technical images and linear text

This (at least initially and primarily) is (and has been) a blog about the assorted means by which contemporary and past societies have administered and controlled behaviour, in order to ensure an ample supply of docile bodies for the production line; conversely, it deals equally with the means by which this multiplicity of docile bodies have abandoned their posts and appropriated those selfsame means of control and production for their own ends. It’s also digressing further and further into the domain of abstract theory and continental philosophy, with occasionally disastrous results (but also, hopefully, some interesting ideas). Apart from being a simple exercise in semi-creative, semi-philosophical writing, it will be my own little forum for musing about culture, elaborating many of my various paranoid delusions with regard to the frightening societies in which we live, as well as my often frightful misconceptions about previous societies in which humans have lived, along with a broad streak of ‘pure’ theory, and extensive run-on sentences with absurd proliferations of clauses, whose already intolerable length tends to be exacerbated by an apparently superfluous verbosity.

To be more formal and straightforward about things, one might call this a blog about media theory, in the broadest and most McLuhanesque sense. Not the sense where he was a pretentious pseudo-intellectual constructed media personality, but the sense where he actually had some fascinating things to say about the function of technology in its relation to the development and consciousness of this silly gendered construct called ‘Man.’

Or you could perhaps just call this Deleuzean philosophy, provided that one accepts the term with a dash of deconstruction, and a healthy interest in ‘reconciling’ or at least engaging this philosophy in some kind of productive way with all those more ‘rigorous’ domains of theoretical inquiry (ie. ’science’ in the Deleuzean sense or Nietzsche’s Wissenschaft).

Perhaps it’s best not to ‘call it’ anything at all, given that the underlying conceptual metaphor kind of falls apart in this context.

To mess things up even further, now I can post to this blog from my phone. So now, no doubt, there will be a considerable inclusion of completely trivial commentary on matters of little to no public concern.

The hypothetical, albeit inexistent definition which encompasses all the incommensurable ones rattled off above perfectly describes this blog.

This is a blog which was at one time created for the purpose of fulfilling the ‘journal’ requirement of a course at the University of Western Ontario on Visual Culture and Surveillance. As you can see, however, it has metastasized into something altogether more… disjointed. Having recently completed my M.A. at selfsame institution, I am pursuing a Ph.D in Science and Technology Studies at York University. If you, the reader, are in the business of offering budding pseudo-intellectuals a venue for publication or large sums of grant money, and my work strikes you as in any way interesting, please contact me via email: “steeze at gmail dot com” (substituting typographic symbols where appropriate).

And do please leave comments. Otherwise this starts feeling awfully solipsistic.