Reading the Boston Bombing Through the Panopticon - Foucault

Bentham designed the Panopticon as a Prison

By seymourblogger/abbeysbooks

Foucault is emphasizing that the Panopticon is a TECHNOLOGY of Surveillance.

Surveillance is the primary and most important variable to reduce the occurrence of crime. 

Foucault has told us that surveillance is our most crucial danger today and that resistance should be targeted there in the grid of power/knowledge/capital/normality

Edward Snowden has employed a strategy worthy of Baudrillard.

He has not resisted.

He has imploded the secrecy of the NSA and its spying on American citizens and the rest of the world. 

The American government can no longer stand for the principles on which it was founded: the rule of Law, equality, freedom, liberty, private use of property.

Because the case of the Tsarnaev brothers follows the Snowden Event, It is taking place in a world where the US government is known to lie, assassinate, torture, fabricate evidence, a world in which no one anywhere believes in anything the US government says, writes, proclaims. 

A government disrespected by its people and by the world. This will help influence US and world opinion about the guilt or innocence of the Tsarnaev Brothers. We owe Edward Snowden a lot.

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The Foucauldian Grid is a spiral of power/knowledge/capital/normality
There is no escape
We are trapped like insects in a spider web and can only resist

Today we are informed that:

(Reuters) - Three college friends of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev pleaded not guilty on Friday to charges that they helped cover his tracks when the FBI was trying to find the people responsible for the April 15 attack.

Dias Kadyrbayev  

Azamat Tazhayakov

Robel Phillipos

These three have just stepped into the Foucauldian Grid

Canetti and Baudrillard have opined that no one thinks to the end of something. 

All the way to  the end. No way out. 

DEATH

This recent action of our government has chilling consequences if we think through it to the end. To Death.

You go to university, even have a roommate from a different country, say Chechnya for example. 

That person is now under surveillance by you.

What if they are secretly terrorists and you have been friends with them. You too will be implicated, faced with proving your innocence, tried and condemned.

Or at least subjected to financial ruin by lawyering up.

Avoid persons who look different, who come from other countries than our western allies. 

Become paranoid of these other persons.

Become paranoid.

While the other will become paranoid also.

It is to teach a fear, a distrust of the Other.

This is the mental template of families who practice incest. Sex with daughters, sisters, mothers is safer than sex with the OTHER, the outsider, the stranger, the unknown.

This kind of surveillance is far worse than spying on your emails, phone calls, internet use. It is insidious and invisible and it is constant. It is like God's eye described by Gaddis in The Recognitions. 

God sees everything, even the dewdrop on the rose at dawn. God has morphed into the technology of the Panopticon.

Do you see where this is going? 

This is incredibly more frightening and dangerous than NSA spying. It is relentless and comes from below, through the interstices of power/knowledge,normality.

And all because three friends are being prosecuted so prosecutors can put 3 more notches on their belt.

It will look great on their CV.

Thinking through to the end, to a metaphoric death, is to know the US Empire is tottering.

It is destroying the integrity of its people. 

The one variable Toynbee found invariant for all 

disintegrating empires.

Therefore, in a totally sickening, mind-fucking way, Edward Snowden might end up being the best thing that ever happened to the NSA and “national security”. His revelation has the power to instill fear and constant vigilance into people, essentially scaring them into submission in a way that the surveillance programs themselves couldn’t.

Couldn't Resist.

When I first read Foucault's account of the panopticon, where the individual at the 

centre can simultaneously see and judge a whole multitude of other individuals, I 

thought it was brilliant but overheated. Now, it actually seems like somebody's 

plan. 

That's what we risk becoming: a society which is in crucial respects a giant 

panopticon, where the people with access to our secrets can see, hear, intercept 

and monitor  everything. LINK HERE

Welcome to the Hunger Games. May the 

odds be always in your favor.

NOTE:  Please scroll down to leave a comment in the box.

Reading Snowden As ParrhesiastesThrough Le Carre and A Delicate Truth

Edward Snowden

The latest book – A Delicate Truth – is centered in modern Britain, on a supposed threat to national security and the use of dubious means towards a justifiable end; the challenge to an individual oppressed by the power of the state. It’s a political tale, appreciated across the political spectrum

On a sunny Sunday early in that same spring, a thirty-one-year-old British foreign servant earmarked for great things sat alone at the pavement table of a humble Italian cafe in London's Soho, steeling himself to perform an act of espionage so outrageous that, if detected, it would cost him his career and his freedom: namely, recovering a tape recording, illicitly made by himself, from the Private Office of a Minister of the Crown whom it was his duty to serve and advise to the best of his considerable ability. 

