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Thematic Essay: The Panopticon and Modern Surveillance Technologies: Have new media technologies of surveillance intensified or eroded the strength of the panoptical model as a strategy of state governance?
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault mines historical developments to understand the impetus and implications of changing logics of power. In conducting a structuralist analysis of political changes in Western Europe between the1700s and the 1900s, he concludes that he has unearthed the presence of a growing disciplinary structure of governance that utilizes surveillance to control the populace. Foucault uses Bentham’s model of the Panopticon as to represent how the state employs the tools of domination and subjection of the panoptical prison to create a hierarchical relationship between itself and it’s subjects.[1] By isolating each individual in a cell within which they are visible to the eyes of the supervisor, but have no eyes of their own, the Panopticon structure multiplies the power to subject without increasing the physical presence of the state. Each subject “is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.”[2] Isolation from those at the same level, coupled with consciousness of one’s permanent visibility to those observing from above, turns man into a fabricated object of the state.[3] While Foucault experienced the rise in state surveillance as a feature of the modern era, the ‘post-modern’ era has continued to develop technologies of surveillance, but with a fundamental shift in the institutional framework within which actors exercise surveillance. Whereas a single viewer watched from the central tower of the Panopticon, the locus of sight has multiplied to lower levels of the hierarchy. Moreover, hypermedia technologies have allowed the ‘prisoners’ to open holes in the walls that separate them from each other. Foucault’s theories of power-knowledge allow for a re-assessment of how current models of surveillance affect the logic of power of political authorities and the technologies they use to structure relationships between the state and the ‘people.’ The spread of optic power amongst subjects as well as between subjects and the state, has undermined the state’s strategies of controlling knowledge through surveillance, and has challenged the rationality that drew upon this body of knowledge. By inscribing the viewer and the viewed within a different set of micro practices of power, new technologies of surveillance have facilitated a change in the meaning of the bond between state and subject, and have given rise to new strategies of domination/subjection as well as strategies of resistance.
To understand the way that control mechanisms have transformed with new technologies, one must first understand the modality of power of panoptic surveillance techniques. The Panopticon provides a specific structuring of social relations that gives rise to a particular form of power through discipline. The Panoptic model serves as “a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centers and channels of power.”[4] By positioning bodies in this spatial arrangement, and by transforming these bodies into the subjects of state knowledge, the state is able to construct a hierarchy. The division between top and bottom, state and subjects, derives, in part, from an economized form of knowledge-power. Mechanisms of surveillance allow the state to ‘know’ the individual, and as the state comes to ‘know,’ it inscribes the marked social subject within the control mechanisms of the state.[5] In amassing a body of knowledge, the state constructs an archiving system to record and process information. The “uninterrupted work of writing links in the centre and the periphery, in which power is exercised without division.”[6] Those who write these archives practice power by controlling the creation of a narrative strain out of a mass of information, “differentiat[ing] discourses in their multiple existence and specif[ying] them in their own duration.”[7]
The initial growth of surveillance technology followed the logic that Foucault proposed, as the state controlled the process of developing the technological capabilities to generate archives of knowledge about its subjects.[8] Writing was no longer the sole form of archival information, and the viewer in the center of the tower began to catalogue the photographic and digital images of the individual. The concentration of this information, along with the public unfamiliarity with new technologies, initially enhanced the Panoptic effect, and may have, as Foucault argued, internalized the political and economic demands of the authorities, masked as the moral imperatives of the ‘Big Brother’ figure, into the minds of the populace. Whereas the notion of God as the top the political hierarchy gave authority to the King as the sovereign head of the body politic, the monolithic entity that, like God, was always watching supplanted God as the mechanism for submission to authority in modern governments. Images and rhetoric about the necessity of Big Brother’s coordination of activities rationalized the presence of this paternalistic authority, drawing upon strategies of surveillance to engender the submission of individuals. As the individual internalized the demands of ‘subjecthood,’ the state power increased.
However, the growth of surveillance technology has seen a diffusion of the production of images and narratives. While governments continue to operate surveillance technology, nongovernmental groups, along with individuals, have access to the means to record and disseminate information. The sense of visibility may have also led to the rise of an increasingly performative subject, who has not only grown accustomed to the ubiquity of surveillance technology, but has adapted to it, producing images of the self. Paranoia about what ‘Big Brother’ sees and how he will use this information may also have had the unintended consequence of transforming conceptions of the self as a private individual to one who represents herself in the space of public performance. Under the Panoptic model of surveillance, she may always be the subject of an inspector’s eye, but now, YouTube allows her to “broadcast” herself performing a specific identity. Having internalized the invasion of the viewer into the private space, people now take part in objectifying themselves.[9]
In conducting a critical analysis of the transformation of the subject within new media, theorist Nicholas Mirzoff argues that ubiquitous media networks have created a surveillance system that is indifferent to the individual that it watches.[10] Individuals have a sense that the networked subject is everywhere on screen, but that “no one is watching”[11] his or her performance. He argues that, without a conception of a place in relationship to the broader society, individuals of the present day experiences anxiety over the notion of the subject itself.[12] Mirzoff, however, focuses on media as a form of representation, and less on media as a form of control. Thus, he does not engage with the extent to which new media platforms complicate the traditional models of state control.
