The line of recent posts at IBTP provide an opportunity to talk a little about the work of Judith Butler and how that work bears on discussions of power and resistance.  There’s this shout-out, of sorts, to Butler – I confess that I am unable to discern whether referring to Butler’s ideas as “entertainment” is meant to be complimentary, insulting, or some subtle combination of the two.  There is also, however, a series of posts that comprise “Cuntalinagate,” which started when Twisty called a woman a cuntalina and continues in the comments sections, subsequent posts, and a few pingbacks.

I refer to these posts, not to opine on the dropping of c-bombs, but because they illustrate an important part of the postmodernist critique of the political subject.  Specifically, every discourse creates, as a condition of that discourse, a certain set of signs and markers that identify and categorize the participants and include or exclude different participants based on their adherence to and/or deviation from the accepted categories.  Deconstructing this process means putting aside an emphasis on a “person” and their “position” and instead focusing on what persons and positions are made possible by this process.  Twisty, perhaps inadvertently, performs a postmodern critique by calling into question her own identity – is Twisty a real person or a fictional character? – and what it means to be a radical feminist who steps outside the accepted bounds of radical feminist discourse.

Twisty quotes a gloss of Butler’s work that says the following:

She follows postmodernist and poststructuralist practice in using the term “subject” (rather than “individual” or “person”) in order to underline the linguistic nature of our position within what Jacques Lacan terms the symbolic order, the system of signs and conventions that determines our perception of what we see as reality.

To make sense of this it will help to take apart the use of the term “subject.”  Loosely speaking, when we think of the role of the subject in language, we think of the doer – the active agent, the driving force of a sentence, the noun that takes action.  The “I” in “I went to the park.”  The subject of a sentence, then, is, in some sense, what the sentence is about.  “I went to the park” is a sentence about me; “The park is the place that I went” is a sentence about the park.  If you are the subject of a documentary, the documentary is about you.  Subject invokes primacy, and main-idea-ness.  On the other hand, a King also has subjects.  The King isn’t about his subjects – usually the subjects are described in relation to the King.  You can also be subject to something.  If you disobey the King you might be subject to penalties.  With this usage a subject is one who is subordinate to something else.

So the use of “subject” as a term to describe the part of the person that does things serves a dual purpose.  It does not allow us to view a person either as completely subject to her environment or as completely the subject of it.  It complicates the relationship between person and environment and calls into question the nature of that which takes action.

In this light, we can start to comprehend the claim that the subject is constituted by social relations – that it is produced by a discourse, upon which it is always contingent.  We just have to ask the question, what does it take to be a subject?  In other words, what does it take – within the confines of a specific discourse – to be considered someone who the discourse is about?  And the answer, appropriately, is that one must subject one’s self to the conventions of that discourse in order to be a subject within that discourse.

In the radical feminist discourse of IBTP, those conventions are pretty clear.  IBTP is a particularly good example because most of the conventions are explicitly laid out in the FAQ, guidelines for commenters, and the boilerplate “Blamer Terms of Use Agreement”:

New to I Blame the Patriarchy? Cast your jaundiced eye upon this before commenting.

Blamer Terms of Use Agreement

By clicking the “Blame” button, you affirm that you have read and agree to follow the Guidelines for Commenters. If English is your first language, you agree to use spelling, capitalization, and punctuation consistent with recognized conventions governing same. If you are a dude, you affirm that you have read the FAQ twice, and that, whether or not you are an authoritarian, supercilious asshole in life, you will be otherwise on this blog. All commenters are encouraged to begin their posts with a word other than “I.”

The conventions are not only enforced by moderation, but also by a consensus of Blamers.  As this post points out, the censure of Blamers in the comment section can constitute a significant barrier to entry for those who aren’t careful to use the markers of a Blamer and eschew any misogynist, anti-feminist, or otherwise patriarchal markers that they may have picked up in mainstream discourse.  IBTP has categories to describe those who cleave strictly to these rules, and those who deviate in some acceptable way, and those who deviate in an unacceptable way (for instance, to be a “funfem” or a “sex-positive feminist” or a “nice guy” is to take an acceptable non-radfem position from which to argue, and be argued with; to be an “MRA” is to take an unacceptable non-radfem position to argue from).  There are also certain positions that are not well-accounted for, such as the post-modernist feminist position.

This system is fairly robust – it can easily classify most positions and understand them accordingly.  But what happens when someone in the position of “radical feminist” uses a very anti-feminist term like “cuntalina?”  The frame of radical feminist discourse does not contain a position for a radical feminist who uses radically anti-feminist misogynist slurs; as a result, when that happens, the most widespread result is confusion.  The members of the discourse whose bounds were violated demand that the violator provide an account of herself.  How can this happen?  What do you mean?  What are you really saying?  What is the explanation for this event that can re-situate you in the discourse such that you will once again be intelligible to us?

This system of conventions that govern subject-hood – that determine which positions are accepted, and which forbidden, which are understood and which unintelligible – is socially constructed within each community of practice by its members through discourse.  In order to allow ourselves to be heard and understood within a particular social frame, we must take on a subject-position that is both permitted and intelligible.  Butler’s contention is that identity is a retroactive product of these positions – that identity is simply that which allows people to identify us (or us to identify ourselves), and that we are always identified by reference to one or more subject positions that we have taken on.

In the prevailing patriarchal order, oppression often takes the form of a limited choice of subject-positions.  For instance, for a woman to express the view that women are fully human and thus entitled to the same rights and privileges as men is considered a marker of “feminism,” which in the patriarchal frame is understood in a very specific way – “feminism” is associated with hairy, man-hating lesbians, etc etc, such that the term “feminist” itself can be an ad hominem dismissal of a woman’s position in many circles.  Such a frame is immensely powerful and oppressive, and so from the post-modernist perspective, it is not enough simply to fight from the subject-position of “feminist” – which, after all, is understood and accounted for by a patriarchal frame – but also to constantly problematize the meaning of the subject-position “feminist” itself, and in fact to contest all patriarchal assignments of subject-position so as to allow for new and different options for all humans to occupy.

