Tag Archives: Foucault

Now-Time: Enid Blyton, Spider-Man and the Illusion of Change

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In Enid Blyton’s novels, the time is always now. The sense of a peculiarly British, unending vacation transforms the literary space, whether the preteen Find-Outers stay in idyllic Peterswood or whether their counterparts from the Adventure series investigate smugglers of dangerous MacGuffins in distant, colonial climes. Nobody ever changes, past events are referred to with the most perfunctory of allusions and the future does not extend beyond the case to be solved. An evildoer painted the Siamese Cat! The butler is a smuggler! She was him all along! While the range of plot options is attenuated, this now-time is the main appeal of these YA ur-texts. The compact is a simple one, dutifully commented on by the protagonists: now-time will contain a mystery, but more importantly it will feature exhaustively described picnics, antics by animal companions, denigrated sidekicks from lower classes and a perennial movement away from home. Adults fade into the background, functioning mainly as the assurance that the status quo will, ultimately, be assured as a paternal deus ex machina swoops in to give legitimacy to the feats of detecting already accomplished. “MOTHER, have you heard about our summer holidays yet?” asks the Famous Five’s Julian at the beginning of their first literary outing. Yes, Mother has heard. So have the readers. Everyone knows what to expect.

There is no coming-of-age in these novels. They present readers with something akin to heterochrony. With this, the French philosopher Foucault designates other time, which “functions at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.” The terms of exchange for this break are simple: young readers do not expect the formula to progress, do not even (as the old defence of genre fiction would have it) expect a blues-like variation on a narrative standard. In Blytonland, readers demand to be released from time. Any break with now-time is swiftly passed by, anything that contains too much future has to be ignored. A protagonist’s assurance that they will all check in on the Indian helper figure in a couple of years is but a hitch in the suffocating comfort of a vacation that never ends.

When Stan Lee offers his own now-time for his expectant true believers, it comes with a well-known caveat: illusion of change. “Evolution, but 360 degrees’ worth. Same old Spider-Man, same old Peter Parker, same old problems at the core”, as Peter David puts it in the 1998 Comic Buyer’s Guide. Spider-Man will always return where he was. And why shouldn’t he? Why should we not grant Spidey and his readers the same now-time Blyton’s characters have been afforded with cosy abandon? After all, once readers catch on to the formula, they were expected to have already moved on to other cultural forms.

The current Marvel Behemoth (the company, not the character), however, will not allow us to abandon enthusiasm. Notably, the Disney-subsidiary has announced its filmic takeover as a succession of phases, a new one (Phase Three!) to receive its Cumberbatchian inauguration next year. And Spider-Man, too, has been recast for an intra-superheroic Civil Fistfight which will, once more, Change Everything. Now-time is dissolved in breathless development. This is not so much illusion of change as illusion of propulsion, of eternal growth, a movement from movie to movie and a universe steadily expanding from phase to phase. This self-replication is masked by dint of sheer forward momentum: How are we to notice that we are still in the same now-time, when we suddenly find our heroes in pursuit of magic (newly introduced to the shared universe) or, according to collective fingers-crossing, are finally graced with a celluloid superheroine? The films do not refute the recurrences of the same – it is half the fun. Critique is pre-empted by the movies themselves: the self-copying robot and the knowing, quippy subversion of tropes assure us that everyone is in on the joke. Corporation, fans, media – genre-savvily, we co-develop the illusion of change together. It is ours.

In contrast, Blyton’s heterochrony is a simple one. “’Ask her if we can go there!’” cries Famous Five’s Dick, “’I just feel as if it’s the right place somehow. It sounds sort of adventurous!’” It does and it will. The slightest twist of the plot-dynamic suffices. If there is an illusion of change, it is a flimsy one. That’s not what these texts and their perennial present are about. In a similarly straightforward way, comics used to embrace their stasis. Half the appeal of Silver-Age Superman is the staunch refusal of development: the details of the zany plot are less relevant than the fact that Lois, once more, tries to expose the Man of Steel’s secret identity. Jimmy has transformed into any number of other Jimmies and is dutifully restored. Superman had a son for a while, but he vanished. In genuine superheroic now-time, freed from illusions of change, reduplication in space replaces development in time.. Another Bizarro version. A superdog. A superhorse. Robotic doppelgangers. Krypton in a bottle. These are similar terms of exchange to the ones accepted by the Blyton-reader of yore: several groups of friends in several series. Remote places. Antagonists. Why should anything change? The next novel in the series is right there.

