The Glass Cage

Sam Barnes

In his fifth and final section of The History of Sexuality, Foucault’s study of the discourse that begat modern sex and sexuality brings us from localized homage of royally-ordained executions in a town’s central square of town to the mass-mediated specter of megadeath, a looming possibility of terrestrial atomic annihilation that so transformed 20^th century consciousness. This transition communicates power’s new domain: it was no longer to rule over death, but rather to rule over life itself. In cataloguing, quantifying, analyzing, and enacting measures of good health, good sex, and social progress— measures most often obtained through dedicated quarantine of cases where these conditions were deemed lacking—rulers channeled the nature of their power from ‘force’ and into ‘control’. They would witness the lives of their subjects from ever-more vantages, with their gaze dreaming a world where each human was demanded to be just that—erased of all traces of the animal, the nymph, the rebellious god, free to live long in the prison of normalcy.

Photo: Gerald Larocque
(CC License)

And it is only fitting, then, that as our bodies came to be witnessed more and more and overcame centuries of flesh-denying spirituality (to wit: the first state-sanctioned autopsy was not performed until the mid-18^th century), correspondent technologies expanded our own fields of witness. The photograph transported vision across time; the development of an effective and international postal service enabled language to transcend space (in Adam Gopnik’s piece on Galileo in the current New Yorker, he writes of the crucial role that the brand-new service played in connecting the Italian to the Danish stargazer Brahe and German mathematician Kepler); newspapers and magazines offered platforms for different brands of thinking a broadening awareness of the world ‘out there’; while telegraphic and then telephonic technologies eliminated the time-lapse of post altogether and birthed the virtual presence. Radio broadcast sound—and the emotional resonance it so often carries with it—simultaneously to millions. Film and television granted those with the wherewithal to create them an opportunity to transport viewers into a wholly different vision of reality for hours at a time. With some notable exceptions, these were the technologies that defined media up to Foucault’s time, and jive well with his inquiries into spectacle, witness and the “analytics of sexuality.” But things have changed.

With the emergent ubiquity of internet-connected screens and the development of countless channels of information flow, our culture has perhaps made a definitive shift out of the muddled zone between symbolics of blood and analytics of sexuality and into something new. Suddenly, the ability to conduct appraisal and witness is not restrained to the doctors, the rulers, the schoolmasters and the psychiatrists: it is distributed in heaping measure to all who engage in this new medium, whether they ask for it or not. This reordering of power—like a panopticon where all can see each other but remain separated by glass—foreshadows the dawn of true bio-power. At present Foucault’s chronologue of ever-more-deadly warfare seems to have reached a point of inflection, as does the rascism and sexism that developed in concert with the 19^th century observational apparatus. The real reckoning, however, where humans are liberated from the pressures of the normative and freed to be wholly themselves, remains a dream. Pressure tends to release with a bang.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2013 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.