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Did we meet the seminar objectives?

What did we learn?

What did we like about the seminar?

What is still unclear?

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This session was nicely organized by Mylene's effort of the Padlet. We have had a fruitful conversation and we all shared new insights related to the content of the stuff to be discussed. The recap of the previous sessions was helpful, so we were all on the same line and we could build further on the stuff. This is very helpful for having a good conversation. Learning objectives have been looked upon very closely and luckily everyone participates actively.

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Let's create a mindmap together, for every 'Post...' theory.

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We are going to do a short discourse analysis:

Discourse analysis uses the language presented in a body of data to draw meaning.

While some forms of discourse analysis centre in on the specifics of language (such as sounds or grammar), other forms focus on how this language is used to achieve its aims.

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How is everyone doing?

How did the third week of IDS go?

Are there any questions, uncertainties, things to discuss?

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What did you think of chapter 6 and the lecture?

If you have any questions, you can ask them now,  or add them under the 'Questions' section at the end of this Padlet!

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I would like to do it a bit different today; a bit more interactive, more discussion together and a few 'assignments'.

1. Discuss the main subjects of Chapter 6

2. Create a mind map together

3. We learn how a discourse analysis works

4. We get to know our own 'lens' as an IDS student

5. Discuss a few topics

6. Answer any questions

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1. Recap of previous seminars

2. Chapter 6

3. Post...

4. Power–Truth–Knowledge

5. Questions & Discussion

6. Conclusion

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Do we have any questions/thoughts on the previous theories?

Let's shortly summarize the previous theories together, in  just a few keywords.

Option 1: we divide the theories between everyone

Option 2: we go through the theories together

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Mid-1960s - early 1980s: critical thinking about development was dominated by Marxist, neo-Marxist, and similar theories.

This critical thinking took systematic and structural forms.

These highly generalized theories tried to position every historical event and place each social characteristic as a component in some more general overarching system, be it mode of production, world capitalist system, or global market.

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Representational theories of truth can never be “accurate”; even at their best, theories provide the perspective of a particular prejudiced thinker (Rorty, 1979, 1991).

The relations between reality and the mind are not direct, and therefore ideas cannot be objectively accurate (“truthful”) but instead are linguistically mediated—that is, the play of language creates what is only taken to be “true.” (Derrida, 1930–2004)

In brief, poststructural and postmodern criticism consider “reason” to be a historical and regional form of biased, incomplete and often mythological thought rather than a universal rationality with liberatory potential.

Hence, poststructuralism attacks the central tenets of modern progress: reason, truth, and accuracy (Best and Kelner 1991).

What do you think Best & Kelner mean by this?

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What would Foucault say about fake news? | BBC Ideas

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What do we know about Foucault?

Come up with a few keywords or sentences.

I'll start:

Discourses

The 'Serious Speech Act'

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Do we understand what a discourse is?

Let's try to discover a discourse ourselves!

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Let's use the seminars to create easy, understandable summaries together.

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Step by step:

1. Take 5 minutes to read the article I sent you in Word just before the seminar started.

2. Use the legend: mark words, sentences and other parts of the article to discover what might be the discourse of the organization/person who wrote it.

3. Discuss your findings!

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Group Effort:

Development as a uniform evolutionary route that all societies follow, from agricultural, rural, and traditional societies to postindustrial, urban, and modern forms

To modernize you have to be like us (us vs you)

Rostow - historical stages

Rationalism

Technological and economical innovation, focus --> industrialize, growth centers.

Theory that was dominant in the 50s and 60s

Trickle down: cut taxes for the richest and the benefits will trickle down and benefit the rest of society

Top-down approaches

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Knowledge/Power

For Foucault, power and knowledge are not seen as separate entities but are inevitably related --> knowledge is always an exercise of power and power is always a function of knowledge.

Power/knowledge could be productive and restraining (positive/negative) --> it can limit what we do but also open up new ways of acting and thinking about ourselves.

Example: History of Sexuality --> confession in Christianity: through confessions (form of power) people were motivated to "tell the truth" (produce of knowledge) about personal emotions, sexual desires, lies, etc.

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Discipline

Mechanism of power that regulates thought and behavior of social actors through subtle means.

It works by organizing space (e.g., how a classroom is built), time (e.g., the exact times you are supposed to be at school everyday), and everyday activities.

Modern society is a disciplinary society: power in modern society is exercised through disciplinary means (e.g., prison, hospitals, military, universities).

