ART CHART

1. Gramsci, Antonio (1971) “History of the Subaltern Classes,” and “The Concept of
‘Ideology,’” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, eds. and
trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. New York: International Publishers,
52–3, 57–8, 375–7.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception.” In Gunzelin Schmid Noerr
(ed.), Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, pp. 94–136. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2002.
Foucoult (1975) Panopticism
Alllen (2009) Discourse, power, and subjectivation: The Foucault/Habermas debate reconsidered
Guy Debord, “The commodity as spectacle.” In Society of the Spectacle, paras. 1–18 and 42.
Detroit: Black & Red Books, 1977 revised edition.
Stuart Hall, “Encoding/decoding.” In Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Love, and
Paul Willis (eds.), Culture, Media, Language, pp. 128–38. London: Hutchinson, 1980.
Roland Barthes, “Operation margarine” and “Myth today.” In Mythologies, pp. 41–2 and
150–9. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.
Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message.” In Understanding Media: The Extensions
of Man, pp. 23–35, 63–7. New York: Signet, 1964.
An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’
Tiernan Morgan & Lauren Purje (2016)
The other/Other
Lacanian Dictionary of
Psychoanalysis
Intersectionality 101
Laura Mulvey, “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema.” In The Sexual Subject: A Screen
Reader in Sexuality, pp. 22–34. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
Diversity is for White People
Halberstam 2011 Intro: Low theory from the queer art of failure
WTF is Queer Theory
Lacan
Foucault
Panopticism
Subjectivation
Tavin and Tavin 2014
Idiology
Spectacle
Marxism
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich (1976) “The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas,” in Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, trans. Richard Dixon. New York: International Publishers, 59–62.
Critical Race Theory Primer
Booty Call: Sex, Violence, and Images of black masculinity Patricia Hill-Collins
Richard Dyer, “Stereotyping.” In Gays and Film, pp. 27–39. New York: Zoetrope, 1984.
© 1984 by Richard Dyer. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Habermas
Violence
Object (petit) a
Borromean Knot
Jürgen Habermas, “The public sphere: An encyclopedia article.” In Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas M. Kellner (eds.), Critical Theory and Society:
A Reader, pp. 136–42. Translated by Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox. New York and London: Routledge, 1989.
Surveillance
Power
Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The cultural logic of late capitalism.” New Left Review
146 (July–Aug. 1984), pp. 53–92.
Postmodern Theory
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class
which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual
force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently
also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those
who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. The ruling
ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations,
the dominant material relations grasped as ideas; hence of the relations which make
the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.
Once the ruling ideas have been separated from the ruling individuals and, above
all, from the relations which result from a given stage of the mode of production,
and in this way the conclusion has been reached that history is always under the
sway of ideas, it is very easy to abstract from these various ideas “the Idea”, the
thought, etc., as the dominant force in history, and thus to consider all these
separate ideas and concepts as “forms of self-determination” of the Concept developing
in history. It follows then naturally, too, that all the relations of men can be
derived from the concept of man, man as conceived, the essence of man, Man.
It seems to me that there is a potential element of error in assessing the value of
ideologies, due to the fact (by no means casual) that the name ideology is given
both to the necessary superstructure of a particular structure and to the arbitrary
elucubrations of particular individuals. The bad sense of the word has become
widespread, with the effect that the theoretical analysis of the concept of ideology
has been modified and denatured. The process leading up to this error can be easily
reconstructed:
1. ideology is identified as distinct from the structure, and it is asserted that it is
not ideology that changes the structures but vice versa;
2. it is asserted that a given political solution is “ideological” – i.e. that it is not
sufficient to change the structure, although it thinks that it can do so; it is
asserted that it is useless, stupid, etc.;
3. one then passes to the assertion that every ideology is “pure” appearance,
useless, stupid, etc. The subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they are
able to become a “State”: their history, therefore, is intertwined with that of civil
society, and thereby with the history of States and groups of States. Hence it is
necessary to study: 1. the objective formation of the subaltern social groups, by the
developments and transformations occurring in the sphere of economic production;
their quantitative diffusion and their origins in pre-existing social groups, whose
mentality, ideology and aims they conserve for a time; 2. their active or passive
affiliation to the dominant political formations, their attempts to influence the
programmes of these formations in order to press claims of their own, and the
consequences of these attempts in determining processes of decomposition, renovation
or neo-formation; 3. the birth of new parties of the dominant groups, intended
to conserve the assent of the subaltern groups and to maintain control over them;
4. the formations which the subaltern groups themselves produce, in order to press
claims of a limited and partial character; 5. those new formations which assert the
autonomy of the subaltern groups, but within the old framework; 6. those formations
which assert the integral autonomy, . . . etc.
Today works of art, suitably packaged like political slogans, are pressed on a
reluctant public at reduced prices by the culture industry; they are opened up for
popular enjoyment like parks. However, the erosion of their genuine commodity
character does not mean that they would be abolished in the life of a free society but
that the last barrier to their debasement as cultural assets has now been removed.