This is the post-structuralist critique in a nutshell: that the potitical contest between two elements of a dichotomy (man vs. woman, black vs. white, bourgeois vs. proletariat, etc) should be secondary to the contesting of the dichotomy itself.  The oppression is not located in one side or the other, but in the structure of the contest.  Twisty implicity recognizes this by blaming not men, but the Patriarchy, a system in which men are dominant but with which women often collaborate.  And by transgressing the bounds of her own discourse, Twisty has demonstrated how jarring it can be when someone transgresses social boundaries that were previously thought inviolable.

It doesn’t take long for any given transgression to be processed, comprehended, and reintegrated into the prevailing social order.  Therefore the goal, from Butler’s point of view, is not to simply find a transgressive position and stay in it, but to constantly bring into view, through transgressions and other strategies, the contingent nature of the categories and subject-positions that we occupy, so that we can learn to recognize and accommodate, rather than ignore and oppress, new and unconventional positions as they arise.

This strategy makes sense from a historical point of view.  Historically, the women’s movement has always gained some synergy from other movements or events challenging the prevailing social order – from Wollstonecraft’s deployment of classical liberalism to argue in favor of education for women, to the increases in women’s rights that came about after WWII made “Rosie the Riveter” a valid subject-position.  If this is true, it also follows that an increase in the recognition of women who occupy non-patriarchal subject-positions would also synergistically make more subject-positions available to other oppressed classes of people.  This is why any study of the resistance to power and oppression is heavily staked in feminist movements, post-colonial movements, etc.

Speaking of post-colonial, I hope to follow up this post with a commentary on RaceFail ‘09 from a post-colonial perspective, specifically using Fanon to deconstruct some of the assumptions floating around about race and culture.  RaceFail is also of interest because the subject-position of an author seems to be of critical importance to many participants.

It is fairly uncontroversial in classic economic theory that free and fair competition is often vastly more productive than limited competition or no competition.  Many economists view a monopoly as a market failure and believe that anti-trust laws must be created and enforced in order to preserve competition.  So-called “no-bid contracts,” in which firms are granted lucrative government contracts based on cronyism rather than competition, are slammed, correctly, for costing a great deal more money than competitive contracts would cost.  As a general rule, when agents compete on the market, the goods or services that the agents are selling become more productive and/or less expensive – in other words, competition allows buyers to get more for less.

How is this related to panoptic power?  Economic competition conforms closely to the panoptic model of power.  Let us compare economic competition to the two hallmarks of the panopticon:  self-surveillance, and isolation.

In the panopticon, self-surveillance is produced within a subject by causing that subject to behave as though at any moment she might be under surveillance by a central observer.  Who is the central observer of the competitive market?  The consumer.  At any time, the consumer might evaluate the quality of the products offered up for sale by the competitors.  Competitors earn reputations based on the quality of their products, and these reputations greatly affect the profits of the competitors.  The consumer is also somewhat unpredictable, in that one never knows exactly what a consumer’s preferences might be.  Perhaps your innovative new product might become the next iPod – or perhaps it might become the next Betamax. Competitors must strive towards innovation and invention and reinvention, and must also master marketing, and still success is not guaranteed.  The point here is that competitors are always being evaluated, and they may live or die based on the results of these evaluations.  This is a powerful incentive towards self-surveillance.

In the panopticon, isolation is caused by physically separating prisoners in individual cells.  In a competitive market economy, isolation comes in the form of patents, trade secrets, and the information asymmetries that arise when competing agents each try to find and maintain a competitive edge.  If you own a restaurant, you might make the best marinara sauce in the county, but if you give away your secret recipe, that will not be the case for long.  Isolation also comes from the fact that individual agents may earn more profits through competition than through cooperation – because there will be fewer people to share the wealth.  Laws against cartelization and other forms of corporate cooperation can produce isolation effects.  In a situation where workers are competing for jobs, the workers may become isolated from each other because some wish to go on strike for higher wages while others wish to take over their jobs.

If the productive power of a competitive market is related to the productive power of the panopticon, then do the same downsides exist?  Sure.  One of these is that PD-like situations may arise in which competitors end up reaching a suboptimal equilibrium state because of their isolation.  An example of this is an industry in which advertising costs comprise a significant percentage of the industry’s income but do not effect a significant redistribution of market share for any one firm nor attract a significant number of new buyers to the market.  Each firm would be better off if no firm advertised, but if any firm advertises, they all must in order to avoid losses.  In the end every firm advertises, and the entire industry essentially throws money away.  The tobacco industry is one such example (although you won’t hear me mourning their suboptimal profits.)  There are also cases like railroads or utilities where, without collusion or intervention, redundant services may be established (imagine the case of two competing rail lines running parallel to each other).

Because the effects of panoptic power are generally experienced as difficult and unpleasant, free markets tend toward a mix of competition and cooperation.  Many agents would like to collude with each other in order to avoid the panoptic effects – in other words, break isolation to resist the power of the panopticon.  A cartel is a good example of this – competitors get together and decide that rather than compete with each other, they’ll fix prices and production at a certain level so they can all profit equally.  These cartels often result in higher prices and lower quality and quantity for goods produced – they are less productive, but they make things easier for those involved.  Labor unions are a form of cartel for workers, who agree to band together to achieve higher labor prices (wages) and shorter working hours (less production).  Such cartels and unions suffer from the risk that one agent will defect or a new agent will enter the market, thus destroying the cartel or union, and as a result an equilibrium can be reached.

The free market, which depends on competition for its functioning, is thus an example of panoptic power at work.  This is an important insight because many experience panoptic power as something which imprisons them, which calls into question how much “freedom” agents in the free market actually have and provides a theoretical framework to contrast, rather than conflate, liberty and productivity.

First and foremost, this is a post inspired by the OSBP situation. Having first heard about this situation via my most oft-visited news source (LiveJournal), I assumed that theferrett was, like, a friend of a friend or something, and that the situation hadn’t reached great internet fame just yet. Turns out it’s been analyzed to death already, and I don’t know how it came to be news on my LJ friends’ page (although at least one of my LJ friends has theferrett friended, and, perhaps ironically, it’s a girl who once called me a misogynist), but I’ve been thinking about it all day.