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Group effort:

It is a reaction to modernization theory

Two sides of the same coin,

''The South answers back''

More holistic and positive view

Still an imperialistic view

Underdevelopment is the result of development elsewhere

The world system theory (core, semi-periphery, periphery)

There is also critique on the modernist idea of unilinear progress in countries

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Group effort:

Modernization and dependency agree on involvement of the state; but neoliberalism wants less involvement of state.

Based on individual capacities of people

Capitalism

Invisible hand (J. Lock) --> market regulates itself, people and economy do whatever they want (privatization), state is just there in case something goes wrong, but not otherwise.

Opposite to socialism and communism

Richer become richer, poorer become poorer.

Eliminating concept of public goods and replacing it with personal responsibility. If you cannot tag along, you'll be 'punished' ; it's your own fault (e.g. you're lazy) and not that of the system.

Based on classical theory of economy

Increased privatization

Critical towards ISI model

Globalization was created through neoliberalism.

Opening world-economy, deregulation, opening free market.

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Doubting knowledge claims

Focusing on specific and local knowledge/ issues

Reader replaces the author as the main source of knowledge

Knowledge is power (Panopticon)

Constructivism; knowledge is relative to social status/ context

Impasse; everything has failed (challenging development thinking)

Structures; considered less important --> more agency

Agency; critique on modern rationality

Focus shifts from trying to explain everything

Deconstruction; depriving theorization of certainties of modernist thinking/ modernist rationality

Hidden metaphors; Foucault will expand on this.

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Postcolonialism is a critical discourse.

Critique colonialist power structures.

Extreme skepticism about Western projections of reason, truth and progress.

The post colonial critique sought to undo Europe's appropriation of 'the other'.

Literature written in previously colonized countries including history was written from a Western viewpoint.

Offers a counter narrative to the European narrative.

Orientalism Edward Said attempted to explain how European Westernized colonizers looked upon the Orient.

Frantz Fanon - 'Wretched of the Earth'

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Critique on modernization, questioning other cultures' lives: ''we'' think they are poor, but do ''they'' feel so?

Participatory action research (PAR)

Development as a term and idea is obsolete;

Development as a reflection of the Western hegemony to conquer the world (again)

Respect for local knowledge, local autonomy, culture --> cultural relativism

Western over the non-West should be understood ad ideological reproduction and not absolute truth

Less materialistic, downscaling economic life

Propositions: radical pluralism (think and act locally), simple living, degrowth, and appreciating non-capitalist societies (life in the undeveloped world wasn't so bad after all).

Socially just eco-friendly and ecologically sustainable lifestyles.

Moving away from capitalism (consumerism).

Inhuman scale of technologies of the West --> development should be less globally structured and more locally focused.

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Bonus: Foucault's critique on modernist thinking/theory

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Bonus: Foucault's critique on modernist thinking/theory

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Modern reason is like a gaze/force which intrudes in every aspect of people's life and form of experience, and which on its turn is regulated. Those modern Enlightenment ideals are normalizing life and imposes an ''appropriate'' (Western / ''normal'') identity of modern people.

Foucault considers modern rationality as coercive rather than liberating.

Western ideals (universalistic) --> are coercive for the rest of the world.

Think of the idea of the Panopticon: people are implicitly forced to be ''normalized'' (behaving like the West, in this case).

This is related to the Power-Knowledge structure --> if you think you are being controlled by others via, for example, CCTV surveillance.

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The philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously requested in his will that his body be dissected and put on public display. This came to pass, and his skeleton now sits in a glass case at University College London, adorned with a wax head, waistcoat and jacket and sat on a wooden stool, staring out at students from its glass case.

Bentham was regarded as the founder of utilitarianism and a leading advocate of the separation of church and state, freedom of expression and individual legal rights. And now, from beyond the grave, his cadaver contains a webcam that records the movements of its spectators and broadcasts them live online, part of UCL's PanoptiCam project which tests, amonst other things, surveillance algorithms. As I write this, a young couple are walking across the corridor, his hand pressed against the small of her back.

Prof Melissa Terras, director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, tells me that the camera is used to learn the best way "to identify and count different people in still images, accurately." UCL are hoping that it will spark discussion around contemporary surveillance, but it isn't a coincidence that this webcam is attached to Bentham's box. The PanoptiCam project is a pun on the "panopticon", a type of institutional building that has long dominated Bentham's legacy.

The Panopticon legacy

As a work of architecture, the panopticon allows a watchman to observe occupants without the occupants knowing whether or not they are being watched. As a metaphor, the panopticon was commandeered in the latter half of the 20th century as a way to trace the surveillance tendencies of disciplinarian societies. Is it still a useful way to think about surveillance in an age of NSA and GCHQ?

