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beccaelizabethSo, now as usual I take my new bits of learning and apply them to my current obsession. I always do this. It is because if it was Torchwood vs. Lit I know which would win, and it would be a rather embarrassing reason to drop out of uni...
The other reason I'm having trouble concentrating on the reading is I think it has started to talk bollocks. One of those times when it started out making sense but then skated fast until, when you start the argument right there, it don't hold. To my mind.
Right now it is talking about Castle = Prison, and I think there's a key point missing in that one. Prisons keep people *in*. Castles keep people *out*. While a prison defines a prisoner and tells them exactly what to do, a castle defends the dwellers and leaves them space to do as they please. Having read the actual book they're talking about I feel fairly sure of my reading on this point.
Question: Torchwood: Prison or castle?
The handout essay started with talking about the Panopticon, and also naming.
Panopticon was a prison and a concept. The idea was to put prisoners in individual cells around a central tower. In the tower there would be wardens who may or may not be looking at any individual prisoner at any time. No prisoner could see any other prisoner. They were just in a cell, alone, possibly watched.
Yeah, that sounds like hell to me too.
But as a basic principle of control it became pervasive through the institutions of the time (when it was invented, roughly Dickens times) and remains pervasive now.
Consider how often through the day you may or may not be being watched. Little mechanical eyes everywhere. CCTV = panopticon in action.
With the key difference of course that we have contact with each other.
Torchwood : I don't think it is giving away spoilers to mention that there are cameras everywhere, and watching and being watched is a thing. We the viewer watch through cameras that are sometimes the same cameras the characters have access to. So this panopticon thingy has relevance.
Naming is the next part. Defining through labels. And being named, allowing the definition.
Pip in Great Expectations names himself by accident, being unable to pronounce Phillip Pirrip. (Luckily I haven't ended up being called Rerere or Buhbe for similar reasons. Although actually it would be more 'we' because of lack of mastery of the letter R.) He gets stuck as Pip through the actions of others, naming him, saying he shall always be known that way. And yet through the naming he gets from a friend he gets a measure of safety via anonymity, and a different perspective on himself (Herbert being the only one that names him a good person). And it is through this naming that he gets a happy ending, work of his own and good company.
Torchwood, especially because these are the first episodes, is doing a lot of naming. The specific denotation/conotation bits about names are for another time, but the question to ask is, who is doing naming, and who is being named? Do they name themselves? When named by another, do they accept that name? Or are they all "One syllable, think you can remember it"? Because right there you get a relation of power. Further, who transforms the names, who abbreviates, who demands an expansion or a title?
The essay idea is, I think, that language locks us into little cells people can see, defines us, tells us where to be within the language structure, where to be within society. Does this through names, labels, definitions. Subject position in discourse, I think it is.
Classic example of how language is never neutral: terrorist vs freedom fighter.
How about: Alien.
Is there a neutral word for not-of-this-earth?
How about non-human?
Person covers everyone, right? Personalities? But... not equally.
Torchwood's little "If it's alien it's ours" motto, by naming things, gives them power over them. Just as naming someone sick, insane, criminal, gives the relevant agencies power over them. As part of a discourse, it names not-normal, and names an institution to control it.
It also defines human vs alien.
Is Jack 'pure' human? By Cassandra's time nobody is. All spread through the galaxy, mixed with whatever is out there. Who did Jack's ancestors dance with?
Where does that put him in the Torchwood discourse?
How does that relate to current discourses on terrorists, or illegal combatants, or whatever the powerful wish to name them now?
Hopefully that level will stay rather a lot more subtle than on Robin Hood, but given how pervasive that particular system of fear and control is getting in the culture it do tend to turn up in the media. And you can always read things in the light of other things. Doesn't always make them easier to see, but, never know until you try.
"Power, conferring identities, controlling destinies"
says the essay I'm reading.
Identity: Torchwood.
Identity: Weevil. (Who did not name themselves, and apparently cannot.)
Identity: Alien.
Identity: Murderer.
The second episode has a conflict of identites right in the middle of it. Human possessed by alien - how to label them? Human? Alien? Murderer? Victim? Watch *who* does the naming and what ideological position this implies for them.
Earlier it mentions "the sense of being looked at is pervasive"
"Where such spying is [...] the sense of being someone constituted as having a secret to hide is not far away."
Interesting to relate that to Torchwood.
Who is watching who? Who has the secrets?
Gwen is the one on camera on camera a *lot*. But as far as we know her only secret is from her boyfriend, not the viewer. Right?
Maybe she's being re-written right now, being watched ends up meaning she has a secret.
This stuff is much more fun about the pretty SF.
"Behind the confession is what cannot be confessed
because it is outside consciousness or too much inside it:
it belongs in the discourse of the society at a level which cannot be directly questioned."
I like that first line. Behind the confession. Like, whatever we're told, there's still secrets.
