Archive for the ‘ panopticism ’ Category
“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 ]
“The reality shows are only side-effects, and moreover mystifying, because in indicting them as manipulation, the critics assume that there is somewhere an original form of life … This criticism is over, as is every Situationist criticism of the ’spectacle’ and the concept of ’spectacle,’ as also in substance all criticism of ‘alienation.’ Unfortunately, I [ 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 ]