Sunday, July 29, 2012

Foucault: uses and abuses

Scholarship is a truly horrible occupation: if you're unlucky, you'll pass through the academic machine, unknown and unloved, and finally, uncited. If you're lucky you'll have your work misread, vulgarized and finally, reduced to a cliché. Exhibit A: Foucault.

Consider Steyerl's gloss:

" The concept of "governmentality" was developed by Foucault and defined as a specific form of exercising power, which operates through the production of truth. According to this, the essential political problem is not the untruth of social conditions, but rather their truth, i.e. the way in which certain concepts and production forms of truth generate, support or circumvent and question domination. Media productions can also assume the role of governmental structures and function as governmental "hinges" between power and subjectivation."

She goes on:

"I call this interface between governmentality and documentary truth production "documentality". Documentality describes the permeation of a specific documentary politics of truth with superordinated political, social and epistemological formations. Documentality is the pivotal point, where forms of documentary truth production turn into government – or vice versa. It describes the complicity with dominant forms of a politics of truth, just as it can describe a critical stance with regard to these forms. Here scientific, journalistic, juridical or authentistic power/knowledge formations conjoin with documentary articulations..."
Hito Steyerl, "Documentarism as Politics of Truth" in 'Ficcions' documentals, 2004

Although she claims to be glossing a "specific form" of power, this passage is not extremely specific. It's hard to imagine, from this passage, how documentary truth (whatever that is) turns into government: does it levy taxes? hold elections? administer social services? go to war? If all she's claiming is that governments use (or craft) documents in the course of their engaging in such activities, then the claim seems banal. If she's further claiming that the creation and circulation of documents shapes us as subjects, then the claim is still banal.

Obviously my birth certificate, say, hugely influences who I become and what I can do, how I understand myself, and what resources are available to me. Likewise with the information generated by government institutions such as the military, secret service, FBI, IRS, and so forth (which is what Steyerl has in mind in referring to the Weapons of Mass Destruction episode earlier in the article); even if they are not "about" me but are "about" my various Others, they still shape my subjectivity.  For example, what I am told by government actors about a class of people I identify myself against--say, "Muslims" or "hippies" or "black militants" or whatever--will be just as important, or maybe more so, than my social security card or passport.

Phrases like, the media "assume the role of governmental structures" or "documentary truth production turn into government" are not specific enough a description of how state power deploys facts and documents in controlling their subjects. For that we need something more like Manufacturing Consent. And if Steyerl wishes to distinguish her approach from Chomsky's (which one would expect she would, given the enormous differences between Chomsky's and Foucault's thought), she would have to first explain what exactly his has failed to explain, which would in turn require identifying the problem afresh, in specific terms. As it is, her initial problem-question ("Does truth determine politics or politics truth?") is less a research problem than a rhetorical cliché and does little to honour Foucault by building on his original (and extremely specific) research.

Monday, July 23, 2012

On page 2...

It's frustrating that we academics, who are not reading for leisure but as a part of our jobs, cannot put a book down if it seems boring or unconvincing two pages in.

In Theory of Film (1960) [Kracauer] would argue that the cultural contribution of photo images, still or moving, is to show new phenomena and, suspending an assumed familiarity with the world, to extend and preserve its visibility. If they are true to the medium, photo images show the pictured. Elucidating the particularity of the pictured, they metamorphose the visual 'raw material.' They do not, as does art, consume it, because as images they are not self-authorized: in her surrender to the experience of the natural-cultural world the photographer cannot suppress the presence of unseen things.
Dagmar Barnouw, Critical Realism: History, Photography, and the 
Work of Sigfried Kracauer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, ix)

Proposed translation: photography and film are culturally significant because they allow us to see our world in new ways. Paradoxically, photos and films that seem most "true" to the medium, eg that are "straight" or unmanipulated, actually transform the things they represent, giving us new insights into them.  Unlike art [and here Barnouw seems to be claiming that photography and film are something other than art], these photo-based images seem to be "authorless" and the removal of the subjective author allows us to better see the objective reality in them.

Other suggestions?