Compromised Reality in 'Jews and the Imperial State'

I've spent a fair amount of wordspace discussing topics related to augmented reality, especially how the current digital wave of augmentation can be informed by analyzing the impact of textual augmentation in the pre-digital era.  As someone who studies Russian history, I find investigating the question of how textual practices altered perceptions of reality especially interesting.  The tsarist government, over the three hundred years of its rule, held a fascination with documentation that rivaled any Western European power.  And just like Western Europe, tsarist authorities recognized the power documenting subjects of the realm could bring to their grander designs of glory and empire.  However, unlike the powers of Western Europe, one problem that chronically plagued tsarist ambitions was lack of available manpower.  If Russian authorities wanted to build a foucauldian gaze of panoptic power, they had to make compromises in order to do so.  Eugene Avrutin's Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia describes the effects of this compromise by analyzing Imperial efforts to document Jewish identity.  His work sheds light on how we might better understand the interplay between textual dualist conceptions of identity and the augmented reality those conceptions measured up against.

"While Jews could be easily identified visually as a collective group or defined in legal terms, authorities found it much more challenging to document Jews as individuals," writes Avrutin, as he later identifies three factors that contributed to this problem.  First, building " a legal-administrative order capable of accommodating the empire's remarkable juridicial distinctions and confessional diversity", second "the ordering of clear and distinct cultural boundaries between Jews and non-Jews" and third "containment of Jews in their permanent places of residence."  During the first half of the 19th century, Russian authorities found it increasingly difficult to accurately document a population under once satisfactory categories of social estate and religious belief.  By turning away from census records towards passports, city censuses, and metrical books in the second half of the 19th century, the ruling regime began to rely more heavily on ethnic conceptions of identity for categorizing and policing diverse subjects.  Passports were handy for regulating internal movement of populations.  In contrast with empire-wide census efforts, city censuses were far easier to carry out and contained very valuable information on the inhabitants of urban centers.  According to Avruitn, it was use of the metrical books that constituted a novel method in documenting the legal status of a subject.

Photo from Rude Cactus

Metrical books recorded the births, baptisms, marriages and deaths that occurred in a community and their maintenance fell to clergymen who acted as an intermediary between state and subject.  Since 1722, when Peter the Great issued his first statute on registering vital events, clergymen of the Russian Orthodox Church kept records of their confessional community, but it wasn't until 1835 that Jewish 'crown rabbis' also found themselves in charge of performing the same tasks.  Avrutin states that, "the recording of vital events allowed the state to recognize the population not only as a religious community but as individuals with distinct civil identities."  This approach, using functionaries of religious faiths as proxies for civil servants in record-keeping tasks, possessed several advantages in the eyes of Russian authorities.  Not only did the state find a way to augment its often meager presence amongst diverse populations across the empire, but it also felt that the information it received from religious authorities was more 'accurate' and complete than otherwise could be attained from trained civil servants.  Unlike census records, which collected data primarily for tax use and military conscription quotas, metrical books delineated identity by acting as a record of an individuals denomination, legal status, ethnic origin and place of residence.  Yet the regime also knew how fickle and prone to error record keeping could be, particularly with the Jewish community in the matter of transliterating Hebrew names to Russian or when rabbis recorded different names for birth and death records.

Over the course of five chapters, Avrutin makes a very compelling analysis come to life with several examples drawn from the multitude of records and archives surveyed.  The footnotes alone are worth reading, as they bring the somewhat narrow focus of the work (Jewish populations) into line with the larger backdrop of imperial record keeping practices across the empire.  As a work of Imperial Russian History, I give Jews and the Imperial State high marks.  Instead of performing a more standard review, I would like to spend the remainder of this post exploring a theme I mentioned above- the interplay between textual dualism and augmented reality.  While never using such terms, Avrutin nevertheless provides intriguing examples that demonstrate how these modes of perceiving reality clashed and modified the terms by which the Imperial Russian state understood the meaning of identity.