A few years ago I was struck by the phrase “authentic human desire.” I am not quite sure who I was reading at the time – it strikes me that it was related to Žižek in some way, but that may be because I’m going to relate my analysis back to Freud and Lacan. Something about the backlash against the OSBP brought all this stuff into my head and provoked a strong reaction – almost a defensiveness.

The OSBP was basically a con game where people (and by people I mean women) could opt into a system where other people (and here we’d assume that these other people would predominantly be men) could ask them, without penalty, “could I touch your breasts.”  If the woman says no, the dude has to respect that, and if she says yes, he gets to touch her breasts.  Those in favor of this project pointed out that it was a more open and honest way to interact.  Those against the project seemed likely to condemn men for wanting to touch a woman’s breasts, or at least for expressing that desire to the woman.

So let’s start with a question:  should men be condemned for wanting to touch a woman’s breasts?  The phrase “authentic human desire” presents us with a test.  What does it mean for a desire to be authentic and human?  What would it mean, on the other hand, for a desire not to be these things?  For a desire to be inauthentic is for it to be fraudulent, or manufactured; for a desire to be non-human is for it to be derived, artificial, or somehow non-essential.  One might say that some desires are inherent to human beings, while others are socially constructed, and then one might argue about which are which.  If we say that it is natural for a man to want to touch a woman’s breasts, is that to say that it is unnatural for a man not to?  Some would consider homosexuality unnatural, inauthentic, inhuman.  But that is a double-edged sword, for if we claim that homosexuality is socially constructed onto a heterosexual essence, we give social construction enough power to completely remove the influences of nature, and in doing so we lose the ability to claim that one thing or another is natural – if homosexuality could be socially constructed, then so could heterosexuality – so could anything.

What this suggests is that a test of normality or majority is insufficient to tell us whether a particular desire is an authentic human desire or is simply a desire created by society.  Does a man want to touch a woman’s breasts because he is a man, or because our culture has inundated him with images of breasts and of female subservience and objectification?  We can’t tell just by pointing out the ubiquity of breast-fetishization – after all, breasts are often the most prominent and obvious difference between men and women and so make sense for the oppressors to use as an identifier of the oppressed class.  If we accept this explanation, then the desire to touch women’s breasts is a desire that men have to touch the symbol of women’s oppression, in other words, to take possession of a woman using the tools that society presents as being for that purpose.  Not an authentic human desire, but one that is taught, from patriarch to patriarch, passed down through the generations.

On the other hand, what if we look at the desire to touch breasts as a manifestation of the desire for contact, recognition, and acceptance?  What if we accept theferrett’s exaplanation at face value, and accept that rather than trying to own or dominate these women, he really was just trying to heal a part of himself that he felt was broken during his coming of age?  Lacanian psychoanalysis describes the state of an infant as having a sense of wholeness and completeness, where all of the infant’s needs are automatically met by the mother.  According to Lacan, the lack that a person feels when he is separated from this state of ultimate completeness is the cause of all desire.  If we look at breasts the way an infant does – as a source of comfort and nourishment – then we can see a psychological root for the desire for breasts.  It is a simple manifestation of basic human need.  To touch a woman’s breasts is to connect to a state of comfort and well-being and healing.

If the desire for contact, to touch and be touch, accept and be accepted, need and be needed, is an authentic human one, then women share this desire with men.  The OSBP should work.  So what’s the problem?

Well, first of all, Lacan has often been criticized for perpetuating the sexism of Freud’s analysis.  And indeed, we’ve accounted for male desires more than adequately using Lacan, but we do not seem to have accounted for, or even located, female desires.

Second, and more important, is that we have not begun to talk about power.

Some commentators have suggested that, to put this thing in perspective, the dudes should partake in some thought experiment.  One suggestion was that men ought to be groped as well, and this seems to have been implemented to some extent.  Someone asked how men would like to have their testicles groped and fondled by complete strangers.  I daresay most of the male OSBP participants would respond “very much, thank you.”  Another person suggested that women play a version where they kick men in the testicles.  The problems that all of these thought experiments share is that none of them are actually analogous to what is going on in the OSBP.

Theferrett and his friends are right about one thing.  A situation in which man M desires to touch a woman’s breasts and woman W desires her breasts to be touched does present M and W with a certain lack of efficiency in having their desires met.  How are M and W to find each other, and how are they to communicate their desires in a socially acceptable way?  The OSBP tries to find a solution to this problem by outfitting W with a certain marker and presenting M with a certain routine that is guaranteed to be socially acceptable to those who are marked.  Now, putting aside questions outside of this system (such as its potential for abuse by those who violate the system’s rules, or the social implications of the fetishization of breasts), what is wrong with this system itself?

Keep your answers in mind, because really, the OSBP is just an unambiguous version of the system we have now.  Now, women are outfitted with certain markers that declare whether or not they are to be approached and in what ways, and men approach them in ways that are influenced by these markers, and women either consent or not, and men are supposed to accept a refusal graciously, but they might not.  The problem with the system we have now is that it contains ambiguities – a man might incorrectly read a certain outfit as a marker of a certain attitude, for instance, a low-cut skirt as an invitation to a cat-call or a come-on, for instance.  A green button, however, is unambiguous, and nobody is going to mistake a red button for a green one (except someone who is red-green colorblind, that is.)  Also, in the non-OSBP system, a man might not ask before touching, because of context and signals and body language – he might be wrong, or he might be right, and it can be hard to tell.  In the OSBP, the man asks before touching, because it is an explicit rule, or he violates an explicit rule unambiguously.

So far, this system sounds better.  Fewer ambiguities mean that malicious men can be caught, identified, and ostracized more easily, based on criteria that everyone agreed to beforehand.  There’s less potential for a man to accidentally push a woman farther than she is willing to go, or to intimidate a woman by making unwanted advances.  Men can feel free to express their desires and women can feel safe to be desired, all without social awkwardness.

Enter the workings of power.  The idea that making the expression of desire more efficient is good is based on the idea that the expression of desire is itself good, and that more of it would make things better.  It certainly seems better for M and W, who want to touch and be touched.  But we can’t look at expected value without taking the bad with the good.