The abolition of educational privilege by disposing of culture at bargain prices does
not admit the masses to the preserves from which they were formerly excluded but,
under the existing social conditions, contributes to the decay of education and the
progress of barbaric incoherence.
The shamelessness of the rhetorical question “What do people want?” lies in the fact
that it appeals to the very people as thinking subjects whose subjectivity it specifically
seeks to annul. Even on those occasions when the public rebels against the pleasure
industry it displays the feebleness systematically instilled in it by that industry. Nevertheless,
it has become increasingly difficult to keep the public in submission. The
advance of stupidity must not lag behind the simultaneous advance of intelligence.
In the age of statistics the masses are too astute to identify with the millionaire on
the screen and too obtuse to deviate even minutely from the law of large numbers.
Ideology hides itself in probability calculations. Fortune will not smile on all – just
on the one who draws the winning ticket or, rather, the one designated to do so by
a higher power – usually the entertainment industry itself, which presents itself as
ceaselessly in search of talent. Those discovered by the talent scouts and then built
up by the studios are ideal types of the new, dependent middle classes. The female
starlet is supposed to symbolize the secretary, though in a way which makes her
seem predestined, unlike the real secretary, to wear the flowing evening gown. Thus
she apprises the female spectator not only of the possibility that she, too, might
appear on the screen but still more insistently of the distance between them. Only
one can draw the winning lot, only one is prominent, and even though all have
mathematically the same chance, it is so minimal for each individual that it is best to
write it off at once and rejoice in the good fortune of someone else, who might just
as well be oneself but never is.
The perfected similarity is the absolute difference. The identity of the species prohibits
that of the individual cases. The culture industry has sardonically realized man’s
species being. Everyone amounts only to those qualities by which he or she can
replace everyone else: all are fungible, mere specimens. As individuals they are
absolutely replaceable, pure nothingness, and are made aware of this as soon as time
deprives them of their sameness. This changes the inner composition of the religion
of success, which they are sternly required to uphold.
Chance itself is planned; not in the sense that it will affect this or that
particular individual but in that people believe in its control.
Such freedom is symbolized in the various
media of the culture industry by the arbitrary selection of average cases. In the
detailed reports on the modestly luxurious pleasure trip organized by the magazine
for the lucky competition winner – preferably a shorthand typist who probably won
through contacts with local powers-that-be – the powerlessness of everyone is reflected.
So much are the masses mere material that those in control can raise one of
them up to their heaven and cast him or her out again: let them go hang with their
justice and their labor. Industry is interested in human beings only as its customers
and employees and has in fact reduced humanity as a whole, like each of its elements,
to this exhaustive formula. Depending on which aspect happens to be paramount
at the time, ideology stresses plan or chance, technology or life, civilization
or nature. As employees people are reminded of the rational organization and must
fit into it as common sense requires. As customers they are regaled, whether on the
screen or in the press, with human interest stories demonstrating freedom of choice
and the charm of not belonging to the system. In both cases they remain objects.
Conflicts hitherto restricted to the private sphere now intrude
into the public sphere. Group needs which can expect no satisfaction from a selfregulating
market now tend toward a regulation by the state. The public sphere,
which must now mediate these demands, becomes a field for the competition of
interests, competitions which assume the form of violent conflict. Laws which obviously
have come about under the “pressure of the street” can scarcely still be
understood as arising from the consensus of private individuals engaged in public
discussion. They correspond in a more or less unconcealed manner to the compromise
of conflicting private interests. Social organizations which deal with the state
act in the political public sphere, whether through the agency of political parties or
directly in connection with the public administration. With the interweaving of the
public and private realms, not only do the political authorities assume certain functions
in the sphere of commodity exchange and social labor, but, conversely, social
powers now assume political functions.
One can trace in advertising a narrative pattern which clearly shows the working
of this new vaccine. It is found in the publicity for Astra margarine. The episode
always begins with a cry of indignation against margarine: “A mousse? Made with
margarine? Unthinkable!” “Margarine? Your uncle will be furious!” And then one’s
eyes are opened, one’s conscience becomes more pliable, and margarine is a delicious
food, tasty, digestible, economical, useful in all circumstances. The moral at
the end is well known: “Here you are, rid of a prejudice which cost you dearly!” It
is in the same way that the Established Order relieves you of your progressive
prejudices. The Army, an absolute value? It is unthinkable: look at its vexations, its
strictness, the always possible blindness of its chiefs. The Church, infallible? Alas, it
is very doubtful: look at its bigots, its powerless priests, its murderous conformism.
And then common sense makes its reckoning: what is this trifling dross of Order,
compared to its advantages? It is well worth the price of an immunization. What
does it matter, after all, if margarine is just fat, when it goes further than butter, and
costs less? What does it matter, after all, if Order is a little brutal or a little blind,
when it allows us to live cheaply? Here we are, in our turn, rid of a prejudice which
cost us dearly, too dearly, which cost us too much in scruples, in revolt, in fights and
in solitude. [ . . . ]
The first hypothetical position is that of the dominant-hegemonic position. When
the viewer takes the connoted meaning from, say, a television newscast or current
affairs programme full and straight, and decodes the message in terms of the reference
code in which it has been encoded, we might say that the viewer is operating
inside the dominant code. This is the ideal-typical case of “perfectly transparent
communication” – or as dose as we are likely to come to it “for all practical purposes”.
