, are vanishing into the sinkhole of poverty in desolate and abandoned enclaves of decaying cities [and] neighborhoods’ (Giroux, 2007, p. 309). In the UK, politicians have diagnosed this condition as ‘Broken Britain’:  an ‘ideological displacement’ which as Emma Dowling and Davie Harvie argue, enables ‘structural conditions of a deep social, political and economic crises’ to be imagined as problems of ‘individual behaviours’ (Dowling, et al., 2014 p. 872) . Through this ‘rhetorical device’ the actual deepening precarity of the working classes is narrativised as a ‘moral crises’ (Dowling, et al., 2014 p. 872).

The opening sequence of Benefits Street transports its audience into this powerful political imaginary. From the programmes title, Benefits Street, through to the splicing of images of rubbish strewn streets, unattended children, loitering youths, cigarettes and alcohol, hooded tops and baseball caps, punctuated by a soundtrack of ‘unemployed, unemployed, unemployed’, the audience is instructed to reimagine the welfare state as a ‘benefits culture’, which impoverishes citizens, feeds addictions and creates what government ministers such as Iain Duncan Smith have described as fatal dependencies amongst ‘those trapped in its clutches’ . As a headline in The Spectatorsummarises, ‘Benefits Street exposes Britain’s dirty secret – how welfare imprisons the poor’.

Benefits Street powerfully demonstrates the pivotal role of media culture in naturalizing the ideology of Broken Britain.  Love Productions, 70% owned by Rupert Murdoch’s global media conglomerate Sky, describes Benefits Street, as a ‘documentary series’, ‘an honest depiction’ which ‘reveals the reality of life on benefits’ and ‘give[s] voice to a community that don’t really have a voice’ ).   However, television, as Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, is ‘an industry which edits and organizes perception, offering visions of the world, classified, portioned and divided in specific ways’ (Bourdieu in Crossley and Slater 2014). The accumulation and repetition of televisual figures of ‘the undeserving poor’ exerts powerful limits on the political imagination by establishing a consensus that Britain, in the words of one viewer, is ‘crawling with workshy, malingerers’ (ref northern echo). In this way, programmes likeBenefits Street establish new rules for the ‘audio-visual policing’ of precariat populations: the marginal, disenfranchised, the underemployed and the unemployed (Rancière 1999, p. 29). As Stephen Crossley and Tom Slater (2014) put it, this is ‘the (tele)vision of divisions’ . The dystopian visions of ‘Broken Britain’, televised by programmes like Benefits Street, are used to ‘politically justify austerity policies’ (Dowling, et al., 2014 p. 875), producing scapegoats for the inequalities which unfold from the crisis of financial capitalism. A reminder that the post-industrial working class not only face precarious employment, downward social mobility, and extreme social insecurity, but endure conditions of ‘heighted stigmatisation […] in daily life as well as in public discourse’ (Wacquant, 2008, pp. 24-25).

More than this though, as I argue in my book Revolting Subjects (2013), the formation of ‘national abjects’ in the public sphere, are technologies of social control through which the transition from welfare to postwelfare states is effected. And there is not only ‘political capital’ to be made here. Reality television production companies like Love specialise in exploitative production processes, harnessing the labours of unwaged participants as ‘human capital’ to produce immense wealth for global media tycoons like Rupert Murdoch. Indeed Benefits Street, achieved peak viewing figures of 6.5 million, making this one of Channel 4’s most popular, and most profitable, television programmes of the year: Yet more ‘accumulation through dispossession’ (Harvey, 2004).

The political aesthetics of ‘Broken Britain’ was not, however, passively accepted by the audience of Benefits Street. Indeed, over the course of 2014, Benefits Street emerged as the site of dense and fractious struggle, amongst the residents of James Tuner Street, television producers, television viewers, politicians, newspaper journalists, television pundits, anti-poverty groups, policy-makers and sociologists (see for example important work of Jensen2013, 2014 and Allen et al. 2014) —exemplified by the ‘Does ‘Poverty Porn’ undermine the Welfare State?’ public event taking place next week.

On August 30th 2014, a group of Middlesbrough[i] football club supporters called ‘Red Faction’, unfurled a banner at the clubs Riverside Stadium which read ‘Being Poor is not Entertainment … F**k Benefits Street’.

This protest against stigmatising television depictions of people living with poverty was stirred by the arrival of a Love Productions television crew in the neighbouring town of Stockton, which had been chosen by the production company as the location for a second series of the Benefits Street. Red Faction had identified that it is ‘no longer possible […] to conduct social struggles without having a specific programme for fighting with and against television’ (Bourdieu, 1998 p.57). The chants of Red Faction on the football terraces that day were a retort to the chant of ‘unemployed, unemployed, unemployed’, with which Benefits Street opens. Under the glare of television cameras, their protest was an imaginative dissent against `the politics of disposability’ (Giroux, 2007). Indeed, the ‘F**k Benefits Street Protest’ is indicative of ongoing class struggles against the symbolic violence and material dispossession of ‘neoliberal capitalist domination’ (Bourdieu, 1998 p. 10).

http://www.the-sarf.org.uk/being-poor-is-not-entertainment-class-struggles-against-poverty-porn-by-imogen-tyler/

MAJOR CONSENSUS NARRATIVE

http://www.the-sarf.org.uk/being-poor-is-not-entertainment-class-struggles-against-poverty-porn-by-imogen-tyler/

http://81.149.91.185/CgiStart?page=Single&Language=0

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/sep/14/toxteth-riots-1981-summer-liverpool-burned-patrick-minford-jimi-jagne

Between 1971 and 1981 alone, the population of Toxteth fell by more than a third. In extreme form, the area exemplified the wider decline of Liverpool. Since the Edwardian era, the city’s commercial zenith, its long chain of working docks – with their colonnaded quays and warehouses like palaces – had been thinning and corroding. Britain’s maritime trade had moved steadily to other ports on the east coast not the west, closer to Europe.

Since the 1970s, the factory jobs that were meant to replace the dock work had been disappearing too, with Liverpool plants increasingly regarded as disposable branch facilities by manufacturing conglomerates based elsewhere. Since the 1950s, Liverpool’s population had been dropping faster than in any other city in the country: from a peak of almost 900,000 to under 500,000 in 1981.

