(172) August 20, 2010
Within days our city will host a spectacular assembly . Dozens of cameras watch us promising that new heaven or paradise called security. Permanent monitoring and control exerted by forces in state hands, and traded in a market that is rubbing his hands with our fear.
One of the most lucid essays on the power of the twentieth century belongs to the French Foucault, rightly called "Discipline and Punish." Foucault puts Europe of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the founding moment of a new society, the discipline. This power opens a silent punishment operates in order to produce bodies and minds domesticated attached. He speaks there
of pastoral power of the State now has a power similar to the Middle Ages with its conception quietist, stun, braking, molds, numb, and convinces us to stay calm and controlled.
Foucault's theory is brilliant: it argues that the reason there is the cost of segregating the madness, the same way that social order there is the cost of imprisoning those who commit crimes. Reason and social order are in the center of learning and passing ballot to the madness and crime. That is, we can be calm, madmen and criminals are locked up in prison. Mental hospital and prison as a guarantee that all is well. Shrink and imprisonment for the court to be free. Governance, which is set through the political economic, security needs as a premise.
extraordinary thing about this objection is to argue that the reason would not exist if there were no asylums, and the legal order if there were no prisons. Foucault turns the tables: the madness is not the opposite, the other, of reason, but one of its sides. The insane to the asylum, and the criminals to jail for society work. Do more asylums and of course many prisons as you Duhalde, to ensure order. But what order? The order determines the power. And why? To hide the fact that the most dangerous criminals, the white collar, not only free but also will be those who continue to impose the rules of the game.
Foucault then goes a step further and bare how the system before punishing rather watch, not because it is more humane, but because it is cheaper. The Panopticon, the great tower from which everything is controlled is history. Video cameras became as obsolete and almost naive. Sixty cameras will be within hours tracing our steps.
few questions: Does it mean a defeat for the state having to watch so its citizens? Do not leave bare something that did or did very badly? Who will monitor? Tune the question, Who seek to monitor? Can we ignore our prisons are full of the poor that the system produces and then expelled?, Is there a high dose of hypocrisy when it is suspected that the crime is only in the street? The devastation that meant brutal dictatorship, the Peronist and Radical neoliberalism, are not the result of what we cook up spurious pacts behind the same people who today support be monitored in the streets no less than many of them?, Do I need to see how these cameras have been used worldwide to control and political repression of popular protest as much intended to question the system? Who is going to take care of those who say ourselves? What place will the police, an institution strongly committed to the crime rather than ensuring safety, is a direct cause of your aggravation?
In a few days we watched, observed, almost like insects. The task look like when universalized and reproduction of power and knowledge. A moment par excellence of a present guise of progress has become subtly arrogant and authoritarian.
0 comments:
Post a Comment