Surveillance and Capitalism

Within the excerpt of Discipline and Punish reprinted in our anthology, Foucault connects the rise of the disciplines and surveillance to the rise of the Enlightenment discourse of liberties as well as to the rise of capitalism. This connection directly opposes an impression that I think I was supposed pick up somewhere or other: the impression that a system based on liberty (aka “democracy”) and capitalism directly oppose and combat the disciplinarity and surveillance of “other” regimes (whether they tend toward fascism or socialism…irrelevant). I believe I (we?) have been taught of a historical period in which this opposition played itself out on a world-wide stage. The Cold War, yeah? The world split between West and East, and on a smaller, physically-bounded level West Germany (FRG) and East Germany (GDR), and again between West and East Berlin, with the two halves divided by one wall (though there were actually two walls).

In view of this physically manifested distinction and the political, social, economic, ideological importance placed upon it, what results from Foucault’s argument that “each makes the other possible and necessary; each provides a model for the other,” that “in fact, the two processes –the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital – cannot be separated?” (564) Maybe what Foucault would have hoped for: a reevaluation of the framework constituting discussions of the Cold War and East and West and a blurring of the distinctions we’ve been taught to believe in.

The Lives of Others captures, on film, life in the GDR. In the film, however, the viewer can see both the typically upheld image of the communist East and an image that complicates the other’s clear-cut, discreet unity. The story centers on Stasi Captain Wiesler’s surveillance of the playwright Dreyman and the changes he undergoes through this surveillance. Even in this set up the opposition between surveillance and capitalism is clearly created along lines of East and West. Wiesler participates as a member of East Germany’s secret police in a system of hierarchical surveillance. And while he is, on the one hand, the seer of Dreyman, he is also the seen. The scenes that show Wiesler’s own apartment depict it as impersonal and cell-like (the walls unpainted, the furniture spartan and constructed from particle board, the food pre-portioned and pre-packaged) bringing to mind the segmented, individualized cells of the peripheral ring in the Panopticon.

But disputing the division between East and West does not require disputing this presence of surveillance or discipline; to accept Foucault’s argument one must accept that everyone everywhere lives in a system based upon discipline and surveillance as opposed to the predisciplinary system supported by spectacle. Instead, to dispute the distinction between East and West involves exposing the West within the East and the East within the West. So in the film, there must be shown characteristics of the West. This mixing of East and West can best be seen in the relationships of West and East German artists and the ways in which these relationships crossed the border. Dreyman communicates and receives visits from a West German man affiliated with the West German magazine Der Spiegel. The man smuggles in a West German typewriter on which Dreyman writes an expose detailing suicide in the GDR that is to be published in Der Spiegel, in the West. Additionally, the presence of a black market in illegal prescription drugs and the presence of prostitution betray the incomplete dominance of communism and the failure of the communist State to eliminate individual consumerist tendencies within the GDR. It is possible, then, to see the capitalist and other characteristics typically limited to the West as being present within the East during the Cold War.

Conversely, the qualities used by the West to characterize and demonize the East (as a state of surveillance and discipline, devoid of the (consumerist) liberties present in the West), can likewise be found in the West. Like Wiesler’s apartment, the division of West Germany (and West Berlin) between the French, British, and Americans into three occupation zones echoes the division of cells within the Panopticon’s peripheral ring. West Germany, though representative of freedom, democracy and capitalism, was divided and controlled according to Foucault’s theory of discipline in the same way (though perhaps not to the same degree) as its eastern counterpart.

My previous observations, I think, can be seen to support Derrida’s conceptualizing of the supplement as well as investigating Foucault’s arguments. It would seem I’ve been examining discipline and capitalism not as distinct systems and discursive objects that, as Foucault argues, make each other possible and necessary, but as two concepts occupied by the history of thought that constitute them, much like Derrida’s discussion of speech and writing. In line with that discussion, the opposition between the discipline of East and the freedom of West, between the communism of East and the capitalism of West, are impossibilities; the terms are tied up in each other and cannot exist without each other; the supplement is always already present at the origin.

Maybe, then, the attempt in the West to dissect and oppose Liberty from and to Discipline (as Foucault pairs the two) results in the impossible separation constructed between East and West in the Cold War. Maybe it was the-condemnation-of the-evils-of communism-in-order-to-praise-the-glories-of-capitalism as a simultaneous masking of the already-presence of all of those communist “evils” within the West.