Bexley police in the UK hold up fake ID cards

Take this observation by Avrutin on the metrical books in the chapter 'Making Jews Legible':

As a fundamental marker of identity, the document (a metrical book entry) followed individuals as they changed place of residence, marital status, and even religious denomination.  The document's civic importance- as the most important tool by which the state obtained knowledge of its population- ensured that officials took much time in enforcing proper registration while continuing to devise new administrative methods to improve record-keeping practices.

By placing so much importance upon an interpretation of reality as espoused by the document, a textual construction of identity, the Imperial Russian government essentially cultivated a textual dualist position with regards to individual identification.  The individual and the gaze the state held on that individual became separated under this interpretation of reality.  When the two differed, as could be the case if a rabbi transliterated a Hebrew name into Russian or if an individual used a Russified version of a Hebrew name in everyday life, then the individual in question would find themselves in an asynchronous conflict between the reality of the lived identity and the identity recorded in the book.  This could prove advantageous, as when Jews resisted being conscripted into the Imperial Army on claims of confused identity, or it could prove a hindrance, as when Jews sought to prove to Imperial authorities that their sons who died in infancy could not fulfill the call for conscription.  There was also the issue of gendered imbalance found in the metrical books, as many crown rabbis did not usually attend a females naming ceremony- the designated time when registration of births occurred.  Avrutin notes that omission of birth registration of females led not only to difficulties for said females as they grew up and began to interact with the social and legal system of the empire, but also to a statistical myth that among Jewish communities a gendered imbalance skewed towards males existed.  Again, the textual dualist conception of reality found in the metrical books, the primary conduit for the state to exercise its documentary gaze, often encountered asynchronous contradictions when individuals operating in an augmented reality conception of reality (which could be said to contain both oral and textual knowledge) disputed the record at hand.

Photo by Awed Job

However, as is often the case with documentary power, a record can be amended thus ameliorating asynchronous conflict between the lived reality of the individual and document that purports to know vital characteristics of the individual.  But true to its absolutist form, the Russian government placed severe restrictions on making changes to recorded events in the Jewish metrical books.  To correct a mistake, crown rabbis were forced to submit petitions in order to receive an exemption and be allowed to amend the records.  Even if interested Jewish parties sought to correct the official record through legal efforts, Avrutin states that the courts would rule that they did not have the legal authority to mandate a change in the official record (as that would be the prerogative of the absolutist central government, embodied in the tsar).  "For the imperial government, a change in the document- however small or inconsequential it may have appeared- undermined the integrity of the entire record-keeping system'"  This insight by Avrutin describes the Russian authorities proclivity to inject absolutist content into the documents used to identify and surveil the population.  While the imperial regime desired to harness the power of individual documentation, inability to consistently maintain a disciplinary apparatus (like those produced in Western Europe and examined by Foucault in his analysis of power) forced authorities to adopt a conception of reality based on stable (to them) textual dualist notions over a more chaotic (for them) augmented reality conception.  This limited the Russian governments ability to integrate religious and cultural differences into its own sense of imperial identity.  As the individual and the gaze held on that individual through documentary power increasingly diverged, the asynchronous conflicts between textual dualist identity and augmented reality identity grew to greater and greater proportions.

While Avrutin's work looks only at a particular group within the multi-ethnic Russian empire, the Jews, it does a superb job of examining how "knowledge-based technologies" impacted the conception of identity at both the individual and panoptic-authoritative level.  I believe that further examination of Imperial Russian use of these 'knowledge-based technologies' could benefit from using a conceptual framework that puts central the conflict between textual dualism and augmented reality in establishing the veracity of the individual.

Can There Really Be Identity Stasis?

Yesterday I read an interesting piece titled 'Mechanisms of Stasis in Identity Prosumption' by Jenny Davis on the equally interesting Cyborgology blog, from which I have drawn many sources of inspiration for my own work.