Foucault again: the role of heterochronies “is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.” The best thing about this non-place of the now? We can leave it behind. Doomed planet, desperate scientists, last hope, kindly couple: at some point we have seen it all, repetitions and reduplications notwithstanding. After a decade of superheroic cultural hegemony, this movement outwards, away from now-time, towards other unique temporalities, is more difficult as we are invited to partake in a trans-medial illusion of change. Which character have we glimpsed in the new teaser? More after the jump. Consider yourself teased. A new phase is about to begin.

Unabashed heterochrony is a thing of the past. “Have you heard about our summer holidays yet?” We used to. And no one expected us to pretend otherwise. Now, instead, we are invited (Summer 2016!) to anticipate a new era, a perennial movement forward. This breathless anticipation effaces the ways in which it is, after all, still the same summer, the same vacation, the same radioactive spider. Conventions are not to be leisurely accepted and abandoned but celebrated as blatant now-time has been recast as coming-soon-time. Blyton’s eternal present, as smug, self-satisfied (and, not to forget, insufferably racist) as it seems today, was, at least, much easier dismissed.

Biting the Hand That Feeds: Hannibal, Rihanna, and Sexual Harassment

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I had somehow missed The Silence of the Lambs, viewing it only a few years ago, well into my adulthood. After years of making jokes about how “it rubs the lotion on its skin,” my husband got frustrated with my blank looks of incomprehension and queued it up on Netflix. As Buffalo Bill grows increasingly irate with his captive, screaming at her “or else it gets the hose again!”, I burst into tears. A 30 year old woman frantically crying over an often-mocked scene in a 20 year old film.

My husband was unnerved to say the least—he had seen the film when it came out, and since it circulated in popular culture in a recognizable way for him, the line had lost its teeth. It was cheesy, and morphed into a joke. I, on the other hand, had no context for the line, and had heard it for years as a cutesy phrase that referenced a film I’d never watched. Having it replaced in its proper milieu was jarring. Instead of a tacky scene worthy of ridicule, something about the pronoun—“it”—and the directive about lotion reached around the rational part of my mind and struck me directly in the amygdala.

I unintentionally overlooked the television series Hannibal until two seasons in, when I was looking to kick off last summer with some horror. The glorious cinematography, the powerfully reserved acting, and the beautifully rendered script combined to make a stunning and tense dance of intellect and gore.

The first and second seasons are fixated on the strain between knowledge and ignorance. Will Graham, a special investigator for the FBI, is capable—according to Dr. Lecter—of “pure empathy”; he can mentally reconstruct a murderer’s actions, playing the role of the criminal in his internal recreation of the drama. Special Agent Jack Crawford contacts Will to assist him on a case in which young women of the same physical description have been disappearing. Crawford’s initial role is less that of a capable investigator than a pushy delegator. Dr. Alana Bloom, a purportedly intelligent psychiatrist, has taken an interest in Will, and wants to protect him from what she sees as Crawford’s potentially disruptive pressure. To this end, she introduces Crawford to Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who is tasked with monitoring Will.

The show relies on the audience’s pre-existing knowledge of Dr. Lecter operating in the background. Assuming we have seen the unhinged Anthony Hopkins biting the cheek off of a prison guard and recounting eating a liver with “some fava beans and a nice Chianti,” we are faced instead with an eminently rational and restrained Lecter in the show.

Lecter’s self-possessed mien in Hannibal stands in stark contrast to Hopkins’ portrayal, and while the audience knows he is the “bad guy,” the show operates less on the shock value of the murders under investigation or Lecter’s own gastronomical vagaries, and more on how power and knowledge must be—as Michel Foucault insisted—thought together.