Within this we can distinguish the positions produced by the professional
code. This is the position (produced by what we perhaps ought to identify as the
operation of a “metacode”) which the professional broadcasters assume when
encoding a message which has already been signified in a hegemonic manner. The
professional code is “relatively independent” of the dominant code, in that it applies
criteria and transformational operations of its own, especially those of a technicopractical
nature. The professional code, however, operates within the “hegemony”
of the dominant code.
Decoding within the negotiated version contains a mixture of
adaptive and oppositional elements: it acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic
definitions to make the grand significations (abstract), while, at a more restricted,
situational (situated) level, it makes its own ground rules – it operates with exceptions
to the rule. It accords the privileged position to the dominant definitions of
events while reserving the right to make a more negotiated application to “local
conditions”, to its own more corporate positions. This negotiated version of the
dominant ideology is thus shot through with contradictions, though these are only
on certain occasions brought to full visibility. Negotiated codes operate through
what we might call particular or situated logics: and these logics are sustained by
their differential and unequal relation to the discourses and logics of power.
Finally, it is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and the
connotative inflection given by a discourse but to decode the message in a globally
contrary way. He/she detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to
Encoding/Decoding 173
retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference. This is the
case of the viewer who listens to a debate on the need to limit wages but “reads”
every mention of the “national interest” as “class interest”. He/she is operating with
what we must call an oppositional code.
Coding
Decoding
The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The
electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless
it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media,
means that the “content” of any medium is always another medium. The content
of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the
content of the telegraph. If it is asked, “What is the content of speech?,” it is
necessary to say, “It is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal.” An
abstract painting represents direct manifestation of creative thought processes as
they might appear in computer designs. What we are considering here, however, are
the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or
accelerate existing processes. For the “message” of any medium or technology is the
change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway
did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society,
but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally
new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. This happened whether the
railway functioned in a tropical or a northern environment, and is quite independent
of the freight or content of the railway medium. The airplane, on the other hand, by
accelerating the rate of transportation, tends to dissolve the railway form of city,
politics, and association, quite independently of what the airplane is used for.
1
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself
as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has
moved away into a representation.
2
The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the
unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds,
in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation.
The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous
image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the
concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the nonliving.
To be clear, Debord did not believe that new technology was, in itself, a bad thing. He specifically objected
to the use of perceptual technologies for economic gain. The spectacle, which is driven by economic
interest and profit, replaces lived reality with the “contemplation of the spectacle.” Being is replaced by
having, and having is replaced by appearing. We no longer live. We aspire. We work to get richer.
Paradoxically, we find ourselves working in order to have a “vacation.” We can’t seem to actually live
without working. Capitalism has thus completely occupied social life. Our lives are now organized and
dominated by the needs of the ruling economy:
The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the contemplated object is expressed in the
following way: The more [the spectator] contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts
recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own
existence and desires. – Thesis 30
The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life. – Thesis 33
The proliferation of images and desires alienates us, not only from ourselves, but from each other. Debord
references the phrase “lonely crowds,” a term coined by the American sociologist David Riesman, to
describe our atomization.
Simulacra
Benjamin, Walter (1969) “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in
Illuminations. New York: Shocken.
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its
presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was
subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may
have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its
ownership.2 The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical
analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership
are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original.
The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.
Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography
is an art. The primary question – whether the very invention of photography
had not transformed the entire nature of art – was not raised. Soon the film theoreticians
asked the same ill-considered question with regard to the film. But the difficulties which
photography caused traditional aesthetics were mere child’s play as compared to those raised by
the film. Whence the insensitive and forced character of early theories of the film. Abel Gance, for
instance, compares the film with hieroglyphs: “Here, by a remarkable regression, we have come
back to the level of expression of the Egyptians. . . . Pictorial language has not yet matured
because our eyes have not
yet adjusted to it. There is as yet insufficient respect for, insufficient cult of, what it
expresses.”
Authenticty
Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective
experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic poem in the
past, and for the movie today. Although this circumstance in itself should not lead
one to conclusions about the social role of painting, it does constitute a serious
threat as soon as painting, under special conditions and, as it were, against its nature,
is confronted directly by the masses. In the churches and monasteries of the Middle
Ages and at the princely courts up to the end of the eighteenth century, a collective
reception of paintings did not occur simultaneously, but by graduated and hierarchized
mediation. The change that has come about is an expression of the particular
conflict in which painting was implicated by the mechanical reproducibility of paintings.
Although paintings began to be publicly exhibited in galleries and salons, there
was no way for the masses to organize and control themselves in their reception.22
Thus the same public which responds in a progressive manner toward a grotesque
film is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism.
