The scream of the butterfly
"Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" Foucault asks in Discipline and Punish. Somehow he neglected to add "hotels" to that list, an oversight exposed by the recent controversy (sparked by this tweet from Anna Seregina) over a Malmaison boutique hotel in a refurbished prison in Oxford, England, that has apparently become popular with influencers.
This is the sort of thing that is so on the nose that it seems fake. What more could you ask for if you wanted to substantiate the argument that social media platforms are panopticons and influencers are the quintessential "docile bodies" and the key vector of disciplinary normativity playing out as "infinitesimal power over the active body" in our era? No one is compelled to become an influencer or to pay any attention to them, yet through a seemingly incantatory magic enacted by the entire system that produces visibility, the "influencer" influences.
And leisure too — the boutique hotel — is not an escape from the "micro-physics" of discipline but one of its highest refinements, a system in which subordination is voluntarily adopted and experienced as exquisite pleasure, flattering attention, cheeky notoriety. The compulsion to flaunt one's obedience appears as a status game, if not a self-propelled journey of self-discovery. One is ultimately compelled to ask for the better room with the better view, to feel slighted if it is awarded to someone else, to wonder what levers might be pulled, what obsequities might be performed, to change the dispensation, all with the righteous sense that one knows oneself well when they know what they want, even more so if it is then put on the widest display.
The spectacle of influencers in the converted prison is an invitation to disavowal. Their at times ludicrous overperformance of a certain idea of conforming to lifestyle standards and/or selling out allows us to believe that we aren't, or at least not in such an abject way. It conceals our complicity. Foucault describes how surveillance in the 18th century was reorganized as a "multiple, automatic and anonymous power," as a network that "functions like a piece of machinery." However we consume the influencer content, we are cogs in that machine, but the brashness of their performance may make us overlook how the "uninterrupted play of calculated gazes" is playing out everywhere else, on and through our own actions.
In a conversation with Jean-Pierre Barou and Michelle Perrot reprinted in Power/Knowledge, Foucault talks about this as the "reign of 'opinion,'" a construct that "represents a mode of operation through which power will be exercised by virtue of the mere fact of things being known and people seen in a sort of immediate, collective and anonymous gaze." The error that the 18th century reformers made was to think that opinion was intrinsically a force for good and not a force that could be put to any use whatsoever (usually profit) by whoever controlled the apparatus that measured it or articulated it. "They overlooked the real conditions of possibility of opinion, the 'media' of opinion, a materiality caught up in the mechanisms of the economy and power in its forms of the press, publishing, and later the cinema and television," Foucault claims, and of course social media can now be added to that list. The reformers "believed opinion would be inherently just, that it would spread of its own accord, that it would be a sort of democratic surveillance. Basically it was journalism, that capital invention of the 19th century, which made evident all the utopian character of this politics of the gaze."
That "utopian" view of opinion remains and seems to recur whenever a new media form emerges; there is a sense that the new means of representation will not create influencers but truth-tellers, agents of justice. But instead, the flexible power of influence becomes recognized as the only truth, to which we all bear witness over and over again.