Much of Liverpool was still handsome, with its bright estuarine light and its steep city-centre hills, stacked with centuries of grand buildings from past booms. It still had cultural leverage and charisma, with its ongoing tradition of clever pop music from the Beatles to mouthy new bands such as Echo and the Bunnymen; and a quick-passing football team, Liverpool FC, that was in the middle of a period of unprecedented dominance of both the English and European games. Yet all this swagger was, at best, inadequate compensation for, and at worst a distraction from, the depopulation and the decaying economy. Early 1980s Liverpool, even more than the country’s many other tatty, depopulating cities, could be seen as a warning: the fall of Britain writ large.

“It was just like having a case study on your doorstep,” Minford told me. “The British disease in its terminal phase. Productivity – hopeless. Union militancy – very strong. Living on benefits – the norm. I saw whole streets doing that at first hand.” On weekday lunchtimes, he and Liverpool University colleagues used to go to a pub on the northern edge of Toxteth. “You had to be a bit careful. But in many ways it was very instructive.”

Postindustrialisation in the Present Tense

Jeff Diamanti

Antonio "Toni" Negri (born 1 August 1933) is an Italian Marxist sociologist and political philosopher, best known for his co-authorship of Empire, and secondarily for his work on Spinoza.

Born in Padua, he became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university. Negri founded the Potere Operaio (Worker Power) group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia. As one of the most popular theorists of Autonomism, he has published hugely influential books urging "revolutionary consciousness."

He was accused in the late 1970s of various charges including being the mastermind of the left-wing urban guerrilla organization^[3]Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse or BR), involved in the May 1978 kidnapping of Aldo Moro, two-time Prime Minister of Italy, and leader of the Christian-Democrat Party, among others. Voice evidence suggested Negri made a threatening phone call on behalf of the BR, but the court was unable to conclusively prove his ties.^[3] The question of Negri's complicity with left-wing extremism is a controversial subject.^[4] He was indicted on a number of charges, including "association and insurrection against the state" (a charge which was later dropped), and sentenced for involvement in two murders.

Negri fled to France where, protected by the Mitterrand doctrine, he taught at the Paris VIII (Vincennes) and the Collège international de philosophie, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. In 1997, after a plea-bargain that reduced his prison time from 30 to 13 years,he returned to Italy to serve the end of his sentence. Many of his most influential books were published while he was behind bars. He now lives in Venice and Paris with his partner, the French philosopher Judith Revel.

Autonomism or Autonomist Marxism is a set of anti-authoritarian left-wing political and social movements and theories.  As a theoretical system, it first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist (operaismo) communism. Later, post-Marxist and anarchisttendencies became significant after influence from the Situationists, the failure of Italian far-left movements in the 1970s, and the emergence of a number of important theorists including Antonio Negri, who had contributed to the 1969 founding of Potere Operaio, as well as Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and Franco "Bifo" Berardi.

Georgy Katsiaficas summarizes the forms of autonomous movements saying that "In contrast to the centralized decisions and hierarchicalauthority structures of modern institutions, autonomous social movements involve people directly in decisions affecting their everyday lives. They seek to expand democracy and to help individuals break free of political structures and behavior patterns imposed from the outside." As such this has involved a call for the independence of social movements from political parties in a revolutionary perspective which seeks to create a practical political alternative to both authoritarian socialism and contemporary parliamentary democracy.

Autonomism influenced the German and Dutch Autonomen, the worldwide social centre movement, and today is influential in Italy, France, and to a lesser extent the English-speaking countries. Those who describe themselves as autonomists now vary from Marxists to post-structuralists and anarchists.

Unlike other forms of Marxism, autonomist Marxism emphasises the ability of the working class to force changes to the organization of thecapitalist system independent of the state, trade unions or political parties. Autonomists are less concerned with party political organization than are other Marxists, focusing instead on self-organized action outside of traditional organizational structures. Autonomist Marxism is thus a "bottom-up" theory: it draws attention to activities that autonomists see as everyday working-class resistance to capitalism, for exampleabsenteeism, slow working, and socialization in the workplace.

Like other Marxists, autonomists see class struggle as being of central importance. However, autonomists have a broader definition of the working class than do other Marxists: as well as wage-earning workers (both white collar and blue collar), autonomists also include in this category the unwaged (students, the unemployed, homemakers, etc.), who are traditionally deprived of any form of union representation.

Early theorists (such as Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Sergio Bologna, and Paolo Virno) developed notions of "immaterial" and "social labour" that extended the Marxist concept of labour to all society. They suggested that modern society's wealth was produced by unaccountablecollective work, and that only a little of this was redistributed to the workers in the form of wages. Other Italian autonomists—particularly feminists, such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Silvia Federici—emphasised the importance of feminism and the value of unpaid female labour to capitalist society.

A scholar of the movement, Michael Ryan, writes that

Autonomy, as a movement and as a theory, opposes the notion that capitalism is an irrational system which can be made rational through planning. Instead, it assumes the workers' viewpoint, privileging their activity as the lever of revolutionary passage as that which alone can construct a communist society. Economics is seen as being entirely political; economic relations are direct political relations of force between class subjects. And it is in the economic category of the social worker, not in an alienated political form like the party, that the initiative for political change resides.

https://twitter.com/MuteMagazine

http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/lest-we-forget

http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/liverpools-docks-dust-and-dirt

Image: Canada Dry Dock, Liverpool

https://libcom.org/library/rethinking-class-recomposition-counterpower

'In this article Paul Bowman draws a line between revolutionary class analysis and universalist utopianism and goes on to explore the history of different ideas of class and the elusive revolutionary subject. After exploring the intersecting lines of class and identity, he poses the challenge that we as libertarian communists face as we strive to create “cultural and organisational forms of class power [that] do not unconsciously recreate the... hierarchies of identity and exclusion” that are the hallmark of the present society.

Against universalism, against utopianism

The term class divides people into two camps. One which seems to uphold its validity with an almost cult-like intensity, and a much larger camp that is at best undecided, but mostly turned off entirely by it – and especially so by the apparently religious fervour of the small minority in the first camp.

Given the fact of this starting point, the most obvious question is - Is class still a useful idea? Is there any mileage to be gained from including class in our analysis or should we instead, just dispense with it and go with the raw econometrics of inequality?

