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 REVIEW on Nietzsche's INSCRIPTION OF THE BODY (Baudrillard, Deleuze,Foucault)

Tris sees Four's tattoo for the first time right after she has been in Four's Fearscape - and so do we

We have seen Marcus come at Four with his leather belt to beat him in multiple selves - a nice wave to The Matrix. We now know that Marcus has beaten Tobias/Four since a young child and Four is paralyzed with fear of him as he regresses to a young child when confronted by him in his Fearscape - (my new word for it.) 

We are not told any more details, but the scene is allowed to resonate in our minds.When you are beaten your body/mind is inscribed as the two are inseparable, in a relation with each other.

We know Tobias's back was beaten because the welts and wounds would not be visible there.The tattoo is announcing the beatings to the world if the world sees.The beatings are revealed and concealed.The belt sliced around to his arms where the tattoo becomes stripes.

A tattoo such as this INSCRIBES the body/mind again. The MEMORY of the constant beatings is inscribed. The memory produces CONSCIOUSNESS of the original inscription. As repetition reinforced the memory of the pain, the tattoo reinforces the memory of what it emotionally and mentally means to you. 

Tris begins to touch the tattoo

The understanding and resonance of touch. Abnegation foregoes touch except in rather indifferent ways. Tris is taught that touch means something. By experiencing the lack of touch, the desire for it and its importance to you increases your awareness of it. Tris is aware of every time Four has touched her in coaching her. His touch is indifferent. Her reception of it is eroticized. She touches Four's tattoo with great tenderness and curiosity. Why all of the factions?

Because Four does not just want to be one person but all of them. We can imagine the child wanting to be imaginative, intelligent, brave, honest, happy and selfless and being beaten for showing any of those indications. His will to knowledge/power has been stifled with beatings. Tris's will to knowledge/power has been snuffed out by her family and her love for them, also an effective way to drive them underground. To repress them in the Inscription of the Body. And Tris's Body/Mind has been reinscribed at Dauntless to be sure. Abnegation, just as all of the other factions, is about Obedience. Staying inside the Dominating Discourse.

For Tris to touch Four with such awe and tenderness is the awakening of eroticism for Four. He turns and kisses her and touches her wanting more. It is then Tris stops him and says, "I don't want to go too fast."

Woman is not equal to man except in the Order of Production. In the Symbolic Order of Seduction, woman is OTHER. Tris does not have a fear of intimacy. That is a clinical term that belongs in the Order of Production. We know she is a virgin and has had Four in her imagination since she met him at the net. She has been unknowingly seducing him. SEDUCTION cannot be produced. It does not figure in the Order of Production - Baudrillard.

Reading through Lacan DESIRE/LACK is a relation. Tris wants to experience desire, not sexual satisfaction. And she wants Four to experience desire. Does she know this? Doubtful. But intuitively she does. This is where that philosophical term the unknown/knowns intercedes, that term Rumsfeld so befuddled himself with. It means that there are knowns you know which you are unaware that you know. Without Lack, there is no Desire.

By going slower Tris will experience longing, desire, waiting, and contemplation of the beloved object and the deepening of self-awareness. Badiou says that love is a challenge, a risk, a jump into the unknown. This is Tris turned into a lovely metaphor. This was Twilight. This is not Hunger Games.

But by going slower Four will also experience these deeper feelings. This is where Four resonates with Dante and his beloved Beatrice, his lifetime muse, whom he only saw once or twice on the street and whom he never knew. An apparition sort of who guided him through the circles of hell. Four's Beatrice will rescue Four from the dungeons of hell.

Step back: the pattern in the tapestry

won’t tell itself till more of it is made.

Although it’s eighty-seven in the shade,

we have to work this hard making the hist-

ory we need till, trusting it, we’re free

to kiss each other better than when we

imagined kissing when we hadn’t kissed.

Marilyn Hacker in Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons 

I would say the same is true on waiting to experience sex.

Divergent Review of Divergent:Foucault;Baudrillard;Lacan

Divergent Review of Divergent:Foucault;Baudrillard;Lacan

An ordinary girl until she became the First Jumper.

