"Liberal" thinkers

[Jane]

KXX4493553 at aol.com wrote:
> 
> When we are talking about (neo)liberalism today, we must also see their
> forerunners in the 18th and 19th century. One of them was J. Bentham, the
> inventor of the "panopticon", a prison system in which all prisoners are
> visible all the time. The full title of the book in which he suggested his
> "new" system of "supervising" was:
> J. Bentham, Panopticon; or, the Inspection House; containing the Idea of of
> new Principle of Construction applicable to any sort of Establishment, in
> which Persons of any Description are to be kept under Inspection; and in
> particular to Penitentiary-Houses, Prisons, Houses of Industry, Work-Houses,
> Poor-Houses, Manufacturies, Mad Houses, Lazarettos, Hospitals, and Schools;
> with a Plan of Management adaptet to the principle: in  a Series of Lettres,
> written in the year 1787, from Crecheff in White Russia, to a friend in
> England. By Jeremy Bentham, Dublin, printed: London, reprinted 1791.
> More about it in: Michel Foucault: Surveiller et punir. La nuissance de la
> prison, Editions Gallimard 1975, German edition: Überwachen und Strafen. Die
> Geburt des Gefängnisses, Frankfurt 1976, Suhrkamp, p. 256 ff.
> 
> To speak about totalitarism is useless without regarding the forerunners, and
> they were called "liberal" in their era...
> 
> Kurt-Werner Pörtner
> 


into the whirlpool who should appear but Owsley.
Owsley, done up in his $600 head costume, has
emerged from his subterrain of espionage and paranoia
to come to see the Prankster experiment for himself,
and in the middle of the giddy contagion he takes LSD.
They never saw him take it before. He takes the LSD
and RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRROIL the
whirlpool picks him up and spins him down into the
stroboscopic stereoptic prankster panopticon in full
variable lag.... (p. 114)

			Tom Wolfe

"Son you were mistaken you are obsolete/ look at all the
White men on the Street." 

			Steely Dan



The philosophy of Utilitarianism influenced many of the
social reforms in Great Britain during the early half of the
nineteenth century. Bentham's philosophical principles
extended into the realm of government and had a profound
influence on the poor, the infirm, and children. ---- the
Factory Act of 1833, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, the
Prison Act of 1835, the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835,
the Committee on Education in 1839,the Lunacy Act of 1845,
and the Public Health Act of 1845. One of Utilitarianisms
greatest opponents was the great novelist, Charles Dickens.

Hard Times is, among other things, Dickens' 19th-century
attack on the utilitarian philosophers.


Bentham claimed that pleasure and pain are our sovereign
masters and he introduced what he called the principle of
utility. This is what I meant Paul, when I said Pleasure and
Pain are philosophical notions and happiness, that mother of
all philosophical notions surely needs to be account for as
well. Bentham's principle of utility can be summarized as:

 "every action should be judged right or wrong according to
how far it tends to promote or damage the happiness of the
community."

And

"the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the
measure of right and wrong."

Bentham thought that human were, at least, in part,
motivated by the desire to obtain certain pleasures and to
avoid certain pains. He believed in his idea so strongly,
that he even went so far as to
suggest that legislators should regulate the ways in which
individuals sought their own happiness.


And how did Bentham think this could be accomplished? Well,
howabout a little S&M? Not exactly, but howabout a little
dominance and submission? Well, what he thought was that
punishment and reward were to be the means by which the
legislator could control the people's pursuit of happiness.
Of course, like all Control the people and make the happy
sort of guys, he preferred the sticks to the carrots. So by
exacting the threat of and the very real pain of social
punishment the masses would be motivated to be happy and
abstain from certain behaviors deemed to be harmful to
themselves and the state. Sounds rather frightening to my
paranoid sentiments bent over awaiting the whip of life,
liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, but at
least, I think, I should have been permitted to read Dickens
in the Panopticon penitentiary.


In the penitentiary:

"The jailer in his central lodge would be able to see into
each of the prisoner's cells,  but screens and lighting
would be so arranged that he himself could not be seen by
them...so they would all have the impression of an invisible
omnipresence."