The unexpected consequences of the growth of surveillance technology, while evidencing a divergence of current practices from the panoptic model, do not nullify the analytical validity of Foucault’s theories. Foucault himself recognized that particular rationalities of governance necessarily confront social realities of the body politic. Micropracitces of power occur at multiple sites, and often produce unintended consequences that challenge the governing body’s ability to bring about a specific end.[13] Instead of dead-ending analysis when a program does not achieve its intended result, he argues for inquiry into how the failure of one program can give rise to a new strategy through which the governing apparatus attempts to realign strategy and rhetoric with reality.[14] What new strategies develop in response to practices of multiplied surveillance, and how do actors re-adjust the rationality of governance in response?
Discipline cannot be reduced to a single apparatus of the Panopticon, or to a single institution, such as the ‘sovereign state.’ It may continue to function as a modality of the exercise of knowledge-power,[15] but political authorities may have to redefine the rationality behind these disciplinary systems.[16] Initially the Panopticon helped to rationalize the creation of a productive social subject within the ideological framework of the Enlightenment, which privileged the centrality of the individual as a subject of a body politic. Now, however, the logic of surveillance seems to draw more upon a rationality of security, and a discourse that frames the subjects of surveillance not as potential delinquents who must be reformed, but as terrorists suspects who threaten to infiltrate the state, and therefore must be removed and punished.
The proliferation of surveillance mechanisms from state-controlled to those operated by a multiplicity of organizations, some of which provide information for governments and some of which operate independently, has not only challenged the state’s ideology of authority, but it has also undermined the hegemonic control over access to knowledge gave this authority power. While the multiplication of viewers has intensified the possibility that political actors can work together, amassing a body of knowledge so as to exercise power over subjects, it has also increased the potential for resistance, as subjects may, by viewing each other, break down the base of the hierarchy of authority that the Panopticon established.
In the Panoptical model, it is not the presence of the viewer that elicits submission, but instead the consciousness that such vision is always possible, and that the viewer more powerful than the viewed. The rise in satellite and video camera recording devises has increased the quantity of public, and sometimes private places in which an individual feels the presence of a viewer. Moreover, it has changed the representational quality of the archival information to that of indexical signs, which, unlike a text, claim to bear a one-for-one correspondence with the individual’s actions. The state rationalizes increased surveillance technology through the logic of security threats, and by utilizing such technologies as body scans, they make not only the mind, but also the physical being, the sight of knowledge. However, business, NGOs and other non-state actors can increasingly access the technology to conduct surveillance on the activities of members of the populace. Through this process, the “trap”[17] of visibility no longer catches an individual solely within the web of the state. Moreover, part of the Panopticon’s method of instilling discipline drew upon abolishing the “collective mass” in favor of “a collection of separated individualities.”[18] New media provides methods of viewing that break through the separation of individualities and allow subjects to reconstruct the notion of a collective public. The choice to bring a web cam into one’s own bedroom redefines the meaning of recording from an act of surveillance to an act of performance. Social networking sites and alternate reality videogames also allow the subject to construct plural identities that exist in the realm of the Internet, which, while easy to monitor, may be harder to govern. By ‘seeing’ each other, groups create multiple meanings for their collective subjectivities, forging imagined communities that escape the totalizing force of the pyramid model of authority, and undermine the discourse of state power that draws upon the triangulation of sovereignty, discipline, and governance[19]
However, the growth of corporate surveillance, when coupled with the increased performativity of the subject, threatens to fetishize this new social subject. If businesses and other actors can draw upon the information they receive from surveillance to claim to ‘know’ the subject, and if they use this knowledge to impede self-representation within dialogues, they re-enact the logic of the Panoptic state that transforms an actor into an object of action. [20] While the power relations between diffuse, non-state actors and individuals may appear less totalitarian than those between a sovereign state and its subjects, they, too, re-instate the model of “unilateral” communication.[21] They may use this strategy to create a hierarchy that constrains the actions of the social subjects, albeit through a different institutional framework than that which constrained the prisoners of the Panopticon.
