Saturday XXXXIII: Invading the Inner Sanctum · 1 March 2008
My beautiful little office is a secret. Hidden behind one and then a second heavy oaken door in the corner of a first-floor suite, with a 15-foot window opening out over the heavy red California-gothic Royce Hall and the glowing-green upper quad. The office is “off-master,” so no janitors or building staff have the key; and it's off-limits in casual conversation so’s not to arouse jealosy in the other grads who huddle in the basement in cold little plastic carrels. Carlos Castaneda, when he was writing his dissertation here, hatched Don Juan in that basement—Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in the building just across the lawn—and I can feel these and the detritus of far better, more difficult discoveries and creations pressing in. It’s like practicing at Eddie’s in NY or at the LA Center for Yoga: years of sweat and shakti hanging from the rafters, if you love your history enough to tap it.
I stayed in the office late on Thursday, but sometime before I slipped back in Friday morning, there was a visitor. Someone with a copy of my special key, a screwdriver, and a roll of electrical tape.
They stole my lightswitch! And replaced it with an evil motion-sensor light! Curses! Sensate technology invading my space. I thought I was off the grid, but now I’m caught in a new game.
The massive window is all the light I could ever want before 5 pm, and a Japanese paper lamp picks up after that. I never even touch the two gaudy fluorescents in the ceiling panels.
But now they trip on with any sudden movement. Toss my hair, twitch a little too much in working out a thought, or even just recross the chair-lotus too quickly, and bling. Friday I was pushing away from the heavy desk, walking the 14 steps to the switch and back, and re-establishing, about every 8 minutes.
It’s going to change me one way or another, this fucking light. Create a stealth within stealth—dodging the colleagues on the way in, and outsmarting the machine once I’ve conquered the outer labyrinth.
I’d smash the infernal mechanism to bits, but the new Mission: Impossible element is just as sexy as it is stupid. There’s always a blind digital sentry of lasers and motion sensors guarding the big jewel in the inner sanctum. This is essential to the M:I narrative.
And in this zone I guess I’ll take any epic narrative I find.
Saturday links.
● The outer extremes of self-regulation: Listen to this NPR story: a modern nightmare. Preschool children forced to plan and document their playtime. Foucault told us this shit was coming. Who wants to write on Foucaldian dynamics as they apply—and can be avoided in—the teaching of yoga? Guest blogger applications welcome.
● A bunch of Japanese people like to film owls inside their houses? Wow. This one’s the best. (No, you wiseasses: I did not find this by auto-google.)
● Montana Diary in The Economist. Whores, strip mines, threats of secession, and wide open spaces.
[T]he scenery—and its emptiness—require no overstatement. I saw more grazing cows than people in the vast flats, and those humans I did see were in a small number of tiny towns abutting the road. The towns usually consisted of little more than a post office, a general store, a saloon and, of course, a video-poker casino. People live out there to be autonomous, perhaps even alone.
● Social networks are like the eye.
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It might be possible to regulate the motion sensor so that it becomes less sensitive.
Posted by: V · Mar 1, 07:29 AM · #
Just remove the lamps from the fixture. No lamps, no invasive fluorescent light. Maybe get a chic Home Depot torchiere for after 5:00pm?
Posted by: Carl · Mar 1, 01:55 PM · #
Ooooh you said Foucault…in fact you said it more than once :) Ok, the panopticon and all that, in teaching yoga? The good is that, say, in the AYRI, where you might expect to have the highest panopticity (surveillance), apparently many people go un-adjusted and, as far as they can tell, un-seen. We doubt that this is ACTUALLY true, but it seems to be. So the upside is that yoga-teaching’s panopticon seems to be a bit agnostic. The bad is that, for example, when I’m teaching, I try to surveil my students as closely as possible; especially when I’m doing a self-guided ashtanga class, I really up the surveillance. Oh sure, it’s all for their good, but I think Foucault would want the intentionality taken out of it. So, on the bad side, I’m panoptical. Gross! This, perhaps, is the ugly of it (hah!).
Posted by: patrick · Mar 2, 05:19 AM · #
I’m sorry, I got lost sat oaken…no seriously, how about covering the damn thing with duct tape?Cover the sensor with duct tape. Duct tape is awesome, you can fix combat boots with it, make wallets, save you from terrorist attacks and keep out big brother.
Posted by: Susan · Mar 2, 09:42 AM · #
Carl, the lamps are 15 feet up and there are two banks containing 15 lights each! Adjusting the sensor… duct tape. Both better options than smashing the mechanism, I suppose. I can’t believe I never thought of tape. I’ll play with it tomorrow.
See ya, big brother.
But the thing is, Patrick, what happens when we internalize the panopticon? When we can never escape its gaze??? This is why I linked to that horrific NPR story on preschool kids being taught extreme forms of self-regulation. This is Foucault’s dystopic prediction: that just the memory of the panopticon (the gaze of big brother) is enough to make us play by the rules and govern/judge ourselves at all times.
