Paradox of the Panoptic

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment...you had to live in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised."

- George Orwell, 1984

In 1787, Jeremy and Samuel Bentham came up with an idea of a circular prison with a central tower where guards could monitor inmates housed in cells around the inner circumference of the structure. Jeremy Bentham saw this as an opportunity both for more effective surveillance of prisoners but also as ultimately affecting their "moral" rehabilitation:

"The essence of it consists, then, in the centrality of the inspector's situation, combined with the well-known and most effectual contrivances for seeing without being seen...it is the most important point, that the persons to be inspected should always feel themselves as if under inspection, at least as standing a great chance of being so."(1)

Over 200 years later, Michel Foucault envisioned panopticism as a metaphoric principle of government domination over its subjects in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison:

"Panopticism is the general principle of a new 'political anatomy' whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline. [...] These disciplines~ which the classical age had elaborated in specific, relatively enclosed places - barracks, schools, workshops - and whose total implementation had been imagined only at the limited and temporary scale of a plague-stricken town, Bentham dreamt of transforming into a network of mechanisms that would be everywhere and always alert, running through society without interruption in space or in time. The panoptic arrangement provides the formula for this generalization. It programmes, at the level of an elementary and easily transferable mechanism, the basic functioning of a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms."(2) 

Foucault theorized that our constant visibility within the urban environment gave our government much more control over its subjects through monitoring, and this power was conceived through panopticism.

The events immediately following the Boston Marathon bombing earlier this month provide us with an example of just how observed and observable our social order has become. The FBI and Boston Police initiated unprecedented actions to retrieve individual photographic imagery from those people present in Copley Square prior to the two detonations. Their efforts were rewarded with "crowd-sourced" video and cell phone images of the two alleged Boston Marathon bombers, their physical descriptions and their movements both before and after the bombs went off. 

Thus, panopticism apparently has a renewed viability in this Age of Terror as the "disciplinary mechanism" of ever-present, unknowable monitoring now becomes a silent watchdog of our urban streets, city parks and the citizens who inhabit them.

At what cost, however? The debate over the loss of personal freedoms in our "post-nine-eleven" world reached fever pitch during the Bush Administration's imposition of the Patriot Act, with its "sneak and peek" search warrants, NSL's and expansion of the FBI's access to voicemail through search warrants instead of tougher wiretap laws.(3)

With this latest "terrorist act," even if it proves to have been accomplished by so-called "lone wolves," there clearly appears to be a shift in public opinion, away from complaint to a more "Patriotic" position of "business as usual." The message is one of resolute fortitude, espoused as far back as 2001, that if we Americans cower inside closed apartments and homes then "the terrorists have won." But it seems as if we're in denial of the simple facts that American life as we know it has been forever altered, and not necessarily by these "terrorists."            

This is the paradox of the panoptic: we exchange our privacy for "protection" and choose surveillance over "terrorism." We rationalize that the erosion of our personal freedoms through President Obama's continuance of the Patriot Act (and Congress's proposed cybersecurity bill) is worth having more "security."

London has thousands of closed-circuit TV cameras aimed throughout its streets and buildings and the July 2005 bomb attacks in London that killed 52 commuters was "solved" with identification of the suicide bombers by CCTV footage. Yet a report by civil rights watchdog group, Big Brother Watch, claimed less than seven years later that the city was "no safer." 

Look up, right now, from your iPhone or laptop; stop reading this and look around you. Do you see an "eye in the sky?" If you're in a subterranean Metro station or a shopping mall there is probably a camera looking at you right now. Notice the the darkened lens cover? That's better to "hide" the camera eye and, symbolically, the "watcher." The essence of Bentham's invention and Foucault's theory is that you cannot tell for sure if you're being watched - at that moment. If you don't know whether you are being watched, do you know if you're secure? So do you feel safer? 


______________________________________________

1. Bentham, Jeremy. Panopticon, or The Inspection House, "Letter V: Essential Points of the Plan," 1787.

2. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York, 1995.

3. USA PATRIOT Act (U.S. H. R. 3162, Public Law 107-56), Title II, Sec. 204 & 209.

Letter to a Young Painter

Administrator’s Note: The following excerpt is from an email I recently sent to the daughter of a friend. My critical evaluations of her representational paintings touched on the history of painting and its continued 20th Century development. I am posting it here (with some details edited for privacy) in the hope that it may be of interest to other young artists.