[1] Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage
Books, 1979).
[2] Ibid, 200.
[3] Whereas in models of public punishment that state had to enact its power upon the body of the individual, the modern state can now mark its presence upon the mind while maintaining distance from the physical body. Ibid, 201.
[4] Ibid, 205.
[5] Foucault argues that, as the state accumulates knowledge about the actions of subjects, it constructs a category of delinquent, and legitimizes the use of discipline to control this deviant social body. By defining “subtle illegalities” as antisocial acts, the state constructs criminality in a range of behaviors. With the increase in knowledge, the state can know who has violated the social code, and can mark the offender as a criminal whose body must be contained and whose soul must be reformed within modern carcerial institutions. Ibid, 301.
[6] Ibid, 197.
[7] Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Tavistock, 1972), 129.
[8] Ronald J. Deibert, Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia; Communication in World Order Transformation (New York: Colombia University Press, 1997), 119-124.
[9] Foucault argued that the power of the Panopticon’s surveillance makes man into an object of social control. Having internalized the dominant logic of the state, and knowing the state may be watching his behaviors, man acts as a means to the ends of the state. Foucault, 220)
[10] Nicolas Mirzoff, “Network Subjects: or, The Ghost is the Message,” in New Media, Old Media, eds. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 342.
[11] Ibid, 344.
[12] Ibid.
[13] In her article, Kulynych compares the strains in Foucault’s work on the practices of power to those in Habermas’s work, and argues that both recognize that the state is not a monolithic machine that uses power to bring about specific ends. Jessica J. Kulynych, “Performing Politics: Foucault, Habermas, and Postmodern Participation,” Polity 30, no. 2 (Winter, 1997), 317-318 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3235221.
[14] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. C Gordon (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), 196-196.
[15] Foucault (1977), 215.
[16] Dillon Millicent, “Conversation with Michel Foucault, The Threepenny Review, no. 1 (Winter - Spring, 1980), 4-5, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4382926.
[17] Foucault (1979), 200.
[18] Ibid, 201.
[19] Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality,; With Two Lectures and an Interview with Michel Foucault, eds. Graham Burchell, Colon Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 102.
[20] Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), 18.
[21] Ibid, 24.
Meredith Weaver and Marc Gilbert's Video Blog on John Phillip Santos' lecture:
Jeffrey Tratner and Sabrina Skau's Video Blog on Christopher Lydon's Global Media Lab:
-What is better in depicting the worst crimes: fiction, non fiction, or both?
‘Photograph is a language … [the photographer] responds to the outer world in the light of his own subjective leanings before he snaps the shutter… there can no longer be any question of art, if one accepts the usual sense of the term, since the personal intervention by the photographer is reduced almost uniquely to the selection of the crucial instant.1” This statement by the famed photographer Willy Ronis was the most telling and the most intriguing account I have stumbled on in my journey as to determine: Which is better in depicting the worst crimes: fiction, nonfiction, or both for that matter? That is to say- should we aspire for a journalistic truth or an emotional truth, as Ted Bogosian expressively laid out in the master class. It is a rather unattainable task to present a comprehensive layout on the finest way to illuminate the truth, especially when that truth is the worst crimes as, if anything, we (as students of global media) are still untangling and perhaps even struggling with “the truth” and the various potential accounts of that truth. Nonetheless, my personal and intellectual expertise compels me as to present a twofold scheme; first, it is worthwhile to contemplate the ways in which the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction are blurry. Second, it is indeed the power of the situation that dictates upon us the “best” method.
The aforementioned quote stresses on the subjectivity of nonfiction; simple matters like the angle from which a picture is shot, the person being interviewed in the journalistic investigative report, and the music in the background of a documentary are all personal choices, whether made by the artist himself or some other body like the director or producer. And if we are venturing to present a truth account, then how far or how close we come to is a function of the cumulative effect of all the choices we make along the way. But what if the child who was brutally murdered in the local market received a letter for the first time in ten years from his imprisoned mother telling him how much she had faith in him (right before he left the house), would this part of the story make a difference in the truth account presented on his murder? I cannot speculate here as that letter might have meant life for the child, or it might have been not more than a sheer piece of paper reminding him of the lingering injustice looming over his life. But if it were of great value, wouldn’t the child want it to be part of the story; after all, it is his story, his life, his prerogative. But the reporter didn’t know of such a letter and the child is dead and the letter is shattered to eternal dust. The heart of the matter is that by choosing to tell something, we are not telling something else and by choosing not to tell something, we are telling something else. As wisely said by Bogosian, telling half a truth is telling half a lie. And since half a lie is fiction in the grand scheme of things, then we are stuck with the irresolvable dilemma: somewhere along the way, our attempt at nonfiction telling, to one degree or another, transforms to fiction telling. I am not attempting here to say that journalists are ‘liars’ and that the truth is an illusion but rather that one should be humble and wise enough to acknowledge that “the truth” is a delicate matter and that seemingly inconsequential elements of telling a story ultimately and cumulatively have a gigantic effect on what is being portrayed. On the other hand, seemingly pure fictitious story-telling is grounded, one way or another, in the human condition or our daily life- that is, nonfiction. Here, I find the recent work of Bogosian discussed in the master class particularly interesting where fiction and nonfiction are intermingled as to amalgamate documentary work with dramatic events; fiction and nonfiction works are not an either-or proposition.
