Archive for the ‘ surveillance ’ Category

Twits and twats: an ethnographic account

Twitter is such a mysterious phenomenon. I mean, here is a site which shamelessly caters to contemporary individuals’ love for the feeling of having a group of friends, without any of the pesky responsibilities commonly associated with having such a group. High-frequency, low-commitment interaction: the ideal type of postmodern sociability, if such a notion is even [ READ MORE ]

Being critical of animal studies

So-called ‘critical animal studies’ is the kind of disciplinary identification that just seems designed to irritate me from the get-go. I mean you have the usual collision of disciplines (according to Wiki, it includes “scholars from fields as diverse as art history, anthropology, film studies, history, sociology, biology, psychology, literary studies, geography,philosophy and feminism or queer theory“), a collection that could be applied to just about [ READ MORE ]

What?

The Onion A/V club’s “my year of flops” feature examines Roman Polanski’s scary-sounding 1972 comedic romp What?, and comes up with this beautiful paragraph: Even in the Wild West world of ’70s cinema, What? is profoundly fucked-up. Polanski pops up in his free-associative bacchanal as an irritable young man known only as “Mosquito.” Why Mosquito? “They call [ READ MORE ]

blog sabbatical: new foucault piece

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 ]

‘essentially emily:’ a new(ish) reason to loathe the cult of celebrity

Essentially Emily is a new blog by Emily Brill, the newly-thin ’socialite’ daughter of Steven Brill, the erstwhile founder of multiple defunct enterprises you’ve likely never heard of. Perhaps you remember his ‘media watchdog’ magazine, Brill’s Content, if you’ve got a maddening memory for the irrelevant like myself. Excited yet? I hope not. This should be [ READ MORE ]

‘knockin’ heads and takin’ bodies:’ foucault, deleuze and the wire

“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 ]

a number, and a brief thought

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0  this number is largely random. or pseudorandom, to be more specific, and utterly insignificant,  and yet my posting it here is in fact illegal according to the law of the United States of America. so, much like those very devout Jews who not only obey the Law, but go out of their way to find opportunities [ READ MORE ]

modernity and the archived body.

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 ]

language as signifying otherness.

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“manifesto of the futurist woman”

note: this is a public-domain article that i’ve resurrected from a now-dead site via the wayback machine. you can view the cached version of the original site here. to make this article “come back,” though, i’ve reposted the text on my blog. enjoy. [ READ MORE ]