[ . . . ] 

The initial aspects of the history of painting, as it relates to your work, have to address the evolving theoretical issues concerning representation. Painting has steadily eliminated most of the formal elements of art, beginning with the Impressionists who rejected the traditional need for art to represent reality as seen, to instead champion their subjective interpretations of what they felt about reality. Thus, Georges Seurat’s pointillist paintings give an “impression” of light, with his visual ideas influenced by his passion for scientific knowledge.

Eventually, representational painting was negated (temporarily) and abstraction of various forms and styles arose around 1900. While there were random painters here and there that “returned” to representational and/or figurative work, the majority of painters during the first half of the 20th century focused more about the “why” of art than the “how.” Malevich developed his theory of Suprematism and introduced a severe reductive visuality that culminated in his iconic “Black Square” of 1915. The Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko also engaged these reductivist theories with his “Red, Yellow, Blue” paintings in 1921.

A rupture in this trajectory toward the minimal was Pop Art in the late 1950’s. Suddenly the “real” returned to painting with a vengeance, yet now the image of an artwork itself was less important than the theory behind it; think of Warhol’s “Marilyn’s.” Ideas about images as signs, and how we read them, were introduced to painting and representation gained new theoretical footholds with various styles ebbing and flowing – in Italy, Germany and New York a “new” or “neo” expressionism returned with Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Georges Baselitz, David Salle and Julian Schnabel. [I wrote an essay on my blog several years ago that might give you some ideas about what these painters have done with representation: Figuratively Speaking.]

Throughout the last years of the 20th Century and into the beginning years of this century we have see a continuance of all kinds of styles of painting; this Pluralism seems to validate the idea that there are different kinds of art for different tastes. This may be so but what I'm trying to convey to you is an idea about representational paintings – paintings that have recognizable imagery – that they are either about semiotics (the study of signs) and/or about the history of representation itself.

Because ideas about representation as another language was supported by a group of French philosophers, linguists and critical theorists (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault) it became vastly more interesting to artists in the late 20th Century. These contemporary painters use visual ideas to explore representation not as a means of imitating something but as a way to open a discourse about cognition, perception and meaning.

That is why I believe your paintings (drawings?) show promise. In your pieces, particularly the ones that show full figures as cut-outs in exterior urban environments, intellectually engage the viewer in thoughts about the “planes of existence.” What does it mean to use a cut-out figure? They are actually like holes into another reality that cut through the picture plane to reveal a transparency; not only of reality but also of the picture plane itself. That is to say, in my view, either consciously or not, you are questioning both the reality of our everyday existence and the futility of trying to convey the three-dimensional on a “two-dimensional” surface.

My questions for you: Are you attempting to only depict a fantasy, or imaginative narrative? Do you see a way to regard representation as your subject matter? If you can see that representation itself might be what you could become visually concerned with as a painter – to question representation’s validity, it’s privileged position in art – then it's a question of how to visually demonstrate that questioning.

And that's a very powerful thing. Because merely to reproduce the world – to make a beautiful picture of the world – is less intellectually engaging for those who are familiar with the history of painting and critical theory. Art theories about the falsehood or fragility of trying to represent anything visually, and what that “means,” are visual explorations and challenges that can take you far into the 21st century. I think that you could be well on your way in terms of working with these yellow cut-out transparent figures.

[ . . . ]

I wish you all the best.

MCB

IMAGE: Untitled (Lens Painting) by Sigmar Polke; 2007; © Copyright by Sigmar Polke Estate.
   

Coincident of Silver Stars

The 1960 U-2 spy plane incident catapulted Francis Gray Powers into history and his name into our consciousness as the public watched his Soviet Union trial and imprisonment, and the eventual American resolution of our suspicions about his actions. As a pilot conducting aerial espionage of our Cold War enemy, the former Soviet Union, Powers’ surveillance of Russia's potential nuclear capabilities and ultimate threat were eventually recognized to be "CIA-initiated." Powers served nearly two years of a 9-year sentence for espionage in the U.S.S.R. yet when he returned to the U.S. he wasn’t eligible for de rigueur military awards for being captured “behind enemy lines” because he was ostensibly CIA, not military.

I learned about Gary Powers as everyone did: through the myth of the U-2 spy plane. I had forgotten about his legend, not knowing even that he'd served time for piloting the U-2. I certainly wasn’t thinking of him when I wrote lyrics for what would become an original song by the Boyd Bros called “Silver Star.” I was living in a loft near downtown Los Angeles, driving up on the weekends to Val Verde, north of LA,  where I played music in one of those desert huts with my brother Scott, Chan Poling and Beej of The Suburbs, and often Su Tissue of the Suburban Lawns. We jammed and partied together those long weekends and I usually ended up late Sunday evening working on songs with Scott at his Newhall bungalow.