It is noteworthy to mention that the political is pertinent here since sometimes, some fiction work succeeds in passing on a certain truth account that relevant nonfiction work failed to disseminate not because the work of nonfiction is deficient per se, but rather because fiction has more robust wings than nonfiction in overcoming entrenched political boundaries. For example, The Yacoubian Building, which is an Egyptian film that is based on a novel, treats homosexuality in a country that illegalizes it and tortures homosexuals2. The Egyptian government is notoriously known for its strict censoring policies and a documentary on homosexuality in Egypt produced by an Egyptian wouldn’t be given the license required for broadcast. Nonetheless, The Yacoubian Building got such a license because it is, presumably, after all, a work of fiction, imagination, fabrication. The viewers though can easily connect such fiction to the reality they undergo each day. Khaled Diab, an Egyptian cultural critic, wrote an article on the film with the subtitle “As Hollywood does gay in a big way, the issue of homosexuality in the Arab World is slowly coming out of the cultural and media closet,” and a work of fiction is bringing the truth out of the closet 3. It is appropriate here to move on as to provide an expose of the power of the situation in determining the “best” way to reveal the truth in the worst crimes committed by humanity.
“I don’t feel like a Non-something. I feel quite specific. I wish I could think of a name in place of “Nonfiction.” In the hope of finding an antonym I looked up “Fiction” in Webster and found it defined as opposed to “Fact, Truth and Reality.” I thought for a while of adopting FTR, standing for Fact, Truth, and Reality, as my new term, but it is awkward to use. “Writers of Reality” is the nearest I can come to what I want,” says Barbara Tuchman in Practicing History 4. It was illuminating to read this sect from her chapter entitled The Historian as Artist as it dawned on me that the way in which nonfiction (or shall I say FTR?) is defined is by not being fiction; the root is fiction. The eminent Swiss linguist Saussure differentiates between Langue, “the whole system of language that precedes and makes speech possible”, and Parole,” the concrete use of the language, the actual utterances.5” Saussure draws a distinction between the language itself and the way in which it is used, the external expression of langue, if you will. Here, I propose that the appropriateness of the employment of ‘non’fiction and/or fiction are functions of the situation. Take for instance, The Yacoubian Building; the non-nonfiction (adding the non-non to fiction is my attempt to reconstruct my own usage of language so that the root becomes nonfiction and the Non-something, previously reserved for nonfiction, becomes allocated for fiction, for the sake of diversity and not for an ideological reason per se) allows for the nonfiction to become possible. That is to say because The Yacoubian Building framed the issue as resultant of the author’s imagination, more activists today are engaging in the debate of the sanctioned torture of homosexuals by the Egyptian government. So perhaps it is not a challenge/race to obtain the best terminology as Tuchman portrays in her article; rather, it is what the situation dictates as to what would allow for the truth claim to disseminate. That is not to say that it is acceptable or even justifiable to abstain from disseminating certain videos or photographs that reveal injustice and calamity. Rather, I propose that one should employ whatever one has to disseminate that truth claim and if the government banned, say, a certain video from being broadcast, one can still employ those other methods (i.e. fiction) to pave the way for the nonfiction to emerge.
Furthermore, I suggest that even when political constraints are not present, revealing a journalistic truth can capture the concrete aspects of the matter and revealing an emotional truth can express the nuances hidden under the surface. I am not arguing that an emotional truth does not have the capacity to reveal those concrete aspects and that a journalistic truth fails to reveal the nuances; rather, emotional truths have more space to uncover the nuances because they do not strictly adhere to what empirically happened (which might make speculation unethical since unless the subject explicitly revealed a certain feeling, an artist cannot enforce that feeling in the truth claim since the artist was not there when the crime happened. Subjects might shy away from fully expressing their entire spectrum of emotions for various complex reasons). On the other hand, emotional truths cannot claim that they are portraying reality as it is empirically and concretely constructed since the elements of their expose is primarily imaginative. Therefore, I think fiction and nonfiction are both tools that should be used to reveal truth accounts of the worst crimes and it is not a race between fiction-oriented artists and nonfiction-oriented artists; rather, it is a race between people who strive to reveal a certain truth account and those who exert their economic, political, and social power as to suppress it.
