On the aesthetic production of atmospheres: the rhetorical workings of biopower at The CELL

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon Foucault's notion of biopower and Böhme's theory of atmospheres, we analyze The Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab (The CELL), a nonprofit institution in Denver, Colorado dedicated to preventing terrorism. Specifically, we argue that The CELL rhetorically induces visitors to submit to and actively participate in continuous surveillance by subjecting them to a strategic succession of atmospheres that affectively and emotively enlists their bodies in its cause. This largely material rhetoric utilizes the design aesthetics of controlled movement, simulation, interactivity, and pseudodialogue. We conclude by reflecting on the implications for rhetorical and security studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetics
• affect
• atmospheres
• biopower
• security

Acknowledgements

Brian L. Ott is Professor and Chair of Communication Studies at Texas Tech University. Hamilton Bean is Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the International Studies Program at the University of Colorado Denver. Kellie Marin is a PhD student in Communication Arts and Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University. The authors are grateful to the editor for his vision and strong editorial leadership. They also wish to thank Dr. Leah Ceccarelli for her feedback on a previous draft. An earlier version of this essay won the 2014 Wrage-Baskerville Award from the Public Address Division of the National Communication Association.

Notes

1. Visitors Guide (Denver: Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab, 2014).

2. Falguni A. Sheth, “The War on Terror and Ontopolitics: Concerns with Foucault’s Account of Race, Power Sovereignty,” Foucault Studies 12 (2011): 51.

3. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, “Biopower Today,” Biosocieties 1 (2006): 196.

4. See, for instance, Nathan Stormer, “Mediating Biopower and the Case of Prenatal Space,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, no. 1 (2010): 8–23; and Megan Foley, “Voicing Terri Schiavo: Prosopopeic Citizenship in the Democratic Aporia between Sovereignty and Biopower,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 4 (2010): 381–400.

5. Marnie Ritchie, “Feeling for the State: Affective Labor and Anti-Terrorism Training in US Hotels,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (2015): 179.

6. “Somewhat schematically, we could say that sovereignty is exercised within the borders of a territory, discipline is exercised on the bodies of individuals, and security is exercised over a whole population.” Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 11.

7. Sovereign power entails “the right to take life or let live.” It demands obedience to the law, which prohibits certain behaviors, and to a centralized authority, which metes out punishment. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 136.

8. Disciplinary power operates by striating social space into a series of enclosures (enfermements) such as the family, the church, the school, the prison, the hospital, etc. These enclosures socialize subjects to behave in particular ways, producing bodies characterized by docility and utility. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 201.

9. “[Regulatory] power is applied not to man-as-body but … ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species.” Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 242.

10. “Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific techniques of a power that regards individuals as objects and as instruments of its exercise.” Foucault, Discipline, 170.

11. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 19.

12. Andrew Dilts and Bernard E. Harcourt, “Discipline, Security, and Beyond: A Brief Introduction,” Carceral Notebooks 4 (2008): 2.

13. “[T]he essential function of security, without prohibiting [as sovereign power does] or prescribing [as disciplinary power does] … is to respond to a reality in such a way that this response cancels out the reality to which it responds—nullifies it, or limits, checks or regulates it. I think this regulation within the element of reality is fundamental in apparatuses of security.” Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 47.

14. Chloë Taylor, “Biopower,” in Michel Foucault: Key Concepts, ed. Dianna Taylor (Durham, NC: Acumen, 2011), 45.

15. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139.

16. Ibid. Though Foucault occasionally uses the term biopower when he specifically means regulatory power, his later writings clarify that biopower comprises both disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms. Thus, we will reserve the use of the term biopower for those instances when we intend both.

17. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 4, 3.

18. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 63.

19. Gilles Deleuze, “Having an Idea in Cinema,” in Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture, ed. Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 18.

20. Davi A. Johnson, “Managing Mr. Monk: Control and the Politics of Madness,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 1 (2008): 31.

21. Patricia T. Clough, “Introduction,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia T. Clough (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 19.

22. Brian Massumi, “Notes on Translation and Acknowledgements,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), xvi. As O'Sullivan elaborates, “Affects are moments of intensity, a reaction in/on the body at the level of matter. We might even say that affects are immanent to matter.” Simon O'Sullivan, “The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art Beyond Representation,” Angeliki 6, no. 3 (2001): 126.

23. “The human body can be affected in many ways by which its power of activity is increased or diminished.” Baruch Spinoza, Ethics: Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992), 103.

24. Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 88.

25. Ibid., 85.

26. Gernot Böhme, “The Theory of Atmospheres and Its Applications” (A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul, trans.), Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts 15 (2014): 92.

27. Ben Anderson, “Affective Atmospheres,” Emotion, Space and Society 2, no. 2 (2009): 79.

28. Ibid., 80.

29. Böhme, “The Theory of Atmospheres,” 93.

30. Anderson, “Affective Atmospheres,” 80.

31. Böhme, “The Theory of Atmospheres,” 94.

32. See Brian L. Ott, “The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27, no. 1 (2010): 32–47; Brian L. Ott and Diane Marie Keeling, “Cinema and Choric Connection: Lost in Translation as Sensual Experience,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 4 (2011): 363–86; Brian L. Ott and Gordana Lazić, “The Pedagogy and Politics of Art in Postmodernity: Cognitive Mapping and The Bothersome Man,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 3 (2013): 259–82; Brian L. Ott and Susan A. Sci, “The Many Moods of Michael Moore: Aesthetics and Affect in Bowling for Columbine,” in Michael Moore and the Rhetoric of Documentary, ed. Brian Snee and Thomas W. Benson (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), 74–100. While Ott et al. use the term mood rather than atmosphere, they are specifically concerned with how the aesthetic practices of film generate shared feelings.

33. As Outi Turpeinen explains, exhibition designers can alter the “atmosphere of the exhibition” and, thereby, “influence the feeling of the visitor” by manipulating the aesthetic qualities of a museum exhibit. Outi Turpeinen, “Researching the Visual Qualities of Exhibition Design through Experimental and CrossDisciplinary Methods,” Nordic Design Research Conference (Denmark, 2005): 4, http://www.nordes.org/opj/index.php/n13/article/viewFile/258/241 (accessed October 22, 2015).

34. Visitors Guide.

35. Though CAP is not central to our analysis, we have gone through this training program.

36. “Look Who’s Visiting,” The Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab, accessed October 19, 2015, http://www.thecell.org/exhibit/look-whos-visiting/

37. While not typically seen as a magnet for terrorism, according to FEMA, Denver is a high-risk target due to its large size, a concentration of military and civilian government facilities, an international airport, and several high-profile landmarks. FEMA. (2013a). Terrorism. Retrieved from http://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/20130726-1549-20490-0802/terrorism.pdf

38. Nikolas Rose, “Government and Control,” The British Journal of Criminology 40 (2000): 325.

39. James Hay and Mark Andrejevic, “Introduction: Toward an Analytic of Governmental Experiments in These Times: Homeland Security as the New Social Security, Cultural Studies 20, no. 4–5 (2006): 337.

40. Visitors Guide.

41. Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (Los Altos, CA: Hermes Publications, 1931), 31.

42. James Ash, “Rethinking Affective Atmospheres: Technology, Perturbation and Space Times of the Non-Human,” Geoforum 49 (2013): 22.

43. That the “Hitting Home” exhibit is designed to instill fear and panic is clear from the Visitors Guide, which cautions, “Warning: This May Not Be Appropriate for All Visitors” and the website, which advises, “The CELL recommends visitors to the exhibit be age 14 and older.”

44. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 138.

45. Ibid., 139–40.

46. Rabinow and Rose, “Biopower Today,” 197.

47. Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Memory and Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum,” Western Journal of Communication 69, no. 2 (2000): 89.

48. On this practice, see Casey Ryan Kelly and Kristin E. Hoerl, “Genesis in Hyperreality: Legitimizing Disingenuous Controversy at the Creation Museum,” Argumentation and Advocacy 48 (Winter 2012): 125.

49. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1.

50. William Bogard, “Simulation and Post-Panopticism,” in Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, ed. Kirstie Ball, Kevin Haggerty, and David Lyon (New York: Routledge, 2012), 35.

51. Ibid., 36.

52. Foucault, Discipline, 201.

53. Brian Massumi, “The Future of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 53–54.

54. Visitors Guide.

55. Mark Andrejevic, iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007), 213.

56. Ibid.

57. Steve Mann, Jason Nolan, and Barry Wellman, “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments,” Surveillance & Society 1, no. 3 (2003): 347.

58. David Savat, Uncoding the Digital: Technology, Subjectivity and Action in the Control Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 119.

59. Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (New York: Verso, 2001), 249.

60. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 342.

61. Mary M. Lay, The Rhetoric of Midwifery: Gender, Knowledge, and Power (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 173.