“Silver Star” was originally about a bar and a guy in there maybe suffering delirium tremens visions that culminated lyrically in orgiastic, Jim Morrison-like petulance, with choruses of “ain’t nothing wrong with staying in bed.”

Over three decades later, I changed those lines and introduced the idea that the protagonist of “Silver Star” might be suffering PTSD, with a new chorus, and a new set of chords to go with it courtesy of Boyd Bro Scott. In the new version, the singer survives Iraq, comes home, and gets a job driving a flatbed, bravely suffering his regular nightmares of being "still in the fight." Our song's refrain of "..the Silver Star, the Silver Star" now possibly implying the singer was awarded that third-highest military decoration for valor.

Suddenly, when I finished those final mixes of my song “Silver Star” on June 21, 2012, it now was  about a decorated veteran, in recognition of outstanding action in some mysterious traumatic combat, of which he sings in the last verse: "No trouble with what I did."

As surprising as that was to me, it wasn’t near as overwhelming to learn that, unbeknownst to me, Francis Gary Powers was posthumously awarded the Silver Star on June 15, 2012.

The full, coincidental extent of this “Silver Star” story only became clear to me later when I read a Powers' obit to discover how Powers had died: he’d been killed while piloting a KNBC news helicopter while covering brushfires near LA; his helo crashed in a field north of LA’s Sepulveda Dam on August 1, 1977.  

Remarkably, a song I had begun in 1977, the same year Francis Gary Powers had died, crashing in a field within 50 miles of where I had wrote that first version, was randomly resurrected in 2012, with new lyrics about a decorated war vet, almost to the very day that Powers was finally awarded his elusive Silver Star.

IMAGE: MCB as "The Pilot" in still photo from "Stop In The Name Of Love," a Hollies video shoot directed by David Jove, 1983. 

Down in the Bottom

On a late Autumn day in 1941, my grandmother, Hallie Mae Underwood, took her two children, Ray and Virginia, to look for pecans "down in the bottom” near the Mississippi River. Hallie Mae’s friend, Lynn Dennie, had come along with his rifle to hunt squirrels. Lynn had also brought a camera and at some point decided to take a picture of Mae and her children. In the photograph reproduced above, nine-and-a-half-year-old Ray stands to the left, wearing his aviator’s cap with goggles and possibly one of Virginia’s hand-me-down sweaters. Mae obligingly propped the rifle up on her shoulder while Lynn snapped the photo. Virginia stands to the right, her eleven-year-old face peaceful in the dappled afternoon sunlight and wearing what appear to be Mae’s dungarees that waft about her ankles like bellbottoms.

Within months of this idyllic Americana moment, Lynn was drafted into service after the attack on Pearl Harbor and our world changed. Virginia eventually met and married John "Jack" Andrew Boyd, and bore her first son, Mark Cameron. Two years later, Virginia and Jack had another son, Scott Clayton, my brother, best friend and loyal partner in many a musical adventure since our teenage years. Two younger brothers, Craig Sheldon and Emmet Jett, who came along a few years later, completed the Boyd family.

I always admired this photograph and when it came time to design an album cover for a collection of new songs Scott and I recorded last year, I asked my mother for permission to use it. The combination of rural Southern life, with squirrel hunting and pecan gathering, coupled with the innocence of childhood joys, suggest the ancestral past that Scott and I come from and those Tennessee and Arkansas roots we share as Boyd Bros. “Growing up Southern” in our formative years was at times stifling, with racial tensions bubbling just under the everyday surface reality, but also exhilarating, having discovered our emergent passion for rock ‘n' roll, R&B and country. We survived those years of slogging through late night gigs, cobbling this and that band of like-minded musicians together, later watching them and us drift apart to new chapters in our respective lives.

Scott and I now live on separate coasts, the vast continent of the United States between us, but we still manage to get together physically two or three times a year to play music, and continue to craft our songs "virtually" in this Brave New Digital World. 

Today, Scott and I are releasing our fifth “record” together; seven original songs recorded last year and available as digital download through iTunes, Amazon and other music streaming sites. We call this new album “Down in the Bottom” and it's a family affair; our youngest brother, Jett, a luthier, plays guitar on one song and brother Craig did the graphic design for the cover and limited edition booklet.  


The Boyd Bros dedicate this album to Mae, Virginia and Jack. It was and is a labor of love that bespeaks the humility and honesty of country folks, the empowerment and celebration of family that kept our passion for music alive and kicking these many years. 

Mark Cameron Boyd
Beltsville, MD

IMAGE: “Down in the Bottom” EP cover; original photograph by Lynn Dennie; graphic design by Craig Boyd; © Copyright 2013.