Davis sought to disentangle "the liberating and constraining potential of digitally enabled identity prosumption" in her post, arguing that the increasing prominence of 'nonomous online environments' force participants to pursue increasingly accurate representations of self that ultimately result in 'identity stasis' due to the moral imperative such authenticity (or rather the specter of being called out for in-authenticity) demands.  This moral imperative is found on both the individual and cultural level, presenting unique challenges for either side.  Engaging in "digitally enabled identity prosumption' requires both sides to "overcome the challenge of lateral surveillance and pervasive documentation", with the individual additionally tasked to find a path towards a more abundant identity construction potential while the cultural must seek to do provide the same abundance in the potential for categorical construction.  This task is not easy, according to Davis, as paradoxically the pursuit of 'abundant potential' through digital prosumption often leads to a decrease in fluidity and tendency to resort to identity stasis, be it through the need to have historical layers of 'status updates' displayed in Facebook congeal or through institutionalization of a culture prompted by categorization and normalization inherent in the documenting process.

Despite provisos that "identity negotiation…is a continuous process" and that "digital technologies…facilitate the acquisition of new identities both interpersonally and culturally", Davis asserts that once these identities engage in the act of digital prosumption their progression towards stasis is all but certain as the very categories the identities create trap those who created them.

Photo by NukelarBurrito

I agree with Davis in the need to examine the prosumption of identity both on the front and back end.  The issues raised by her investigation ask important questions of new processes now being integrated into the constructions of the self.  Yet, I cannot believe fully in the idea that digital prosumption of identity triggers mechanisms of stasis.  My objections lie in two areas.  First, while both the individual and the cultural are increasingly interacting with 'nonomous online environments' their moral imperative for authenticity does not solely occur in the digital realm because, second, the representations of the self as seen through the new Facebook 'Timeline' or documentation of a culture via Wikipedia or Newspaper articles are, at best, snapshots of a highly mobile identity potential or, at worst, Soma filled idealizations of the self that are as authentic of the creator as the shadows cast from the forms found outside Plato's cave.

Take the Facebook 'Timeline', a much talked about user interface that the pre-eminent social network recently debuted.  Just as it sounds, the 'Timeline' chronologically organizes your status updates, photos, events, etc… in order to give the once various islands of data a more human-friendly narrative form.  Davis uses this change in interface as an example demonstrating the limiting potential digital prosumption of identity, represented by the sum total of events displayed in the 'Timeline', forces upon the individual as they strain to maintain a verifiable authentic self that gives coherence to what is and what can be displayed.  But if we maintain the belief that our digital activities intermesh with our physical activities, it seems lopsided to say that only the digital maintains a say in the authentication of the self.  Augmented Reality demands that information- in this case ascertaining the validity of authenticity driven by moral imperative- flows between and amongst both physical and digital realms.  I can accept the influence of the digital only if the physical is given equal measure.

Intersection of influence found in Augmented Reality

Of course, there is no denying that activity on Facebook, in addition to other means of digital reflection or documentation, possesses discernible influence on the activity of the physical.  But I would be cautious of making claims of authenticity based on Facebook posts, as often those posts are what I would term 'highlights' of one's day or thought.  There is a strong disincentive to post anything with a negative alignment, not only because it provides a strong contrast to the general commentary of unbearable lightness many willingly display but also because the very architecture of Facebook itself rewards positive commentary via ranking algorithms tied to 'Likes' and comments produced.  No one posts photos of their difficult moments of solitude, at least not to any great degree.  If an integral part of digitally enabled prosumed assemblage of identity relies on documentation of, or anchoring to, activity of the physical, then we cannot put full confidence in an interpretation that does not account for the sum total of the augmented experience.

But even if we grant digital prosumption platforms like Facebook power of total documentation, there is another reason why solely relying on one sphere of activity to explain the results of an augmented reality is not sufficient to enable detection of 'stasis mechanisms'.  Status updates, photos, comments on blog posts, even 'Likes' are essentially one-off snapshots of the self expressed at that moment.  If we took a chronologically-close cluster of these one-off moments captured, patterns of continuity and correlation would no doubt be detectable.  Under the right conditions one might even be able to witness the digital prosumption process underway in shaping identity.  But if we took a chronologically-distant gathering of moments there would most likely appear very discernible differences in disposition or tastes, to name only a few qualities, marking the change of identity over time.  While Facebook posts might act as a milepost on the road of life, they do little to tell you the grade of asphalt or bumpiness encountered along the way. 