The basic setup of Bentham's panopticon is this: there is a central tower surrounded by cells. In the central tower is the watchman. In the cells are prisoners - or workers, or children, depending on the use of the building. The tower shines bright light so that the watchman is able to see everyone in the cells. The people in the cells, however, aren't able to see the watchman, and therefore have to assume that they are always under observation.

"The panopticon wasn't originally Bentham's idea. It was his brother's," says Philip Schofield, professor of the History of Legal and Political Thought and Director of the Bentham Project at UCL.

"His brother Samuel was working in Russia on the estate in Krichev and he had a relatively unskilled workforce, so he sat himself in the middle of this factory and arranged his workforce in a circle around his central desk so he could keep an eye on what everyone was doing."

Bentham went to visit his brother in the late 1780s, saw what he was doing, and decided the centralised arrangement could be applied to all sorts of different situations - not just prisons but factories, schools and hospitals.

Bentham managed to persuade the prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, to fund a panopticon National Penitentiary, but a stream of problems eventually meant the project was abandoned. Bentham never saw a panopticon built during his lifetime. A number of prisons have since incorporated panopticon elements into their design but it wasn't until the 1920s that the closest thing to a panopticon prison was built - the Presidio Modelo complex in Cuba, infamous for corruption and cruelty, now abandoned.

'The principle is central inspection'

The French philosopher Michel Foucault revitalised interest in the panopticon in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish. Foucault used the panopticon as a way to illustrate the proclivity of disciplinary societies subjugate its citizens.

He describes the prisoner of a panopticon as being at the receiving end of asymmetrical surveillance: "He is seen, but he does not see; he is an object of information, never a subject in communication."

As a consequence, the inmate polices himself for fear of punishment.

"The principle is central inspection," Schofield tells me. "You can do central inspection by CCTV. You don't need a round building to do it. Monitoring electronic communications from a central location, that is panoptic. The real heart of Bentham's panoptic idea is that there are certain activities which are better conducted when they are supervised."

In many ways, the watchtower at the heart of the panopticon is a precursor to the cameras fastened to our buildings - purposely visible machines with human eyes hidden from view.

The parallels between the panopticon and CCTV may be obvious, but what happens when you step into the world of digital surveillance and data capture? Are we still "objects of information" as we swipe between cells on our smartphone screens?

Unlike the Panopticon, citizens don't know they are being watched

Jake Goldenfein, researcher at the Centre for Media and Communications Law, University of Melbourne, tells me it's important to remember the corrective purposes of Bentham's panopticon when considering it as a metaphor for modern surveillance.

"The relevance of the panopticon as a metaphor begins to wither when we start thinking about whether contemporary types of visuality (effectively digital and data-driven) are analogous to the central tower concept. For example, whether this type of visuality is as asymmetrical, and - I think more importantly - being co-opted for the same political exercise. Does the fact that we don't know we're being watched mean we are being normalised in the way the panopticon was intended to correct behaviour?"

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Jeremy Bentham's panopticon diagram Photograph: The Guardian

As Goldenfein suggests, the asymmetrical exposure of inmates in Bentham's building is of a different order to how government bodies such as GCHQ conduct surveillance. In the panopticon the occupants are constantly aware of the threat of being watched - this is the whole point - but state surveillance on the internet is invisible; there is no looming tower, no dead-eye lens staring at you every time you enter a URL.

It wasn't until the Snowden leaks that the scale of NSA and GCHQ operations became known. This arguably makes the system more panoptic post-Snowden, when we are aware of it, but it hasn't been the official rhetoric. The original emphasis, and still the emphasis today, hasn't been on correcting behaviour but on providing security, namely from terrorists.

Another important difference is the relative intangibility of data surveillance. With Bentham's panopticon, and to some extent CCTV, there is a physical sense of exposure in the face of authority.

In the private space of my personal browsing I do not feel exposed - I do not feel that my body of data is under surveillance because I do not know where that body begins or ends. We live so much of our lives online, share so much data, but feel nowhere near as much attachment for our data as we do for our bodies. Without physical ownership and without an explicit sense of exposure I do not normalise my actions. If anything, the supposed anonymity of the internet means I do the opposite.

My data, however, is under surveillance, not only by my government but also by corporations that make enormous amounts of money capitalising on it. Not only that, but the amount of data on offer to governments and corporations is about to go through the roof, and as it does the panopticon may emerge as a model once more. Why? Because our bodies are about to be brought back into the mix.

Facts about data

Internet of things: morals reformed? Health preserved? Industry invigorated?