First, let’s look at the men’s side.  The man wants to touch some breasts.  In a normal social setting, he fears both rejection and punishment if he asks to touch a woman’s breasts.  Even if she accepts, people might still hear about how he propositioned some random woman, and he may still endure social punishment.  A man also does not have a reliable way to find the women who would say yes.  So, a low chance of success coupled with fear of rejection and fear of punishment cause these men to refrain from asking the boob question.  In the OSBP, the man has a reliable way to avoid punishment and a better chance of finding women who will say yes to him.  Greater chance of reward, no chance of punishment, lower chance of rejection.  OSBP is a win for the man.

Now, let’s look at the woman’s side.  In a normal social setting, a woman fears that men will make unwanted sexual advances.  A woman also fears that if she rejects the man, he will sexually assault her.  The kind of man willing to break social convention enough to ask her if he can touch her breasts may also break social convention enough to do it anyway if she says no.  A woman has to be careful of what she wears lest some man interpret her outfit as a license to assault her.  A woman has some reason to fear whenever a man desires her.  In the OSBP, does the woman stop fearing unwanted advances?  Does she stop fearing sexual assault?  Does she stop fearing misinterpretation?  Does she stop fearing that the rules will be broken?  Maybe she can feel safer letting someone touch her breasts knowing that they are are following social convention, and maybe she has less reason to fear misinterpretation, and so maybe she can feel somewhat better off than in the non-OSBP.

However, overall, the stakes for a woman are much higher per desire-transaction.  It is not clear that reducing somewhat the risks that a woman takes in any single desire-transaction reduces overall risk if the number of desire-transactions increases drastically.  I want to make clear that a woman experiences taking these risks even if there are no rule-breakers.  The question is not how men behave, but how power behaves.  The thing about the OSBP that is objectionable boils down to this:  it is a system in which imbalanced power transactions are encouraged to take place.  These transactions may well be balanced somewhat better than normal social interactions between men and women, but they are still imbalanced.

I would describe OSBP as generally sex-positive and societal norms as generally sex-negative.  The problem with any sex-positive project is that it threatens to simply repeat the oppressive patriarchal norms built into society, which OSBP does pretty clearly.  However, without sex-positive projects, there is nothing to challenge patriarchal sexual norms.  That doesn’t give a hall pass to all sex-positive projects; we have to rate them on their merits.  One that’s just about dudes groping boobs isn’t likely to challenge much; on the other hand, if the participants (specifically the female ones) can say that they were able to safely express and fulfill their desires, can we afford to ignore a system that really was able decrease a woman’s risk-per-transaction?

Of course what really killed the OSBP were the externalities.  The things outside of the system.  The fact that the focus on breasts plays into issues of the male gaze and objectification and self-surveillance and the breaking down of women into their component parts, and the fact that there are people who would be encouraged by the system to go outside the system, both make the considerations of the relative merits of OSBP itself nearly irrelevant.

The question I want to leave with is this:  Given the authentic human desires – for connectedness, wholeness, contact, recognition, acceptance – and given the imbalance of power between men and women, is there a system that can actually allow these desires to be expressed and fulfilled in a safe, fair, and balanced way?  Or do we have to keep muddling along, occasionally blundering into our own OSBPs-in-miniature, repressed and disconnected and alienated from the rest of humanity?

In Organized Labor: A Power Analysis, I examined the power relationships involved in the formation of a labor union. In one sense, the formation of a union follows the prisoners’ dilemma: the workers can cooperate with each other by striking, or defect by becoming scabs. If enough of them cooperate, they can be successful and gain a measure of power back from the employers. If enough of them defect, the strike can be broken and the striking workers fired. In this and other examples following the panoptic model of power, cooperation is a counter to the isolation that produces the panoptic effect. Once the workers are part of the union, the union acts on their behalf – negotiates wages, benefits, vacations, etc. The union thus becomes a symbolic agent – instead of saying that the workers took an action, we say the union did it. The union thus has metonymic power. In this example, we see that metonymic power is also a counter to panoptic power – membership in a group with a powerful symbolic agent allows people to act without self-surveillance.

Let me explain that claim a little more. It is safe to say that laborers are under direct and indirect surveillance. An example of direct surveillance would be when a foreman or supervisor actually watches the laborers and directs their activities. An example of indirect surveillance would be an inspector who checks the laborers’ work for defects. In either case, the laborers must constantly behave as though they are under surveillance – hence they regulate their own behavior to fit the standards imposed on them from outside. These standards are imposed through a fear of punishment. If the work is defective, the laborer may be docked. If the laborer behaves the wrong way he may be suspended or fired.

With the intervention of the labor union, workers have a degree of protection from arbitrary discipline. The supervisor or inspector has a burden of proof to satisfy if action is to be taken. The laborer can work knowing that his membership in the union provides a degree of protection from the surveilling authorities. The more powerful the union, or symbolic agent, the more protection the worker, or acting agent, has. The same is true for citizens of powerful countries – the symbolic agent – the king, or president, or country itself – has a power that allows its citizens to act with greater freedom. At the same time, the cost of this freedom is a loss of agency. This may seem paradoxical, however, we can see how a displacement of agency allows greater freedom of action with the simple phrase, “I didn’t do it.” Americans benefit from the privilege of America’s dominance at the same time as many or most of America’s inhabitants disavow their responsibility for the actions which lead to this dominance. Hence the soldier who is just following orders or the taxpayer who is just doing his share for society – yet their money and their lives are used to maintain America’s power in the world at a deadly cost for all who oppose us. Our privilege as Americans comes from a lack of self-surveillance: we do not carefully watch and regulate our actions because we do not fear the consequences of carelessness.

If cooperation and membership both serve to attack the basis of panoptic power, what is the cost of these tactics? The cooperating prisoner takes a risk – the risk that the other prisoners will defect. The member of an organization sacrifices their agency in return for the power of privilege. It seems then that the two goals of any project to mitigate panoptic power should be to decrease the risks of cooperation on the one hand, and to combat the displacement of agency on the other. How can either of these goals be accomplished? A question for the future.