If it appears that I am working to discredit the role of Facebook and other digital prosumption platforms in identity, I do so not to eliminate its presence all together in the digital prosumption of identity but rather to place it within appropriate terms so that its effects are not overstated.  To be fair, Davis does leave room in her analysis of digital prosumption of identity to allow for escape from identity stasis, although only obliquely, in stating that the abundance of identity categories do not inescapably trap one in the categories constructed.  Yet how one escapes the prohibitive obstacles of lateral surveillance and pervasive documentation, mentioned by Davis as the challenges "digitally enabled identity prosumption must overcome", is largely left unaddressed.  It is my belief that the framework of ‘mobility potentials’ can answer questions presented by potential activation of 'stasis mechanisms'.  Not only does 'mobility' point the way towards a more fully reckoned account of the various interactions occurring in our larger augmented reality, but it can also uncover why claims of 'identity stasis', or really any stasis at all, simply cannot be true.

Let's take a look at 'digitally enabled identity prosumption' under the mobility potential framework, beginning with the type of mobility potentials created by posting entries on the Facebook 'Timeline'.  When anyone uploads a status update, photo or makes a comment on Facebook, they are engaging in documentation of low mobility potentials.  Knowledge constructs with low mobility potential, by their very nature, engage in little change through the act of transmission.  The photo you post will look the same to anyone who views it, regardless of when they view it.  The same applies to status updates and the like- the act of transmitting that update will do little to change the composition of that update.  Now it is entirely possible that someone will view your photo or update, internalize its content, and then create their own response.  'Mobility' states that the low mobility status update is transmitted to the mind of the viewer which acts as a transition point for the transformation of the low mobility knowledge (status update) into high mobility knowledge represented by thought-reaction (response to status update).  This reaction is then transformed into a low mobility construct (posting one's response to status update) that is registered by Facebook.

What makes Facebook so valuable, in a mobility perspective, is that it allows production (or prosumption) of low mobility constructs anchored to our everyday events to occur in a very rapid manner, reducing the asynchronous effects personal documentation (to name a single documentary mode) often encountered in eras before digital communication networks existed. (And in places where the digital wave of augmentation has yet to fully permeate, one can see these asynchronous effects occurring more often- especially in claims of identity) This reduction of asynchronicity is what provides the illusion of 'pervasive documentation'- when it becomes extremely easy to create low mobility 'mileposts' of one's life it can appear as though the definition of self consists solely of low mobility constructs, thus achieving the perceived effects of a 'stasis mechanism'.

But in an augmented reality perspective, we must accept that other low and high mobility constructs encountered by the individual (reading a book or editing a wikipedia entry, respectively) in both the physical and the digital world alters that individuals activity in both spheres.  A person might have a conversation, compelled by the moral imperative to authenticate, discussing the finer points of their belief when presented with a fact, or argument, that proves persuasive and forces them to alter the presumptions upon which rest their identity.  Or they might read a book, or blog post, and decide that a new perspective should be included in the constellation of ideas that go into making an identity.  If anything, digital prosumption reduces the asynchronous effects between the self's actualization in forming identity and the projection of that identity in an augmented reality.

Short Thoughts on 'Gutenberg Galaxy'

I just finished reading Marshal McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy in preparation for an abstract I'm planning to submit to the Theorizing the Web 2012 Conference, and there was a line of argumentation brought up in the work I wanted to discuss.  It comes from a quote McLuhan selected from James Frazer's Golden Bough for its commentary on the accelerating effect literacy and visuality introduced to the oral world:

"Compared with the evidence afforded by living tradition, the testimony of ancient books on the subject of early religion is worth very little.  For literature accelerates the advance of thought at a rate which leaves the slow progress of opinion by word of mouth at an immeasurable distance behind.  Two or three generations of literature may do more to change thought than two or three thousand years of traditional life…and so it has come about that in Europe at the present day the superstitious beliefs and practices that have been handed down by word of mouth are generally of a far more archaic type than the religion depicted in the most ancient literature of the Aryan race…"

Using the example (drawn from a different work) of 'folktales' and 'traditions' found in the play of schoolchildren as a corollary to the quote above, McLuhan declares, "In communities widely separated in space and time there is a continuity and tenacity of tradition quite unknown to written forms."