Mass Media
Consumption
Technological
Change and Art
Cultural Theory
What must then immediately be observed is that the technology of our own
moment no longer possesses this same capacity for representation: not the turbine,
nor even Sheeler’s grain elevators or smokestacks, not the baroque elaboration of
pipes and conveyor belts nor even the streamlined profile of the railroad train – all
vehicles of speed still concentrated at rest – but rather the computer, whose outer
shell has no emblematic or visual power, or even the casings of the various media
themselves, as with that home appliance called television which articulates nothing
but rather implodes, carrying its flattened image surface within itself.
Postmodernism 507
Such machines are indeed machines of reproduction rather than of production,
and they make very different demands on our capacity for aesthetic representation
than did the relatively mimetic idolatry of the older machinery of the futurist moment,
of some older speed-and-energy sculpture. Here we have less to do with kinetic
energy than with all kinds of new reproductive processes; and in the weaker productions
of postmodernism the aesthetic embodiment of such processes often tends to
slip back more comfortably into a mere thematic representation of content – into
narratives which are about the processes of reproduction, and include movie cameras,
video, tape recorders, the whole technology of the production and reproduction
of the simulacrum.
Jean Baudrillard, “The precession of simulacra.” In Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 1–42.
Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look
A
In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between
active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on
to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role
women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for
strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-atness.
Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pinups
to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and
signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative. (Note,
however, how in the musical song-and-dance numbers break the flow of the diegesis.)
The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative
film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to
freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then
has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetticher has put it:
What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the
one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for
her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest
importance.
A three-way split has developed recently around postmodernism. There are those
who refuse to admit that postmodernism engages with anything that modernism is
not better able to explain and who also defend the values of modernism as they relate
to both intellectual work and political analysis. This grouping has established itself as
a counterbalance to those others who from such a “reasonable” standpoint display
what are viewed as the excesses of postmodernism. Allowing even for predictable
negative typecasting in a debate which has become as heated as this, the image of
these postmodernists remains particularly flimsy and marked by what Butler (1992)
describes as a kind of slur of infantilism or at least youthful aberration. The third
path is occupied by the postcolonialists and there is in this work both a notion of
what Gilroy (1993), drawing on Bauman, labels “the counter-cultures of modernity”
and at the same time a remorseless critique of modernity and a looking to those
accounts of postmodernity as a way of finding a place from which to speak and a
space from which to develop that critique of the places and the spaces of exclusion
inside modernity.
Angela McRobbie, “Feminism, postmodernism and the ‘real me.’ ” In Postmodernism and
Popular Culture, pp. 61–74. New York and London: Routledge, 1985.
in some ways the embracing of modernity as a critical concept in contemporary
political thinking is a way of decentring Marxism by showing it to belong to a
broader philosophical project. Thus, while Stuart Hall shows how modernity and its
focus on “man” and the unified subject was itself undermined by Freud (the unconscious),
by Marx himself (production and labour rather than exchange, the market
and free will), later by structuralism (which opposed the transparency of meaning)
and more recently by the social movements (including those of gender, sexual
identity and ethnicity), so also could we say that the interest in modernity can be
seen as a way of both relocating Marx in a less universalistic mode (a kind of process
of downgrading or relativizing) and of looking to find something in modernity
which can be used to ward off the encroaching chaos of postmodernity. Feminist
intellectuals (with a few exceptions) have tended either to argue for the necessity of
some of those great modernist values: truth, objectivity, reason (Nicholson, 1990),
or else they have argued against the assumed invisibility of women found in much of
the recent writing on modernity (Bowlby, 1992; Nava, 1992).
Myth
Modernity
Feminism
To make one’s self vulnerable to the seduction of difference, to seek an encounter
with the Other, does not require that one relinquish forever one’s mainstream
positionality. When race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure,
the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as
constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders,
sexual practices affirm their power-over in intimate relations with the Other. While
teaching at Yale, I walked one bright spring day in the downtown area of New
368 bell hooks
Haven, which is close to campus and invariably brings one into contact with many
of the poor black people who live nearby, and found myself walking behind a group
of very blond, very white, jock type boys. (The downtown area was often talked
about as an arena where racist domination of blacks by whites was contested on the
sidewalks, as white people, usually male, often jocks, used their bodies to force black
people off the sidewalk, to push our bodies aside, without ever looking at us or
acknowledging our presence.) Seemingly unaware of my presence, these young men
talked about their plans to fuck as many girls from other racial/ethnic groups as they
could “catch” before graduation. They “ran” it down. Black girls were high on the
list, Native American girls hard to find, Asian girls (all lumped into the same category),
deemed easier to entice, were considered “prime targets.” Talking about this overheard
conversation with my students, I found that it was commonly accepted that one
“shopped” for sexual partners in the same way one “shopped” for courses at Yale,
and that race and ethnicity was a serious category on which selections were based.