One of the many fascinating aspects of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is the way that it is framed. Take, for instance, this concise description from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Tanya and Cinque have been arrested for robbing the Hibernia Savings Bank and placed in separate isolation cells. Both care much more about their personal freedom than about the welfare of their accomplice. A clever prosecutor makes the following offer to each. “You may choose to confess or remain silent. If you confess and your accomplice remains silent I will drop all charges against you and use your testimony to ensure that your accomplice does serious time. Likewise, if your accomplice confesses while you remain silent, they will go free while you do the time. If you both confess I get two convictions, but I’ll see to it that you both get early parole. If you both remain silent, I’ll have to settle for token sentences on firearms possession charges. If you wish to confess, you must leave a note with the jailer before my return tomorrow morning.”

First of all, what’s in a name? “The Prisoner’s Dilemma” tells us about a dilemma faced by a prisoner – note the placement of the apostrophe. In this example, though, there are two prisoners, and they both face the same dilemma. Why, then, do we not see this dilemma called “The Prisoners’ Dilemma?”

Well, the dilemma only comes about as a result of the separation of the two prisoners into individuals. If there were one player controlling both prisoners and trying to maximize her score, she’d have no dilemma. The Prisoner’s Dilemma, however, is faced by one individual, alone, isolated from contact with her fellow prisoner.

That leads to another question: why a prisoner? There are plenty of ways to propose the same paradigm – for example, two students who turned in identical examinations. Or an invading army offering a reward for whoever will open the town’s gates at midnight. The point is there are any number of anecdotes that match the payoff matrix of the PD, and perhaps infinitely many could be invented. Prisoners were chosen – why?

On some level, the prisoner’s dilemma applied to prisoners is well-understood. Plenty of people enjoy the legal drama as a story – plenty of people have been exposed, in our time, to Law and Order, Homicide, or CSI, and these modern shows have predecessors, and those predecessors use tropes set up in literature.

I would argue, however, that the choice of prisoners goes deeper than a simple familiarity. There is a match in situation between a prisoner and one caught in the prisoner’s dilemma. In other words, if this same problem were explained using students caught cheating instead of criminals caught robbing a bank, the students would still feel trapped. They would still feel like prisoners. And the person who reads the dilemma sympathizes with the subjects of the dilemma and feels their sense of being trapped. The situation that we call the Prisoner’s Dilemma works because of panoptic power, and panoptic power makes its subjects into prisoners, much more than it makes them into students, or frightened villagers.

When I say that people sympathize with the subjects of the dilemma, I mean, the reaction intended by the framing of the dilemma is that the reader puts herself in the place of the prisoner. The reader must ask “What would I do if offered such a deal,” and not “What would I do if I were the prosecutor and I had two prisoners?”

And that brings up another quite interesting point. We are told explicitly what the preferences of the prisoners are: they want to maximize their freedom, even to the detriment of their partner in crime. We are never told the goal of the prosecutor, although the prosecutor’s actions seem to speak for themselves. The prosecutor’s goal is, simply, to get convictions – to maximize jail time for the two prisoners. In our legal system, prosecutors build their careers by putting people in jail. If the goal of the prosecutor were to find out the truth, the Prisoner’s Dilemma would not be an effective tool. Imagine that one prisoner committed a crime and the other prisoner just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who would be more likely to confess a crime, thus putting the other person in jail, and who would be more likely to maintain her innocence, thus going to jail?

If the panoptic model helps to maximize power, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma uses the panoptic model on behalf of authority, then it is a blind authority whose power is maximized. The authority does not care about the well-being of the society it has authority over; it is merely concerned with maintaining its own power. And indeed, this relationship is reflected by the names of the moves in the Prisoner’s Dilemma: defect and cooperate.

To defect is to cooperate with the authorities. To cooperate is to be defective from the point of view of the authority – a defective, criminal citizen, a defector, a saboteur of civil authority. The terms “defect” and “cooperate” refer to a presumed partnership between the two prisoners. I say presumed because nowhere in the description of the Dilemma is it stated or implied that the two prisoners have made any kind of agreement about how to handle such an eventuality as being placed into the Dilemma. The two prisoners are presumed to be partners only in the sense of (allegedly) participating in a criminal activity together; since nothing is stated about their guilt or innocence it may well be that neither of them has even met the other. The two are described as “accomplices,” but accomplices who prioritize each other’s well-being much lower than their own – in other words, hardly friends, or compatriots, or long-term partners in any sense.

However, the term “defect” implies something defected from, some country or alliance. Again, the term cooperate is ambiguous – the prisoners can cooperate with each other or with the authorities. We’ve already established that the authorities do not have the best interests of the prisoners in mind, and now we also establish that if the prisoners are to do any cooperating, it will be with each other, against the authorities. The authorities want to gain power by destroying the bonds of cooperation and causing someone to defect from society; the prisoners want to remain free by holding together as a society.

The choices could have been named differently. Confession could have been called cooperation – and certainly if we view the game from the perspective of the prosecutor, a confession would be a way for a prisoner to cooperate. However, again, the PD puts us in the place of the Prisoner, who is depicted as being in society with other prisoners but not with the prosecutor or the authorities.

Again, the PD does not have to be expressed in these terms that suggest that authority is opposed to, rather than part of, society. It doesn’t have to, but it is, and I consider this highly significant. The PD is not a dilemma about how we get justice – it is a dilemma about how we get freedom. And the freedom of the reduced sentences is not simply a freedom from jail, but a freedom from the power that would turn us against each other in pursuit of its own anti-social goals.

One place where the question of power has had a great effect on society is the relationship between employer and employee. Marx portrayed this as a class struggle, between the proletariat – those laborers whose physical activities produced value in the economy – and capitalists, whose role is to organize the activities of those laborers. Marxism generally holds that the capitalists do not produce value through their activities, and instead exploit the laborers by making profits (that is, unfair monetary gain) from the work of the laborers, who receive wages worth less than the value of their work.

The question Marxism must answer, then, is: how do the capitalists maintain this exploitation, if they are indeed adding nothing of value? Why do the laborers allow the capitalists to exploit them? Clearly, the capitalists must have some power over the laborers.

What is the nature of this power? To begin, the capitalists own the means of production. They may own land, tools, supplies, or other property that the laborers cannot obtain due to political or economic factors. Modern ownership of land goes back to feudalism, where all property rights flowed from the king, down through the nobility, and usually stopping there but occasionally ending in yeoman farmers. And of course colonial American plantations are a perfect example of workers laboring to make profits for a plantation owner who was granted the land by a monarch or the monarch’s representative. And plantation workers – often indentured servants or slaves – are a perfect example of the exploited worker who does not and cannot own property and, as a result, whose work benefits another. Furthermore, the system of property rights at the time of colonial America was so extensive that one person could own another, in the form of indenture, or slavery.