One of the themes I want to address in my abstract is the need, in my opinion, for a new conceptualization of information that will allow us to more accurately map the augmented reality presence infused in our daily lives.  While the points addressed by both Frazer and McLuhan are, on face, correct they do some disservice in their perpetuation of an informational framework dependent on speed as the indexer of change.  With the advent of the digital wave of augmentation, the interaction between supposedly slow atoms of oral knowledge and the fast bits of digital knowledge increasingly level each other out in their interoperability making distinctions of speed between the separate domains of knowledge increasingly moot (under what McLuhan calls the 'pressure of simultaneity') and even illusionary once an augmented reality perspective is pursued.  The question can no longer be, "what is the speed of this accelerating effect?"  It must instead shift to, "what degree can this knowledge be modified through transmission?" as this qualifier, this focusing of informational pursuit, will allow us to move away from harmful dualist modes of thinking towards a more realistic augmented reality perspective.  

This is helpful not only for interpreting the effects of the digital wave of augmentation, but also the previous waves and the waves to come.  My attempts to define knowledge in terms of high and low mobility potentials, as seen in my examination of the debate on usage of oral citations on Wikipedia and the new website Small Demons, denotes small efforts towards this larger goal. 

Storytelling with Amnesia

via Marxchivist

While I hate to harken back to Halloween, having now passed Thanksgiving, there is one ritual associated with the former holiday that I feel has year-round appeal; ghost stories.  This past Halloween I managed to engage in two forms of the modern ghost story- I watched both a marathon of 'American Horror Story' episodes (verdict: I like it) and Sean Plott (better known to Starcraft fans as Day9) live stream his play-through of the critically acclaimed horror computer game Amnesia: The Dark Descent.  While both played on familiar horror tropes- dramatic lighting, eerie music and action 'jolts'- I found myself more intrigued with Plott's play-through of Amnesia, in part because it was a computer game (yes, I'm a nerd) but mostly because I immediately sensed that this was a new type of ghost story in which I was participating.  Not only was there the appeal of the main storyline being 'told' through play, but Plott also displayed in his live feed a camera on himself that allowed viewers to see his reactions to horrific elements interspersed in the game.  Plott also set-up a chat room for viewers to espouse their comments (or taunts/jeers), making the experience interactive and not simply a one-way netcast.  While there were moments of tedium, anytime tense or scary moments developed I was engaged and watching with bated breath to see what would happen to Plott's character.  Even though I wasn't playing the game I was still drawn into viewing its narrative effect not simply for the story but also to watch the reaction of players recording or streaming the game because in doing so I felt like a participant in the communal act of telling scary stories.

Screenshot of the Sewer in Amneisa- via Frictional Games

Go search YouTube for Amnesia videos and you will see that I'm not alone- there are several examples of others recording themselves playing and reacting to the game's many scary moments.  After watching only a few it becomes obvious that the makers of Amnesia, Frictional Games, developed a truly immersive and deeply frightful environment.  In his GDC Europe 2011 talk, 'Evoking Emotions and Achieving Success by Breaking All the Rules', lead designer Thomas Grip discussed how the Amnesia team made several unconventional (for the Horror genre) choices in the basic mechanics of the game, those being no death, no weapons and no competitive mechanics.  While Grip does a fine job of explaining why these choices were made in his GDC Talk, I believe this quote from his post reviewing 'Heavy Rain' on the blog 'In the Games of Madness: Unspeakable thoughts on horror game design and development' provides a good summation:

What I think happens is that as we interact in a videogame, there is feedback loop between us sending input to the game and us getting information back from the game (in the form of visuals, audio, etc). which builds the basis of us feeling present inside the game's virtual world.  The better this loop works, the more we feel as a part of the experience.