Ultimately, whether one is creating a fictitious or a non-fictitious account, it is indispensible to immerse oneself in one’s project as to be the closest a subjective actor (with preset beliefs and biases) can be to presenting a ‘truth’ claim. As the great James Alexander Thom eloquently puts it, “you’ll know you’re ready to write when you begin to dream about your characters… you’ve researched every little plat map in the country. You’re surrounded by diaries, written in tiny spidery letters.6”
1Ryan, Paul. Willy Ronis 55. London: Phaidon Press Inc, 2002
2 I do not know how to cite this as all that was mentioned on The Yacoubian Building and the way in which it opened up the discourse on homosexuality in Egypt is prior knowledge that was obtained from two classes I took while I was at the American University in Cairo.
3 The article can be found by following the URL:
http://www.diabolicdigest.net/Middle%20East/Rainbow.htm
4 Tuchman, Barbara. Practicing History. Ballantine Books, 1982. The page from which I quote is 46.
5 These defintions can be found by following the URL:
http://changingminds.org/explanations/critical_theory/concepts/langue_parole.htm
6 Campbell & Mills. "Witing History That Comes Alive." Writer's Digest. March 1998: 41
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Ted Bogosian And His Untruths About Monte Melkonian
By Ara Manoogian
17 years following his martyrdom in Artsakh, Armenian national hero Monte Melkonian is once again a victim of defamation. I came across a very interesting interview on Radio Open Source with an Armenian decorated filmmaker and documentarian Ted Bogosian. The subject of the interview was Ted's vocation - seeking the truth and telling it. Open Source host Christopher Lydon introduced Ted Bogosian as a truth hound and put the 'what is truth' question to him (see: http://www.radioopensource.org/ted-bogosian-confessions-of-a-truth-hound/). What I heard in response less than halfway through the interview led me to think that Ted may have misheard Christopher, thinking he had been asked 'what is a lie' or, for that matter, how to present a lie as truth.
As someone committed to truth seeking, I was at first thrilled to learn about an alternative experience from a prominent Armenian until I heard the following statements made by him:
"In Armenian Journey there is a very important sequence which didn’t make the cut. And that is that I started to pursue an interview with a young man of my age and background named Monte Melkonian. And Monte was born in about the same year, in the central valley of California. And while I was at Duke, he was at Berkley, and when I went to graduate school, he went to graduate school in Beirut. And he was pursuing the truth about the Genocide in his own way and he became radicalized and he went underground and started selling arms and started selling drugs and started an Armenian terrorist movement. And so while I was making Armenian Journey, he was in jail in France, for having masterminded several bombings in Europe, at Orly Airport and at Turkish embassies and other businesses, where many innocent people were killed. And so, I went to see Monte in prison, and it was quite a moment, because he thought that I was there to kill him since he didn’t know who I was and wasn’t expecting a visitor that day. But I came to start corresponding with him and came to understand his manifesto, and I realized that what he was doing was similar to what I was doing except in a different theater. And so, my battle was against the media to try to tell the story one way, and his battle was more traditional. So, that didn’t make the cut because I wouldn’t have been able to get the film on television had I presented that manifesto. But I mention it because I want to say that I think this sort of thing is in the blood not only of Armenians but of people who want to tell the truth and, that is, they’re willing to go there no matter where it leads." (The audio fragment is at 09:16-11:36).
Having devoted over a decade of my life researching Monte Melkonian's brief and thorny path, it was especially saddening for me to hear such irresponsible and defaming statements coming out of a fellow truth seeker's mouth. These statements manifest shoddiness of research, sweeping generalizations and a self-indulgent distortion of recent Armenian history. I would like to see one single piece of evidence that supports Mr. Ted Bogosian’s claim that Monte Melkonian was a drug dealer, arms dealer and a founder of a terrorist movement, who masterminded the Orly operation. These are the three major things against which Melkonian had been struggling with all his essence, endangering his life in the process. It was the Orly operation that catalyzed the split of Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA). To be more specific, below I have singled out each of Ted Bogosian's inaccurate claims. Let's start from the most innocent inaccuracies.
Ted Bogosian's claim #1: “And Monte was born in about the same year.”
