TEÓDULO LÓPEZ MELÉNDEZ, Writer and Journalist - Caracas, Venezuela
The development of the alienation concept tossed in the forgetfulness to that of fetishism. Both have suffered periods of splendor and of forgetfulness, remodelings and changes. Marx is in the origin of both, only the interpretation of “fetishism of the merchandise” he went decreasing to a false valuation of the things what gave him an ideological implication, when today in day the society of the show has transformed to that merchandise into the creator of the world that we inhabit.
It is evident that both concepts are intertwined. The object is a fetish (today the symbol to mention would be the cellular telephone) and we are alienated in the sense that our creation escaped from us and it dominates us. Today we say in relation to both concepts that have modified the dominance means substantially. It is evident that we insist in the tecno-mediático because we live in the civilization of the image, but she has direct relationship with the merchandise “outside of yes”. This “normalized flock” it is now it for different roads, which have been tuned in their effectiveness by the technology.
The precision of the change defined it Gilles Deleuze like the step from a society disciplinal to a control society. In the first one institutions that work as the spine exist and they define the social especio, this is, the call civil society (another concept in risk) it defines to the social body everything. If to see we almost go the entirety of the institutions that serve from structure to that civil society they are demolished resulting in what this thinker calls “I empty social”.
The call civil society, in some cases, continues conserving the institutions and characteristic that at some time defined it, but these they have been flooded by the new control forms until arriving to one of the essential conditions of this, the hipersegmentación of the society. Here, and everywhere, we should begin to speak rather of a society poscivil.
It is clear that for the existence of a democracy the civil society is indispensable. It is her the field where logically the essential mediations take place to the democratic spirit. It was Hegel the biggest specialist in this topic, although, clearing is, the concept was born to oppose it to that of natural society. The civil thing in the previous thinkers implied the social organization, with the Right included as great computer, while Hegel seems to refer rather to “bourgeois society.”
Well it could be argued that the civil society has become in a mockery of the social thing. The democracy, for example, seems to move away from its drainage mark and composition, to rise above the conflicting forces that move in its breast. The power that he threatens to arise in the XXI century he works-we have already said it until the satiety - with the speed and with the image, more with the speed of the image. Its lift above a weak civil society allows him to recover the dream of the total domain, of the modelación of those “contemporary” (before citizens) to its loyalist to know and to understand. This way, the power of the dominance becomes total. In the field of the political system the democracy begins to be looked as an impediment, as a nuisance.
We are no longer, because, and a lot of people don't sometimes realize, in an industrial society. In consequence the forms of power are others. Those that correspond to a society panóptica * if we accept the term, or, simply to a control society. In consequence, the old forms (unions, political parties, managerial associations and all those “institutions” of the civil society) they collapse, the same as the systems of traditional values, the family, the systems of power (the democracy in danger). it is not, like so much people repeat in my country, that the parties are regenerated or become different. What happens is that the form of political expression of this time no longer goes by them.
There are new forms of power and also new politics forms, only the tendency is to the elimination of this last one, that is to say, to a neo-totalitarianism. If we see, for example, the uselessness of the unions and the absolute impotence of the parties to unite around ideologies, we should admit that the new structure politics will go by a lattice of action nets and political pressure. What it is necessary to understand is that the politics stopped to be an individual or unite-organizational action space to become a great net of nets of transmission of information, creation of coalitions and alliances and in articulation of political pressure.
In their postscript on “The control societies”, Gilles Deleuze reminds us the process, with Foucault, of the disciplinary societies of the XVIII and XIX centuries, in fullness in the principles of the XX century, where the man passes from closed space to closed space, this is, the family, the school, the barracks, the factory and, possibly, the prison that would be the perfect analogical model. This model would be brief, hardly substitute of the calls societies of sovereignty, where more she is organized the death that the life. Deleuze considers the II Guerra's World cup end as the point of precipitation of the new forces and the beginning of the crisis of what we call civil society. The family, the school, the hospital, the army, the prison enter in crisis.
In other words, they enter with force the control societies that substitute to the disciplinary societies. Virilio speaks that control outdoors for opposition to the old closed spaces. The great diagnosis on this process makes it, there is no doubt, Foucault, but it is Deleuze to who we should appeal to understand the change from the old molds to what he denominates modulations.
The modulation constantly changes, he adapts, it becomes flexible. The key is in that in the disciplinary societies always you something began, while in those of control anything, the important thing never ends it is not not even the mass, but the figure. That is to say, we have stopped to be individuals to become in “dividuos”. there is not doubt of the mutation: we are in the era of the services, the old form production capitalist disappeared. I have defined this era like that of the speed, because well, the control is quick, changing, continuous, limitless. If some terrorists place explosive necklaces to their victims, the control society places us an electronic necklace.
And as always that we diagnose in this topic we should return to Michael Foucault (“Microfísica of the power”, “to Watch over and to punish (Birth of the prison)”, “The archaeology of the knowledge”, “The abnormal ones”, “Strategies of power”). some type of surveillance has Always existed toward the individuals or social groups, but one that can call you of “centralized institutional range” it corresponds to this time of the birth and progress of the new technologies. This way, the control society has bigger intensity and systematizing in its surveillance, running off with this last one as substitute of the physical coercion.
This loss of freedom is accepted gladly. Foucault distinguishes this way between show society and society of surveillance, differentiation that I don't find correct, because as I have said above, the show is a vigilant form.
Anyway we can accept the coined term, that of society panóptica that is not another that that that reproduces the structure and operation of the power. In other words, the behavior is homogenized. The prisoner cannot observe who observes it, while the panóptico doesn't make another thing, it is fixed in front of the jailer, looking at him, learning of him, being made him. To say it with words characteristic of a dictatorship, the one that one knows watched over it offers “to behave well.”
The surveillance you introyecta, integral part of the is made “dividuo”. we have become robots consumers of images. And we return to what I have called the neo-totalitarian plague that he can avizorarse in the horizon: there will no longer be dictatorships with full stadiums, it won't be necessary, the submission it will be inside the man, because the “dividuo” he won't see to the power, neither it will be necessary, and when not seeing it he will find absent, inaccessible, and that will make of the power the loving dictator whose effectiveness is guaranteed.
*Panóptico: Said of a building. Built so all their interior part one can see from a single point. DRAE),
tlopezmelendez@cantv.net