Eschewing traditional mechanics in horror games- the fear of death, the need for weapons, and 'gaming the game' to defeat the various monster obstacles- Amnesia instead relies upon the circulation of information between the game and the player to capture interest and create a compelling atmosphere.  By removing the more obvious 'game' mechanics Frictional Games paradoxically created an even better 'game' that borderlines on interactive storytelling.  Yet players don't feel like the game is a movie- indeed, one of the reasons for Amnesia's emotion evoking success is how easily (perhaps deceptively) it convinces players that their agency in narrative action is real and has consequences that a flowing movie-like narrative structure wouldn't allow.  Thanks to tweaks in how important mood elements (the sanity meter and appearance of monsters) operate, Amnesia creates effortless feedback loops that, honestly, rely much more on the player than the game to provide both fuel and production of emotive responses.  In this regard playing the game is akin to listening to a ghost story.

via William Cromar

This, alone, would be impressive in and of itself.  Yet Frictional Games went a step further and released mod tools for the player community to use for creating their own Amnesia 'stories'.  The results were impressive, as noted by Grip in his post about Amnesia, one year later, found again on 'Games of Madness':

Another pleasant surprise was the amount of custom stories that have been made.  In Penumbra we only knew of a single attempt to make a user-created level and that one was never released in public.  For Amnesia at least 300 custom story projects have been started, and 20 or so have actually become completed, high quality, experiences.  There has even been a Tetris clone with the tools! … It really show that supplying users with creation of tools is well worth the time.

Over at the ModDB 'Amnesia' site there are listed 75 'story' mods in various stages of completion.  One of the most impressive stories in terms of its scope and complete reworking of the original Amnesia setting is 'White Night', created by Turkish Computer Engineering student Tansel Altinel.  On the 'summary' page of White Night's ModDB entry, Altinel makes it clear up front: "White Night is a total conversion mod for Amnesia: The Dark Descent; and focuses on mostly storytelling." (Emphasis in original)  This is evident the moment you boot up the 'story' as Altinel has clearly spent a lot of time on crafting not only a new environment (Amnesia takes place in a castle, White Night at the Denver Mental Hospital) but also new objects, like the box lightbulbs come in, for the player to pick up, examine and toss about the various rooms in the asylum.  This level of detail only adds to the 'feedback loop' Grip describes above and brings the player deeper into the story experience.

Denver State Hospital Entrance found in 'White Night'

What's even more interesting is how both the original Amnesia and the player created 'stories' allow for more than just single-person interaction when the players themselves either record or stream their gameplay experience.  In the case with Sean Plott's live stream, which included a chat room viewers used to comment, the back and forth between player and viewers produced a mix of teases, taunts, even helpful suggestions.  Even though some of the chat room participants, and probably many of the viewers who watched the archival video, already knew the Amnesia story through previous play, they spent time watching Plott play the same game because there was participatory value in watching him encounter and experience the same frightful moments as they did. Much like those who gather around campfires or held flashlights to tell ghost stories, viewers/commenters of Amnesia or its mod derivatives are engaging in a community-themed narrative experience that heavily relies upon the feedback loop between the story and the listener.

One key difference that viewers/streamers/recorders of Amnesia have over the campfire/flashlight crowd is that they are engaging the narrative story in an augmented reality whereby the experience can be shared online for others to view and engage.  Campfire stories are limited to the time and space they are told, whereas Amnesia stories can be told over much longer spans of time and greater distances thanks to their presence in the analog/digital intermeshing that is augmented reality.

Had Frictional Games instead decided to keep the weapons system they first designed for Amnesia instead of cutting it (watch the GDC Europe talk), I'm not sure the streams and recordings of play-throughs would possess the same narrative impact.  The same goes with repeated death moments or the inclusion of competitive mechanics (the game hunting the player down).  These mechanics would be fun for the player (maybe) but not necessarily for the viewer.  By focusing on the immersion, the feedback loop, Frictional Games instead created a narrative experience that could become communal- something I'm not sure would be as possible without the presence of an augmented reality.  Perhaps, as the various player created 'stories' for Amnesia indicate, there is a future for this new type of narrative experience.