The First Jumper.

 The first image we see of her after she lands in the net is of a happy, relieved, delighted young girl wrapped in her Abnegation robes lying innocently erotic, erotically innocent in the net. 

ONDINE

Like a Silkie or a mermaid from the deep. We are not given the cliched shot of Four looking at her, their eyes locked, but we can imagine Four sees her for the first time just as we see her for the first time. Silkies are women from the sea caught in the nets of fishermen as are mermaids. They can be captured and kept but if they find their pelts they will return to the sea. This Silkie in Divergent appears to have dropped from the skies, the Heavens as a gift, lying there in the net as she does. 

Reading through Lacan, Beatrice means "Bringer of Joy, Blesses, Dante's guide through Paradise, his lifetime muse." Tris is an off homonym with the French tres meaning very, excessively so, the diminutive for Beatrice. 

But the net is also a metaphor of the Foucauldian Grid, the mesh of the net of power/knowledge, The Matrix. It carries with it a Dominating Discourse of language and action just as Abnegation does.

Image of Foucault straddling the chasm

What is concealed immediately is her jump over the chasm, the abyss. Where Foucault stops at the edge of the abyss (where one resists) - as Baudrillard writes in Forget Foucault! - The soon to be Tris hurtles across it.

This is the metaphor for the EVENT!Beatrice becoming OTHER!

As Four addresses her and grabs her out of the net, the screenplay begins its wonderful editing process of Roth’s book defining Four’s character precisely and creating the new masculine ideal: Edward Cullen, dreamed by Stephenie Meyer into existence has now morphed into Four played by Theo James opposite Shailene Woodley's Tris.

Most of the reviews compare and contrast Divergent with the other YA franchises by Scummit/Summit with female leads. Then the interpretive critique begins. Everything sinks into that “swampland of psychological interpretation” Foucault — and Sontag — have demolished. Instead of pitting them as rivals against each other, I suggest reading each one through the other to deepen the meaning of each against the resonances of the others.

Each has a love story, but many books have this theme. What is unique about these three is what is revealed/concealed in them. We have the love story following Tristan/Iseult and Twilight’s Courtly Love, the Hunger Games romance and Divergent’s master/student relation. We also have the menacing presence of: 

surveillance; 

confinement; 

totalitarianism, 

Simulated Reality and 

Virtual Reality, 

all subsumed under the label of Dystopian Worlds, all of which are invisible.

Behind the story of young adult first love, finding identity, love and the coming of age rituals - We have no Vision Quest as Twilight, Katniss, Divergent does - into adulthood (This is the reality of the movies and the books.)

 — we have the Zizekian/Lacanian REAL — the invisible REAL — 

and a YA anxious, dreading preoccupation with a future of disaster, where only love can save us, or so they think. A world of totalitarian control unvisioned and unimagined by even Orwell or Huxley, where lies are truth and truth has only the credibility of speculation. An unimaginable horror as Simulated Reality steals our real world in homeopathic doses. The Borges map becomes the territory.

No crime-no victim-no criminal-no crime scene-invisible

In Twilight Bella is caught in the Foucauldian Grid of normality as described in Foucault’s Lectures in Abnormal at the College de France in 1974-75. It is invisible. She is confined in Forks. Simulated Reality occurs as the Cullens perform as humans at school, slowing their movements, during the boredom of classrooms repeating what they have already known for decades. Virtual Reality is what Bella embraces as she turns into a vampire: the acute auditory and visual perception that reads like an LSD trip or Huxley’s Doors of Perception. She desires this and wills it and will live it forever.Like being high an d knowing you are never going to come down.

The Hunger Games divides the people into districts in which they are confined and cannot leave. Panem the capitol is Simulated Reality and the Games themselves are Virtual Reality; meaning there is no escape as Simulated Reality has become total. Katniss will shoot her arrow into the invisible covering, short circuit it with lightning, with Jove’s thunderbolts, and “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” says Morpheus to Neo.