What does Foucault say about the Panopticon? 

It's a typical situation
In these typical times
Too many choices
Everybody's happy
Everybody's free
We'll keep the big door open
Everyone will come around
Why are you different
Why are you that way
If you don't get in line
We'll lock you away

	Dave Matthews

Pynchon, like Dickens is concerned with the complacency and
paranoia of those that succeed during economic good times
(1950s, 1980s America) and those that are exploited , even
locked up (McAfee, Zoyd) , and how the experiences and fears
of economic Hard Times are an easy tool for the  manufacture
of both complacency and paranoia during Good Times. 

Utilitarianism appealed to the middle class, it was popular
with those members who had benefited financially from the
Industrial Revolution. In fact, as is often the case, those
that benefited most endorsed it most vigorously. Like the
50s economic revolution in America, the industrial
revolution
claimed to provide  great power of the individual and
with this economic power came the powerful consumer. 


But in Pynchon, all economics and politics, utilitarian
ideas for example, are  pushed to an obscene extreme.
Satire! At the time, critics, like Dickens satirized
Utilitarianism, claiming that the utilitarian measures, the
broad and extensive legislation of utilitarian  principles
turned life into a mechanized, anti-human, social madness
with NO WAY OUT.

Enfetishment is an ironic process because it invests the
inanimate with human characteristics and inanimates human
subtly, by first divesting them of human characteristics
through reification and then re-investing them with pseudo-
human characteristics, turning them into fetishes.

CHAPTER II - MURDERING THE INNOCENTS

THOMAS GRADGRIND, sir.  A man of realities.  A man of facts
and calculations.  A man who proceeds upon the principle
that two and  two are four, and nothing over, and who is not
to be talked
Into allowing for anything over.  Thomas Gradgrind, sir -
peremptorily Thomas - Thomas Gradgrind.  With a rule and a
pair of scales, and  the multiplication table always in his
pocket, sir, ready to
Weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you
exactly what it comes to.  It is a mere question of figures,
a case ofsimplearithmetic.  You might hope to get some other
nonsensicalbelief into the head of George Gradgrind, or
Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind
(all supposititious, non-existent  persons), but into the
head of Thomas Gradgrind - no, sir!  In such terms Mr.
Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself,  whether to
his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in
general.  In such terms, no doubt, substituting the words
'boys and  girls,' for 'sir,' Thomas Gradgrind now presented
Thomas Gradgrind  to the little pitchers before him, who
were to be filled so full of  facts. Indeed, as he eagerly
sparkled at them from the cell a rage before  mentioned, he
seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and
prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood
at one discharge.  He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too,
charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the
tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.

            XI  NO WAY OUT

THE Fairy palaces burst into illumination, before pale
morning showed the monstrous serpents of smoke trailing
themselves over  Coketown.  A clattering of clogs upon the
pavement; a rapid ringing  of bells; and all the melancholy
mad elephants, polished and oiled  up for the day's
monotony, were at their heavy exercise again. Stephen bent
over his loom, quiet, watchful, and steady.  A special
contrast, as every man was in the forest of looms where
Stephen worked, to the crashing, smashing, tearing piece of
mechanism at
which he laboured.  Never fear, good people of an anxious
turn of mind, that Art will consign Nature to oblivion.  Set
anywhere, side  by side, the work of GOD and the work of
man; and the former, even though it be a troop of Hands of
very small account, will gain in  dignity from the
comparison. So many hundred Hands in this Mill; so many
hundred horse Steam  Power.  It is known, to the force of a
single pound  eight,
what  the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of
the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil,
for love or hatred,  for patriotism or discontent, for the
decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at any
single moment in the soul of one of these its quiet
servants, with the composed faces and the
regulated actions.  There is no mystery in it; there is an
unfathomable mystery in the meanest of them, for ever. -
Supposing we were to reverse our arithmetic for material
objects, and to govern these awful unknown quantities by
other means!

"And I feel to be a COG in something turning"

		Joni Mitchell