Foucault equated knowledge with power, something that those currently struggling under the auspices of austerity in the academe may find laughable, but it’s an equation that is nonetheless compelling for situating current debates about the role of those with knowledge, and what types of knowledge can (or should) be leveraged into power. In Hannibal, Lecter uses his intellect, as well as his privileged status as confidant and guide for Will, to conduct increasingly bizarre experiments on him while the latter is in a fugue state. Lecter manipulates those around him, relentlessly curious about the boundaries of goodness and empathy in those who have the capacity for them.

Foucault is careful to distinguish between knowledge that is laden with power and knowledge that is marginalized. He specifically notes the “disqualified knowledges” of the mentally ill, but broadens this to say that “We are concerned, rather, with the insurrection of knowledges that are opposed primarily not to the contents, methods, or concepts of science, but to the effects of the centralizing powers which are linked to the institution and functioning” of a discipline (Power/Knowledge 84). In regards to this, he parses the way in which power is only thought of as something that is exerted, rather than something that is naturalized and replicated without direct activity.

As shorthand, it can be thought of as the distinction between the power of having and the power of doing.

Hannibal’s ability to unnerve and disquiet rests not on the “reveal,” as with many crime thrillers. The audience already knows who the villain is, even as the team tries to sort out other cases of varying drama and terror. Instead, the appeal of Hannibal rests almost entirely with the tacit knowledge shared by the audience and Lecter: that he is the antagonist, but we still want to see precisely what he is capable of in relationships. In fact, the least interesting scenes in the show are those that depict him enjoying a meal of a person alone. The tension instead resides in watching Lecter use the knowledge he has of himself—as well as his developing theories about other characters—to his own ends.

I’ve been reflecting on Hannibal throughout the year because its peculiar blend of refinement, psychopathology, and epicureanism holds me in a strange thrall. It reminds me of other debates about power, both the having and the doing, because the show has crafted a world in which the rules of behavior and the exercise of power are nearly illegible to those in the best position to address the atrocities occurring within their midst.

In particular, as I watch the third (and possibly final) season of Hannibal, I’m also embroiled in the ongoing debate about campus sexual harassment, launched in part by Laura Kipnis in her now-famous Chronicle of Higher Education article “Sexual Paranoia Strikes the Academe.” This may seem an odd pairing—a show about a psychiatrist/cannibalistic serial killer and a turgid debate about whether or not professors should be permitted to have sex with students—but I can’t help but think that the same questions about power are at stake.

For those who haven’t followed the discussion, Kipnis’s argument rests on three major elements. The first is that administrators are overstepping their boundaries and are infringing on academic freedom. This is patently true, and doesn’t merit debate. Administrative overreach has been consistently critiqued over the past 30 years, and is getting worse as faculty are increasingly shifted to the status of contingent labor. Furthermore, because of this administrative overreach, it is increasingly clear that non-educators are determining educational policy, always to the detriment of students’ actual development.

Second, she contends that an obvious example of this is new policies prohibiting professor-student romantic relationships. These policies have been implemented at a variety of universities to quell the tide of demonstrations against campus sexual assault. While I personally agree with these policies, I can see the potential problems with them, and am willing to debate them.

Third, she argues that the supposed “sexual panic” on campuses is vastly overinflating a relatively benign problem, and that students’ own sense of exaggerated vulnerability is actually making professors the more vulnerable class. This is ridiculous. Professor-on-student sexual harassment and assault are still significant issues. While student-on-student sexual harassment accounts for 80% of reports on campus, that still leaves a sizable problem. Furthermore, many cases of both varieties go unreported. For example, Kipnis asserts that

For the record, I strongly believe that bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square. Let no one think I’m soft on harassment. But I also believe that the myths and fantasies about power perpetuated in these new codes are leaving our students disabled when it comes to the ordinary interpersonal tangles and erotic confusions that pretty much everyone has to deal with at some point in life, because that’s simply part of the human condition.