Its spinning off Freud, who I don't like, but the idea of layers is interesting.
Because even if there's no subconscious layers left, there's the layers imposed by language and symbols - confession, in trying to convey information, is constrained by the structures of this shared 'reality' that is constituted through language. There's things that cannot be confessed, said, thought, because the structure hasn't got room for them.
So, then what?
So the handout essay is full of interesting.
If I manage to get through it, I'll go back and fill in individual details from Torchwood for this watching/naming stuff that caught my interest.
The trouble is it is talking now in ways that are quite opposite not only to how I read the text but to how I see the text as possible to read, which obviously means I'm a bit wrong because that is what they see in there, but means also I think they're just wrong.
They're saying the end of the book means that Pip is doing just what was done to him, and I rather thought that having broken the cycle Pip was finally doing different.
What they said precisely that annoyed me -
"the dominated have no choice but to take over the language of their domination - to continue to beat, as they have been beaten, to continue to name disparagingly, as they have been named"
which is clearly not true. By using names to mean a new thing then even the old words can cease to be disparaging - see 'queer' for current attempts. Yeah, there's language inertia, and it don't lose the old associations. But it can be used in a new way, made different.
As for 'continue to beat' as a no choice thing... absolute bollocks. Even within the context of the book. Joe lets himself be beaten in order that he not continue to beat. Which I think puts him more in his mother's position, except for the thing where she sometimes actually left, but Joe wouldn't. So there is a way of looking at it that makes Joe 'continue to'. But that would be because Joe is only a fraction part, he isn't the guy who ends up remaking himself. Pip does *not* beat, and also is *not* beaten. He gets caught by a bad man and yells for help, and is rescued. Which... can be considered another part of another pattern, but my point stands. He stopped, and changed. And when he suggests he wants to borrow/adopt mini Pip at the end, that isn't 'horrifying' like the essay suggests - he doesn't have to be Magwitch or Miss Havisham, because he can see how screwed up they were.
Torchwood... do as you have been done to?
Too early, too little back story, for most of them.
For Jack... interesting angle.
"There is no 'knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations'." essay quotes Foucault.
Knowledge is power - naming and being named, labels, structures. This is not that, but how do you decide which is this and which is that and where the lines are and which are valuable?
"You people and your quaint little categories"
Jack is working from a different discourse. Only in his sexuality? Only if the writers are a bit limited.
I'll go back to the sofa and attempt to finish reading this increasingly annoying essay handout.
I have no idea if what I just wrote is any kind of useful, except to me helping me digest this stuff.
The other reason I'm having trouble concentrating on the reading is I think it has started to talk bollocks. One of those times when it started out making sense but then skated fast until, when you start the argument right there, it don't hold. To my mind.
Right now it is talking about Castle = Prison, and I think there's a key point missing in that one. Prisons keep people *in*. Castles keep people *out*. While a prison defines a prisoner and tells them exactly what to do, a castle defends the dwellers and leaves them space to do as they please. Having read the actual book they're talking about I feel fairly sure of my reading on this point.
Question: Torchwood: Prison or castle?
The handout essay started with talking about the Panopticon, and also naming.
Panopticon was a prison and a concept. The idea was to put prisoners in individual cells around a central tower. In the tower there would be wardens who may or may not be looking at any individual prisoner at any time. No prisoner could see any other prisoner. They were just in a cell, alone, possibly watched.
Yeah, that sounds like hell to me too.
But as a basic principle of control it became pervasive through the institutions of the time (when it was invented, roughly Dickens times) and remains pervasive now.
Consider how often through the day you may or may not be being watched. Little mechanical eyes everywhere. CCTV = panopticon in action.
With the key difference of course that we have contact with each other.
Torchwood : I don't think it is giving away spoilers to mention that there are cameras everywhere, and watching and being watched is a thing. We the viewer watch through cameras that are sometimes the same cameras the characters have access to. So this panopticon thingy has relevance.
Naming is the next part. Defining through labels. And being named, allowing the definition.
Pip in Great Expectations names himself by accident, being unable to pronounce Phillip Pirrip. (Luckily I haven't ended up being called Rerere or Buhbe for similar reasons. Although actually it would be more 'we' because of lack of mastery of the letter R.) He gets stuck as Pip through the actions of others, naming him, saying he shall always be known that way. And yet through the naming he gets from a friend he gets a measure of safety via anonymity, and a different perspective on himself (Herbert being the only one that names him a good person). And it is through this naming that he gets a happy ending, work of his own and good company.
Torchwood, especially because these are the first episodes, is doing a lot of naming. The specific denotation/conotation bits about names are for another time, but the question to ask is, who is doing naming, and who is being named? Do they name themselves? When named by another, do they accept that name? Or are they all "One syllable, think you can remember it"? Because right there you get a relation of power. Further, who transforms the names, who abbreviates, who demands an expansion or a title?