The looming interconnectivity between objects in our homes, cars and cities, generally referred to as the internet of things, will change digital surveillance substantially. With the advent of wider networked systems, heralded by the likes of Google's Brillo and Apple's HomeKit, everything from washing machines to sex toys will soon be able to communicate, creating a vast amount of data about our lives. And this deluge of data won't only be passed back and forth between objects but will most likely wind its way towards corporate and government reservoirs.

With everything from heart-rate monitors in smartwatches to GPS footwear, a bright light is once again being thrown on our bodies. Will we feel exposed under the gaze of a central tower? Perhaps not, but with habits and physical stats charted against the norm, we will feel scrutinised nevertheless. Much of the justification of this is the alleged benefits to health and wellbeing. "Morals reformed - health preserved - industry invigorated" - not Apple marketing material but Bentham's words on the panopticon.

There may not be a central tower, but there will be communicating sensors in our most intimate objects.

Bentham didn't want the panopticon to be a tool for oppression, and in fact its failure eventually led him to develop a type of anti-panopticon later in life - where a minister sits in an exposed room and is surrounded by members of the public who listen and ask questions.

The idea is that this transparency holds power to account, because the most dangerous people in society can be rulers. It is important that they, as well as prisoners, workers and children, feel watched.

It is difficult not to think of that audience chamber when you stare at Bentham in his box, a skeleton on a stool, an object of information posed for all to see.
Topics

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What does the panopticon mean in the age of digital surveillance?

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The philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously requested in his will that his body be dissected and put on public display. This came to pass, and his skeleton now sits in a glass case at University College London, adorned with a wax head, waistcoat and jacket and sat on a wooden stool, staring out at students from its glass case.

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This session was great because we had a nice recap at the beginning of the seminar on previous theories, which was extremely helpful and is evident on the Padlet. We thoroughly discussed the themes of poststructuralism, post colonialism and post developmentism. One could even say a debate on post colonialism between some of the Dutch members of the group and me the Irish member of the group. But all in good spirit! Mylene did a very good job of condensing and explaining the information of these theories. It is also brilliant to see everyone working together and participating as a team.

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Why does Foucault think power and knowledge are inevitably related?

The knowledge that exists at any given time, the discoveries that are yet to be made or the facts that to be discovered are heavily influenced by that eras power relations.

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Does the knowledge received in the era which we live allow us to have agency? Or does it coerce us to some kind of normality?

Even though, our lives have been shaped in countless ways by the power of society, we still have our own lives (we are own selves) BUT seeing it from Foucault's point of view, he was very skeptical of the idea that there is a "true you" hiding underneath of what society has made of you. Without society, you wouldn't be a person at all. All of us are and always will be normalized to a very large extent. He doesn't think you can break away from the ways you have been shaped by society but by becoming aware of the many ways in which we are subjects to power, we can be a little bit more autonomous than if we remained in the dark about this.

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Summarizing the first theories (modernization, neoliberalism, dependency) in this seminar was useful and served as a nice reminder. This allowed us to establish connections between the various schools of thoughts of the first lectures with the poststructuralism, postcolionalism and postdevelopmentalism. In other words, it helped us understand the roots/background, and answer questions such as: where do they come from? who are the precursors? why did it surge during this period of time?, etc. Through today's seminar, we were able to answer questions about the sections of the chapter that remained unclear and needed a more thorough explanation. Talking about all the "posts" using simple terms (vocabulary) enables us to comprehend it even further.

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I really enjoyed this seminar. Mylene did a great job in 'hosting' this seminar; she made sure there was more of a discussion, ensured everyone contributed and the structure of the Padlet contributed to this. Recapping previous theories helped in understanding post-structuralism better and will help us/me remember the content better. I feel like we discussed all the content of the book chapter and everyone got a better understanding.

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This seminar was great because it gave us the ability to do a recap on the previous chapters. We spent quite some time on it, but it was nice that we could discuss this again with each other. The structure of the Padlet was nice and gave a good overview of the theories of this week. The only feedback that I have is that we spend a little too much time on the recap, causing the fact that we were not able to spend the necessary time in all of the activities that Mylene had planned for this seminar.

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I very much liked how we filled in this seminar. Starting with a summarization of last weeks was very helpful to get into the right mindset for the seminar, as well as refreshing my knowledge. By defining several post-isms, it was clear how they differentiate from each other and what each 'ism' contextualizes. The one thing we perhaps struggled with today was the time. It took us longer than usual to start the seminar, but this was also because of the expanded recap of last weeks (which I personally did not mind).

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The sections that are added/edited by individual group members reflect the group discussion that took place. The individual group member was the note taker.