Archive for the ‘ foucault ’ Category
here’s a revision of the piece I wrote a while back on Foucault and the wire, worked up for publication in UBC’s film journal Cinephile. if you liked the old one, you’ll dig this. if you didn’t, i may have addressed your objections to it – or you might have come up with some new ones. [ READ MORE ]
“I know I’m lookin’ for something, but I can’t even tell you what it is… I’ve had this feeling for a long time, and, it’s like I’m standing outside myself, watching me do things I don’t want to do. You know? Just seeing me like I’m somebody else, but never ever bein’ able to stop [ READ MORE ]
Allan Sekula proposes that ‘every proper portrait has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the police” (5), and thereby equates the idealistic representational mode of photography with the more repressive. Sekula’s “Body and the Archive” is a particularly provocative piece, insofar as it refuses to consider photographic practices in isolation: police photography and [ READ MORE ]
Modern society, particularly modern American society, is endlessly patting itself on the back. It thinks of itself as a spectacular society, a fantastic society which is more or less the most fantastic place which there is or ever has been on Earth to make one’s home. These things are partly true. What does it mean, [ READ MORE ]
Deleuze’s ‘postscript’ raises some interesting questions about the contemporary validity of the kind of disciplinary, panoptic model of social control outlined in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Deleuze posits that these kinds of disciplinary societies, having succeeded the ‘societies of sovereignty’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are now undergoing a transformation into what he calls [ READ MORE ]
…wondered what foucault meant by calling the Panopticon a “Columbus’s egg in the order of politics,” perhaps this story will be somewhat illuminating. obscure though it may be, it’s a quite lovely little allusion. in the highly apocryphal tale, Columbus was getting somewhat piqued at the gentlemen who were proposing that “anyone” could have done what [ READ MORE ]