Today books like “The Spirit Level”1, try to recast the old discourses of socialism against poverty and class injustice, as appeals to universal rationality. Inequality, they say, leads to measurably worse social outcomes on a whole number of levels. The graphs and the statistics they muster, should surely convince any putative social engineers, with a scientifically neutral interest in the social policies most proven to maximise social utility, of the sanity, the “rationality” of more egalitarian policies.

Similarly, inspired by the success of Occupy Wall Street in putting the whole 1% versus 99% meme on the social agenda2, sources as diverse as popular science magazines like New Scientist publish special reports3 on the scientifically measurable ills of inequality, and locally organisations like TASC4regularly publish data on inequality in Ireland.

What useful extra does class add to that? In what way does class step outside the dead end of the “rationalist” programme? Simply put, by rejecting the unspoken, underlying presumption of such a programme – by rejecting universalism - and its bogus moralising.

A class analysis accepts the truth that the status quo is not against everyone's interests. That being the case, any attempt to construct a programme of radical social change in the name of the “general interest” is doomed to failure, because there can be no universal interests so long as the interests of a minority resist change. In fact it is the very ability of a tiny minority to make its own interests rule over those of the vast majority that is one of the most important things that needs to change.

But more than this, a class perspective is not simply the foundation of a critique of what exists, and an analysis of what needs to change, but also implies a strategy for how that change could be brought about. In the matter of strategy, a class perspective rejects the “rationalist” programme as utopian.

What does it mean to say that a programme for social change is utopian? In the first instance it means that the programme has no obvious strategy for how it is to be brought about, other than a vague notion of if you educate enough people about its desirability then somehow it will be brought about through weight of numbers and the force of public opinion.

On a deeper level, utopian programmes are differentiated from instrumental and prefigurative ones on the basis of the means-ends relationship. To start with the most familiar case, instrumentalism is the position that “the end justifies the means”. That is to say, that if the end, or goal, is one that significantly increases social good or the welfare of the masses, then any squeamishness about using deceptive, manipulative or manifestly unjust methods to achieve it, is a case of misplaced scruples, or “bourgeois morality”. In other words, for instrumentalists, there is a total disconnect between means and ends.

The prefigurative approach holds, by contrast, that there is an inherent link between means and ends. For example, if kangaroo courts or summary execution are used to rid society of a genuine evil-doer, the use of improper methods lays the foundation for miscarriages of justice in the future. The means used to achieve a goal, necessarily leave its mark in the end result, in the prefigurative view. For example, the famous Sonvilier Circular issued to all sections of the First International by the Jura Federation in 1871, declared that

However, recognising the link between the means employed and the ends achieved, as prefiguration does, must not mean mistaking the one for the other, for confusing means and ends.

This error, of confusing means and ends, is the starting point for utopianism. From the utopian viewpoint the end and the means are simply one. If you want to change social relations all you have to do is for a group of well-meaning people to voluntarily begin to practice the new relations amongst themselves and spread their adoption through the power of example, education and propaganda etc. This perspective erroneously confuses interpersonal relations, which can, with effort and struggle, be changed by the voluntary actions of a few, with social relationships, which cannot.

To take another historical example, Robert Owen, in his 1819 “An Address to the Working Classes” states that because the new (communist) society will be an improvement in the conditions of all members of society, therefore there is no fundamental conflict between classes in the here and now to prevent its achievement. Hence why Owen is generally categorised as a utopian socialist (and not just by Marxists).

Despite the clear difference between prefigurative and utopian approaches, the two continue to be confused today. Partly this is deliberate on the part of instrumentalists like Leninists and other authoritarian Marxists and socialists, who are hostile to prefiguration on principle. But partly it is genuine confusion on behalf of those, who through naivety or lack of critical ability, read the Sonvilier line about the International being the embryo of the new society growing within the bosom of the old too literally.

So, in the question of class this question has significant meaning. If we aspire to a classless society, it is not enough to start by pretending that class doesn’t exist. Such a confusion of means and ends would be hopelessly utopian and would ignore the fact that class is not simply a subjective phenomenon, but has an objective material basis that persists regardless of whether anyone chooses to believe in it or not.'

https://bigflameuk.wordpress.com/about/

Big Flame (political group)

http://www.magnumphotos.com/Catalogue/Ferdinando-Scianna/2006/ITALY-Italian-artist-Giovanni-RUBINO-2006-NN146947.html

Italian artist Giovanni RUBINO. 2006

http://www.openschooleast.org/contact/

Open School East
The Rose Lipman Building
43 De Beauvoir Rd
London N1 5SQ

On occasions, Open School East welcomes ideas for space use. If you are a community organisation and are looking for a space from which to run free one-off cultural or educational activities (classes, workshops and events), please contact us.

Postindustrialisation in the Present Tense

Jeff Diamanti

To some, the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA) might appear to be but a ragged bunch of activists sporting false noses, a smudge of grease paint, camouflage pants and bad wigs. And those people may be right. But it is also a highly disciplined army of professional clowns, a militia of authentic fools, a battalion of true buffoons.

Clowning is a state of being rather than a technique

Art activist John Jordan and colleagues L.M. Bogad, Jen Verson and Matt Trevelyan founded CIRCA in late 2003 to welcome arch-clown George W. Bush on his royal visit to London. CIRCA aimed to be a new methodology of civil disobedience, merging the ancient art of clowning with contemporary tactics of nonviolent direct action. It went on to be a successful meme and international protest phenomenon, with self-organized groups taking action in the streets outside summits and military bases in dozens of countries from Colombia to New Zealand.

Key Principle at work

Use absurdity to undermine the aura of authority

Ridicule and absurdity are powerful tools against authority. To be effective, authority has to be perceived as such, otherwise people would never obey its commands. On the other hand, who ever takes a clown seriously? Rebel clowning used this slippery dichotomy to great effect, turning the tables on authority in the street by posing in mock-serious fashion next to lines of cops, as well as at the highest levels of power, by pointing out the clownish behavior of George W. Bush and other authority figures.

Get arrested in an intelligent way

Watching police handcuff and bundle clowns into police vans is always entertaining for passersby, begging the question: What did the clowns do wrong? What is this all about? An arrested clown also makes for very mediagenic images. By staying in character during the whole process of an arrest, including giving their clown army names (e.g., Private Joke) and addressees (e.g., the big top in the sky) as their real identity, rebel clowns caused much mirth and havoc in the police stations.

