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

DIVERGENT: Reading Jeanine's Strategy and Tris's Radical Otherness Through Zizek

"Abnegation if left unchecked, will destroy the faction system"

Jeanine is absolutely correct in knowing that Abnegation will eventually ruin the peace based on the  faction system as it is, patterned closely on the Quakers and on Gandhi's method of Satyagraha that brought down the United Kingdom, and disrupted the Indian Caste system, where people were born into a caste (determining their entire lives) with never any chance of change. But what did the Quakers do? 

They began the resistance to slavery in 1760 in Virginia. They were active in the Resistance Movement against the Viet Nam War. Quakers believe in carrying their ideals and beliefs into action. They are not Sunday Christians. The Quakers initiated the abolition movement, destroyed slavery and the wealthy plantation system that depended on enslaved labor. It took about 100 years.The Quakers also fomented the resistance and end to the Viet Nam War. Does anyone think Abnegation cannot do this to the faction system?

Abnegation is obstructing Jeanine's plans to introduce materialism and prosperity, i.e. capitalism. They will not be complicit in fostering "capitalism" which will be less regulated, or unregulated by any moral codes of behavior.

The movie reveals many things to us without comment. We see some older people in Abnegation as the crowds move in the streets toward the Initiation Ceremony, but few if any in Dauntless. We also see older people in Amity. We slowly learn that the factionless mainly come from failed initiates, especially Dauntless. Dauntless is itself increasing the population of the factionless, increasing the problem of homeless hoards. Dauntless thus creates the factionless that they must protect the city against. Dauntless creates its own reason for being. This information comes to us in a purely visual form with the announcement of being chosen, some information that requires us to connect some dots. 

It is apparent that at one time Dauntless - and the other factions - were created by some spontaneous and authentic feelings. The factions as we see them 100 years after have become institutionalized. The factions have entered the Order of Production, ensuring irreversibility, metastasizing. What might have transpired is being changed into an Event by Jeanine.

This is what Edward Snowden warned about the NSA mass collection of information. He did not say that it was being misused BUT that at any time the administration of NSA changed, with those coming to leadership positions there, this could easily happen. That different people could decide to use the information in a different way that would compromise citizens and reveal their personal lives to their detriment.

Divergent gives us this moment in time where institutionalized factions - and we are most familiar with Dauntless - have metastasized into a totalitarian mini state and formed an alliance with Erudite.

As Baudrillard tells us through Nietzsche, when the Symbolic Order moves into the Order of Production it becomes IRREVERSIBLE. It metastasizes. This is what we see with Dauntless. New Rules. Roth's book makes this clear in Four's complaining to Tris, but if we can read through Baudrillard we need no explanation as to what's going on here. The Order has changed in Dauntless and in Erudite. Science and technology are on their way to endless complication. The Foucauldian Grid of power/knowledge is now visible.

Tris is a true revolutionary. Katniss is a figurehead and those using her are violently fighting the government. So why is Tris this radical figure? An imaginary figure Jeanine has had nightmares about is now present in her reality. 

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. 

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.

So here we have the ideology. You know like our own freedom, equality and justice for all.  Zizek will say to over-identify with the ideology to force it to be what it says it is or disintegrate. Tris has over-identified and continues to push it.

HOW?

First she believes it. (Roth's book pushes this point over and over. To make sure we get it.) The movie shows us Tris's face as Max gives the Manifesto in an address to the new initiates and they are lifted and carried in a ritual of solidarity. An act now empty of meaning but an act of propaganda for the initiates who are seduced. Then she begins to participate in the reality of the training which has little to do with the ideology and a lot to do with obedience and "never giving up."

Discipline and Punish - Michel Foucault

Clearly only an Abnegation born and transferring to Dauntless is innocent enough to take this to their hearts. This is why they are a danger to Erudite. Tris  believes in the ideology of Dauntless that does not exist in the example of the leaders. Is this familiar to the reader?

This is what forces Tris to expose herself by becoming a PARRHESIASTES. This is the kind of behavior to expect from Abnegation. It is the kind of behavior to expect from the Quaker community, the Society of Friends. It was the kind of behavior that Gandhi displayed to bring down the United Kingdom. "That little man in the loincloth," as Churchill called him. So Jeanine is correct to fear it. Abnegation will eventually ruin her plans, obstruct them for sure. 

Jeanine opts for our present government's preference: PRE-EMPTIVE THREAT. That is, like the movie Minority Report, stop the projected violence before it happens, while it is just a small weed to be rooted out, as Mao says of capitalism. This is what our police and law enforcement are doing today. We are under surveillance to make sure we do not plan to do anything in the future that the government might object to. 

Jeanine is very modern. She is taking precautions and she is correct in doing so from her perspective.

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.