His name was Toby Bell and he was entirely alone in his criminal contemplations. No evil genius controlled him, no paymaster, provocateur or sinister manipulator armed with an attache case stuffed with hundred - dollar bills was waiting round the corner, no activist in a ski mask. He was in that sense the most feared creature of our contemporary world: a solitary decider: Of a forthcoming clandestine operation on the Crown Colony of Gibralter he knew nothing; rather, it was this tantalizing ignorance that had brought him to his present pass. (ADT p. 47)

This is Edward Snowden who becomes an employee of BoozAllen in order to steal secrets - the truth - from the NSA

This is not the situation Toby Bell, the reluctant whistle-blower, finds himself in by relentless circumstances. His awareness begins slowly, well, here is a quote explaining how.

In coded discussions in Whitehall's sealed basement rooms, new rules of engagement with suspected terrorist prisoners are cautiously thrashed out. ...The word enhance , once used to convey spiritual exaltation, has entered the new American dictionary, but its meaning remains willfully imprecise to the uninitiated, of whom Toby is one. All the same he has his suspicions. Can these so-called new rules in reality be the old barbaric ones, dusted off and reinstated, he wonders? And if he is right, which increasingly he believes he is, what is the moral distinction, if any, between the man who applies the electrodes and the man who sits behind a desk and pretends he doesn't know it's happening, although he knows very well?

But when Toby, nobly struggling to reconcile these questions with his conscience and upbringing, ventures to air them - purely academically you understand - to Giles over a cozy dinner at Oakley's club to celebrate Toby's thrilling new appointment on promotion to the British Embassy in Cairo....Oakley quotes his beloved La Rochefoucauld:

'Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, dear man. In an imperfect world, I fear it's the best we can manage.'(ADT p.53)

In a half-hearted effort to find excuses for Crispin, Toby even wondered whether, deep down, the man was just plain stupid....And from there, he wandered off into an argument with Friedrich Schiller's grandiose statement that human stupidity was what the gods fought in vain. Not so, in Toby's opinion, and no excuse for anybody, whether god or man. 

What the gods and all reasonable humans fought in vain wasn't stupidity at all. It was sheer, wanton, bloody indifference to anybody's interests but their own.(ADT p. 296)


"The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures. They'll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society. But they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests." - Edward Snowden

And then they get Toby Bell:

The first blows were undoubtedly the most painful and the most surprising....But it was the hail of blows to his stomach, kidneys, groin and then his groin again that seemed never to end, and for all he knew it continued after he had lost consciousness. But not before the same unidentified voice had breathed into his ear in the same tone of command:

'Don't think this is over, son. This is for appetizers. Remember that.'

Le Carre

LINK TO COMPLETE INTERVIEW

“I do think we live in most extraordinary period of history,” he says now. “The fact that we feel becalmed is the element that is most terrifying, the second-rate quality of leadership, the third-rate quality of parliamentary behaviour.”

That sense of correctness has a broader resonance, informing, when we discussed it recently, his views about Edward Snowden’s revelations of the extraordinary scale of US surveillance of its own citizens as well as those of other countries. He tells me he is horrified: “There seems to be no limit to the violations to their hard-won liberties that Americans will put up with in the catchall name of counter terror.” But he also recognises that “no country can allow its secret servants to whistle-blow with impunity”.

He has long disabused me of the sense that his family background might have been an impediment to joining the British intelligence services. The attraction of someone with a semi-criminal background was irresistible to the spooks, he says. They were looking for recruits with a broad sense of morality, individuals who were unanchored and wayward, who hankered for discipline (“his father’s a bit bent, we could use a bit of that”).

If the secret service produced so many bad eggs, he tells me, it’s because they looked for them.

Gove probably didn’t pick up on the book’s strong attack on the secret courts for which his government voted (allowing matters of “national security” to be heard behind closed doors). Le Carré is greatly concerned about such courts, which undermine the rights of some individuals while making it easier for others to make the wrong choices. 

 He “smuggles this kind of stuff” into his best-selling stories, conscious that subliminal influence lasts longer than a news story. There is a political agenda, born of personal experience.

Who is his greatest hero? Andre Sakharov, father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, who came  
to recognise the dangers of his own work (“He realised he’d given the bomb to a bunch of 

gangsters”).

And if you have seen Dirty Wars you will know that american Special Ops are in 75 different countries in order to destabilize them. A country in chaos is an easy takeover to exploit their resources.

