Review: Reading Divergent Through Foucault's Panopticon

Jeanine's speech to Tris

The brilliance of the faction system is its conformity to the faction that removes the threat of anyone exercising their independent will. Divergents threaten that system.

Don't get me wrong. There is a certain beauty to your resistance, its defiance of any categorization. 

It's a beauty we can't afford.

Power/Knowledge/Normality

Power and Knowledge are a relation. They form a grid that intersects with history. As capitalism grows the demand for workers/consumers grows and "normality" is demanded. The vagrants, the mad, criminals, derelicts, et al are rounded up and confined all over Europe.

Divergent's Faction System illustrates the Foucauldian Grid. Each faction demands explicit and implicit conformity. Beatrice smothers herself to display the correct behavior demanded of her in the faction of Abnegation. Caleb is able to pass by displaying all the outward behavior of Abnegation as "floating signs" masking the emptiness of his commitment. He passes.

Foucault has taught us that power does not come from above. It seeps from below, through the interstices. Caleb controls Beatrice, inhibiting any spontaneous gesture she begins to make. This is where power is. Right there with Caleb overseeing her every move when he is with her. Pecking at her like a crow, keeping her from growing as a person.

What is important is that Beatrice be obedient. That she display the "floating signs" at least of selflessness.And this is the meaning of the Grid of power/knowledge/normality.

The other aspect here is 24/7 surveillance.

This movie which has so much respect for its fan base signals surveillance without explaining it.

1. Beatrice has been told by Tori to go home, say the test made her sick so she can think over what to do without being in a room with others to distract her. Caleb asks her over dinner prep where she was and she tells him she was sick and came home. He asks her if she finished her test and she says yes. Then he asks her her result. Instead of her usual avoidance or lying, she inverts his question to address his intent by saying, "What were your results?" His questions are interrogative, for the purpose of domination and she turns the tables on him.

2. At the dinner table her father admonishes her for just coming home like that and she says, "I was sick." And still he reprimands her as they are being watched carefully, being scrutinized. 

3. When her mother appears as they are loading the truck, right after embracing her Tris says, "Mom, you can't be here." Natalie says, "I know but you're in danger."

So with these few sentences we know people are not only in factions, but they are confined as to where they can and cannot go.So, as in Hunger Games, we get confinement, although not as harsh, but still confinement it is.

Discipline and Punish

And here's Taylor Swift

But that's exactly what Foucault meant Swiftie
Smart woman

DIVERGENT: Reading Tris as a Nietzschean Revolutionary Through Baudrillard's Forget Foucault

Power/Knowledge are in a Functional Relation Known as the Foucauldian Grid- The Matrix

Power does not come from the top down. It is not something you can have, take, give away, barter, lose, share or anything else of that order. Power comes from below, through the interstices of the Foucauldian Grid. It seeps from below and we see Beatrice caught in that, being denied her "will to know."

Agnes Martin Grid Painting 

Foucault advocates applying resistance pressure locally where it can be most effective. Of course, power does the same.

Jeanine is fusing the power of Dauntless with the Knowledge of Erudite
She is fusing the power/knowledge Foucauldian Grid which will keep the system static

Don't get me wrong. There is a certain beauty in your resistance. But we cannot afford that beauty. Each person in their faction must submit their independent will to their faction, for our peaceful coexistence.

And this is what constrains Beatrice. She rebels in a passive/aggressive way to the pressure of power. Her brother Caleb corrects her, restrains her, introduces her to Jeanine, tells her she is wrong about Abnegation and generally controls her. Her movements are restrained as a child when she wants to run with Dauntless. Her father warns her to be careful at the dinner table. She generally exists in a bourgeois family environment eating dinner together with restrained conversation, preparing meals, dressing so as to limit her freedom of movement. 

She has grown up and lives in the Grid of Abnegation, its Dominating Discourse of language and action.

To jump or not to jump nor reason why

Tris jumps into the abyss

Where there is power, there is resistance. - Foucault

Foucault Straddling the Chasm

Baudrillard has said Foucault does not go far enough. He straddles the abyss. He does not push to excess, extremes to collapse the system. (Following Nietzsche) He does not push to the edge of the abyss and then over.

You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: 

how else could you become new, if you had not first 

become ashes? - Thus Spake Zarathustra

This is what Tris does.

Tris is becoming the best Dauntless she can be. 