In Divergent there are five factions into which those that have been chosen and accepted live in confinement, more obvious than our own. And each has its Dominating Discourse of language and action. Simulated Reality is a bit more complex and occurs in simulations deliberately projected into people’s minds via serums and transmitters. But there is a strange twist to them. In the aptitude tests and the fear simulations the subject is as if in a dream.

In Journey to Ixtlan — as I remember — Don Juan is lecturing Castaneda on “Controlled Dreaming.” When you are in a dream and become aware that you are in a dream, knowing you are in a dream. This is Tris’s experience in Divergent. She knows she is in a simulation and manipulates it. This is what Don Juan is suggesting Castaneda learn to do in his apprenticeship to the Yaqui Indian. The process is:

1. Become aware that you are in a dream.
2. Bring your hands up in front of your face.
3. Look from your hands to the dreamscape and back again, repeating constantly.

As you do the dream will move to a different level, or as in Divergent, Tris changes the simulation as it changes in response to what she chooses to do. Just as your dream changes in response to your shifting perception going back and forth. If you stare too long at your hands their image becomes hallucinatory and you will go somewhere else without knowing anymore. The idea is to continue this practice and attain mastery over it.

In my case my spiritual quest was not so serious. After I began to be able to get my hands up — very heavy and clumsy at first — I began playing with it.

“If I am in a dream, then I could fly right now.” So I would fly higher and higher. At first it was very hard to get off the ground. Then if I were in a dangerous dream and “woke up in it” I would say to myself, “I can become invisible and they won’t see me.” And I dreamed that. Very freeing and exhilarating.

This is what Tris as a Divergent can do that the others cannot. She possesses the ability to think like the Dauntless, the Erudite and Abnegation where she was from. More flexibility which Don Juan is always forcing Castaneda into to break the conditioned frames his language and academic culture have imprisoned him.

I have much more to say about Divergent but my point here is that in our own classical Hegelian dialectical Dominating Discourse X is always rated against Y. One movie against another. This is Tabloid thinking. One book of the same genre against another. One person against another. The dichotomy of our language, our thinking, our writing, our behavior forces us into this frame.

Hey, you can just walk out of it if you want. It’s only a simulation. That’s all a Discourse is.

REVIEW:Don Jon:Reading Through Baudrillard - Welcome to the Desert of the Real

DO NOT MISS THIS FILM

And Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Neo had this book in his desk drawer in THE MATRIX

Don Jon is a movie on how we get to THE MATRIX.

It takes awhile but you have fun doing it.

Dirty Sexy Dancing.

Scarlett is hot, hot hot and she won't put out. At least not until she gets what she wants first.
Him.
Into her interfaced fantasy.

Happy Ending Romantic Fantasy

Dirty Sexy Laptop

JGL has been sensitizing himself to feel erotic looking at porno. He is becoming Pavlov's dog, salivating to the bell, - whoops, the nekkid bod and ass of the porno queen of the moment. He jerks off thus reinforcing himself for his gaze on the porno queen - or princess. His sexual responses are conditioned to the Barbie porn videos, not a real life Barbie. Just a simulacrum in Simulated Reality, and he goddamn well prefers her or her Barbie sisters. And his responses are now Hullian prepotent responses. 

Joseph Wolpe, M.D. Father of Behavior Therapy.

See any theory can be used against you.

Mark Tansey - Still Life 
Aside here: Mark Tansey is giving us the GREAT 21st century Foucauldian CUT in art history
Still Life is a painting of this movie without a happy ending.

Fuck real life. Gimme the simulacrum willya.

The Wondrous Julianne Moore
Enter Julianne Moore, a REAL woman. Who wants real?
Who wants intimacy?
Gimme that porn star willya.

No victim's body,no criminal, no crime scene,no capture,no punishment
The Perfect Crime
What Baudrillard is saying here is that our reality is stolen from us in homeopathic doses. That way we will not notice it so infinitesimal will those doses be. And we will never know when the boundary blurs, when we lose reality, when we are in Simulated Reality, and when we can't get back. As Jon learns when he can no longer close his eyes, masturbate to his own fantasies, make them up. His imagination has been stolen from him. His ability to contemplate has been stolen from him (Walter Benjamin folks.) His mind has been stolen from him. His life has been stolen from him. And he doesn't even know it.
The Perfect Crime

Jean Baudrillard, the Bear and the Screen

This embracing of Simulated Reality is our greatest danger according to Baudrillard. When Simulated Reality is total then we will be in Virtual Reality. Think Hunger Games here: The Districts are Reality, The capitol Panem is Simulated Reality, The Games are Virtual Reality. So who the hell wants reality. Gale didn't. Katniss does but then she really had her fill, an excess, didn't she. 