Reframe

Rebel clowning helped reframe the media images of protests during the big summit mobilizations of the mid 1990s. A colorful band of disobedient clowns could easily capture the limelight and shift the narrative away from ?violent clashes? and smashed windows.

Why it worked

Rebel clowning was a gateway for lots of people to get involved in radical politics who were otherwise put off by its seriousness. For many recruits, it was their first experience of civil disobedience, but the playfulness and mask-like make-up empowered them to be deeply disobedient, often in unexpectedly absurd and creative ways.

John Jordan is an artist and activist in the direct action movements, Co-editor of "We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism", Verso 2003 he is presently working on a book/film Paths Through Utopias

http://andwhilelondonburns.com/

 "We are looking into an unprecedented abyss of economic and social turmoil that confounds our previous perceptions of historical risk. Our vertigo is intensified by our ignorance of the depth of the crisis or any sense of how far we might ultimately fall."

http://dutchartinstitute.eu/page/3701/jakob-jakobsen

ISSUES TO BE DISCUSSED: 

• acsessability of audience > publication, reading room, installation, livestreamign events
• REAPROPRIATION of found footage in video work
• reading room structure
• subject matter > poverty porn / power relations
• hosting events in installation
• SUPERFLEX > Tenantspin > Superchannel + Tools

REPORT OF TUTORIAL AD RECCOMENDATIONS

• N55
• UTV Stephan Dillemuth
• Jakob Jakobsen
• sndwhilelondonburns.com
• REBEL CLOWN ARMY PROTESTS
• BIG FLAME > liverpool
• autonomio Operaia, autonomist movement 1970s
• COMUNITY > open school
• community center De Beauvoir
• ROSE LIPMAN BUILDING
• Giovanni Rubino
• Recompossition of Class
• Working Artists
• Position of artists within class structure
• Critique of Superflex's effect and involvement in communities.

The Tag from Superflex on Vimeo.

tenantspin is a Liverpool-based Community TV Channel. It was established by the Danish artists? group Superflex in 1999 and is now managed by FACT(Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), city-wide tenants and Arena Housing, a North-West Housing Association. This unique collaboration enables all parties to explore issues around ways of living and interacting.

For The Fifth Floor, tenantspin will design and establish a fully-equipped TV studio within the galleries where stories, opinions, and views will be collected from visitors, and where live discussions, readings and performances will take place. All content will be available on the tenantspin website.

tenantspin are also providing Media Training to individuals and community groups in Liverpool. In tandem with the International Festival stage, the tenantspin studio will be a hub for a live programme of events on The Fifth Floor.

By working with tenants over an extended period of time, empowering them to lead and shape the programme, tenantspin developed their skills and creative practice. This approach to participation still lies at the heart of FACT?s Collaboration and Engagement Programme. 

In its formative years, tenantspin took the form of a Superchannel, a web-streaming platform and live-chat facility created before the rise of Youtube, that enabled tenants to produce online content. This allowed tenants to connect with their neighbours and the global community in real-time. Webcast content ranged in subject matter from serious topics relating to housing or welfare, to light-hearted subjects close to the tenant?s hearts. The project invited artists, leading cultural figures, experts and innovators from across the world to join them in their Liverpool studio to debate and contribute to the 1000 hours of broadcasted content and produce new work. In the later years, tenantspin continued to work in a social housing context working in neighbourhoods such as Sefton Park and North Liverpool developing tenant-led content, artist commissions and webcast content.

Michel Foucault, the French postmodernist, has been hugely influential in shaping understandings of power, leading away from the analysis of actors who use power as an instrument of coercion, and even away from the discreet structures in which those actors operate, toward the idea that ‘power is everywhere’, diffused and embodied in discourse, knowledge and ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault 1991; Rabinow 1991). Power for Foucault is what makes us what we are, operating on a quite different level from other theories:

‘His work marks a radical departure from previous modes of conceiving power and cannot be easily integrated with previous ideas, as power is diffuse rather than concentrated, embodied and enacted rather than possessed, discursive rather than purely coercive, and constitutes agents rather than being deployed by them’ (Gaventa 2003: 1)

Foucault challenges the idea that power is wielded by people or groups by way of ‘episodic’ or ‘sovereign’ acts of domination or coercion, seeing it instead as dispersed and pervasive. ‘Power is everywhere’ and ‘comes from everywhere’ so in this sense is neither an agency nor a structure (Foucault 1998: 63). Instead it is a kind of ‘metapower’ or ‘regime of truth’ that pervades society, and which is in constant flux and negotiation. Foucault uses the term ‘power/knowledge’ to signify that power is constituted through accepted forms of knowledge, scientific understanding and ‘truth’:

Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of mid-20th-century French and continental philosophers and critical theorists who came to international prominence in the 1960s and 1970s.^[1][2][3]

Post-structuralism is defined by its relationship to its predecessor, structuralism, an intellectual movement developed in Europe from the early to mid-20th century which argued that human culture may be understood by means of a structure—modeled on language (i.e., structural linguistics)—that differs from concrete reality and from abstract ideas—a "third order" that mediates between the two.^[4] Post-structuralist authors all present different critiques of structuralism, but common themes include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of the structures that structuralism posits and an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute those structures.^[5]Writers whose work is often characterised as post-structuralist include Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, and Julia Kristeva, although many theorists who have been called "post-structuralist" have rejected the label.^[6]

Existential phenomenology is a significant influence; Colin Davis has argued that post-structuralists might just as accurately be called "post-phenomenologists".

Deconstruction

A major theory associated with Structuralism was binary opposition. This theory proposed that there are certain theoretical and conceptual opposites, often arranged in a hierarchy, which human logic has given to text. Such binary pairs could include Enlightenment/Romantic, male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signifier/signified, symbolic/imaginary.

Post-structuralism rejects the notion of the essential quality of the dominant relation in the hierarchy, choosing rather to expose these relations and the dependency of the dominant term on its apparently subservient counterpart. The only way to properly understand these meanings is to deconstruct the assumptions and knowledge systems that produce multiplicity, the illusion of singular meaning.^{[clarification needed]}

Post-structuralism and structuralism

Structuralism was an intellectual movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s that studied the underlying structures in cultural products (such as texts) and used analytical concepts from linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and other fields to interpret those structures. It emphasized the logical and scientific nature of its results.