Tris is exemplifying Zizek's prescription for breaking the system.

 One embraces the 

idealistic pronouncements and works to make them surface, to become reality, to truly 

be what they are. 

She is excessively Dauntless in challenging each event as it escalates.

Dauntless Manifesto

• We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, 
• And in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.
• Dauntless never give up.

Where Caleb - eating from the trashcan of ideology -  observed the everyday prescriptions of behavior for Abnegation -  which Zizek would label as Abnegation Lite -  Beatrice sullenly complied when she had to. But her will to know was stifled. She could not grow in that environment. She wanted MORE!

Tris is more Dauntless than Dauntless. Worse as Nietzsche says. And in excessively being an excessive Dauntless, Dauntless is imploded and the entire system along with it. 

This is what Edward Snowden has done with his over-identification with the ideology of the United States of America. 

A lot is imploding all around us now.

Now Cody Wilson has come along to take it to excess and implode it.

http://youtu.be/g5fhBBipU3w

Review: MONSIEUR LAZHAR At The MOXIE

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/monsieur_lazhar_2011/

The consensus on this movie is absolutely positive in all different ways. So do read them, as I am not going to write about that aspect of the film except to say that it is wonderful in every way and is deeply moving.

What I do want to say is that Monsieur Lazar is caught securely in the Foucauldian Grid of power/knowledge expressed through the educational system in Montreal which is no different from what we know: academic credentials; certification; political correctness that is smothering teachers and students alike. What you can observe, now that I expose it, in case you didn't know, is why exceptional people do not go into the teaching profession, why they tend to leave it in many different ways, why schools are failing and will continue to fail no matter how much money is poured into them, nor what enticements they offer to recruit talent. 

The problem is basic and structural and cannot be fixed. 

We are all under surveillance. The Panopticon is alive and well and represents our greatest danger. (Foucault)

We see one extraordinary teacher arriving to take the place of a much loved teacher. His classroom is classic, and older people will recognize their own experience. The rest of the teachers in the school are new age politically correct specimens, who know the rules, visible and invisible, which ones must be observed and which ones may be ignored, and willing to conform to them.  Coming from Algeria Monsieur Lazhar is culture innocent. A blessing. 

The classic authoritarian classroom may not be what modern educational methods prefer, but, and this is important, in the classic classroom there is NO phoniness, masking, "floating signs" covering up the authoritarian structure with good fellowship, and friendly group work, which hides the fact of authoritarianism behind a smiling, friendly mask of  an egalitarian classroom. The authoritarian structure is up front and direct and allows for the behavior of children to resolutely recognize it, and develop their individual ways of meeting it. When it is subversive and invisible, children are unable to come to any terms with it. No matter how nice-nice the school and teachers are, it is still a disciplinary institution to mold students into normality. For an extensive analysis see Foucault's Discipline and Punish and his 1974-75 
College de France Lectures on Abnormal.

Bachir Lazar is walking a tightrope with great finesse and compassion. He loses of course, and that's what happens to the best of teachers. They lose. The Foucauldian Grid defeats them. 


Only by compromising integrity can they continue. It matters not at all that Bachir's students perform well in their exams and that they are learning as well or better than students in other classrooms. Praising academic performance is a mask dissembling the fact that it is not learning that is the priority in a public educational setting. The dirty secret is that it is obedience and control.

Review: Snow Flower And The Secret Fan;The Inscription of the Body

Official Site

Oh what a gorgeous film this is. Wayne Wang is the director and he never disappoints. Ebert doesn't like it much but I like to read him anyway so maybe you will too. The official site tells you much more.

BFF Best Friends Forever now was named lao tong in the 19th century. With parents' consent,  two girls with good astrologically compatible signs were paired often before birth. It resonates with the two Elizabeths - John the Baptist's mother and Mary's mother, both of whom desired a child desperately as they aged and prayed together for God to grant their wish, depicted in Giotto's murals in  the chapel in Padua.
Your lao tong is a serious  relationship and was considered for life, no matter what changing circumstances intervened decreed by fate. Two women bound for life in a man's world. Nu shu, a secret language was invented by women, forbidden an education, to communicate their secret heart to their Other in this world of men. Only a handful of women now know this language and it threatens to be lost. Ebert misses all this but then he is a man, so understandably. He confuses it with lesbianism which it is not. All cultures must have rituals and institutions where women interact with other women and men with men. In the middle east, men get together to decide whom their sisters, cousins, aunts, will marry - who they will fuck. Deleuze describes the homo-erotic aspect of this in his book Anti-Oedipus. I hope all this is enough to interest and inform you about this movie. But none of this is my interest, because it is the binding of the feet, the bound feet that has riveted my attention. Because this is a specific and ritualized Inscription of the Body. And the body is never - never - inscribed without the Inscription of the Mind accompanying it. But it is known as the Inscription of the Body after Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals, where he lays out TORTURE as the necessary and sufficient condition for the dawning of human consciousness. Torture is required to inscribe MEMORY in the mind of primal unthinking and without language early humanity. Nietzsche acknowledges the ghastliness of the practice of torture as he tells us of its necessity.