To these young males and their buddies, fucking was a way to confront the
Other, as well as a way to make themselves over, to leave behind white “innocence”
and enter the world of “experience.” As is often the case in this society, they were
confident that non-white people had more life experience, were more worldly, sensual,
and sexual because they were different. Getting a bit of the Other, in this case
engaging in sexual encounters with non-white females, was considered a ritual of
transcendence, a movement out into a world of difference that would transform, an
acceptable rite of passage. The direct objective was not simply to sexually possess the
Other; it was to be changed in some way by the encounter. “Naturally,” the presence
of the Other, the body of the Other, was seen as existing to serve the ends of
white male desires.
Othering
Mass media's tendency to blur the lines between fact and fiction has important consequences
for perceptions of Black culture and Black people. Images matter, and just as those of Black
femininity changed in tandem with societal changes, those of Black masculinity are
undergoing a similar process. As is the case for controlling images of Black femininity,
representations of Black masculinity reflect a similar pattern of highlighting certain ideas, in
this case, the sexuality and violence that crystallizes in the term booty, and the need to
develop class-specific representations of Black masculinity that will justify the new racism.
bell hooks, “Eating the other: Desire and resistance.” In Black Looks: Race and
Representation,
pp. 21–39. Boston: South End Press, 1992.
Bentham's Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was based: at the
periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner
side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they
have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the
light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to
shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one
can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the
periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and
constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to
recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions - to enclose, to
deprive of light and to hide - it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a
supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.
It's a case of 'it's easy once you've thought of it' in the political sphere. It can in fact be integrated into any function
(education, medical treatment, production, punishment); it can increase the effect of this function, by being linked
closely with it; it can constitute a mixed mechanism in which relations of power (and of knowledge) may be precisely
adjusted, in the smallest detail, to the processes that are to be supervised; it can establish a direct proportion between
'surplus power' and 'surplus production'. In short, it arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not
added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to
increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact. The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a
point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a
function, and of making a function function through these power relations. Bentham's Preface to Panopticon opens with a
list of the benefits to be obtained from his 'inspection-house': 'Morals reformed - health preserved - industry invigorated
- instruction diffused -public burthens lightened - Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock - the gordian knot of the
Poor-Laws not cut, but untied - all by a simple idea in architecture!' (Bentham, 39)
As I will use it here, the term “subjectivation” refers to the process by which
neonates are transformed into competent subjects who have the capacity to think,
deliberate, and act. Both Foucault and Habermas are interested in this process––
indeed, their accounts of this process are arguably crucial to their respective
philosophical projects––but they understand it differently. Foucault’s use of the
term “subjection” underscores what he takes to be the ambivalent nature of
subjectivation. As Foucault sees it, in the modern era, individuals become subjects
by being subjected to the forces of disciplinary power and normalization. By
contrast, Habermas’s term “individuation through socialization” suggests a more
benign process whereby autonomous individuals are socialized into a com-
municatively (thus, rationally) structured lifeworld. In this way, each of these
accounts captures an important part of the truth about subjectivation, but only a
part; each is too one-sided to tell the full story.
Myriad reasons exist for why K-12 art teach-
ers may or may not be able to use overtly violent
works of art in their classroom. Many examples
are offered of contemporary artworks that are
mobilized in pursuit of resolving problems and
"making the world better" for all of humanity.
Yet, Kindler's position echoes the dominant
view on the efficacy of contemporary art for the
larger field of art education—within a frame of
predetermined artistic and ethical criteria, and
knowable and conscious experiences.
This frame relies in part on the autonomous
capacities of conscious reason to "heal" us from
our unconscious fears, anxieties, and traumas.
However effective and hopeful, this liberal
humanist approach— centering on an always
already stable individual— is at odds with a
Lacanian and Levinasian perspective. In Lacanian
theory, for example, the unconscious void of the
subject, the Real, cannot be healed. Any
ethical project proclaiming such
potentiality of ideal harmony and stability
is a "flight of fantasy." Such an ethic is "one
of philosophers' pretty little dreams"—
it attempts to deny and negate the always
already unconscious lack-of-being of
the split subject (the negation of the
negation), which is the very mark of
human identity. (Indaimo, 2011, p. 141)
Again, while the motivation to search for a
utopian ideal of universal humanity and good-
ness through art is worthy and admirable, it
substitutes symbolic assurance for the ambigu-
ity of the Real— and, as a consequence, offers up
only a narrow set of examples: mostly beauti-
ful, pleasant, kind, and subjectively nonviolent
artworks that elicit certain kinds of pleasure,
wonder, and enjoyment (Tavin, 2007). The unin-
tended result may exclude pain, discomfort,
anxiety, and trauma from the register of ethics
for art education.
Critical Race Theory
Fucking: It’s Political
From the assertion that power trickles down to our every-day
behavior a conclusion was made: the personal is political. Now, lots
of Marxists and other critical theorists got into a tizzy about this and
it’s still being bitterly disputed. One side believes that historical
materialism is the only thing that matter and the other side thinks
people have agency (go ahead, start the hate mail and lecture me on
the nuances of post-Marxism). So if refusing to perform the script of
hetersexuality is radical, than the same applies for non-heterosexual sex.