Here, she is conflating normal misunderstandings with harassment.

My annoyance with the tenor of this discussion has increased with the tone-deafness of Kipnis’ understanding of power and its subtle manifestations.

In Hannibal, the audience is in reluctant collusion with Lecter as he manipulates and slaughters characters. There are—of course—the “ordinary interpersonal entanglements” of daily life. Will Graham and Alanna Bloom share an attraction, but because Alanna is concerned about Will’s mental state, she refuses to enter into a relationship with him. Jack Crawford’s pressure on Will to use his empathy can grow harsh. However, standing in stark contrast to these relatively benign interactions is the maneuvering of Lecter.

Interestingly, both Will and Lecter work from the point of curiosity about human emotions and motivation. While Will is able to adopt the perspective of others who have committed misdeeds in the past, Lecter is able to use his observations to predict future behavior. Both are talented, but only one begins the series with a sense of the way in which his knowledge brings him power. In the first season, Lecter experiments on Will after discovering that he has the symptoms of encephaly. Instead of seeking surgical treatment for his patient, Lecter devises a series of experiments in the clinical setting to encourage Will to lose time. In entrusting his mind to another, Will is violated at both the psychological and bodily levels because he fails to discern how this power can be leveraged against him.

After Will reconstructs a crime scene that includes a grisly totem pole of bodies, he loses time and appears at Lecter’s office door. Lecter tells him that this is the result of his psyche “enduring repeated abuse,” and Will frantically objects that “No, NO! I am NOT abused!” Lecter repeats that Will has an empathy disorder, and that disregarding his disordered psyche is “the abuse I’m referring to.” Here, abuse is relocated as being the act of the person suffering—abuse at his own hand—rather than being visited from the outside. This recalls Kipnis’s argument that it is students’ sense of vulnerability, rather than objective conditions in which they are disempowered, that is the problem.

Will wants to find a physical—objective—cause for his disorder. The viewer already knows that Lecter is hiding some aspect of this from Will, but it is not until the following episode that we see there is indeed a physical cause for Will’s rapidly fraying sanity, a cause that Lecter pressures the neurologist to conceal. Much like the objective problem of sexism within the academe, Will’s disordered brain matter has psychological effects that are erroneously attributed to more ethereal causes.

It is not that Will or Lecter stand in an easy allegorical relationship to students and professors in relation to Kipnis’s argument. Instead, Will and Lecter represent two distinct modes of knowledge, both of which are necessary to understand the real causes, circumstances, and consequences of sexual harassment in the academy and elsewhere. Lecter has power in his superior knowledge of the mind, and is not afraid to leverage it to his own ends. In this sense, we must remember that knowledge is not equivalent to ethics.

Will, on the other hand, has the capacity to understand others on an experiential level—to feel as they feel—but this very gift is also potentially disabling. Neither emotion nor reason are able to wholly grasp the diegetic world of Hannibal. Instead, there is a third term—power, and its subtle operation—with which all of the characters in both the on-screen and real-world dramas must contend.

It would be foolish, however, to equate Lecter’s power with his capacity to do violence on others. Violence is almost beside the point of the show, much like violence is frequently beside the point in terms of sexual violence. It remains popular to say that “rape isn’t about sex. It’s about power.” However, too often, those who remark on this conflate power with violence, as if violence is the only way in which power operates. Power in the world of Hannibal is not Lecter’s murders, or the murders by other various and sundry psychopaths populating the chorus of the show. It is the leveraging of psychological force.

One of the greatest myths that persists to today is that sexual harassment, and sexual violence, are invariably violent in the traditional sense of the word. The ham-handed training on sexual harassment provided by private companies making money off of universities trying to comply with Title IX do little to help this issue, as they have themselves a vested interest in concealing how subtly power circulates in a workplace, classroom, or clinic.

Perhaps this is less than legible for those who have acclimated themselves to shows of force. For example, Mads Mikkelsen, the actor who plays Lecter in Hannibal, was recently featured in Rihanna’s new video “Bitch Better Have My Money.” The video represents Rihanna as a kingpin of some sort whose accountant, Mikkelsen, has stolen her money. She kidnaps and tortures his wife, which doesn’t particularly phase him, so she goes on to torture him.