Aside from simply condemning this system as evil, it is worthwhile to analyze it further. The system of property rights is a way of organizing some or all of the things in the world (people, places, objects) so that each thing is accounted for in some way. This can be viewed from a functionalist perspective – in other words, the function of fertile land is to be farmed, and so it is up to the nobility to make sure that it is farmed so the people do not starve, and it is similarly up to the peasants to do the actual farming, for the same reason. In this way, power is not simply a tool of privilege, but a tool of productivity. As society advanced, the economy evolved, and the nobility was replaced by a more efficient system of administration. People who were better at organizing the means of production were allowed to be in charge, and to grow rich from their success, and these people are Marx’s capitalists. Capitalism proved more efficient at organizing productive power than its predecessors (mercantilism and feudalism) , but the power relationship that existed under feudalism was never really abolished. Instead, it is simply better organized.

One of the ways that the system is better organized is that it is better at sorting people based on their productive capacities. It is by no means perfect – the system is still marred by things like gender, class, and race discrimination – but it is certainly better than a system where a son of a farmer is automatically also a farmer. The system provides people with a range of options and then rewards those who choose the options that enable them to be more productive.

The individualism that comes with a system in which individuals feel that their lives are created by their choices provides a certain amount of resistance to metonymic power. Metonymic power involves a displacement of agency and an abdication of personal or individual responsibility. Individualism encourages people to take individual responsibility for their lives, and a broader range of choices provides people with a sense of agency. So in a sense, capitalism can be seen as a substitution of productive power for metonymic power – individuals become more productive (producing productive power) and also gain a sense of their own agency (reducing metonymic power). Another way of saying this is to say that the economic sphere has gained power while the political sphere has lost power.

The fact remains that under capitalism, laborers still find themselves the subjects of a form of power. The difference is that while metonymic power is explicitly linguistic (or at least semiotic) – the acting agent thinks of an action as having originated from a symbolic agent – productive power is more phenomenological: it is felt, experienced, performed, and quite difficult to express linguistically. In other words, while a peasant can express any number of symbolic agents (God, the King, his feudal lord, duty) to explain why he continues farming, and thus make it very clear that he is under the effects of a power relationship, the worker is denied these symbolic agents, and is left only with the idea that his labor is a personal choice, that he could choose to do something else, or nothing at all, that nobody is forcing him to work, and thus is told that he is the one with the power. And so we come across arguments that say that the laborer and the capitalist both have power – the capitalist offers wages, the laborer offers work, and thus an equitable bargain is struck, with no force, threat, or coercion – and the productive power that organizes the labor by organizing the laborer is obscured and hidden.

I have spoken a great deal about this productive power, but I have not yet described what productive power is. My answer, which I will elaborate upon later, is that productive power is disciplinary power, which is panoptic power, which in turn is inverted, or reflexive, metonymic power. I have teased you all a great deal with this answer, which opens up more questions than it answers. I believe my meaning will soon become clear.

First, lest I be accused of forgetting the traditional meaning of the phrase “organized labor” I turn my attention now to labor unions and collective bargaining. The idea behind collective bargaining is that individual workers will have more negotiating power as a whole than they will singly. The theory is that, where if one person says “Give me a raise or I won’t work” that person gets fired, if an entire workforce says “Give us a raise or we won’t work” the workforce gets the raise. If, as I say, the productive power that the workers are subject to is in fact panoptic power, then the solution of breaking the isolation to break the panoptic model fits with the action of organizing as a labor union to break the power the capitalists have over the workers. In fact, the position of workers in a labor union cooperating to receive higher wages can be compared to the position of prisoners in the prisoner’s dilemma – if one or a few workers cooperate, by striking, but other workers defect, by being scabs, the striking workers get fired and the scabs get “rewarded” with their jobs (but no raise); if everyone defects the status quo is maintained, which is bad, but if enough people cooperate everyone is better off because the company grants the raises.

One could look at the organization of a labor union as a collective entity as a deployment of metonymic power on the workers’ behalf. Since, under individualism, their metonymic power was unassigned, they can easily assign it to the labor union as a symbolic agent, on whose behalf they act and in whom they vest the power to direct their activities. The deployment of metonymic power disrupts the productive power, and, indeed, we have certainly heard capitalists complaining about how unionized labor negatively impacts productivity.

So let’s talk a little about this productive power. Productive power does not so much produce things as it produces individuals, or subjects. As a simple example, under feudalism, the peasants are the King’s subjects. They have well-defined roles. One could say that the power that the King has is what causes this situation – what makes people subjects, what assigns their roles, and thus what determines what they do, who they are, what their function is. Of course, I’ve said before that the power that the King has is simply metonymic power, which constitutes the King as a symbolic agent as a result of the power the peasants vest in him. (We can see here that the specificity of these types of power begins to blur, and that these relations of power, which Foucault refers to as the “micro-physics of power,” are one way or another what constitutes and identifies individuals, and that we are all subjects of this kind of power.) In the King we see a rudimentary panoptic observer – the King makes claims to divine right, has the power to reward or to punish – but the King’s systems have not mastered many aspects of panoptic power, have not mastered isolation and self-surveillance, and the productivity that we see is likewise rudimentary.

Under capitalism, the panopticon becomes much more relevant as a model and productivity likewise increases. In another post I will argue that the free market follows a more or less panoptic model. Also, workers are much more likely to be supervised in factories than in the individual shops they had as skilled laborers in ages past; factories begin to resemble panopticons, with workers isolated and continually under threat of surveillance and punishment. Other social institutions begin to resemble panopticons as well, all with the goal of producing disciplined, productive individuals who will keep the capitalist system going.