Post-structuralism offers a way of studying how knowledge is produced and critiques structuralist premises. It argues that because history and culture condition the study of underlying structures, both are subject to biases and misinterpretations. A post-structuralist approach argues that to understand an object (e.g., a text), it is necessary to study both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object.

This seems to be what?s going on in the famous street piece Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983). The photos portraying Hammons with his neatly arranged rows of snowballs for sale are probably the most frequently reproduced images in the artist?s oeuvre. The piece has become iconic, the single ephemeral work ? a work that is essentially about ephemerality ? that has come to stand for his entire practice. As it comes down to us in documentation, it is a portrait of the artist as an anonymous and disreputable pedlar, an absurdist street hustler. Hammons? notion of an artist includes a constant flirtation with notions of the illicit and the fraudulent ? the ever-present suggestion that the whole business might be a scam. What, after all, could be more of a scam than selling snowballs in winter?

Much of his work reflects his commitment to the civil rights and Black Power movements. A good example is the early Spade with Chains (1973), where the artist employs a provocative, derogatory term, coupled with the literal gardening instrument, in order to make a visual pun between the blade of a shovel and an African mask, and a contemporary statement about the issues of bondage and resistance. This was part of a larger series of "Spade" works in the 1970s, including "Bird" (1973), where Charlie Parker is evoked by a spade emerging from a saxophone, "Spade," a 1974 print where the artist pressed his face against the shape leaving a caricature-like imprint of Negroid features.

In 1980, Hammons took part in Colab's ground-breaking The Times Square Show, which acted as a forum for exchange of ideas for a younger set of alternative artists in New York. His installation was made of glistening scattered shards of glass (from broken bottles of Night Train wine).

Other works play on the association of basketball and young black men, such as drawings made by repeatedly bouncing a dirty basketball on huge sheets of clean white paper set on the floor; a series of larger-than-life basketball hoops, meticulously decorated with bottle caps, evoking Islamic mosaic and design; and Higher Goals (1986), where an ordinary basketball hoop, net, and backboard are set on a three-story high pole - commenting on the almost impossible aspirations of sports stardom as a way out of the ghetto.

Through his varied work and media, and frequent changes in direction, Hammons has managed to avoid one signature visual style. Much of his work makes allusions to, and shares concerns with minimalism and post-minimal art, but with added Duchampian references to the place of Black people in American society.

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

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/20/the-big-society-civil-exchange-audit-shows-coalition-contempt-and-hypocrisy

Back in 2010, it was the new big idea. Why did it fail? Civil Exchange?s final audit of the big society demonstrates that in fact coalition policies showed contempt for civil societyit?s instructive to re-read the prime minister, David Cameron?s rhetoric on the i?big society?, back in the heady, early days before austerity had taken root: how eloquent and purposeful it seemed then; how empty and cynical now.

Stirring phrases were crafted for his speeches. He promised to oversee a shift ?from state power to people power?, and from ?unchecked individualism to national unity?. To citizens, he issued a call to arms: ?Society is not a spectator sport?. To charities, he promised a starring role in public service provision: ?Come in and provide a great service,? he urged.

Most glib and infuriating of all, Cameron gave us the phrase that has been adopted as an ironic coda to the now almost daily reports of widening social, economic and geographic inequality: ?There is no ?them? and ?us? ? there is us. We are all in this together.?

In 2010, big society seemed momentarily significant. Whitehall devoted huge resource to making policy big-society-compatible. Big society lobbies were pump-primed with cash (controversially it turned out); supposed gurus were enobled and promoted (but didn?t last long). There were conferences. Within months it became an Oxford dictionary word of the year (alongside ?double-dip? and ?Tea Party?).

Briefly, some actual big society participants may even have believed in it. Two years after he attended the invitation-only launch of big society at Downing Street, the community activist David Robinson concluded the PM?s vision was ?as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike?. His was not a minority view.

Now big society has disappeared entirely, like an embarrassing fashion item, worn once and pushed to the back of the cupboard. The PM last mentioned it at Christmas 2013. The phrase has been erased from official government discourse (although a monthly big society gong is still awarded by the PM?s office). On Twitter, the big society hashtag is used wryly to signify coalition hypocrisy and spending cuts.

In the circumstances, it almost seems superflous that the Civil Exchange thinktank has published its third and final audit of the big society; but it is worth reading as a guide to why and how the policy went so disastrously wrong, and a useful pointer to whether some of the sound principles underpinning it might be rescued in future.

More than anything, Civil Exchange demonstrates the coalition?s sheer contempt for civil society, right from the start: billions of pounds cut from charity grants (small, local charities losing most); restrictions against civil society?s right to challenge policy through the courts, and the voluntary sector?s ability to speak out on behalf of the people it works with.

The coalition?s saw charities narrowly as service ?contractors? the report notes. And yet its obsession with market-led reform of public services meant those charities that sought a role were frozen out by ?private sector quasi-monopolies?.

According to the audit, people feel less able to influence local decisions than they did in 2001, Britain, it notes, ?still has one of the most centralised political systems in the world.? It promised a rise in civic engagement, and yet volunteering levels are flatlining, and while cuts and austerity have fallen most harshly on deprived neighbourhoods, social action remains concentrated among the well-off, in the wealthiest places.

But ultimately, you sense big society failed for a very simple reason. Too many members and supporters of government did not understand or believe in ? and in some cases actively despised ? its overarching social vision.

The journalistic tendency to balance stories with two opposing views leads to a tendency to ‘build stories around a confrontation between protagonists and antagonists’ (Ricci 1993: 95). Issues such as garbage and sewage sludge only get coverage, despite their importance, when there is a fight over the siting of a landfill or incinerator and the coverage is then on the ‘anger and anguish of affected citizens, or the conflicting claims of corporate spokesmen, government regulators and environmental activists’ rather than the issues and technical background to them(Gersh 1992: 16).
The job of media is not to inform, but to misinform: Divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by the political and economic elites, by the technique of flood or continuous flood of distractions and insignificant information.
Journalists who have access to highly placed government and corporate sources have to keep them on their side by not reporting anything adverse about them or their organizations. Otherwise they risk losing them as sources of information. In return for this loyalty, their sources occasionally give them good stories, leaks and access to special interviews. Unofficial information, or leaks, give the impression of investigative journalism, but are often strategic manoeuvres on the part of those with position or power (Ricci 1993: 99). ‘It is a bitter irony of source journalism … that the most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the “best” sources’(quoted in Lee and Solomon 1990: 18).