Postcolonialism
Here, to explain why decolonization is and requires more than a
metaphor, we discuss some of these moves to innocence:
i. Settler nativism
ii. Fantasizing adoption iii. Colonial equivocation
iv. Conscientization
v. At risk-ing / Asterisk-ing Indigenous peoples
vi. Re-occupation and urban homesteading
Such moves ultimately represent settler fantasies of easier paths to
reconciliation. Actually, we argue, attending to what is irreconcilable
within settler colonial relations and what is incommensurable
between decolonizing projects and other social justice projects will
help to reduce the frustration of attempts at solidarity; but the
attention won’t get anyone off the hook from the hard, unsettling
work of decolonization. Thus, we also include a discussion of
interruptions that unsettle innocence and recognize
incommensurability.
Settler adoption fantasies are longstanding narratives in the United States, fueled by rare
instances of ceremonial “adoptions”, from John Smith’s adoption in 1607 by Powhatan
(Pocahontas’ father), to Lewis Henry Morgan’s adoption in 1847 by Seneca member Jimmy
Johnson, to the recent adoption of actor Johnny Depp by the family of LaDonna Harris, a
Comanche woman and social activist. As sovereign nations, tribes make decisions about who is
considered a member, so our interest is not in whether adoptions are appropriate or legitimate.
Rather, because the prevalence of the adoption narrative in American literature, film, television,
holidays and history books far exceeds the actual occurrences of adoptions, we are interested in
how this narrative spins a fantasy that an individual settler can become innocent, indeed heroic
and indigenized, against a backdrop of national guilt. The adoption fantasy is the mythical trump
card desired by critical settlers who feel remorse about settler colonialism, one that absolves
them from the inheritance of settler crimes and that bequeaths a new inheritance of Native-ness
and claims to land (which is a reaffirmation of what the settler project has been all along).
Our plan was to live in a golden cage for three days, presenting
ourselvesas undiscovered Amerindians tiom an island in the Gulf of
Mexicothat had somehow been overlooked by Europeans for five
centuries. Wecalled our homeland Guatinau, and ourselves Guatinauis.
We performedour "traditional tasks," which ranged from sewing voodoo
dolls and liftingweights to watching television and working on a laptop
computer. A donationbox in front of the cage indicated that for a small fee, I
would dance(to rap music), Guillermo would tell authentic Amerindian
stories (in anonsensical language) and we would pose for polaroids with
visitors. Two"zoo guards" would be on hand to speak to visitors (since we
could notunderstand them), take us to the bathroom on leashes, and feed
us sandwichesand fruit.
The Precessionof Simulacra, Jean
Baudrillard (1994)
Consider, for example, thepowerful alternative
position that postmodernism is itself little more
than onemore stage of modernismproper (if not,
indeed, of the even older romanticism); it may
indeed beconceded that all of the features of
postmodernism I am about to enumerate canbe
detected, full-blown, in this or that preceding
modernism (including suchastonishing
genealogical precursors as Gertrude Stein,
Raymond Roussel, orMarcel Duchamp, who may
be considered outright postmodernists, avantla
lettre). Whathas not been taken into account by
this view is, however, the social position of the
oldermodernism, orbetter still, its passionate
repudiation by an older Victorian andpost-
Victorian bourgeoisie, for whom its forms and
ethos are received as beingvariously ugly,
dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral,
subversive and generally “anti-social”.It will be
argued here that a mutation in the sphere
ofculture has rendered such attitudes archaic.
Not only are Picasso and Joyce nolonger ugly;
they now strike us, on the whole,as rather
“realistic”;and this is the result of a canonization
and an academic institutionalizationof the
modernmovementgenerally, which can be traced
to the late 1950s. This is indeed surely one ofthe
most plausible explanations for the emergence of
postmodernism itself,since the younger
generation of the 1960s will now confront the
formerlyoppositional modern movement as a set
of dead classics,which “weigh like a nightmare on
the brains of the living”, as Marx once saidin a
different context(Jameson,409).
From Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The cultural
logic of late capitalism.” New Left Review146 (July–Aug.
1984), pp. 53–92.
Disability
Studies
Disability studies can benefit fromfeminist theory and feminist
theory can benefit from disability studies. Bothfeminism and
disability studies are comparative and concurrent
academicenterprises. Just as feminism has expanded the lexicon
of what we imagine aswomanly, has sought to understand and
destigmatize whatwe call the subject positionofwoman, so has
disability studies examined the identity disabledinthe service of
integrating people with disabilities more fully into oursociety. As
such, both are insurgencies that are becoming
institutionalized,underpinning inquiries outside and inside the
academy. A feminist disabilitytheory builds on the strengths of
both (3).
