On the subject of poaching...
Poaching as a specific act could be said to have emerged in the eighteenth century. Before, that time, each of the different social strata enjoyed their own set of tolerated illegalities. Ordnances were passed and edicts issued from on high, and a few of these were allowed to slip by unobserved. Within each strata of the social hierarchy, the non-observance of particular laws was so widespread and uniform that it achieved "in a sense its own coherence and economy" (Foucault, 82). The instances of these tolerated illegalities took on different forms. Sometimes they took the form of laws published but never enforced, or of a "law gradually falling into abeyance, then suddenly being reactivated"; sometimes these illegalities were tolerated simply due to the logistic impossibility of capturing and convicting the delinquents (Foucault, 82). As one travelled farther and farther down the social continuum, toward the base population, contradiction arose, or rather, an economy of stasis and balance, between privilege and tolerance. Foucault describes this as,
"The least-favoured strata of the population did not have, in principle, any privileges: but they benefited, within the margins of what was imposed on them by law and custom, from a space of tolerance, gained by force or obstinancy; and this space was for them so indespensible a condition of existence that they were often ready to rise up and defend it..." (82).Often termed "peasant's rights," such tolerable acts might have included stealing a duck or two every couple of months from the master's private pond, or skimming from the harvested grain stores flour enough to make bread for a week.
But conditions arose in the eighteenth century which problematized these tolerated delinquencies. A whole complex mechanism in Europe began to take shape, "embracing the development of production, the increase in wealth, a higher juridical and moral value placed on property relations, and stricter methods of surveillance", all pointing toward a new interest and a new anxiety surrounding property -- things, capital, produced goods (Foucault, 76).. Along with this general mechanism, which was linked to, but not contingent upon, the Industrial Revolution, there also arose "a general movement [that] shifted criminality from the attack of the bodies to the more or less indirect seizure of goods" which began to spread across Europe, and along with it a police force with a refined ability to prevent these open acts of criminality and to locate and obtain information on delinquent acts (Foucault, 77).
The result was the emergence of "poaching" as an act no longer bound up explicitly with "rights" and "privilges," but an act forced underground. Of course, poaching can never be completely disassociated with "rights", for the whole reason why poaching is performed at all is because of a proposition that the poacher somehow has a "right" to whatever he or she is poaching. Poaching as an act at this time also became inextricably linked to politics, for in the face of the ideal of an "utopia of a universally and publicly punitive society in which ceaselessly active penal mechanisms would function without delay," poaching became not an act performed against "tax farmers, financiers, the king's agents" or magistrates, but against entire regimes that exploited the lower social stratas (Foucault, 272-274). Within a society in which Foucault's "carceral archipelago" functioned, poaching was a way to point out fissures, gaps in surveillance, and ways of escaping the ever pure and austere gaze of power. ¹
In the study of popular culture, poaching has come to be regarded as a strategy of resistance. In Understanding Popular Culture, John Fiske regards poaching as a postive strategy for the invidual, inherently weak in relation to the dominant culture industries which "control the places and the commodities that constitute the parameters of everyday life" (Fiske, 33). For him, the powerful are "cumbersome, unimaginative, and overorganized" and the weak are "creative, nimble, and flexible" (Fiske, 32). The weak, then, are able to employ "guerrilla tactics against the strategies of the powerful, make poaching raids upon their texts or structures, and play constant tricks upon the system" (Fiske, 32).