The 10 Strategies:

1. The strategy of distraction
The primary element of social control is the strategy of distraction which is to divert public attention from important issues and changes determined by the political and economic elites, by the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.
Distraction strategy is also essential to prevent the public interest in the essential knowledge in the area of the science, economics, psychology, neurobiology and cybernetics.
“Maintaining public attention diverted away from the real social problems, captivated by matters of no real importance. Keep the public busy, busy, busy, no time to think, back to farm and other animals” (quote from text Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars).


2. Create problems, then offer solutions
This method is also called “problem -reaction- solution.”
It creates a problem, a “situation” referred to cause some reaction in the audience, so this is the principal of the steps that you want to accept.
For example: let it unfold and intensify urban violence, or arrange for bloody attacks in order that the public is the applicant’s security laws and policies to the detriment of freedom.
Or create an economic crisis to accept as a necessary evil retreat of social rights and the dismantling of public services.

3. The gradual strategy
Acceptance to an unacceptable degree, just apply it gradually, dropper, for consecutive years.
That is how they radically new socioeconomic conditions (neoliberalism) were imposed during the 1980s and 1990s:
• the minimal state
• privatization
• precariousness
• flexibility
• massive unemployment
• wages
• do not guarantee a decent income,
...so many changes that have brought about a revolution if they had been applied once.

4. The strategy of deferring
Another way to accept an unpopular decision is to present it as “painful and necessary”, gaining public acceptance, at the time for future application.
It is easier to accept that a future sacrifice of immediate slaughter.
• First, because the effort is not used immediately
• Then, because the public, masses, is always the tendency to expect naively that “everything will be better tomorrow” and that the sacrifice required may be avoided
This gives the public more time to get used to the idea of change and accept it with resignation when the time comes.5. Go to the public as a little child

5. Go to the public as a little child
Most of the advertising to the general public uses speech, argument, people and particularly children’s intonation, often close to the weakness, as if the viewer were a little child or a mentally deficient.
The harder one tries to deceive the viewer look, the more it tends to adopt a tone infantilizing.
Why?
“If one goes to a person as if she had the age of 12 years or less, then, because of suggestion, she tends with a certain probability that a response or reaction also devoid of a critical sense as a person 12 years or younger.” (see Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars)

6. Use the emotional side more than the reflection
Making use of the emotional aspect is a classic technique for causing a short circuit on rational analysis, and finally to the critical sense of the individual.
Furthermore, the use of emotional register to open the door to the unconscious for implantation or grafting ideas , desires, fears and anxieties , compulsions, or induce behaviors …

7. Keep the public in ignorance and mediocrity
Making the public incapable of understanding the technologies and methods used to control and enslavement.
“The quality of education given to the lower social classes must be the poor and mediocre as possible so that the gap of ignorance it plans among the lower classes and upper classes is and remains impossible to attain for the lower classes.” (See Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars).

8. To encourage the public to be complacent with mediocrity
Promote the public to believe that the fact is fashionable to be stupid, vulgar and uneducated…

9. Self-blame Strengthen
To let individual blame for their misfortune, because of the failure of their intelligence, their abilities, or their efforts.
So, instead of rebelling against the economic system, the individual auto-devaluate and guilt himself, which creates a depression, one of whose effects is to inhibit its action.And, without action, there is no revolution!

10. Getting to know the individuals better than they know themselves
Over the past 50 years, advances of accelerated science has generated a growing gap between public knowledge and those owned and operated by dominant elites.
Thanks to biology, neurobiology and applied psychology, the “system” has enjoyed a sophisticated understanding of human beings, both physically and psychologically.
The system has gotten better acquainted with the common man more than he knows himself.
This means that, in most cases, the system exerts greater control and great power over individuals, greater than that of individuals about themselves.

"the uses and abuses of power"

Hoggart believed this was the era when working-class performers and audiences held greatest sway, dominating British music. Though he couldn’t have known it, that golden age was just about to come. As he wrote his venerable text in the Hull of the mid-1950s, not far down the road in another northern port a bunch of Scouse teenagers was strumming the overture to an entertainment revolution (albeit one with music- hall roots) that would eclipse the reign of Marie Lloyd and Dan Leno.

Entering Paul McCartney’s council-house childhood home at 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton, Merseyside, American visitors are often visibly shocked by how tiny it is, how plain – spartan even. (Lennon’s was slightly bigger, so he is routinely and wrongly labelled as “middle-class”. His dad was an itinerant galley hand, and after his single-parent mum died he was brought up by an aunt in a modest Liverpool street. It’s hardly Downton Abbey.) From these little houses, from terraced streets across the north or unlovely London boroughs, from mill towns and ports, factories and coalfields, came working-class kids who’d shake the world with every shake of their head.

But those days are gone – whether James Blunt thinks so or not. The former Guardsman-turned-balladeer has improved his media standing of late by building a genuinely funny and self-deprecating presence on Twitter. But he showed his more rebarbative edge on 19 January with an attack on the Labour MP Chris Bryant. Bryant had made the fairly anodyne point that posh kids such as Blunt and the actor Eddie Redmayne were becoming increasingly prevalent in UK entertainment. It’s not a particularly new or shocking assertion, but the vehemence of Blunt’s response was revealing. Replying by that most modish of platforms, the open letter, he called Bryant a “classist gimp” and a “prejudiced wazzock”, and invoked the threadbare sneer about the politics of envy. If nothing else, the rant by James, an Old Harrovian, gave the lie to the notion that the upper classes have better manners. Yet there is more to it than that; the note of wounded paranoia suggests that Blunt knows Bryant is right.

The great cultural tide that surged through Harold Wilson’s 1960s and beyond, the sea change that swept the McCartneys, Finneys, Bakewells, Courtenays, Baileys, Bennetts et al to positions of influence and eminence, if not actual power, has ebbed and turned. The children of the middle and upper classes are beginning to reassert a much older order. In the arts generally – music, theatre, literature for sure – it is clear that cuts to benefits, the disappearance of the art school (where many a luminous layabout found room to bloom) and the harsh cost of further and higher education are pricing the working class out of careers in the arts and making it increasingly a playground for the comfortably off. The grants are gone and the relatively benign benefits system that sustained the pre-fame Jarvis Cocker and Morrissey is being dismantled daily.