Subverting the Panoptic Structure

While on a recent visit to NYC for some archival digging, I took a day to visit parts of the city I wanted to see- chief among those parts was that glorious bookstore The Strand.  There I picked up a copy of Michel Foucault's '73-'74 lecture at the College de France titled Psychiatric Power, which proved to be a wonderful buy.  I've enjoyed reading Foucault's monographs on Sexuality, Madness, Discipline and Power, etc… but for me, the best place to explore Foucualt's imaginative thought process is in his lectures captured via tape recorder and transcribed for publication.  Psychiatric Power does not let down in this regard, as Foucault spends his twelve lectures investigating what would become the main topic of 'Discipline and Punish'- the role and configuration of disciplinary apparatuses.  His lectures on the topic are succinct and easy to engage, due mainly to the oral nature of their delivery.  I would easily recommend this volume for anyone attempting to grasp Foucault's larger themes of power and the disciplinary mechanisms created to channel power.

Photo by Nicolas Nova

Recently I've been using posts on this blog to investigate what I have termed the mobility potential of knowledge.  While reading Psychiatric Power it occurred to me that Bentham's panopticon and Foucault's use of it to explain the workings of disciplinary power might provide a good opportunity to map out the differences in operation and conception a panoptic mechanism would possess when examined under the framework I've tried to establish for the operation of mobility potentials.

Before diving into the differences each depiction portrays, it might be helpful to establish the baseline for how Bentham envisioned his Panopticon to function and how Foucault found in its operation the workings of a disciplinary apparatus of power.  (Quotes below come from Psychiatric Power)

Bentham designed the Panopticon to augment the power of the central observer through two means.  First, the panoptic design is a multiplier of power that provides 'herculean strength' to power circulating within the institution and to the individual who holds/directs power and, second, the panoptic design gives the center a means of obtaining 'mind over mind' power. This is accomplished by the individualizing nature of the panopticon, as it places the focus of the gaze, the body, on a singular subject. The result Foucault notes,

...means that in a system like this we are never dealing with a mass, with a group, or even, to tell the truth, with a multiplicity: we are only ever dealing with individuals.  ... All collective phenomena, all the phenomena of multiplicities, are thus completely abolished. (75)

Examples of 'collective phenomena' include distinction in workshops achieved by use of songs or strikes, collusion among prisoners, or acts of irritation/imitation found in the asylum.  As a result, "the whole network of group communication...will be brought to an end by the panoptic system."  Power thus becomes collective at the center, the beginning of the anonymous gaze, with the distribution of power always focused on the individuals, the bodies, located in their separate cells.  Foucault equates collective power held at the center as "...a sort of ribbon of power, a continuous, mobile and anonymous ribbon, which perpetually unwinds within the central tower.  ...(The Panoptic Mechanism) is an apparatus of both knowledge and power that individualizes on one side, and which, by individualizing, knows." (Both quotes from p. 78)

Returning to the illustrations above, we can now map out the operation of a panoptic mechanism using both disciplinary and mobility potential frameworks.  The disciplinary framework concerns itself, primarily, with the individualization of the subject in its cell.  The center's gaze penetrates the cell, able to give commands and directives but also capable of conducting observations that record the reaction of the cells to their individualized directives.  This 'feedback' of observation is reconciled in the center via the 'perpetually unwinding ribbon of power' which spurs the creation of new directives and commands.

Now let's examine the same panoptic mechanism through a mobility potential framework.  Because the panoptic mechanism facilitates the imposition of discipline it relies upon the transmission of primarily, perhaps exclusively, low mobility knowledge.  Foucault states that the rise of disciplinary mechanisms is closely tied to the growing use of documentary records to track a body, individually, through space, and the record keeping obsession possessed by many powers from the nineteenth century to present day attests to its enduring practice.  Documentary records, largely, do not transform through transmission or else they would lose their value in the larger practice of forming discipline.  