Even in the privacy of the inner sanctum, we can never escape.
And thus “the state” or “the teacher” becomes unnecessary.
We split ourselves in two, carry the external judge on our shoulders wherever we go, and can never any more just be. We become our own critics and disciplinarians, having been trained to perform for the motion-sensor-like gaze of the regulator.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Should it be that way?
Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 2, 01:57 PM · #
Ahhh that’s a nicely chewy question: ashtanga likes its full expressions…there are stories of people being told to take the toe in Trikonasana even if they come completely out of alignment. My struggle with the inner judge was/is with dropbacks, and yet I notice today that I know my Marichyasana D needs work to keep the half-lotus knee down, but also that I don’t care. I do the pose, bind, vinyasa, Navasana. “The State” and “The Teacher” I think are, ideally, totally different things. The State, particularly the globalized, decentered, postmodern (if you will) State, is disembodied, hard to “hit” (and this is all stated in Foucault’s thing on micropolitics and internalized punishment) but a teacher is usually there in flesh and blood. Sure, you can internalize “the tradition” or “the way my teacher says to do it” or “the way Arjuna’s pose looks,” but that’s not the same animal, doesn’t come with as broad a pack of ideological baggage. For example, my drive to have hands-to-chin in Garbha Pindasana isn’t going to turn me socially conservative. Questions arise from here about “free-flowing” vinyasa versus ashtanga, and from there maybe to one-pointedness, tradition, adherence, panopticon. Flow or only do the poses you are “given”? Larry or SKPJ? One-pointedness via repeated asana pattern, or by adjusting one pose at a time in a flowing vinyasa class? More valid, less valid? Easier enlightenment, faster enlightenment? Capitalism? “Get enlightened now in 12 easy steps”? Panopticity in doing “what your teacher told you”? Injury? Age? Giving poses back to the bank? “Being” a 2nd/3rd/whatever practitioner? Sure, I’ve felt bad about not doing “my full practice” sometimes, but that got to be a bummer. As I said to Karen some time back on-blog, “Bugger it, do the poses, don’t do the poses.” I sometimes envision myself, during home practice, in SF again. When it turns up my practice, I keep it. When it makes my practice stressy or “criminal,” I drop it. The panopticon can be negotiated, at least when we are also those who panopticize. Apologies, for the book :D
Posted by: patrick · Mar 2, 05:16 PM · #
Hey, wait a minute, isn’t the superego “enough to make us play by the rules and govern/judge ourselves at all times”? Or introjects like parents or teacher? And then, of course, all the stuff Patrick mentions. Inside and outside? Is there such a thing?
Posted by: karen · Mar 3, 04:16 AM · #
Big Brother is Dead.
Long Live Big Brother.
I just jumped around and hopped up on my desk. No switch-trip. I am free again.
I mis-described the lights. Two sets of three 5-foot long bulbs bedind shiny metal grid-cages that are 6 squares by 3 sqares. And more like 12 feet up, not 15. Still, easier to go to the remote (with tape) than to the source.
P & K, you have got me thinking. Uh oh…
Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 3, 11:09 AM · #
ohhhhhh, owls owls owls OWLS!!!!!!!! What is WRONG with the Japanese? The owls are so adorable, but it is so WRONG for them to be sitting on a kitchen counter focusing on a video camera that can’t even focus back on them.
On another note, can’t you just find the motion sensor for the light and cover it?
Posted by: Katie · Mar 3, 12:25 PM · #
Oh, duh, Carl beat me to that practical suggestion and I didn’t see it til now. So-rry!
Posted by: Katie · Mar 3, 12:40 PM · #
No, Carl suggested removing the lights from the fixtures. I suggested the duct tape.
Me! ME! I get the credit! ME!
:)
Posted by: Susan · Mar 3, 02:49 PM · #
Susan, it was all you on this one.
Isn’t that bizarre and sad about the owl inside? Yeah. Funny that the camera is so thrown off by its wonderful inquisitive head-swivels.
Big raptors in captivity. Not ok.
Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 3, 06:30 PM · #
More owl movies: this just in. Go directly to the :28 mark. Oddly, this one likes fluorescent lights.
I am still pondering this Foucault, inside/outside, witnessing/nondualism thing. Maybe big brother isn’t dead after all. Uh oh.
Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 3, 08:09 PM · #
So weird and beautiful. The owls, not the light switch. :)
Posted by: Katie · Mar 4, 10:53 AM · #
Susan, look at you and your badass duct tape-wielding self! You go sister!
I’m more inclined toward the Brazil-style sabotage though. I’d probably rewire the light fixtures to a switch of my own provision and then wire the motion sensor to the president’s private sensor-activated toilet.
Posted by: Carl · Mar 4, 12:46 PM · #