The essay idea is, I think, that language locks us into little cells people can see, defines us, tells us where to be within the language structure, where to be within society. Does this through names, labels, definitions. Subject position in discourse, I think it is.
Classic example of how language is never neutral: terrorist vs freedom fighter.
How about: Alien.
Is there a neutral word for not-of-this-earth?
How about non-human?
Person covers everyone, right? Personalities? But... not equally.
Torchwood's little "If it's alien it's ours" motto, by naming things, gives them power over them. Just as naming someone sick, insane, criminal, gives the relevant agencies power over them. As part of a discourse, it names not-normal, and names an institution to control it.
It also defines human vs alien.
Is Jack 'pure' human? By Cassandra's time nobody is. All spread through the galaxy, mixed with whatever is out there. Who did Jack's ancestors dance with?
Where does that put him in the Torchwood discourse?
How does that relate to current discourses on terrorists, or illegal combatants, or whatever the powerful wish to name them now?
Hopefully that level will stay rather a lot more subtle than on Robin Hood, but given how pervasive that particular system of fear and control is getting in the culture it do tend to turn up in the media. And you can always read things in the light of other things. Doesn't always make them easier to see, but, never know until you try.
"Power, conferring identities, controlling destinies"
says the essay I'm reading.
Identity: Torchwood.
Identity: Weevil. (Who did not name themselves, and apparently cannot.)
Identity: Alien.
Identity: Murderer.
The second episode has a conflict of identites right in the middle of it. Human possessed by alien - how to label them? Human? Alien? Murderer? Victim? Watch *who* does the naming and what ideological position this implies for them.
Earlier it mentions "the sense of being looked at is pervasive"
"Where such spying is [...] the sense of being someone constituted as having a secret to hide is not far away."
Interesting to relate that to Torchwood.
Who is watching who? Who has the secrets?
Gwen is the one on camera on camera a *lot*. But as far as we know her only secret is from her boyfriend, not the viewer. Right?
Maybe she's being re-written right now, being watched ends up meaning she has a secret.
This stuff is much more fun about the pretty SF.
"Behind the confession is what cannot be confessed
because it is outside consciousness or too much inside it:
it belongs in the discourse of the society at a level which cannot be directly questioned."
I like that first line. Behind the confession. Like, whatever we're told, there's still secrets.
Its spinning off Freud, who I don't like, but the idea of layers is interesting.
Because even if there's no subconscious layers left, there's the layers imposed by language and symbols - confession, in trying to convey information, is constrained by the structures of this shared 'reality' that is constituted through language. There's things that cannot be confessed, said, thought, because the structure hasn't got room for them.
So, then what?
So the handout essay is full of interesting.
If I manage to get through it, I'll go back and fill in individual details from Torchwood for this watching/naming stuff that caught my interest.
The trouble is it is talking now in ways that are quite opposite not only to how I read the text but to how I see the text as possible to read, which obviously means I'm a bit wrong because that is what they see in there, but means also I think they're just wrong.
They're saying the end of the book means that Pip is doing just what was done to him, and I rather thought that having broken the cycle Pip was finally doing different.
What they said precisely that annoyed me -
"the dominated have no choice but to take over the language of their domination - to continue to beat, as they have been beaten, to continue to name disparagingly, as they have been named"
which is clearly not true. By using names to mean a new thing then even the old words can cease to be disparaging - see 'queer' for current attempts. Yeah, there's language inertia, and it don't lose the old associations. But it can be used in a new way, made different.
As for 'continue to beat' as a no choice thing... absolute bollocks. Even within the context of the book. Joe lets himself be beaten in order that he not continue to beat. Which I think puts him more in his mother's position, except for the thing where she sometimes actually left, but Joe wouldn't. So there is a way of looking at it that makes Joe 'continue to'. But that would be because Joe is only a fraction part, he isn't the guy who ends up remaking himself. Pip does *not* beat, and also is *not* beaten. He gets caught by a bad man and yells for help, and is rescued. Which... can be considered another part of another pattern, but my point stands. He stopped, and changed. And when he suggests he wants to borrow/adopt mini Pip at the end, that isn't 'horrifying' like the essay suggests - he doesn't have to be Magwitch or Miss Havisham, because he can see how screwed up they were.
Torchwood... do as you have been done to?
Too early, too little back story, for most of them.
For Jack... interesting angle.
"There is no 'knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations'." essay quotes Foucault.
Knowledge is power - naming and being named, labels, structures. This is not that, but how do you decide which is this and which is that and where the lines are and which are valuable?
"You people and your quaint little categories"
Jack is working from a different discourse. Only in his sexuality? Only if the writers are a bit limited.
I'll go back to the sofa and attempt to finish reading this increasingly annoying essay handout.
I have no idea if what I just wrote is any kind of useful, except to me helping me digest this stuff.