In 2010 the Daily Mail reported on the growing gap in music provision between the state and private school systems. In the state sector local authorities were spending less than half the amount on music teaching that they did 20 years earlier: as little as £1.15 a child per year. “On top of this, families who can afford private school fees are often affluent enough to pay for extra music tuition, for equipment such as drum kits, guitars, amps, and also for rehearsal space,” it said. When the Daily Mailbemoans this trend, you know there’s something afoot.

Does it matter? Surely Noel Gallagher is no better than Nick Drake just because he went to a Burnage comp rather than Marl­borough? Of course not. But pop culture should reflect the lives of its people in all their vibrancy, challenge and hurly-burly, not the rarified interests and experiences of a few. Most modern indie bands’ lyrics seem to be either turgid chunks of half-digested philosophy or indulgent disquisitions on the singer’s fragile emotional microclimate. It is telling that the last alternative bands to emerge with lyrics that observed the world around them wittily and pungently were Kaiser Chiefs and Arctic Monkeys, both from working-class backgrounds in Yorkshire. One can go further. The best art, and the best pop music certainly, has always been made by smart, impassioned outsiders such as Cocker or Morrissey, or by the cussed and ornery: the likes of Lennon or John Lydon. Conflict, be it generational, geographical or economic, is the turbine that drives art forward, the grit in the oyster that makes the pearl. At the risk of sounding like a classist gimp, grittiness is surely not the prevailing ambience at Bedales and Harrow. The silencing of other, rougher voices brings with it a creeping blandness.

Martin Parr - documenting subjectivities 
Martin Parr, who was born in 1952, and who grew up in suburban Surrey, today exhibits widely. In addition, his work can be found regularly in newspapers, magazines and journals. Nationally and internationally respected, Parr and his work are described in Contemporary Photographers (1995:800) thus:

Martin Parr can be considered generally as the leading light of the ?New Colour Documentary? school of eighties British and European photography. As such he has been a major influence upon young photographers, both as a protagonist and a teacher. His style has been imitated extensively, but in the original, is marked by an aggressive, typically British coolness and a gleeful propensity for eccentricity and the foibles of human existence. These qualities are presented for our inspection in a manner that seems somewhat insistent and unyielding compared to the methods of the traditional documentary photographers.

Parr is fascinated with holiday resorts such as Scarborough and Morecambe, and the ?brash side of English life,? as he has described it. One of his earliest photographic essays was made at Harry Ramsden?s fish and chip shop just outside Bradford, when he was about 16 years old. He says himself that he portrayed the shop as being bleaker than it actually was, as quite a sad sort of place. Even at this early stage he was searching for a way of expressing the fact that he identified with the places that he was photographing. He knew that they would soon become outdated, as society and culture moved on.

This theme of Britishness characterises much of Parr?s work. He is interested in the way people decorate their living rooms and socialise on holiday; in the values, attitudes and ways of life that are being eroded or are under threat. The trivia and ordinariness of everyday life appears regularly in Parr?s photographs, and represents a resistance to the homogenisation of society and the erosion of individual national identities. Thus, in the exhibition The Last Resort (1986), a study of the seaside town of New Brighton on the Wirrall, Parr photographs the ways that family groups act and behave together. He includes the screaming, the crying, the good and the bad points which are revealed and on display during a day out at the seaside.

The best way to describe Parr?s work, then, is ?subjective documentary?. Writing in the catalogue for the exhibition On The Bright Side of Life (1997) Brett Rogers describes this school of contemporary British photography as follows:

The revitalisation of documentary begun by (Tony) Ray Jones and continued by such individuals as Martin Parr, Paul Graham, Chris Killip, John Davies and Jem Southam was motivated by radically new perception of its function. Like their American counterparts, the British photographers had undergone a disillusionment with documentary practice, realising that its objectivity was mythical, that its claims to reveal the ?truth?? were spurious, and finally but most fundamentally that it had failed to effect any real change in the world. The ethical problem they posed themselves was how to respond to the radical social and political changes occurring in Britain while not succumbing to the old myths about the power of the documentary aesthetic.

In using photography to explore the physical and cultural climate of Britain in the light of the economic, social and political changes and the post-industrial climate of the late twentieth century, Parr and his contemporaries are arguing that photography is fundamentally subjective. It is about re-presentation, not representation; that is about the ?re-presentation? of visual material in a way that acknowledges the thoughts, feelings, preferences and ideologies of the photographer; it is about acknowledging the subjectivity of the photographer who, even within the tradition of so-called documentary photography, can never portray a subject as it ?really is?. The photographer always works from a specific and individual point of view.

Foucault and His Panopticon

by Moya K. Mason

Michel Foucault

Above all else, Michel Foucault believed in the freedom of people. He also realized that as individuals, we react to situations in different ways. His used his books as a vehicle to show the various factors that interact and collide in his analyzation of change and its effects. As a philosophical historian and an observer of human relations, his work focused on the dominant genealogical and archaeological knowledge systems and practices, tracking them through different historical eras, including the social contexts that were in place that permitted change - the nature of power in society. He wrote that power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives" (Foucault 1980,30).

Along with other social theorists, Foucault believed that knowledge is always a form of power, but he took it a step further and told us that knowledge can be gained from power; producing it, not preventing it. Through observation, new knowledge is produced. In his view, knowledge is forever connected to power, and often wrote them in this way: power/knowledge. Foucault's theory states that knowledge is power:

Knowledge linked to power, not only assumes the authority of 'the truth' but has the power to make itself true. All knowledge, once applied in the real world, has effects, and in that sense at least, 'becomes true.' Knowledge, once used to regulate the conduct of others, entails constraint, regulation and the disciplining of practice. Thus, 'there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time, power relations (Foucault 1977,27).

For him, power exists everywhere and comes from everywhere; it was a key concept because it acts as a type of relation between people, a complex form of strategy, with the ability to secretly shape another's behaviour. Foucault did not view the effects of power negatively. For him, power didn't exclude, repress, censor, mask, and conceal. Foucault saw it as a producer of reality: "it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth" (Foucault 1977,194). The importance for him always lay in the effect that power has on entire networks, practices, the world around us, and how our behaviour can be affected, not power itself.