Despitethe aura of objectivity they like to assume, neither the “sociology of the
intellec-tuals”, which is traditionally the business of “right-wing intellectuals”, nor
the critiqueof “right-wing thought”, the traditional speciality of “left-wing
intellectuals”, isanything more than a series of symbolic aggressions which take
on additional forcewhen they dress themselves up in the impeccable neutrality of
science. They tacitlyagree in leaving hidden what is essential, namely the
structure of objective positionswhich is the source, inter alia, of the view which
the occupants of each position canhave of the occupants of the other positions
and which determines the specific formand force of each group’s propensity to
present and receive a group’s partial truth asif it were a full account of the
objective relations between the groups.
Coco Fusco (1994) The Other History of
Intercultural Performance
Text
Tuck & Wang (1998)
Decolonization is not a
metaphor
Culture
class
media representation
critical theory
Disabled
Here’s what I’ve learned: diversity is how we talk about race when we can’t talk about race. It has become a stand-in when
open discussion of race is too controversial or — let’s be frank — when white people find the topic of race uncomfortable.
Diversity seems polite, positive, hopeful. Who is willing to say they don’t value diversity? One national survey found that more
than 90 percent of respondents said they valued diversity in their communities and friendships.
The term diversity has become so watered down that it can be anything from code for black people to a profit imperative.
Consider the cringe-worthy experience I had sitting in on a corporate diversity training, where initiates learned that diversity
could mean our preferences for working at daytime or at night, or our favorite animal. As a Deloitte study showed, many
Millennials take it to simply mean one’s unique culture and perspective. (Apparently they are listening to their diversity
trainers.)
However much it might feel good, though, diversity talk is not enough. At this paradoxical time, when we are at once
commemorating fifty years of civil rights gains while questioning racism in policing and prisons, it allows us to sidestep
persistent, alarming racial inequalities. Its appeal makes it downright pernicious. It lets white people off the hook from doing
something about our own culpability in the problem — like our inclination to live near people like us (i.e. white) or to put in a
good word with the boss about our friends (i.e. probably white).
Queer Theory
Hegemony
Other
Gay people, whether activists or not, have resented and attacked the images of homosexuality
in films (and the other arts and media) for as long as we have managed to
achieve any self-respect. (Before that, we simply accepted them as true and inevitable).
The principal line of attack has been on stereotyping.
The target is a correct one. There is plenty of evidence1 to suggest that stereotypes
are not just put out in books and films, but are widely agreed upon and believed to
be right. Particularly damaging is the fact that many gay people believe them, leading
on the one hand to the self-oppression so characteristic of gay people’s lives,2
and on the other to behaviour in conformity with the stereotypes which of course
only serves to confirm their truth. Equally, there can be no doubt that most stereotypes
of gays in films are demeaning and offensive. Just think of the line-up – the butch
dyke and the camp queen, the lesbian vampire and the sadistic queer, the predatory
schoolmistress and the neurotic faggot, and all the rest. The amount of hatred, fear,
ridicule and disgust packed into those images is unmistakable.
Even today, I think one’s relation to one’s alma mater is fraught with haute-bourgeois
peril. In descending order of coolness are:
1. Dropped out of prestigious college;
2. Graduated from prestigious school, never bring it up unless asked—then as joke;
3. Graduated from prestigious school with honors, bring up quickly, no irony;
4. Graduated, have become garish, cheerful head of alumni booster committee.
I think that all the fields of cultural production today are subject to structural
pressure from the journalistic field, and not from any one journalist or network
executive, who are themselves subject to control by the field. This pressure exercises
equivalent and systematic effects in every field. In other words, this journalistic field,
which is more and more dominated by the market model, imposes its pressures
more and more on other fields. Through pressure from audience ratings, economic
forces weigh on television, and through its effect on journalism, television weighs on
newspapers and magazines, even the “purest” among them. The weight then falls on
individual journalists, who little by little let themselves be drawn into television’s
orbit. In this way, through the weight exerted by the journalistic field, the economy
weighs on all fields of cultural production. [ . . . ]
The audience rating system can and should be contested in the name of demo-
cracy.
Pierre Bourdieu (1984) The Aristocracy of Culture
Pierre Bourdieu (1998) On Television
When an X person, male or female, meets a member of an
identifiable class, the costume, no matter what it is, conveys
the message “I am freer and less terrified than you are.”
Bérubé, M. (2005). Disability and narrative.
Garland-Thompson, R. (2002). Integrating disability,
transforming feminsit theory
Low (2008) Class Dismissed A new status anxiety is infecting affluent hipdom
Never is there an attempt to disguise her
prosthetic legs; rather all of the photos thematically echo
her prostheses and render the whole image chic. Mullins’s prosthetic
legs—whether cosmetic or functional—parody, indeed proudly mock, the fantasy of
the perfect body that is the mark of fashion, even while the rest of her body
conforms precisely to fashion’s impossible standards. So rather than
concealing, normalizing, or erasing disability, these photos use the hyperbole
and stigmata traditionally associated with disability to quench postmodernity’s
perpetual search for the new and arresting image. Such a narrative of advantage
works against oppressive narratives and practices usually invoked about
disabilities. First, Mullins counters the insistent narrative that one must
overcome an impairment rather than incorporating it into one’s life and self,
even perhaps as a benefit.
