A Review for the essay and Presentation:
Arguments from the articles in the Kit on University and Popular
culture
University and Society
• Popular culture
• Intellectualism
• Anti-intellectualism
A university is an institution of higher
education and of research, which
grants academic degrees.
•University shapes intellectuals
•Its tools: disciplines, professors, curricula,
Libraries, readings
•Outcome: Shaping individual’s minds,
thoughts, professions and careers.
Popular culture shapes public assumptions and
opinions on Intellectuals.
e.g.: movies or Ads shape the popular images
of professors, students, and schools.
Intellectualism:
• Content and methods of one who pursues
knowledge in science and art.
Anti-intellectualism
• describes hostility towards, or a mistrust of
intellectuals, and their intellectual pursuits.
• expressed in various ways: e.g., attack on
the merits of science, education, or literature
Anti-intellectualism (contd.)
• Reflects an attitude that simply takes
"intellectualism" with a grain of salt
• Assumes that intellectuals may be vain
or narcissistic in their self-image,
• “Common people” view intellectuals
as a fallible human archetype.
Where does it exist?
• In every country
• Most influential in USA
• New England Puritan writer John
Cotton wrote in 1642:
"The more learned and witty you bee,
the more fit to act for Satan will you
bee."
Popular cultural representations: Movies, TV and
other pop media
Dimitriadis, G (2006) :
•Representations have cumulative power
•Conversations privilege certain thought and
discourses
•Dimitriadis, G. (2006) 'On the Production of Expert Knowledge: Revisiting Edward Said's work on the intellectual', Discourse:
Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 27:3, 369 – 382.
On university & Popular culture
•Morrison (2000): University must examine, evaluate,
posit and reinforce values.
•Giroux (2002): Corporate culture has intruded into and
taken over the university
• Tsoukas: Popular public assumption is the authorities’
knowledges (i.e. information) give them the power to
manage the society.
On popular media:
Winter, J (2002): The repercussions of the media concentration in
Canada for the general public are the loss of editorial autonomy of
each paper and its columnists. corporate headquarters, not the editors
make news judgments. In this process, dissenting views are censored
and repressed.
Yang, M., et al.(2006): Media advertising affects consumers'
purchase decisions might not only be conscious but unconscious.
Characters’ use of brands and a story association with brands than
brands placed in the background are recognized at higher levels of
cognition.
Andrejevic, M (2011): Relentless privatization of a publicly funded
Internet as a public space has led to the commercial colonization that
turned it into an economy based on surveillance. This power of
surveillance manages & controls consumers in their behaviour on the
web. Commercialization manipulates the social relations between the
users and the commercial entity to control users’ access and to
commercially benefit from tracking the public that empowered it.
Uses of popular media for health monitoring:
Bauer & Olsen (2009): monitoring and imaging of the body and
digital databases – collect data on population health becomes
surveillance in new ways.
Surveillance modes: Panoptic, oligoptic and synoptic , together
operate in medical observation. Techniques of surveillance
monitors the individual patient’s body
As it is deployed in making clinical decisions upon the medical
evidence and in preventing health problems. Surveillance being
inherent to diagnostics in the present times, it is a key
mechanism in governing populations.
Is Online learning a system for managing and controlling people
according to the objectives, i.e., to regulate learning
Stricker et al. (2011): If Online learning is combined with lecture in
class may not increase students’ workload much, while improving
their course performance
In contrast, several studies have shown that online learning may
increase students’ workload, and may lead to a higher dropout rate of
online learners (Carr, 2000; Dutton, Dutton, & Perry, 2002).
Is online learning a ‘disciplining’ or self-actualizing process?
Good achievement via self-regulated learning requires a strong
will to learn and excellent learning skills (Torrano & González,
2004).
Junco, R, et al 2011). Twitter
communication,
engagement, and the democratization of roles and
relationships
mobilized faculty to query students and
more mutual conversations
academic, co-curricular,
and personal support
Social Networking (popular media) as an educational tool:
Educational use of social networking technology in higher
education (Hsiu-Ting Hung and Steve Chi-Yin Yuen)
SN facilitates:
•development of classroom communities
•strengthening students’ emotional connectedness
•participants’ enhanced engagement and mutual support
Hung & Yuen (cont’d)
Foucault: Discipline: People are regulated by instruments of
power which organize their space (architecture) and time
(schedule).
Hung & Yuen: Students’ perceptions of enhanced sense of classroom
community were closely related to the information sharing function
and the interaction function of the social media.