The video is an interesting contrast to Mikkelsen’s role on Hannibal. While he is still situated in relatively luxurious surroundings, he is ultimately at the whims of Rihanna. Furthermore, some critics have levelled the charge that the video is misogynistic because of the violence she visits on the woman who plays the wife of Mikkelsen. Speculations flew about whether or not this was a revenge fantasy about Rihanna’s real-life former accountant. Feminists of color have (rightly) pointed out that white feminism hasn’t always been welcoming to women of color.

Even the debates surrounding this video illustrate how fraught power is, particularly in relation to those who have been historically oppressed. Of course, the theft of money and sexual harassment or assault are not equivalent. Instead, this clearly illustrates how the public tends to react to obvious displays of violence—particularly from a disadvantaged woman, and in this case, particularly a woman of color—versus its critical acclaim of a white man with an advanced degree who eats people.

Hannibal is more than a show about a dude with “refined tastes,” however. It’s a series that best hits its stride when the audience is gazing on the beautifully plated delectables we know for a fact are composed predominantly of the minor character killed off in the previous scene. It’s a series that does more with an eyebrow raise, a small hand gesture, or a mild remark, than most shows are capable of doing with an ample explosives budget.

And it is loved—and found disturbing—precisely because we recognize that the power wielded by Lecter is at its most insidious when it is least obvious.

Obvious displays of power are few and far between. It would be delightful if tomorrow I could wake up in a world where power had shifted so far from the hands of professors and administrators that students weren’t threatened in a variety of ways by their moods and their decisions. Lecter remarks late in the second season that “Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude,” but even at this point, Lecter still knows much that Will does not.

After all, Hannibal kills both for pleasure and for necessity. He only eats those he considers equivalent to the animals most humans ingest. As he remarks to a character he’s keeping captive, “This isn’t cannibalism, Abel. It’s only cannibalism if we’re equals.”

And so goes Kipnis’ argument. It is only sexual harassment if we pretend that we are equals, and that there are not small, subtle (or even obvious) power dynamics at play. It’s only violence if it looks like it to her.

Power isn’t merely in the exercise thereof. It is in the ability to assess whether or not it was exercised.

A Doctor in Every Panopticon: Response to Ben Schwartz

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Ben Schwartz posted a response/review to the first episode of the new Doctor Who season over on the main tcj.com site. I won’t summarize it in detail ‘cause it’s right here and you can just go read it. (Go read it! Support our host site! Give Ben some hits! He needs your support to counteract all the shit I’m giving him…)

Ben’s (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) thesis is that Eleven (the Doctor’s eleventh regeneration) is a “Tory” doctor – the idea being that this Doctor caves in to authority too quickly. I think this conclusion is wrong: it’s based first on overlooking the ways in which the plot of the first episode coheres internally, then overlooking how it coheres with the theme of the multi-episode story arc – the Doctor must decide whether the good of the many outweighs the good of the one – and then subsequently misreading how both that story arc and this specific story’s plot tie into contemporary British politics.

I’m not sure whether Ben feels like the old episodes are more tightly plotted than the new ones, but in my read, Dr Who has never been particularly about plot. It’s a secular morality play. If you don’t like morality plays, you’re probably not going to like this show (unless, these days, you just have a crush on the cute Doctor). But that doesn’t make it badly written. That’s like saying The Canterbury Tales is badly written because it isn’t The Lord of the Rings.

So although I think Ben is just mistaken about the plot points – something I go into in Ben’s comments section in nauseatingly geeky detail – mostly his post felt worth an argument to me because one of the reasons I do not watch a lot of tv in general is this notion, implicit in Ben’s position, that everything should be clearly spelled out bluntly and explicitly at the level of plot and dialogue, making it easy to get all the pieces on a casual viewing or two. To me, it’s the things that are not spelled out, but that can be reconciled via close reading (or even sometimes only by recourse to extra-diegetic elements) that give writing in any medium texture and life and complexity. I don’t share Ben’s concern with plotholes, but I also don’t agree that the episode actually has plotholes to be concerned about. I think it’s very tightly scripted and very well done.