Second, Mullins counters the practice of passing for nondisabled that people
with disabilities are often obliged to enact in the public sphere. Mullins uses
her conformity with beauty standards to assert her disability’s
violation
of those very standards. As legless and beautiful, she is an embodied paradox,
invoking an inherently disruptive potential (27)
Or take Gattaca, which is not only about eugenics but also about passing as
nondisabled. I use the term "passing” advisedly, because in Gattaca the relation
between race and disability is one of mutual implication: unable to pursue a career in
aeronautical engineering because of his genetic makeup, Vincent (Ethan Hawke)
decides to become a "borrowed ladder," using the bodily fluids and effluvia of Jerome
(Jude Law) to obtain the clearance necessary for employment at the aerospace firm,
Gattaca. Jerome is a former world-class athlete who was struck by a car; permanently
disabled and visually marked by the most common sign for physical disability,
a wheelchair, he literally sells his genetic identity to Vincent. Interestingly, both the
genetic counselor whom Vincent s parents consult and the personnel manager who
conducts Vincent's first job interview are black: it is as if we have created a society
obsessed by genetics and indifferent to race, and one of the film's better features is
that it leaves this feature unremarked. Gattaca is not only a dis ability passing
narrative; it is also, as I have argued elsewhere, the leading example of the science
fiction employment-discrimination genre (569).
But it is no longer a question of eithermaps or territories. Something has disappeared: the sovereign
difference,between one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction. Becauseit is difference
that constitutes the poetry of the map and the charm of theterritory, the magic of the concept and the
charm of the real. This imaginaryof representation, which simultaneously culminates in and is engulfed
by thecartographer’s mad project of the ideal coextensivity ofmap and territory, disappears in the
simulation whose operation is nuclear andgenetic, nolonger at all specular or discursive. It is all of
metaphysics that is lost. Nomore mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept. No
moreimaginary coextensivity: itis geneticminiaturization thatis the dimension of simulation. The real is
produced fromminiaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control – and it can
bereproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to berational, because it no
longer measures itself against either an ideal ornegative instance. It is no longer anything but
operational. In fact, it is nolonger really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a
hyperreal,produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspacewithout
atmosphere.By crossing into a space whose curvature isno longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the
era ofsimulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials –worse: with their artificial resurrection
in the systems of signs, a materialmore malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems
ofequivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. (Baudrillard,454)
Why did this American defeat (thelargest reversal in the history of the USA) have no internal repercussions inAmerica? If
it had really signified the failure of the planetary strategy ofthe United States, it would necessarily have completely
disrupted its internalbalance and the American political system. Nothing of the sort occurred.Something else, then, took
place.This war, at bottom, was nothing but a crucial episode of peaceful coexistence. (477)
This is why nuclearproliferation does not increase the risk of either an atomic clash or anaccident –save in the interval when the
“young” powers could be tempted to make a nondeterrent,“real” use of it (as the Americans did in Hiroshima – but precisely only
theyhad a right to this “use value” of the bomb, all of thosewho haveacquired it since will be deterred from using it by the very
fact of possessingit). Entry into the atomic club, so prettily named, very quickly effaces (asunionization does in the working
world) any inclination toward violentintervention. Responsibility, control, censure, self-deterrence always growmore rapidly than
the forces or the weapons at our disposal: this is the secretof the social order. Thus the very possibility of paralyzing a whole
country byflicking a switch makes it sothat the electrical engineers will never use this weapon: the whole myth of thetotal and
revolutionary strike crumbles at the very moment when the means areavailable – but alas precisely because thosemeans are
available. Therein lies the whole process of deterrence.
It is thus perfectly probable that one day wewill see nuclear powers export atomic reactors, weapons, and bombs to
everylatitude.Control by threat will be replaced by the more effective strategy ofpacification through the bomb and through the
possession of the bomb. (479)
American, postmodern culture is the internal and
superstructural expression of a whole new wave of
American military and economic domination throughout the
world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the
underside of culture is blood, torture, death and horror
(Jameson, 409).
Critical Media
Kyle Guzik
To this murderous power is opposed that of representations
as a dialectical power, the visible and intelligible mediation of the Real. All Western
faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign
could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning
and that something could guarantee this exchange – God of course. But what if God
himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute
faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but
a gigantic simulacrum – not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged
for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or
circumference.
Such is simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation stems
from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence
is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from
the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as
value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas
representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation,
simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum.
Such would be the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
For many, both black and white, CRT may be criticized as too cynical, nihilistic, or hopeless. Indeed, its assumption of the
permanence of racism and its prediction of continued subordination of blacks can be read as excessively negative. However,
within its own constructs are the means to combat helplessness and hope lessness. Its experiential-based center provides
common ground for proponents and interested parties; its oppositional nature gives voice to otherwise suppressed opinions;
its gritty realism is firmly rooted in centimes of resistance by enslaved persons of African descent who, in the worst of
circumstances, exerted their human dignity, and on whose shoulders we now stand.