It is not hard to come up with moments in the space of the internet where inviduals demonstrate their un-weakness, a strength or force to be recognized. Hacking would be such an activity. Hacking seems to be one activity on the web which is more about tricks, games, and jokes rather than actually gaining material objects or wealth. So too would the hacking of passwords and registration numbers for pirated software and the distribution of such software over the Internet. Adult sites, as well, come under attack; there is a proliferation of sites on the Internet where one can sample and try out recently hacked, stolen, or otherwise obtained passwords for private, pay adult sites. Disciplinary forces have not organized in such a way as to break the coalitions and ferret out the individuals whose games disrupt yet steal nothing, perhaps because those being pursued -- hackers, phreakers, poachers of the Internet, are able to adapt as quickly to the technologies of ensnarement as they are developed coupled with the virtuality of Internet space. It is a different type of poaching, one without material gain, which links better to De Certeau and his studies of the practices of every day living, than to commerce and commodity which Foucault's study of eighteenth century criminality focuses on.
The importance of poaching for A Day in the Life of ... would be an attempt to show how identity is constructed and how poaching pervades the art of the home page. In my construction of myhome.html (I admit that given time constraints it is not as polished or elaborate as I had hoped), I stole, or poached images from other home pages, as well as stealing design ideas, buttons, animated GIFS, and general layout ideas. In addition, the ease with which code can be stolen from other websites speeds dissemination of different ways of stylizing a website. One could argue that the aesthetics of homepages are circulated through copying and through template programs at such homepage-hosting sites as Geocities, which allow even those with the most rudimentary knowledge of HTML construct a home page. I went to some of these sites to collect the materials for constructing my own home page. It is quite easy to do; a simple right-mouse click can save any image to a hard drive. The sites I stole or poached from are:
The picture who is supposed to represent the 'me' of the website is taken from the personals section of excite.com. He's actually from Paragould, Arkansas. The ease of copying on the web creates the potential for proliferation and decentralizes any type of knowledge/power locus. Pictures from a pay pornographic site can easily be copied onto a hard drive and then distributed widely on usenet groups. The case of Heaven's Gate, the cult which in the late 90's committed a mass-suicide in anticipation that behind the Hale-Bopp comet was an alien spacecraft which would take believers to the next level, had a web page. Soon after this website was revealed, it became duplicated, archived, and mirrored (the technique of cutting down on traffic by having several separate sites containing the same content) across the Internet. Even now, typing in "Heaven's Gate" into a search engine will reveal dozens of sites, most of which keep intact the original structure of the site, others which are appended with commentary.Family Fun
Will Heaven's Gate websites continue to be on the Internet in 100 years? Perhaps. Poaching on the Internet has a consequence which is unique to this medium. That poaching has as a result a certain type of immortality is a concept which could not have been spoken of before. I know someone who had a webcame which uploaded images of him typing papers to a website once every twenty seconds. Without becoming too technical, this person used a type of program which prevented people watching his camera from saving his images. But he learned of another program being circulated which, in effect, bypassed this control. One person he talked to had collected over five hundred separate images of this person by means of subverting these controls. Other issues aside, there is a certain guarantee implicit in this of my friend's image being forever circulated on the Internet. The decentralizing effects of poaching and mirroring sites, images, works of art, and works of literature could ensure to a greater extent permanence to these materials. If Heaven's Gate is archived on different servers, in different cities, on different continents, should one node be destroyed, say, the original node in California, others would still exist. I could be self-righteous and say that in a way, I am protecting the memory of those I have poached from. Though this, of course, is not true, for I've attached different names to the photos of those I've stolen. They represent other people now, fake people.
I do not appologize for poaching these images.
----- NOTES -----
¹ Foucault's "carceral archipelago," functions, as I see it, as a series of concentric circles radiating out from a central point, a point of promise and of punishment for delinquencies -- the prison. Radiating out from that central institution (which would undoutedly be, for Foucault, the Panopticon), are instititutions which to lesser and lesser degrees embody the technologies of discipline and surveillance which are perfected in the prison. Closest then, would be institutions of incarceration: orphanages and juvenille centers. Moving further away, worker's estates, factory-convents, and almshouses. Still further, adopting the carceral method to lesser and lesser degrees, yet infiltrating the lives of citizens to greater and greater extents, would be such public places as post offices, schools, factories, shopping malls, and art museums (Foucault, 297-298).
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