Ted Bogosian was born in 1951, whereas Monte Melkonian was born in 1957.
Ted Bogosian's claim #2: “…and when I went to graduate school, he [Monte Melkonian] went to graduate school in Beirut.”
Monte Melkonian was admitted to a graduate school at Oxford, but chose to give up his academic career in favor of a trip to Beirut at the onset of the second phase of the civil war and joined the defense of Bourj Hammoud, the Armenian quarter of the city.
Ted Bogosian’s claim #3: “…and [Monte Melkonian] started selling arms and started selling drugs…”
All the accounts of people who knew him, whether interviewed by me or other researchers, including those who spoke up at their own initiative, indicate that Monte was adamantly opposed to drugs, be it for use or for sale. Throughout my research, I haven't come across any evidence of Monte being involved in arms or drug dealing. According to one of Monte's brothers-in-arms, once Monte, already a Commander of Martuni Defense Region, refused Samvel Babayan, Commander of the Nagorno-Karabakh Defense Army, to promote an officer only because he smoked marijuana. He had even banned his soldiers from using alcohol, which was common practice in other detachments. More importantly, Monte earned himself highly influential enemies after burning lucrative cannabis fields in a noble attempt to shut down the local drug trade. This deed was followed by a few attempts on his life. One might assume that Monte could use the proceeds from supposed drug sales to feed and equip the poorly armed fighters under his command. All evidence indicates that he had ignored any such compromise.
Ted Bogosian’s claim #4: “…he [Monte Melkonian] started a terrorist movement.”
This is an outright false statement. ASALA, to which Ted Bogosian refers, was founded in 1975 in Beirut, Lebanon during the first phase of the Lebanese Civil War by Harutiun Takoshian, alias Hagop Hagopian. This was 3 years before Monte arrived in Lebanon for the first time. Monte was recruited by ASALA in 1980 after serving in an Armenian militia group in the Beirut suburb of Bourj Hammoud helping defend the Armenian population during the civil war. Furthermore, based on the accounts of both supporters and opponents of ASALA, Monte played a pivotal role in the violent split of the organization in 1983 into those who supported the despotic leader Hagop Hagopian and those who disapproved his methods of struggle exactly because it took innocent lives, as well as distracted the attention from the cause the attacks were supposed to raise awareness of.
Ted Bogosian’s claim #5: “…he [Monte Melkonian] was in jail in France, for having masterminded several bombings in Europe, at Orly Airport and at Turkish embassies and other businesses, where many innocent people were killed.”
A sweeping generalization. Monte Melkonian was arrested for possession of a falsified passport and an illegal handgun in Paris on November 28, 1985. He was sentenced to six years but served only three and a half. The Orly airport attack, which took place on July 15, 1983, and did kill and wound many innocent people, was masterminded by his already archenemy Hagop Hagopian and carried out by the latter's supporters in Paris. The only people tried for the Orly airport attack were Varadjian Garbidjian (also spelled as Varoujan Garabedian life sentence, released 17 years later), Soner Nayir (15 years), Ohannes Semerci (10 years). Parallel to the preparation of the Orly operation, inner turmoil was in progress within ASALA due to the widening gap between the members of the organization over the despotic leadership of Hagopian, the methods of struggle and, specifically, the implementation of the Orly attack. Monte was in the opposition wing. But despite his efforts to cancel the the Orly operation, it was implemented, accelerating the final split of ASALA.
Who knows, the Karabagh war could have been a lost cause, had Monte Melkonian been the mastermind of the Orly airport attack and therefore gotten a life sentence? Melkonian was arrested twice. In his court documents there was neither evidence, nor allegations supporting Mr. Bogosian’s announcement regarding his participation in the attack in any form, as well as arms and/or drug dealing. It would have been convenient for the French authorities and to Monte’s enemies to find such evidence, but there was none. To support my claim, I suggest that interested individuals read The Right to Struggle, My Brother’s Road, Reality, A Self Criticism and a dozen other books.
Ted Bogosian's claim #6: “I went to see Monte in prison, and it was quite a moment, because he thought that I was there to kill him…”
Okay, let me try to get this straight. Monte thought that Mr. Bogosian came to the prison to kill him? So, Mr. Bogosian is saying that Monte thought an Armenian-American filmmaker was going to walk into a high security prison, formerly a concentration camp, armed guards watching his every move, and kill him? What about checking for weapons before entering the highly guarded visiting room? Ted Bogosian makes it sound like Monte was in a health spa in the South of France.