The job of the capitalist in this system is simple: to find out what people demand, and supply it. If the capitalist does a good job he is rewarded, if not, he is punished. The capitalist has choices and options – many choices and options, because the capitalist has capital – but ultimately the capitalist must also fulfill his role in society just as the nobility had to fulfill their roles. The greater productive power as opposed to metonymic power means that the capitalist need not be a symbolic agent – the capitalist can be nameless and faceless, and thus can be anyone. The capitalist is constrained by, and serves, the same system as the laborer, with the caveat that the capitalist has more options and is thus often considered better off, or less constrained by power. The capitalist also tries to overcome power, to beat the system, by organizing – this is why we see corporations, cartelization, lobbying, price-fixing, insider trading.

I want to say a few more things about labor and power. Earlier I said that modern labor, under capitalism, is denied a symbolic agent. The modern worker can’t say “I’m a laborer because my lord told me to labor;” he must instead take responsibility for his choice to work as a laborer (instead of, for instance, doing some other job, or being unemployed). In this case, the acting agent can be said to have no symbolic agent, since the acting agent claims agency himself. However, one could also say that this is reflexive metonymy – that the “self” is the symbolic agent of the action. Can a “self” be a symbolic agent? Of course. Especially if we don’t accept an essentialist or modernist theory of the self. One could go so far as to say that the “self” is the symbolic agent of last recourse, that when we can’t figure out where the agency comes from, we simply invent a concept of “self” as a placeholder for that agency.

(In The Illusion of Conscious Will, D.M. Wegner argues that conscious will itself is simply an illusion designed by our brains to keep track of who is doing our actions. In other words, in order to remember and track what it is that we are doing, we need to develop a strong sense of self, agency, and self-agency, but in reality, our brains perform our actions without any conscious willing of those actions.)

With the panoptic model of power, the panoptic central observer becomes the symbolic agent. We act the way we do because the observer might be watching; we watch ourselves and discipline our own actions, imagining that we are being watched. This imagined observer, the observer that is a constructed response to circumstances, is the symbolic agent in the metonymic power relationship; at the same time, this observer is ourselves, since it is only in our minds. In this way we can see panoptic power as an inversion of metonymic power, or a reflexive deployment of such.

To make clear, the laborer under capitalism is denied a symbolic agent, thus makes the “self” the symbolic agent; the panoptic effects of isolation and self-surveillance cause him to work, and work in a certain way; the panoptic observer that the worker imagines is watching him, who is really just the worker himself, gets the symbolic agency; thus the productive power produces effects that the worker experiences as being imposed by an outside force; the force is imagined (symbolic) but has real effects. I’m not sure if that really was clear, but this post is now very long and has gone quite far off topic.

To conclude, there is power at work in the relationship between employer and employee – however, this power is much more complicated than simple domination, as it involves the interplay of panoptic and metonymic power. As I explore these models of power further, I shall be attempting to derive generalized strategies for working within and/or against these systems of power, and I hope to be able to say more about this issue, as well as to use the work that’s already been done by the organized labor movement towards that end.

I’ll start this post with a brief recap:

The Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) is a concept in game theory that describes the situation of two suspects who have been apprehended by the authorities. In the PD, the authorities need a confession in order to get the conviction they want, so they come up with a scenario to try to convince each suspect to confess. They offer each prisoner a reduced sentence in exchange for a confession that incriminates the other prisoner. If both prisoners stay silent – a play that is conventionally called “cooperate” – they both get a short sentence. If one prisoner chooses to “cooperate” but the other prisoner makes a confession – a play called “defect” – the defector goes free and the cooperator gets a full, long sentence. If both “defect” they both get a medium sentence.

Like the Traveler’s Dilemma, it is better in the Prisoner’s Dilemma for both players to cooperate – choosing (100) or choosing to stay silent. Also like the TD, in the PD if one player cooperates, the other player can increase his payoff by defecting – choosing (99), or choosing to confess. And finally, if one player defects – by choosing (2), or confessing – the other player can mitigate the harm done by also defecting.

The Panopticon is a philosophical concept that describes the situation of prisoners in a more general sense. The original panopticon was a design for a physical structure that would house prisoners in such a way as to maximize the number of inmates who could be supervised by one warden. This design consisted of a central tower where an observer could remain unseen by the inmates but from which all of the inmates could be seen. The inmates were situated in individual cells surrounding the central tower, separate from each other.

The idea of the panopticon is that this situation – isolation and the perpetual possibility of surveillance, would produce within each prisoner a sort of self-surveillance. Each prisoner would know at all times that he could be under supervision, and so each prisoner will act at all times as though he were under supervision.

The difference between self-surveillance and regular surveillance, though, is that self-surveillance can be much more intrusive. After all, an outside observer can only see certain physical manifestations of our actions – in other words, can only see what our actions look like. We, on the other hand, can, in a sense, see what our actions are. We form the intent that turns a motion into a gesture, an activity into an action, a sound into a word. We can read our own minds.

This paves the way for what I like to call the panoptic model of power. The panoptic model of power says that power is constituted and magnified by the effects of isolation and self-surveillance. Isolation and self-surveillance are interlocking, mutually reinforcing forces – in other words, isolation helps constitute self-surveillance and self-surveillance helps constitute isolation. A good example of how this works is the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

The most obvious intersection of the PD and the panoptic model of power is isolation. Without isolation, the PD would not be a dilemma. Imagine the PD with both prisoners in the same room. They can talk to each other, they can see each other, and they know what the other one is doing at all times. In other words, you’ve removed the hope that one player can defect without the other player defecting, and so now the options are only (defect, defect) or (cooperate, cooperate). Between those two options, one is strictly better, and it’s the one that benefits both players the most – so there’s no dilemma.

The self-surveillance part of the PD may not be as obvious. First we can look at the effects: The expected effect of the PD is that both prisoners confess. Is not confession a form of self-surveillance? It’s self-incrimination, certainly. One might expect the prisoners to provide additional information to the authorities in the course of their confession – details of the crime, perhaps the location of weapons used in the crime, perhaps details about other accomplices, or motives, or planning. In other words, the PD goes a lot deeper than the surveillance the authorities were able to place upon the prisoners without the PD.

To find the cause, we need only locate the central observer. In the panopticon, the prisoner exercises self-surveillance because the prisoner might be under surveillance. In the PD, the prisoner confesses because the other prisoner might confess. In the panopticon, the possibility of being watched leads the prisoner to watch himself. In the PD, the possibility of being incriminated leads the prisoner to incriminate himself.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma, thus, provides both an example of the panoptic model of power at work, and an insight into one of the mechanisms of the panoptic model of power.

