The Leisurely Historian…

The color tools on the curriculum this week were all very helpful, although I’m a bit leery of relying overly on them. The overall effect aimed for by all of these things is a sort of "pleasing neutrality." While that goal is a good one, it can make things bland, sometimes, too, I think.

I’m not a color person. I actually barely perceive color, tone, shade… No matter how much I’ve tried, I’ve learned this is somewhat inescapable. I can see a good color scheme or a bad one, and know the difference and why, but I’m just not inclined to see that way; it’s a neglected visual organ in my brain. I’ve developed a theory that there are three main ways to perceive things visually, and that each of us favor one or another. There’s people who see line and form, whose eyes naturally trace the shapes of things. There’s people oriented toward color and tone– these people are naturally atoned to changes in light, how it interacts with the contours of surfaces, things like that. Then there’s people like me– the iconic eyes. I see things almost semiotically– as representations of ideas. I see a cup, and the first thing I see isn’t the height or heft of it, or its color, or the way the light plays on its contents. I see it, and I see "cup."

Each of these is naturally inclined toward certain types of visual production– the first sort will be best at pen and ink, line drawings, and the like. The second group will be well suited to using paints, charcoal, things like that. The third group, people like me, who see representations of objects within objects, are most likely apt to be cartoonists. We’re the people who are good at Pictionary.

So color tools like these, they’ll be useful to me. Working with color always feels unnatural to me, forced, and I spend far too much time while working on my assignments playing with this.

Well, that’s a major digression.

What I wanted to talk about was Tufte.

Well, I’ll leave this post now– for the sake of brevity, in hopes that someone actually reads it– with the main thought I had while reading that book:

It’s brilliant. It’s useful. It gives a lot to think about, and doesn’t shy away from complex answers or ambiguity. That said, the statistician in Tufte shines through a bit for my tastes– I don’t believe completely that the ideal use of visual information design is accuracy and "truth." However, he gives you a great tool box, whether you’re trying to tell the truth with pictures or not.

In other people’s blogs this week, I commented in Maureen’s blog about Tufte’s self-publishing, and on Chris King’s blog about the joy of theft.

I’d like discuss the issue of agency in Discipline and Punish.

The reaction of my Historiography class, which I gladly re-read this book for, was somewhat mixed. One student argued that “Foucault dismisses personal responsibility and the willful choice of an individual to commit a crime.” Meanwhile, another argued that Foucault’s departure from Marxism “is evidenced by assigning a sense of free will to the individuals discussed…”

This isn’t a new debate. Since his rise to academic prominence in the US, at least, people have been debating whether Foucault presents a view of people trapped in multivalent matrices of power that leave them with little or no agency or choice, or if his work represents a radical imbuing of power to all, even those traditionally considered to be powerless in society.

Is this a view of a world where we are constantly being disciplined, punished, and robbed of choices, or is it one where the subaltern can not only speak, but act? Personally, I fall into the latter camp. I’m going to try to explain why here.

The key to this view, to me, is Foucault’s construction of power. He describes power as a “perpetual battle,” as a thing “…exercised rather than possessed, , it is not the ‘privilege’, acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions- an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the positions of those who are dominated.” (26-27)

The traditional concept of power coming from the top down, embodied physically in the figure of the king, with what Foucault repeatedly describes as his “super-power,”* (e.g., 57) is out the window.  Where popular notions of power had been forces like Newtonian gravity, Foucault’s power is like quantum physics—unpredictable, unstable, constantly shifting, everywhere, and appearing in quantities too small to see. Foucault discusses “infra-penalty” and “infra-politics,” (pgs 214 & 222) concepts that, along with his concept of power, likely are the main source for Robin
Kelley’s concept of infra-politics—political acts on a small scale taken up by the supposedly powerless.

It may be easier to take an optimistic view of power when looking at the “bad old days” of torture, when you’re looking at this book. Foucault almost puts the criminal and the king on equal footing (47-48) in his argument that the criminal’s power to break the law is a direct affront to the power of the king, whose will is law. It’s harder to see this sort of power at work later in the book, with the advent of modern penal reform. Part of this is probably a result of having to spend a lot more time inside prisons, after punishment ceased being a public spectacle and became a cloistered, private affair between the state and the body—or the soul—of the individual subject.