I provided my arguments as accurately as I could and am willing to embrace supporting evidence that proves Mr. Bogosian's claims. Otherwise, as a friend of mine put it, Mr. Bogosian's interview is more like "Ted talking about Ted - not the truth." I welcome facts, as they will enrich our knowledge about who Monte really was. With that said, I invite Ted Bogosian to set the record straight by exchanging his recollections with evidence and facts. Otherwise a public apology from Ted Bogosian is in order.
Ara Manoogian is a human rights activist representing the Shahan Natalie Family Foundation in Artsakh and Armenia, as well as a member of the Washington-based Policy Forum Armenia (PFA)
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vBlog by Ibiayi Briggs, Sue Ding, and Liling Soh on Critical Theories/Practices of Media
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzcx9a6lOC8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2VBBEwIttE
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Isabel Parkes
Thematic Essay: Signs & Speed[1]
Professor James Der Derian
3 March 2010
Yes I know the Marlboro Man: the Power of the Sign
Thematic Essay in response to the question: Which is more powerful, an empire of signs (ie. immaterial) or an empire of resources (ie. material)?
Though until relatively recently, the empire that controlled the largest proportion of human, natural and man-made resources was most powerful, contemporary shifts in technologies and in the nature of hegemony itself have revealed that an even greater power lies within signs and images, within more intangible (and ubiquitous) elements in our growing global economy. Today it seems that perhaps sight and surface shape the public more than guns and steel. With this apparent shift from the resource to the sign, a frightening amount of control is up for global grabs. Vital to the shift and its consequences has been the role of the public as well as the rise of mass media, players in an equation that duo Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Guy Debord and Robin Andersen address in their respective texts. Ultimately, each author hints at the waning of material influence across the globe and highlights the growing dominance of the image, all the while exploring the benefits and consequences of this more immaterial moment in time.
As Benedict Anderson charted the rise of print capitalism – in particular the way in which its increasing speed and number of converts to literacy meant a new trajectory for languages of power – so too do authors Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri address imperialism. Yet imperialism is really a starting-off point for their trajectory into a new form of Empire,[2] in which much has been erased and a new dialectic of power exists between the Empire itself and a rebellious, conscious proletariat. In essence, write the two authors in preface of their Marxist tome, Empire, “Imperialism was really an extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries. Eventually nearly all of the world’s territories could be parceled out and the entire world map could be coded in European colors…” Thus imperialism not only physically mapped out resources by delineating borders and color-coding nations but also more intangibly marked the importance of images in empires; that is, imperialism marked a transition from resources as power to a more effective, immaterial demarcation of place. Control no longer simply took the form of brute force but rather snuck directly into the lives of colonized peoples by way of print media, radio and later, televised propaganda. Hardt and Negri distinguish the more tangible, material effects and goals of imperialism from those of the postmodern Empire for which their text is named. They write that in gross contrast to imperialism, “Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (xii). They continue in this vein, describing how the very “concept of Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: …no limits…no temporal boundaries” (xiv). Later in the work, they explain how “ “Discourse” and “interpretation” are presented as powerful weapons against the institutional rigidities of the modernist perspectives,” again referencing the Hegelian binary between Empire and its influenced/influencing public, which engages with intellect and not necessarily with force. They add here that “The resulting postmodernist analyses point toward the possibility of a global politics of difference, a politics of deterritorialized flows across a smooth world, free of the rigid striation of state boundaries,” and breathe life into a power structure that operates as a more silent network (142). This “non-place” as they later call it seems governed by the silent, the virtual – which again seems to reference the intangibilities of political and cultural power. It is “defined by the productive activity that is autonomous from any external regime of measure…By the [term] virtual we understand the set of powers to act (being, loving, transforming, creating) that reside in the multitude” (357). Thus the powers are plural, they do not reside in one location but rather in many. So then one must ask what is at stake in this new system of power, this Empire, that Hardt & Negri so enthusiastically describe? Here Guy Debord – within his 1967 text Society and Spectacle – precedes the discussion with warnings of mass manipulation and particularly, overabundance of images and commodity fetishism. Similarly influenced by Marxist trends, Debord brings to light the threat of a society in which authenticity is replaced by representation, in which the spectacle surrounds us, in which even “truth is a moment of falsehood” (14).
Debord warns us in his first thesis of the “immense accumulation of spectacles” that now characterizes modern society. He defines the spectacle in thesis four, writing that it is “not a collection of images; [but] rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (12). The problem, he explains, is that
Here we have the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by things whose qualities are “at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.” This principle is absolutely fulfilled in the spectacle, where the perceptible world is replaced by a set of images that are superior to that world yet at the same time impose themselves as eminently perceptible loss of quality (26).