One of the techniques/regulatory modes of power/knowledge that Foucault cited was the Panopticon, an architectural design put forth by Jeremy Bentham in the mid-19th Century for prisons, insane asylums, schools, hospitals, and factories. Instead of using violent methods, such as torture, and placing prisoners in dungeons that were used for centuries in monarchial states around the world, the progressive modern democratic state needed a different sort of system to regulate its citizens. The Panopticon offered a powerful and sophisticated internalized coercion, which was achieved through the constant observation of prisoners, each separated from the other, allowing no interaction, no communication. This modern structure would allow guards to continually see inside each cell from their vantage point in a high central tower, unseen by the prisoners. Constant observation acted as a control mechanism; a consciousness of constant surveillance is internalized.

Foucault's Panopticon

The Panopticon was a metaphor that allowed Foucault to explore the relationship between 1.) systems of social control and people in a disciplinary situation and, 2.) the power-knowledge concept. In his view, power and knowledge comes from observing others. It marked the transition to a disciplinary power, with every movement supervised and all events recorded. The result of this surveillance is acceptance of regulations and docility - a normalization of sorts, stemming from the threat of discipline. Suitable behaviour is achieved not through total surveillance, but by panoptic discipline and inducing a population to conform by the internalization of this reality. The actions of the observer are based upon this monitoring and the behaviours he sees exhibited; the more one observes, the more powerful one becomes. The power comes from the knowledge the observer has accumulated from his observations of actions in a circular fashion, with knowledge and power reinforcing each other. Foucault says that "by being combined and generalized, they attained a level at which the formation of knowledge and the increase in power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process" (Foucault 1977).

For Foucault, the real danger was not necessarily that individuals are repressed by the social order but that they are "carefully fabricated in it" (Foucault, 1977), and because there is a penetration of power into the behaviour of individuals. Power becomes more efficient through the mechanisms of observation, with knowledge following suit, always in search of "new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised" (Foucault 1977).

When only certain people or groups of people control knowledge, oppression is a possibility. We need to find out who is recording our actions. At least then we will know who has power and who doesn't.

But what happens to all the knowledge that is collected through mechanisms of power? Isn't that the most important question? Foucault painted us a picture but left it up to us to create a process for resistance, and to figure out how to resolve conflicts ourselves. He gave us instruments of analysis, but offered no weapons.

Where can we draw the line between security and freedom, especially when modern surveillance technology is increasingly used in urban public spaces to control or modify behaviour, tracking people who aren't incarcerated, but mobile and innocently going about their business? Who determines what our rights are? Can we make the rules together?

Can we mobilize counter-power to form a resistance against the pervasiveness of an increasingly intrusive electronic society that is trying to manage the information it is tracking and collecting? Can we wage our own battles and develop some strategies to help us retain a semblance of individual anonymity and privacy? Can we develop our own system of power/knowledge as a form of resistance? Or should we just surrender to it? Surrender to the unseen power that endeavours to control us from afar? Or should we continue to adapt and submissively, quietly accept the prevailing philosophy of an increasingly monitored society? Or should we try to overcome?

If power systems are already immersed in society, does smart mob technology offer any real opportunities for significant counter-power? Should we even bother to hope that we can change the world? Who or what should we develop a resistance against, if we want to see real change? Foucault says it is better to forget the State in our struggle against power, and instead, concentrate on local struggles. Are recent street protests against globalization a good point of departure? Can we really expect that the right thing will be done just because? Can local cooperation and resistance make a difference globally?

Can smart mobs help by allowing us to organize even more appropriate and more mobilized counter-power protests, and offer a more sophisticated avenue for defending democratic liberties and personal rights? It may be possible that coordination and cooperation, brought about by smart mob technologies, will help us to acquire new forms of social power by organizing just in time and just in place. Perhaps the real power of smart mob technologies lies in their ability to act as agents of change; one group at a time, one place at a time.

Related Papers

Jeremy Bentham and Rhetoric

Social Anthropology is the comparative study of the ways in which people live in different social and cultural settings across the globe. Societies vary enormously in how they organise themselves, the cultural practices in which they engage, as well as their religious, political and economic arrangements.

Ben Rivers is a filmmaker. The show?s title comes from a phrase once heard by the writer Paul Bowles while living in Morocco, and that country provides the unifying motif for the five films here, most of which are projected within large, makeshift wooden spaces built from salvaged BBC sets. There?s a loose adaptation of a famously brutal Bowles short story about desert bandits, using local Moroccan non-actors ? except that the film also reveals its own making, with scenes being redone and clapboards being clacked. This theme of fabrication extends to the other works too: from recordings of Mohammed Mrabet, Bowles?s muse, telling enthralling and long-winded stories to two films using behind-the-scenes footage of other movies simultaneously being filmed in Morocco, to material shot by Rivers when he was working for one of those other filmmakers?

Confused? That?s sort of the point. The idea is for different levels of reality and fiction to blend and intertwine, with the Moroccan landscape acting as a sort of stage set, a background against which different imaginings can be projected ? a Morocco of the mind, you might call it. Yet while Rivers?s footage is often austerely beautiful, the intertextual referencing occasionally starts to grate and the sheer, meandering length of some pieces can render them a little mundane. In the end, it?s the location ? the real, BBC environment ? that?s the star of the show.

n social science and politics, power is the ability to influence or outright control the behavior of people. The term "authority" is often used for power perceived as legitimate by the social structure. Power can be seen as evil or unjust, but the exercise of power is accepted as endemic to humans as social beings. In business, power is often expressed as being "upward" or "downward". With downward power, a company's superior influences subordinates. When a company exerts upward power, it is the subordinates who influence the decisions of their leader or leaders.

The use of power need not involve force or the threat of force (coercion). At one extreme, it closely resembles what an English-speaking person might term "influence", although some authors distinguish "influence" as a means by which power is used. One such example is soft power, as compared to hard power.

Much of the recent sociological debate about power revolves around the issue of its means to enable – in other words, power as a means to make social actions possible as much as it may constrain or prevent them. The philosopher Michel Foucault saw power as a structural expression of "a complex strategic situation in a given social setting" that requires both constraint and enablement.