Foucault: Surveillance: A constant gaze controls the prisoners
affecting not only what they do but how they see themselves
Foucault: Discourse: “Practices of obeying certain rules”
Hung & Yuen Social networking for building ‘community of
learners’: sharing personal interests -This course site was fun and
interesting-feel more connected and closer to them-expect to get
feedback
http://tvo.org/video/210751/susan-pinker-village-effect
Susan Pinker says real world social circles are essential to our wellbeing and health,
and as valuable as exercise and good diet. Susan Pinker sits down with Steve Paikin
to discuss what it lost when we rely on social media for our human connections.
Kelly, P. et al (2007): Individualization, Normalization &
Body shaped by knowledge/power
F’s ethical self formation through diversity of conduct:
• Determination of ethical substance
• Mode of subjection
• Ethical work
• Purpose of the ethical subject
A ‘Corporate Athlete’: normalized body; health of the body
over the role of the mind; profile score of body fitness;
corporate health is linked to employees’ health;
freedom/ethics of self is practiced in pursuit of management
devised (outsourced) goals; one becomes such a person
through the discursive practices: being balanced, effective,
regular.
F’s Ethical self: F’s themes for Plagiarism/cheating
Advanced Capitalist society: cut-throat competition,
insecurities and uncertainties in the workplace.
‘Individualized’ worker/citizen: They have to
exercise/practice their freedom in specific ways that
conforms to the expectation of the market place
F’s term ‘Conduct’: equivocal in nature- is it conformity to
power as it suits one’s purpose or is it questioned as
unethical
Character (Sennett, R. (1998) cited in Kelly (2007)): loyalty,
mutual commitment, ethical value of our desires and of our
relations with others.
How do we decide what is of lasting value in ourselves in a
society that pushes immediate gratification?
F’s process of formation of an ethical self.
Judith Butler:
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/articles/foucault-and-the-paradox-of-bodily-inscriptions/
• Resist normative power
• Gender Trouble: normalization is repeated performance –
normative is repetition of the norm
• Resist hierarchal binarism
e.g.: drag queens- better women (high normative feminism)
compared to women
• Subversion by changing a little each time you represent through
disruption
Repetitions often fail to perfectly conform to the norms that
inspire/require them.
• How many of us fail to perform ideal (hetero, white, ablebodied, middle-class) masculinity or femininity? Even most
hetero white able-bodied middle-class women fail to perform
ideal femininity
• In the potential for (intentionally or unintentionally) imperfect
repetitions, that disciplinary power produces its own resistances.
•
•
•
Truth is produced by institutions and by scientific
discourses formulated in relation to these institutions
The state’s (or any organized) dominant economic and
political structures control the production and
transmission of the truth
We assume it is truth when it becomes ‘hardened into an
unalterable form in the long baking process of history’
F’s Genealogy’s role:
• to connect different events according to ‘the emergence
of different interpretations’
• to explain these different interpretations as a ‘perspective’
rather than a universal or transcendental truth.
Foucault utilizes genealogy to figure out the various practices
applied on the body and the dominating powers that produce
such practices.
Foucault:
• Constructing the Docile Bodies through Disciplines, the new
political technology of the body (137) :
• Cellular (located bodies in (spatial Enclosures)
• Organic (Specified Repetitive activities)
• Genetic (Trained and Timed in hard work of
production)
• Combinatory :Division of labour and organizing ranks
& classes as units of production- Marx, Capital, vol. 1.
311-12) (Hierarchical Isolation)
COG-D of L
THIERS
http://www.firstpost.com/topic/person/michel-foucault-docile-bodies-vs-college-soccer-video-FERxP_8qmJU-9332-3.html
Source: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/docile-bodies see examples on blogs
Cellular—Spatial manipulation of the body
Draw up tables
Cells, places, and ranks
Organic—Coded activities that are temporally established for
the body to follow
Prescribe movements and schedules
Time-tables, monastic rituals, and following recipes
Genetic—Accumulation of time constituting ‘progress.’
Impose exercises
Dictation, Homework, and Drills
Combinatory—Composition of forces to attain efficiency.
Arranges ‘tactics’
“Knowledge of men, weapons, tensions, circumstances…”
Explained another way:
Disciplined bodies, e.g., in prisons, the
military, the corporate world and in schools.