This quote outlines a few important points to his argument and to our larger discussion of the power of signs. Though he acknowledges at the beginning of the sentence that signs dominate society, he hints at their subversive and manipulative nature: the masses believe that they understand the images, that they “perceive” them both literally and intellectually, yet they are truly imperceptible and their sheer abundance replaces quality with quantity. This perhaps too-common postmodern conundrum nevertheless exposes a clear problem within the hegemony of the sign: that same “loss of quality” translates to desensitization of the masses, and therefore a lessening of its power. However instant communication may be for us today – for example through technologies like the Web - it is still “essentially one way.” Debord expands this idea in writing that “the concentration of the media thus amounts to the monopolization by the administrators of the existing system of the means to pursue their particular forms of administration” (20). The public, according to Debord, is lulled into passive, deathly acceptance of the abundant sign: “The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such, the autonomous movement of non-life… the unity it [the spectacle] is merely the official language of generalized separation” (12). The public is unknowingly separating itself from authenticity, from the very truth claim that today’s media famously grasps for.
So then perhaps then Robin Andersen’s text, A Century of Media, a Century of War, might offer a meditative space for Hardt & Negri and Debord in which the pros and cons of our spectacle-laden society can be interrogated. Certainly, Andersen begins by fulfilling the immaterial-sign-as-power prophecy that we have laid out, but does she maintain it? The author’s first and perhaps most powerful supporting example comes in her 2006 text’s opening paragraphs, in which she describes the leaked photographs of prisoners at Abu Ghraib: “The naked, hooded Iraqis will forever hold a prominent position in the global catalogue of human misery documented photographically over the last one hundred and fifty years. They are arguably a visual rendering of evil itself, not as an abstract construct, but as the brutality humans inflict upon one another” (xvii). The photographic images described here - silent and largely intangible signs - not only ‘went global,’ but managed to embody the evilness of a race and to spark national and international debate within the public sphere. The passivity of modern consumers that Debord describes seems rapidly turned into action, the masses that Hardt & Negri describe rebelling against Empire seem alive and feisty.
Andersen wavers, however, and hastens balance her academic argument by describing public reactions to both the El Salvador conflict of the 1980s and the more recent 9/11 Terrorist Attacks in New York City. She writes of the former,
A particularly disturbing type of photograph came to characterize Salvadoran reality. News photographs featured in national magazines imaged piles of bodies, severed heads and gruesome cadavers. To a passive spectator looking at such pictures of dead and mutilated corpses, the impression is one of finality, even disgust. The act exists in the past by the time it reaches the eyes of the magazine reader. There is nothing to be done at present. Such images proclaim forcefully that the worst has already happened (99; emphasis author’s own). Later on she draws on a similarly frightening example from September 11th, writing that “The inability to fully grasp events as they occurred in real time was further hindered by the field of images familiar to media culture, the ones most readily available as frames of reference…Our perceptions have been permanently framed by the sensibilities of those commanding fictions, and television practicioners were certainly under the sway of the techno-hyper real” (197-198). In both instances, Anderson describes the passivity viewers felt because of perceived distance (physical, temporal) from the event and because of the overwhelming effect of “hyper-real” footage – that is, what is too viscerally, too closely real to us. The question therein arises, of whether or not the public is equipped to understand and act upon signs.
Accounting for the arguments of each author, I give a cautioned yes. Despite the steady deluge of images and signs that surround clutter our contemporary landscape, the power of the sign cannot be belittled. American intellectual “[Walter] Lippmann asserted that public judgment was based not on valid criteria, but on the images of the world people hold in their heads, often based on misconceptions, stereotypes and emotional associations” (313). Andersen cites Lippmann’s somewhat pessimistic remark yet importantly (as she does in other parts of her text), underscores the capacity of signs and human mind to forge a productive relationship built around truth and the constant questioning thereof. Debord too, calls for a group -- “that class which is able to effect the dissolution of all classes” – that will take up “arms to impose its own conditions upon the world” (154). Hardt and Negri’s invigorated proletariat may be just this. What binds these authors together is their emphasis on human agency, on the active and aware will of the masses. Only through a conscious undertaking and understanding of signs can the masses harness the power of the empire it comprises. Knowing that the media is arguably the best and most important locale to be understood, let the masses continue with their interrogation thereof.
[1] NB. In answering the question of “Which is more powerful, an empire of signs (ie. immaterial) or an empire of resources (ie. material)?” we must first hasten to understand power. Let us simply say that for our purposes, power resides in a system’s supreme cultural, political and economic control and that an empire is just one of many such systems that we have chosen to address.
[2] Hence their capitalization of the term.