And the beginning of A Delicate Truth:

Forgive me, Minister: What field would that be, exactly?'

'Private defense contractors. Where've you been? Name of the game these days. War's gone corporate, in case you haven't noticed. Standing professional armies are a bust. Top-heavy, under-equipped, one brigadier for every dozen boots on the ground and cost a mint. Try a couple of years at Defence if you don't believe me.'(ADT p. 9)

Philippe Sands is a writer and barrister who teaches international law at University College. To comment on this article email magazineletters@ft.com

What I want to emphasize here is that Snowden is a parrhesiastes not a whistle-blower. Toby Bell is dragged into it by his conscience, Snowden by a compelling sense of duty from the beginning. to practice parrhesia.

PARRHESIA - Fearless Speech:Reading Snowden Through Foucault

Edward Snowden - A Parrhesiastes

Socratic-Platonic answers to the questions:

1. How can we recognize someone as a parrhesiastes?
2. What is the importance of having a parrhesiastes for the city?
3. What is the training of a good parrhesiastes?

FOUCAULT

And I would say that the problematization of truth which characterizes both the end of Presocratic philosophy and the beginning of the kind of philosophy which is still ours today, this problematization of truth has two sides, two major aspects. One side is concerned with ensuring that the process of reasoning is correct in determining whether a statement is true (or concerns itself  with our ability to gain access to the truth). And the other side is concerned with the question:

What is the importance for the individual and for the society of telling the truth, of knowing the truth, of having people who tell the truth, as well as knowing how to recognize them?

With that side which is concerned with determining how to ensure that a statement is true we have the roots of the great tradition in Western philosophy which I would like to call the "analytics of truth." And on the other side, concerned with the question of the importance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why we should tell the truth, we have the roots of what we could call the "critical" tradition in the West. And here you will recognize one of my targets in this seminar, namely, to construct a genealogy of the critical attitude in Western philosophy. That constituted the general objective of this seminar. (FS pp. 170-71)

My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of the truth-teller, or of truth-telling as an activity....At issue for me was rather the attempt to consider truth-telling as a specific activity or as a role. ...I could have compared the role and status of truth-tellers in Greek society, Christian societies, non-Christian societies _the role of the prophet as a truth-teller, the role of the oracle as a truth-teller, the role of the poet, of the expert,of the preacher, and so on.  But, in fact, my intention was not to conduct a sociological description of the different possible roles for truth-tellers in different societies. 

What I wanted to analyze was how the truth-teller's role was variously problematized in Greek philosophy. ....this same Greek philosophy has also raised the question of truth from the point of view of truth-telling as an activity. It has raised questions like: 

1. Who is able to tell the truth?
2. What are the moral, the ethical, and the spiritual conditions which entitle someone to present himself as, and to be considered as, a truth-teller?
3. About what topics is it important to tell the truth?(About the world? About nature? About the city? About behavior? About man?)
4. What are its  anticipated positive effects for the city, for the city's rulers, for the individual?,etc.

And finally: What is the relation between the activity of truth-telling and the exercise of power? 

Should truth-telling be brought into coincidence with the exercise of power, or should these activities be completely independent and kept separate?
Are they separable, or do they require one another?

These four questions about truth-telling as an activity:

1. Who is able to tell the truth?
2. About what?
3. With what consequences?
4. With what relation to power?    

These four questions seem to have emerged as philosophical problems towards the end of the Fifth Century around Socrates, especially through his confrontations with the Sophists about politics, rhetorics, and ethics. (FS pp. 169-173)

And we all know what finally happened to Socrates. 

 And what is disturbing to me is that my tweets on Foucault's Panopticon have been picked up concerning Snowden's truth-telling of NSA surveillance (see a google search on Foucault + Snowden) but no one - NO ONE - is discussing Foucault's last works at the end of his life on parrhesia, or as Foucault calls it truth-telling, outlined in a series of talks at Berkeley in the early 1980's collected after his death from transcripts into the Semiotext(e) edition Fearless Speech.

Is this subject too frightening to touch? Are academics too scared? There are careerist academics who have made their career off Foucault's coattails. They have written dissertations on his work, books on his life, gotten tenure, prestigious chairs at universities all over the world and not one goddamn one of them has connected Edward Snowden to Foucault's work on truth-telling or the ancient Greek term parrhesia and the parrhesiastes!  This is 2500 years of critical tradition in the West, and only in the West, and no one is connecting these dots?

SHAME