Now, I’ll accept that the episode’s tightness is pretty subtle and easy to miss on one watching. (I’ve now watched it 6 times, because every time Ben said something I’d go, “Wait, what? Wait! Lemme watch that again!) But that subtlety is a tactic: just because it’s hard to catch precisely how things tie together in a single viewing doesn’t make the subtle bits “plotholes.” Having some things be tricky to figure out – but nonetheless tight – is what makes a video, tv or film or otherwise, worth watching and rewatching, that makes the viewer an active participant and rewards engaging for more than just a couple hours diversion. Dr Who is TV for geeks, which is why we’ve been watching it for 40-odd years.

So Ben and I, I think, disagree on what it means for an episode to be “well-written” because we think about plot in different ways. But that said, we also appear to have watched two very different versions of The Eleventh Hour. Ben argues:

[The Doctor] had direct contact with the Atraxi and then Prisoner Zero and was given the Atraxi message personally.

He points out that he leads the Atraxi to Zero by using his sonic screwdriver because they’re looking for alien technology — so, the Atraxi definitely know our world, that the Doctor’s not part of it, and then ignore this until it becomes a key part of catching Zero.

Ben rightly identifies the kernel of the plot in the second quote, but the details are wrong. The Doctor doesn’t lead the Atraxi to Zero using his sonic screwdriver. It’s actually fairly tricky for them to track something as small as the screwdriver. The Doctor tries to get their attention using it in the town square, and fails, because the screwdriver burns up before the Atraxi can, ahem, zero in on it.

The Atraxi don’t speak directly with him until the end, when he meets them on the roof. Prior to that, they’re just talking to his technology. Ben rightly remembers that in Amelia’s bedroom the Atraxi send their message directly – but it isn’t a personal message. It’s just the same rote “Prisoner Zero has escaped” that they’re broadcasting on every available communications medium, Earth-based and otherwise. They identify the alien technology of the sonic screwdriver and then broadcast their message directly onto the Doctor’s psychic paper.

But they don’t make the connection between the alien technologies and the biological alien. It’s not the Doctor they know; it’s the Doctor’s things. What they have a lock on is the technology they identified in Amelia’s bedroom and yard when the Doctor first arrived: that’s why they followed the Doctor away from Earth. (He says in the town square when he’s explaining why 12 years passed before they came back: “they’re only late ‘cause I am.”)

Tracking the Doctor in the Tardis is different – philosophically and in practice – from tracking the Doctor walking around. Atraxi scanning technology isn’t precise enough to find an individual the size of a human being quickly. Even with the sonic screwdriver going off in the town square and the Atraxi directly overhead, they can’t pinpoint the screwdriver, let alone identify the Doctor and Prisoner Zero, in that few seconds. In fact, although we don’t know it during the scene in the town square, the Atraxi don’t even know that the Doctor is alien until they scan him at the end of the episode on the rooftop – after he actually does succeed in phoning them. They scan him, and then they say “you are not of this world.”

So the Doctor’s being alien in fact isn’t a key part of catching Zero (except insofar as he’s smarter than we are). And the alien-ness of the Doctor’s technology doesn’t play any role either: what the Doctor did, he did entirely using present-day Earth technology: a laptop, a computer virus, and a camera phone. The Atraxi’s ability to scan alien technology in particular ends up being entirely irrelevant. Instead, what’s relevant is the distinction between the technology and the individuals who use it – and the fact that the Atraxi’s technology can’t tell the difference.

Insofar as there is something political in this episode, this is it. The use of earth technology is it. The gap between who a person is and the technology (s)he uses is it. This is well-played technology-as-Panopticon – and there aren’t many places, in the West at least, where the Panopticon has more present-day relevance than in 21st century Britain. According to the BBC, there are 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain – about one for every 14 people. That’s almost Orwellian, and it’s a huge issue for British politics.

