Make-up Blog (March 17-19)

Agre’s discussion of surveillance casts it as a model, “a set of metaphors” which maintains an “identification with the state . . . with consciously planned-out malevolent aims of a specifically political nature,” (Agre 743). He also notes the conflation of human bodies with their constituent parts or objects metonymically associated with them (ex. “a system that tracks trucks can generally depend on a stable correspondence . . . between trucks and their drivers”) (742). This made me think of biopower as part of the state’s political aims in conditions of near or imagined “total surveillance,” (737). Agre agrees to a paranoid extent with Foucault about disciplinary/surveillance societies simultaneously forcing and enforcing compliance with their mechanisms of organization and ideological aims. By objectifying the body and its parts to make it capable of tracking, institutions impose “a moral influence over behavior,” (Foucault 210) and regulations of the body with eugenic implications.