In my last post I introduced the “panoptic model of power” as an explanation of where the name of this blog comes from. In doing so I touched briefly upon the concept of the panopticon, because at first glance “panoptic” is the word in that phrase that needs to be explained. I was able to take for granted that anyone reading would have some previous understanding of the word power. However, in presenting a new model of power I also implicitly challenged that understanding. Therefore, I believe that an examination of power as a concept is worthwhile before we go any further.

Often individuals and groups are spoken of as having power. For instance, America is a powerful nation – some would say the most powerful in the world. Within America, George W. Bush is currently in power. Here we are speaking of military power, political power, economic power. What does it mean to have this kind of power?

One can say, “George W. Bush invaded Iraq and removed Saddam Hussein from power” in all seriousness without considering that it was not Bush himself but rather certain members of the United States military who invaded Iraq and toppled the government. Using the name of the President to stand in for the troops who are carrying out his orders is an example of metonymy, a rhetorical device in which one word or concept is used to stand in for a related word or concept. The use of metonymy is widespread when discussing power relationships. If officials from the US government sign an agreement with officials from the British government, it is said that Washington and London have signed an agreement. This, too, is metonymy.

If we read these metonymic statements literally what we see is a displacement of agency. Bush himself did not invade Iraq, nor did the city of Washington, D.C. pick up a pen and write its name on a piece of paper. In these examples, Bush and Washington are not direct agents but related concepts – concepts linked by the relations of power. They do not do anything themselves and yet the agency of the actions taken is ascribed to them through metonymy.

So one formulation of power we could postulate would be the metonymic model of power – the possession of agency not through action but through metonymic relations. The reason I am formulating power this way is to point out that it is not just individuals who wield power – it is also concepts, and it is also the names of these concepts. Under the metonymic model, “Washington” has power even though it has no real agency of its own. Washington, instead, is a symbolic agent – it has agency through a metonymic relationship.

By definition, then, metonymic power is the displacement of agency from an acting agent to a symbolic agent. This displacement of agency is what gives metonymic power its power. A displacement of agency is also a displacement of responsibility. Therefore, metonymic power gets its power from the human tendency to evade responsibility.

Thus, when we say that President Bush invaded Iraq we relieve ourselves – that is, everyone except our symbolic agent, President Bush – of the responsibility of invading Iraq. We do not blame the acting agents, i.e. the soldiers, because they were just following orders. But by relieving the soldiers of responsibility for their actions we enable them to take actions irresponsibly.

But we haven’t finished displacing the agency yet. We could also say that America invaded Iraq. America, after all, is the world’s most powerful nation. America is much more powerful than, for example, President Bush. This is because America cannot be an acting agent. America is a concept, a dream, a set of markings on a map. America is purely symbolic, which means that when we displace agency to America there’s no individual to take the blame or the responsibility. Soldiers can invade other countries because President Bush is assigned the agency; President Bush can invade other countries because America is assigned the agency. The idea of America becomes the ultimate authority and the ultimate scapegoat for any action because we can and do point to the action and say “America did that.”

If America is an extremely powerful symbolic agent, then perhaps the most powerful symbolic agent is God. God, as a concept or symbol, is often assigned all of the agency for everything that ever happens in the whole world. God is watching and God has a plan. God made this all happen for a reason. The Catholic Church was able to launch the Crusades in the name of God, and I certainly don’t remember which pope it was who harnessed this power, because ultimately the symbolic agents – the Church, and God – are much more powerful than the individual who puts these agents to use. The divine right of kings was a concept that said that all kings derived their authority from God, and thus to oppose the king was to oppose God. What is this other than a displacement of agency? Everything the king does as an acting agent is justified by the will of God, the ultimate indisputable symbolic agent from which all agency flows.

The power of polities and religions has often been described as hierarchical or top-down, with the power deriving from the king or God, and proceeding down through the nobility/clergy and ending with the peasants/laypeople. But in general terms, the king doesn’t have any more acting agency than the peasant, and God as a symbol doesn’t have any acting agency at all. Under a classic model of power this leads to a paradox: why do people follow the king, or God? The answer usually comes swiftly – fear – but I do not find this satisfactory. People have a natural tendency to displace agency. People don’t want to be responsible for bad things happening to them. People are happier with fewer choices. When people fail they want to justify their failures by blaming something other than themselves. Metonymic power is bottom-up power. It essentially consists of individuals passing the buck onward and upward until a satisfactory symbolic agent can be found.

(From a Lacanian point of view, one might say that the displacement of agency is an attempt to abdicate the Imaginary identity and return to a need-response paradigm. This argument is strengthened when you consider recent cognitive science work suggesting that conscious will exists solely as a marker of agency. People want to satisfy their feeling of lack by returning to a non-agencied, pre-conscious state.)

Perhaps at this point an example might help to clarify things: Let’s say King Jeff fights a war against the French. King Jeff doesn’t do the fighting himself. Instead, “King Jeff” is a metonymy: a word that stands in for a related word or concept, in this case, the subjects that do the fighting. But how is King Jeff, or “King Jeff,” related to his subjects? You might say the relation is power. I say, rather than Jeff being related to his subjects by power, he is powered by his relation to his subjects. The relation between Jeff and his subjects – the metonymic relation – is a displacement of agency. Jeff is related to his subjects in that he is their symbolic agent. He acts by them acting – their actions become his actions. This metonymic relationship is what constitutes Jeff’s power. Now if we substitute for “King Jeff” the word “England” in the above explanation we see how agency can be metonymically assigned to symbols or ideas and not just people. And indeed, “England” was considered one of the King of England’s names (Even if Jeff was never one of the King of England’s names).

Metonymic power accounts for a great deal of what is traditionally known as power. It bears mentioning that there is also power as a synonym for strength, capacity, or energy – as in, a car with a certain amount of horsepower, or a power tool, or a rock with the power to turn lead into gold. This type of power seems on it face somewhat less interesting, but it provides a good segue into a discussion of productive power, which I will discuss in a later post.