Modern Times (Chaplin US 1936), …Gattaca
(Niccol US 1997),
•
•
•
•
Spatial division of individuals
Control of their activities,
Organization of individuals into groups
Coordination of these different groups
Morrison (2000): How to resist docility:
(Cellular) University must teach students to examine their own values
and those of society. spatial Enclosures
(Organic) Process: Interrogation of U’s purpose: Specified Repetitive
(Genetic) Students/ profs. must be encouraged to: Trained and Timed
• do public volunteer service
• debate readings and their political implications
• do research for public good not private profit
• interrogate complex ethical problems
(D of L): University’s role: Hierarchical Isolation
•Guard civic freedoms through ensuring democratic practices
•Examine social problems and individual responsibilities in
establishing ethics/truth in behaviour
Giroux:
Higher education
• is seen as a commodity (C spatial Enclosures)
• embodies value of market driven self interest (G Trained
and Timed )
• promotes consumer life styles (O Specified Repetitive activities)
• produces market identity (G Trained and Timed )
• lacks accountability & social responsibility (D of L
Hierarchical Isolation)
Giroux: Corporate funding of and corporate culture in
higher education:
• Corporate control over what and how we
learn/research in univ. reduces ability of the state and
civil society spatial Enclosures (univ. not open to shape one’s self or
social values)
• Driven by profit motive - ‘applied’ (vs. ‘pure’)
research Trained and Timed
• Experiments at the cost of ethics Specified Repetitive
activities
• Advances vocational learning vs. pure knowledge
Trained and Timed
F’ s Savoir and Connaissance :
Savoir: (what we call real knowledge)
•To know or to be known – to know as well as knowledge
e.g., a theorem, a continent, an atom,
•It can be quite abstract or concrete
•Such knowledge is not genuine if its object is nonexistent or false
•It need not be the product of a reliable method or pedagogy
•It need not be precise or fully justified
•It can fall short of proof—a domain not of things known but of things to
be known
Connaissance: relatively superficial mode of knowledge,
•Grounded in incomplete information or incomplete research or
knowledge of minimal degree
•It could only be translated as cognition or learning or a body of learning
or expertise
•Tied to highly developed apparatuses of justification , modes of
competence supported by well-crystallized apparatuses of background
training.
•A cognitive state is an effect of power
Foucault ‘s biopower
•It is a technology which appeared in the late eighteenth century for
managing populations.
•It incorporates disciplinary power.
•Disciplinary power is about training the actions of individuals (their
bodies)
•Biopower is that of official organizations (the state or government)
managing the society: births, deaths, reproduction and illnesses of a
population.
•Refer to the practice of modern states and their regulation of their
subjects through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques
for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of
populations.” (Foucault).
Humphreys, A (2007):
1.Foucault’s examples of power/knowledge at work in mechanisms of
discipline cf. in the science of marketing. Marketers’ use Internet tools to
discipline consumers by individuating, surveying, and legitimizing their
preferences
2.Documentation of every individual
• Essentialize them using their past and present preferences to
diagnosing future tendencies (psychoanalyst has expertise,
“knowledge claim”, and thus power over his patient)
3.Mechanism of individuation by “wish list” i.e., consumer identity
(classifying, organizing, and labeling them) for marketing analysis
4.Consumers living in our narcissistic culture want to be watched. Not
paranoids as being seen in the Panopticon
5.In image culture, the embeddedness of the gaze i.e., gaze is internalized
by controlling how consumers themselves see
6.Consumer insists that he then can reason and resist, e.g. Illegalities:
Pilfering Versus File Sharing these forms of resistance from within occur
in the form of practice, i.e.,ethics rather than morals.
Foucault: Disciplinary power constructs a Docile
Body
1.
2.
3.
4.
Surveilled body
Objectified Body
Controlled Body
Disciplined body
Discipline is the Technology of Power that turns
the body docile.
Repetitive, trained:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfFhuj1VONw
Power shapes bodies into : (Foucault, Michel (1995). Discipline
and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.)
1.Objectified Body
From the Classical age : the body as object, a target of
power - body is manipulated, shaped trained, made to
obey and learn skills & rules - body is used, subjected and
analyzed and manipulated
2. Controlled Body:
Works individually in retail - Coercion is used to shape/
‘improve’ movement, attitudes, gestures; Body’s modes
and economy are tailored for efficient control through
uninterrupted coercion
3. Disciplined body:
The body is disciplined through surveillance and control in
all aspects as to turn it docile. Discipline produces
‘pracitised bodies’ .
1.Objectified Body
From the Classical age : the body as object, a target of power body is manipulated, shaped trained, made to obey and learn
skills & rules - body is used, subjected and analyzed and
manipulated
Keller (2005):Ab/Normal Looking: Voyeurism and surveillance in lesbian pulp novels and US
Cold War culture, Feminist Media Studies, 5 (2):177-195.
• Popular culture is the space of homogenization - Stereotyping
objectifies the matter, person and experience
• Voyeurism controls the private, the sexual – Surveillance
controls the public, the criminal, and political.