But Ben gets the wrong party: the surveillance state is even more Labour than it is Tory. Officially the Tories support reductions in the surveillance state – but convicts are an exception to their plan to reduce the reach of their databases. In Britain-as-Panopticon, Labour and Tory are equally implicated. Certainly surveillance is a political issue, but it’s not one that falls out on the reductive liberal/conservative binary so characteristic of American politics.

Surveillance is instead a political issue in the Foucauldian sense. Foucault explained it thus in Discipline and Punish:

Perhaps we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands, and its interests. Perhaps we should abandon the belief that power makes mad, and by the same token, that the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit rather than power produces knowledge…that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. These “power-knowledge relations” are to be analysed then, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not free in relation to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject who knows.

Surveillance is about gathering information and turning that information into knowledge about the people under surveillance. What’s at stake in this episode is not the straightforward partisan allegory, but its moral facet: the omniscience of the panopticon, and the limitations of that omniscience.

That gap between the individual and the technology, the gap the Atraxi surveillance cannot bridge, cuts to the moral heart of the very existence of a state: the necessity for individuals to make decisions on behalf of the many that affect each individual one, and the inadequacy of the knowledge we base those decisions on. Where better to explore the relation of surveillance to power than in a story where the hero’s power so explicitly comes from knowledge?

This is why the question (blustering over the Internet on Whovian message boards at the moment) of why the Doctor gives up Prisoner Zero without any evidence of his guilt is missing the point. Foucault’s insight is that the perspective of the Panopticon is not just about monitoring the prisoner – it’s about the way in which the ability to monitor individuals creates a category of citizen subjectivity unique to the modern state: individuals are transformed by surveillance into objects of knowledge.

That’s what Prisoner Zero is to the Atraxi, and by the force and necessity of his power-knowledge and the limitation of Earthly time, to the Doctor as well. The Atraxi mothership is a Panopticon – in concept and in design – but it is the Doctor who is all-seeing. Zero’s body is trapped in a forcefield of power and knowledge articulated by both the Atraxi and the Doctor: a forcefield that renders any sense in which he might be “not guilty” irrelevant – secondary in the face of the need to “govern” and “protect” the rest of the world. The state depends on the prisoner. The sacrifice of the one is necessary for the good of the many. The Doctor, like Foucault, knows this – and it makes him sad.

This is the point Ben misses when he insists that the Doctor jumps when the Atraxi flash their badges. Yes, the Doctor is complicit in the use of surveillance technology against Zero – but when the Atraxi take Zero, the Doctor’s expression is heartbroken. He’s genuinely sorry. It’s not a rote caving to an external authority; it’s recognizing that no individual beings matter in this universal, timeless, always existing field of power-knowledge. The Doctor recognizes his own subjugation to his own power.

But he also recognizes that he is the one individual in a position to determine whether the field of power-knowledge serves good or evil. (I’m wondering whether this will be a theme in the upcoming Churchill/Nazi/Dalek episode.) The Doctor, contra Foucault, turns the surveillance technology back against the Atraxi too. He subverts the Atraxi by turning their attention FROM the technology TO the one individual who does matter in that field, the individual in the Panopticon, the organic, living Doctor – the Doctor who protects the Earth. The Doctor who is our Superhero. The Superhero whose superpowers are his compassion, his mind, and his knowledge.

This is why I just don’t think this episode can be easily reduced to partisan politics, as Ben suggests, or even to simplistic questions of whose authority is most compelling.

Doctor Who doesn’t just have knowledge and a conscience. He has the power to make decisions that challenge and test the limits of his conscience, and that have consequences for individuals – individuals with whom he feels genuine compassion but over whom he nonetheless has power. Ben not only completely diminishes the complexity of this story when he overlooks how much the Doctor struggles with this role; he diminishes – like so much of contemporary politics in the age where the most powerful Panopticon is the eye of the media – the extent to which political good always relies on the ability of those individuals fortunate enough to sit in the panopticon to watch themselves as clearly and as vigilantly as the prisoners below.