We are all interfaced with the media of our culture. How we fall in love, the courtship, the rituals, the wedding, they marriage, the children, the dog, the house, the mortgage, and so it goes as Vonnegut would say. We are no more free than our pet dogs. We have been conditioned to want what they want us to want. And conditioned to get it the way they want us to get it. How we fuck has been conditioned recently by porn. So we now fuck like porn stars. (Did I do OK honey? Did you get off? Performance anxiety eh.)  So we do. We obey them. To do this we Inscribe our bodies (Nietzsche's Inscription of the Body) to fit the template of normality, we think the way we have been taught to think, we do not even have the words to free ourselves from this. Sex is empowered to do this to us. We got rid of repression -  we thought so anyway -  but what is this? And we are embracing it as fast as we can learn how. 

Who will intercede? Who will give us the intervention we need? Who will be our Julianne Moore? And our prepotent responses will undergo spontaneous recovery in the future. Pavlov again, the great one.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real! - Morpheus quotes Zizek

Here's what Joseph Gordon Levitt said about his movie Don Jon:

I wanted to talk about how the media influences people's expectations, Gordon Levitt says. Pornography is a huge, huge part of our media culture. The message Don Jon is trying to bring to light - and make fun of - is reducing people, especially women, to nothing but sex objects. It happens in music videos, TV shows, movies, and magazines, and so many commercials. Whether it's rated X or approved by the FCC to sell Doritos, the message is the same.

Entertainment October 4, 2013 #1279

___________________________________________________________________________

Let me tell you it is so much more than what he thinks it is. It is a fictionalized account of Jean Baudrillard's The Perfect Crime

The title is taken from a short story by 
Jorge Luis Borges.
wiki on Borges

It was almost all map for Jon.

I am going right over to hitRECord.org to tell him so.

The Hunger Games and Katniss Everdeen - Foucault: Fearless Speech and Parrhesia

Katniss Shooting

This is not a review review.


In a pre-introduction before the games, just as an American Idol selection or other somesuch reality show, Katniss is to show her stuff to the audience who isn't paying attention - she has been advised to get their attention -  as she sinks arrows into flat human body targets. So she aims at them, or rather the apple in the pig's mouth at the banquet table, aces it just whizzing by the head of the Master of Ceremonies of The Games. I can't find this image of Katniss in her sexy black leathers and marvelous hair arrangement with a bow and arrow, but you get the idea. The above image is in the beginning of the movie, when she is aiming at a deer.

The Evil One is on the Far Right

There is silence as her arrow goes to the heart of the apple. Astonishment. Shock. And then she bows  forward, making an age old gesture with her arms stretched out to her sides. She might be holding a ball gown in her fingers, making obeisance to a king. This is her gesture of utter contempt, as she inclines her head and says, "Thank you for your consideration," contemptuously uttered, just before she turns and leaves the stage/platform.

She wows them and when they vote she gets an almost perfect score.

What has she done? She has performed an act of parrhesia. And her insolent words complete her performance of parrhesia. She has "spoken truth to power," which must, by definition, include risk. It is a Greek term, and it often involved death for the speaker. 

Foucault discusses this in his book Fearless Speech as he does a genealogy of parrhesia.  Ayn Rand in her defense of William Hickman said, "He was condemned to death, not for what he did, but for what he said." (Journal of Ayn Rand;Letters of Ayn Rand)

Katniss is condemned to death for her audacity and her courage, giving too much hope to those watching screens, from the fringes of this world.

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....  who is able to tell the truth, about what, with what consequences, and with what relations to power.... With the intention  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 of the West. - Michel Foucault