In his seminal book, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault lays out his most well known piece of philosophy: expanding the concept Panopticon posited by Jeremy Bentham. From D&P, “the Panopticon is a machine for disassociating the seen/being seen dyad: the peripheric ring is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees without ever being seen”. Taken literally, this applies to all places where a guard is present, either to watch over criminals, valuables, or other people or items of value. However, the panopticon has a more devious and sinister notion behind it than just pure surveillance. To surveil a body is to make certain that body conforms to the surveyors’ standards, lest the body faces punishment. A different, but similar concept to the Panopticon is Foucault’s theory of biopower. Biopower, basically, is the idea that there is a technology of power for managing humans in large groups. In this post, I will explore the functions of biopower and panopticism within the creation and utilization of the archive. In doing so, I will articulate that the state-run archive is a panoptic-like tool of biopower, which employs memory control, where those in power can oversee what parts of cultural memory gets persevered and made easily accessible.
Today’s society is a controlled society. It is defined by how a person is able to find information through search queries, and how the information shown to them is controlled in the background. For the LIS occupation, this control is in the form of metadata, data created about an object that allows it to be discoverable. A majority of archival, library, and museum institutions utilize terms created by the library of congress to help create metadata. While an information institution, the Library of Congress (LoC) is still a state controlled body and therefore the terms that come out of it would be subject to be judged by the current majority party. In her paper “Disciplining Knowledge at the Library of Congress” Melissa A. Adler states that “ [LoC] plays a vital part in discipline creation and maintenance, as it actively reproduces specific discourses, while silencing others, such as those from the humanities, social sciences, and the general public” (1). As a state controlled entity, the LoC is the perfect example of Foucault’s Panopticon, as archival institutions that adopt LoC terms are themselves conforming to the standard put in place by whatever political party is in power. The archival institution then helps to “reproduce the dominant discourse and produce silences through censorship and undercataloging”. In this way, the Panopticon is in effect in multiple layers of information organization and retrieval.
In using terms curated by a state entity, the state takes control over something which would occur naturally– individual memory. Thus, in this manner, the state has a direct hand in what is remembered and how. Through this, it can control what an entire population remembers, what is accessible. As stated earlier, archives that are controlled by a government entity are subject to their authority. This becomes a form of biopower as memory is a biological function of life. While having a general access point for terms is good for the process of standardization, it is extremely damaging to those who have long been at mercy of those who would oppress, and symbolically annihilate them. As Browne states:
“Foucault describes normalizing judgment as that which normalizes by singling out and correcting ‘that which does not measure up to the rule, that departs from it’ with a glance, a gaze that classifies, ranks and measures. So although disciplinary power is individualizing, by way of normalizing judgment, individual actions are referred ‘to a whole that is at once a field of comparison, a space of differentiation and the principle of a rule to be followed’” (21).
The normalization of individual judgment is what allows this silencing to continue. Since, if the judgment of those who allow memory to be discoverable conforms to the standards, only those facets of history that measure up to the norm are the ones preserved and made accessible, and lost are the stories of the subaltern.
When researchers enter a national archive, they are led to what the archivist has determined to be useful. Similar to how museums “include the spatial routing of visitors,” both physical and digital archives lead their visitors through an unseen route, unknowingly led by those who curate the information. In this manner, the state-run archive is a tool of memory control, engineered in such a way to hide information that would deviate from what the presiding government would deem acceptable to research. For example, “in July 2019, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a startling feature story about ongoing efforts by officials within Israel’s Ministry of Defense to suppress public access to sensitive files in various state archives relating to the 1948 war”.
Archival work is that of historical and cultural preservation through the storing of legacy and heritage. In other words, archival work is on the one hand the preservation of memory, and on the other, how memory is kept. Though these are two different concepts, they reside under the same umbrella. One side is not more important than the other, as the state can use both to pervert the otherwise good intentions of memory-keeping. It is in this way that the state archive becomes a tool for biopower and a panopticon, as it can control, either blatantly through violent means, or subtly in the background, determining what people see, what can be accessed, and what is remembered.
ReferencesAdler, Melissa A. “Disciplining Knowledge at the Library of Congress.” Knowledge Organization 39, no. 5 (2012): 370–76. https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2012-5-370.
Anziska, Seth. “The Erasure of the Nakba in Israel's Archives.” Journal of Palestine Studies 49,no. 1 (2019): 64–76. https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2019.49.1.64.
Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Scholars Portal, n.d.
Caswell, Michelle, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez. “‘To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives.” The American Archivist 79, no. 1 (2016): 59. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.79.1.56.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. — The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley, 1988.
Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching With Visual Materials. Thousand Oaks: Learning Matters, 2022.
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