The cells, upon receiving the transmitted low mobility knowledge, formulate their own reaction or interpretation, although this cannot be shared to the other cells due to the configuration of the panoptic mechanism. (Remember that 'collective phenomena' is what the Panopticon is designed to avoid)  Information produced by the cell, be it high or low mobility, is observed by the gaze of the center and brought into the center for interpretation.  In doing so, the center acts as a 'transition point' for the shifting of high mobility information into low mobility information, a place to reconcile the two and mitigate the disruptive effects their transition generally entails, creating new directives that are then transmitted, once again, to the individual cells.  The key difference in this understanding is that both the cells and the center engage in knowledge interpretation, yet the design of the panoptic mechanism means that only the center can act as the 'transition point'.

Now I would like to ask different questions that I think hold significance with events unfolding today.  Can the panoptic mechanism be subverted?  Are there instances in which the operation of this subverted mechanism could be demonstrated?  I would like to explore the idea that the panoptic mechanism can be subverted and that the prime example of such subversion is the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Below, I've sketched out what I think a subverted panoptic mechanism would look like. 

Here we have the exact same layout as the traditional panoptic mechanisms analyzed above, yet the flow and type of information is highly varied.  Some distinctions are immediately evident.  The center, instead of being solely based on a physical location, now embraces an augmented reality presence allowing both high and low mobility information to be transmitted and received by the center.  This is the first key distinction, as the meshing of the physical and the digital allow the panoptic mechanism to maintain its form even while its very function is subverted.  Because an augmented reality presence necessitates the use of high mobility knowledge potentials, the gaze the center normally possesses in a traditional panoptic mechanism becomes inverted.  Cells now gaze and penetrate the center, attempting to gain knowledge and 'individualize' in a function closely aligned with the traditional panoptic gaze.  The 'perpetually unwinding ribbon of power' is now shared by the center and cell alike, meaning that cells can now engage in the sort of collective phenomena prohibited in traditional panoptic mechanisms.  Now the 'transition point' function, the capacity to interchange high and low mobility knowledge with minimal disruptive asynchronous effects, resides in both the cell and the center.  This shift is the second key distinction of a subverted panoptic mechanism.

In some instances, the subverted panoptic mechanism can wield traditional panoptic powers- this is evident when Occupiers pose for pictures taken by tourists or when video or statements created by the center are transmitted to the cells.  What is interesting is that only in these expressions of 'weak panoptic power' (utilizing the physical structure of the panoptic mechanism) does the center actually gaze into the surrounding cells.  When engaging the cells in an augmented reality presence (as Nathan Jurgenson says, uniting the hashtag and the physical), this gaze is inverted and can no longer penetrate the surrounding cells.  By utilizing the panoptic mechanism in such subversion, the cells also acquire the two benefits outlined by Bentham and explained above- the 'herculean strength' of power multiplied and a means to obtain 'mind over mind' power- and while the effect of the first benefit is immediately apparent when viewing the outpouring of discussion, videos and photos associated with OWS, the second benefit, while very crucial, becomes diminished by simple fact of plurality.  Many cells aligned with the 'ribbon of power' mean that many interpretations are created, making the 'mind over mind' power generated by the subverted panoptic mechanism more suited to the question and analysis of hegemony.

It cannot be stressed enough that the essential characteristic of a subverted panoptic mechanism is the intermeshing of both the physical and the digital.  Absent the physical anchoring, the movement would still be transmitting and receiving information but it would do so outside of the (subverted) panoptic structure.  This, to me, is a key difference between a movement like Occupy Wall Street and a group like Anonymous.  There is a question now, with the general revocation of a physical space to occupy, if the OWS movement can continue or maintain the impact they have fostered so far.  While the loss of a physical location would prevent the movement from subverting the panoptic mechanism for their own uses, there is always the possibility that one of the cells will hold new ground and re-create the movement there.

This is just a very preliminary sketching out of ideas regarding the role of the panoptic mechanism under the framework of mobility potential.  I gladly welcome any comments from readers as to points I either glossed over or missed completely.