Foucault will take torture up in his Discipline and Punish and elaborate its presence today in ensuring normality, normal behavior in both mind and body, in his 1974 Lectures on  Abnormal at the College de France. By the time you have followed Nietzsche and Foucault you will observe it everywhere in body language, in novels, in films, and you will never be free of it again. To inscribe the body is to inscribe the mind at the same time.   This is why human rights is not going to make a dent on the symbolic practice of genital mutilation of young girls to inscribe on their bodies and on their minds the excruciating torture and pain connected with sex.

Stephenie Meyer has made the Inscription of the Body a central theme in Twilight. Bella's heart races, it splutters, it stops, it restarts, her stomach clenches, her knees weaken, she swoons, she blushes, she stammers, she trips, she falls, and then in New Moon when Edward leaves her, all this is shut down, her mind is shut down, and she becomes the Deleuzean Body Without Organs. So I hope my readers are on the same page now with this Inscription of the Body.

The two young girls in the film are played in the 19th century and the present time by the same actresses. Wang keeps switching back and forth. One comes from a wealthy family and the other from a poorer one. The mother of the poorer child determines to ensure her daughter's prosperous future by binding her feet. This starts the day she is born. It continues as long as she grows. The torture is excruciating, relentless, unending and she is left with tiny stubs that cripple her for walking. She must be helped or carried as an adult. She spends much of her childhood in unending pain, her mother tosses in bed as she hears her daughter cry. But the mother deprives her daughter and herself of all compassion, pity, love, concern in her obsession to make her daughter's feet so perfectly bound that she will be married to an aristocratic son of a ruling family. Her face endures the torture without it marring her expression or her beauty. So we are witnessing a girl/woman who has endured unbelievable torture for all her growing life to avoid a primitive existence, in order to marry a wealthy and distinguished man from a ruling family. The perfection of the bound feet determined the quality of the husband. The miniaturization of the feet are the prized possession. We see a young woman, who has never run or walked any distance, who has a precarious sense of balance, totally dependent, who has been deprived of all love and affection, except from her beloved lao tong.

She marries and her new husband touches her first by kissing her feet, acknowledging the suffering she has undergone to be worthy of becoming his wife. She withdraws. She will never know any real physical pleasure, and will only submit to give birth to sons and serve her mother-in-law, who also has bound feet, is jealous, will not let her communicate with her lao tong. The older woman is a tyrant. But the older woman has endured the same Inscription of the Body and Mind and then we see its real purpose within the rituals of this culture before Chairman Mao. Lily will always serve her mother-in-law before anyone. She will always want the approval of this cold woman who is like her own mother. She will forever be trying to get too little too late. She serves her mother-in-law before her own children, with whom she is cold. Her only love is Snow Flower, her lao tong.

And so we see how this brutal Inscription of the Body holds up the entire aristocratic family, freezing it from change, determining its loyalties and practices, ensuring the care of old mother-in-laws by the accompanying practice of crippling the mind and the emotions. One can only imagine the horror of a girl child enduring this, and her emotional crippling as she suffered and suffered and suffered in an emotional void.

The American Quaker from Philadelphia, William Hinton was in China during the Cultural Revolution in the mid 1960's spending the year in Ox Bow Village, telling about it in his book Fanshen, (turning about), while the peasants there went through the Cultural Revolution change. One older woman with bound feet at last liberated but crippled went and worked in the fields, attended all the meetings and proclaimed her freedom at last. I wonder.

At the end of Reading Bel Ami Through Marx, Foucault, Baudrillard and The Inscription of the Body is another horrifying example of The Inscription of the Body.

I am nowhere near finished with this theme.