Yet even under the régime of panopticism, there is hope in Foucault’s construction of power. Think of it this way: the utility of the panopticon is based on its efficiency—the uncertainty of whether one is being watched leads to an internalization of discipline, and thus to the disciplining of one’s self. As this technology increased, it spread out, became more generalized, and became a prevalent method of social control.

But the beauty part of this is, most of the time, we are policing ourselves. We discipline ourselves. This means that within the modern world of discipline and biopower, if one feels denied the opportunity to exercise ones agency, all one really needs—most of the time—is the strength and the courage to stop doing the work of the warden for him, and go out and do what you want.

Because Foucault is essentially a Neitzchian. That’s why he writes genealogies rather than histories or metaphysics.

Of course, it’s also why Chomsky dismissed him as “amoral” after their televised debate, but I’ve just opened a couple cans of worms I don’t have the time or space to close right now.

______________________________
*I don’t have the book in French, but I have a suspicion that this term is a translation of puissance supérieure—a phrase that gives a sense, again, of top-down-ness. Just a thought, really.

My baby sister came up to visit me and my other sister who lives in Baltimore. She’s moving to Iowa to work on the caucus for Barack Obama. As such, we spent most of the weekend hanging out with her, doing the family thing. As such, it’s 10:30 the night before class, and I’m still fiddling with my page. It will be up before most of the class wakes up, I’d assume, but this is going to be an all-nighter. This whole design thing is completely time consuming, I have to say, though I’m still enjoying it.

One thing I’m playing with, with my page, is what this person does with their page-header font– matching it to that of an Art Nouveau poster. I liked their use of font on that, and am working on doing something similar.

This book, while a bit ponderous, was quite interesting.

I’ve read
dozens of authors who acknowledge a debt to Thompson, so I’ve been eager
to read it. The size, and having a week to read it, meant that I had to
“gloss” or “gut” the book more than read it, but I enjoyed the task, and
hope to return to it when I have more time. (I never thought I’d see the
day when I see Foucault coming up in a syllabus and think, “finally, a
nice quick read!”)

This book looks at the rise of class consciousness among the British
working classes in the period between the 1790s and the 1830s. Thompson
divides the book up into three sections.  The first section is primarily
an intellectual and religious history. I found it a bit hard to follow,
as I’m not too familiar with the history of many of the groups that
Thompson feels it is sufficient to simply mention without explanation.
For this reason, I have to admit I had wikipedia on my laptop next to me
for a lot of this section.

The next section looks at material and
cultural conditions in the lives of workers—looking at specific
industries before moving onto issues of standards of living, religion in
the lives of the poor and working class, and broader cultural issues of
leisure, immigration, etc. The final section deals with conflicts that
represent the inchoate working class coming toward a final class
consciousness in the first part of the nineteenth century.

The thing that most struck me about the book was Thompson’s emphasis on
class consciousness, rather than simply class. Many Marxist scholars,
moreso even than Marx himself, have this tendency to see class as a
structural fact. Under capitalism, there are workers and there are
capitalists, and therefore class exists, and should be treated as a
material reality.

Thompson argues that it is awareness of class
structures, and the perception of more commonalities within class strata
than across them. For this reason, the book deals with the period that
it does—Thompson trying to record the advent of workers’ class
consciousness, and the process of its formation. He questions the common
assumption that industrialization necessarily and immediately brought
about the creation of a new working class, arguing that “…we should not
assume any automatic, or over-direct, correspondence between the dynamic
of economic growth and the dynamic of social or cultural life.” (p. 192)
It’s a situation of correlation and impact rather than direct causation.

Overall, I don’t necessarily agree with the argument put forth by some of the folks in my Historiography class that Thompson is unduly influenced by Marxist ideology.
Given the context of his times, there were many Marxists who were still
very strict adherents of dialectical materialism. In the consistent
emphasis he places on the social and cultural, Thompson signals a break
from such strict by-the-Das-Kapital Marxists.

Of course, I’m the product of a loose socialist upbringing, and went to
a pretty overwhelmingly Marxist college. So there’s a chance I’m just a
little blind to overt commie propaganda…