• Bond & Playboy - Gaze, the voyeuristic eye, coding woman as
its object
[Popular culture is] the space of homogenization where stereotyping and the formulaic
mercilessly process the material and experiences it draws into its web ... It is rooted in
popular experience and available for expropriation at one and the same time ... [A]ll
popular cultures ... are] bound to be contradictory ... site[s] (pp. 469-70) of strategic
contestation. (Stuart Hall 1996, )
2. Controlled Body: (Foucault)
Works individually in retail - Coercion is used to shape/
‘improve’ movement, attitudes, gestures; Body’s modes
and economy are tailored for efficient control through
uninterrupted coercion
Keller (2005):
Coercion through voyeurism:
• Voyeurism in popular culture serves as a method for the
dominant culture to control the Other
• Voyeurism is also a desire to identify with the Other while
simultaneously desiring to guard the boundary between self
and Other
• Inscribing the self : The gaze controls and punishes: We
“come to know how we are constituted and who we are“
through the way we represent and imagine ourselves
• Desires are both satiated and punished
3. Disciplined body:
The body is disciplined through surveillance and control
in all aspects as to turn it docile. Discipline produces
‘practiced bodies’
Disciplining a result of :
Media systematically objectifies bodies – the public are
socialized to assume an outsider’s view of their body.
They learn to objectify themselves. Thus, surveillance
and monitoring their appearance becomes a habit (“body
Surveillance”) (Aubrey, 2006)
Why Care of the Self?
“In the abuse of power, one exceeds the legitimate
exercise of one’s power and imposes one’s fantasies,
appetites and desires on others…But one can see…that
such a man is the slave of his appetites. And the good
ruler is precisely the one who exercises his power as it
ought to be exercised, that is, simultaneously
exercising his power over himself”
How Do We Care for the Self?
“Freedom is the ontological condition of
ethics. But ethics is the considered form that
freedom takes when it is informed by
reflection.”
Ontological: the nature of being, existence, or
reality
ASKESIS – the exercises one practices that aid in
the cultivation of an ethical self, particularly (but
not limited to) acts of self-deprivation and
introspection
http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/foucault.
DT5.techniquesParrhesia.en.html
What is Enlightenment?
“The critical ontology of ourselves must be
considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor
even as a permanent body of knowledge that is
accumulating; it must be conceived as an attitude, an
ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of
what we are is at one and the same time the historical
analysis of the limits imposed upon us and an
experiment with the possibility of going beyond
them.”
“In the Apology, one sees Socrates
presenting himself to his judges as the
teacher of self-concern. He is the man who
accosts passersby and says to them:”
“You concern yourself with your wealth,
your reputation, and with honors, but you
don’t worry about your virtue and your
soul.”
References:
Foucault, Michel. “The Thought of the Outside” The Essential Foucault. New York: The
New Press, 1994. 423-441.
Foucault, Michel. “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of
Freedom” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New York: The New Press, 1994.
281-301.
Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of Self” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New
York: The New Press, 1994. 221-251.
Foucault, Michel. “What Is Critique?” The Essential Foucault. New York: The
New Press, 1994. 263-278.
Foucault, Michel. “What is Enlightenment?” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth.
New York: The New Press, 1994. 303-319.
Foucault, Michel. “Hermeneutic of the Subject” The Essential Foucault. New
York: The New Press, 1994. 93-106.
Globalization and commercialization of medical care
(Turner, 2006)
• Informational knowledge systems and e-health
• Increased power and dominance of bio-medical sciences
• Combination of micro-biology and informational
knowledge systems proffer new technologies for
reproduction, selection of enhanced human traits and
genetic engineering
• Creation of free markets in body parts through popular
media
• Medical knowledge is not a product of ethical scientific
research made up of the conventional procedures.
• Power produces medical research and new knowledge as
it is dominated by private corporations
Turner: Hospital
Three levels of this ‘spatialization’ of disease (Foucault, 1973)
1. Disease ontologies are differentiated by resemblance
and analogy
2. Disease is mapped onto the human body, moves from organ
to organ, undergoes metamorphosis
3. Specialization: a disease is circumscribed, medically
invested, isolated, divided up into closed, privileged regions,
or distributed throughout cure centres, arranged in the most
favourable way’ (Foucault, 1973)
4. Contradictions between the medical ethic of curing the
patient and the medical economy, which derives profit from
the life-long maintenance of illness.
5. Corporate & global medical systems transformed the
professionalism i.e., medical dominance (state authorizes)
and the consulting ethic (needs Public trust) -
Azzarito (2010)
Surveillance:
• The feminine docile body: ‘woman-as-Panopticon.’
•The power of the media as a surveillance mechanism
presenting and reiterating ideals of high-status femininity.
•The media defines and circumscribes the feminine body
as a complement to and/or in opposition to the masculine
body in normative ways.
Azzarito (2010) (cont’d):
Objectification:
1.popular culture constructs unrealistic ideals of
women’s bodies
2.Normal/abnormal: normalizes stereotypes of race
and gender
3.Celebrating slenderness, lack of muscularity and
athleticism. Dieting and fitness practices promoted in
health, fitness and fashion magazines serve as
technologies of the self for achieving ‘perfection,’ an
unattainable, monodimensional notion of slenderness
with its promise of ideal femininity
Azzarito (2010) (cont’d)
Discourse:
1.media offers ever more important sites of
pedagogizing girls’ construction of their bodies
2.The Muslim girl’s body remains portrayed not
only as a covered body, a ‘silent body,’ but also
as an oppressed and constrained female
physicality
3. Racial and other minorities are often
misrepresented by the media, esp. in Hollywood
movies
Disciplining:
1. Media can impact viewers to learn their values,
beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors as media content
normalize models of these which then are
disseminated as popular culture (see, Bandura,
1986, 1989, 1994, 2001).
2. Popular views of normal/abnormal of : Who
the girls/women are: What types of behaviors;
What types of motivations; parents & the nature
of relationships within families
3. ‘House of certainty’ is set up for controlling
gender related activities and physicality
Dryburg & Fortin (2010) Ballet & Docile body:
1.Surveillance:
• Idealized images of the body in media
• ‘The ballet studio is a panoptic place,’ the barre as
“backstage”, is a place of surveillance by instructors,
and self-surveillance by dancers looking in the mirror.
• Self-surveillance of the body as well as the
adaptation of social behaviour.
• The mirror encourages body surveillance and often
reminds the dancer that her body does not match the
ideal body type
• Lateral surveillance manifests itself as competitive
observation and comparison of appearance and
habits between dancers
1. Objectification
• Audience ‘gaze’ of ‘physical appearance’,
‘beautiful lines’ and an ‘ideal body type’.
• Body scrutinized more closely after being asked
to shed some pounds
• Under weight surveillance, dancers tend to think
of themselves as a ‘mass of flesh’ (a blob)
rather than as an artist
3. Discourse:
Narratives in popular cultural magazines, TV fictional
shows, movies (1,791 magazine images of models/
celebrities) (McDermott: 2005) :
• Physical attractiveness
• Media role models
• Ballet dancers’ “norm” of accepted ‘physical
appearance’, ‘beautiful lines’ and an ‘ideal body type’.
4. Disciplining:
•Conforming to the ad’s or movie’s requirements
•Requirements of pleasing viewers (others) to entice the
viewer’s Gaze
•Willingly marketing the docile body although in an art
form that is socially appreciated (Ballet)
•Selling the norm of popular cultural body image
•dance plays a significant role in feeding dancers’
obsession with their bodies
Merskin (2004)
Foucault’s argument: Discourse and presentation of body
and sexuality in popular media are narratives of control by
social institutions (Lewis, 2002)
Merskin: Thesis:
In fashion advertisements show girls as sexualized images,
infantilizes the women for controlling them with legitimacy.
These ads procure such images, offer them to the public in
order to sell them.
Merskin (cont’d)
Impact of advertisers and mass media on
young/adolescent girls and their gazers:
1.Surveillance:
• Normalizing adolescent as ‘sexually available’ and
seeing them as always having sex on their minds,
willing to be dominated, sexually violated and
become sexual objects.
2.Objectification:
• Gazing at sexualized girls’ representations
subordinates them for male consumers. It turns
them into objects of forbidden lust for
preadolescent girls
Merskin (cont’d):
3. Discourse: Narratives in Media-content
•Pornographication
•Hollywood’s representation of adolescent beauties
•‘Teenage tart’ symbolizes adult gaze that sexualizes
and seduces adolescents’
•Young girls are “dressed up” surveilled as adult women
•Representation of the imaginary relation of adolescents
and viewers to the real condition of existence”
Stern, B.B., et al (2005):
Soap Opera on TV
•Para-social Attachment
•Social Learning
•Behavioral Modeling
Knowledge vs. Deception:
Yang M., et al (2006): Variables:
Independent variable: Brand names placed in video games
Dependent variable: (Effect on) College students' implicit and
explicit memory for brands
Word-fragment completion test and a brand recognition task:
For the brand names placed in the video games:
• Low levels of explicit memory (recognition rest)
• Showed implicit memory (word-fragment test)
Interrelated variables: Story or characters’ use enhance brand
recognition