[João Biehl and Catarina in Vita; image by Torben Eskerod from the book] There is a place outside of Porto Alegre in Brazil where families leave behind “undesirable members” (14) (mostly sick) to wait for their death. It is called Vita, what João Biehl, in an ethnographic work, describes as a “zone of social abandonment.”…
Category Archives: Big Brother
watches out for totalitarianism, but, in doing so, is him/herself being totalitarian?
[Shopping at Macy's, the world's largest store; Image from corbis] Andrew Bacevich, Professor of International Relations at Boston University, contributes to the discourse on American empire in an interview with Bill Moyers. Bacevich’s thesis is that America’s current troubles (brewing for decades now)—a consequence of its worldwide empire—are caused not by something external—some enemy plotting…
[The "reformatory" of Mettray, north of Tours, France] [Continues "The Panoptic Society (of Surveillance)"] Despite (modal/technological) changes in the way that power is exercised—despite, that is to say, the (systemic/structural) change in the regime of power—one function/element remains central to society: namely, penality. This is true even of the panoptic society (of surveillance). The disciplinary…
[Jacques-Louis David's rendering of Napoleon's coronation] In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault traces the genealogy of social control, specifically the ways in which the State has disciplined (made manageable, kept in line, made to obey) its populace (usually by punishing)—whether in confronting criminality, disease, (preparation for) war, (economic) production, education, . . .—activities in general…
[The New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street; Image from the New York Times] [Continues "Blood on Our Hands"] Roughly four decades earlier, in the midst of another war, the major newspapers performed an act against the government analogous to the exposés we witnessed of late. In 1971, the New York Times and the Washington…
[Image from masternewmedia.org] [Continues "The Surge"] As the war effort was going on abroad, another war was being waged at home: the war of information, with the news media at the forefront. Frontline chronicles how the mainstream media was used by the White House to help build its case for war in Iraq. The media,…
[A painting by Filipino Revolutionary artist Juan Luna, The Spolarium] Things have of late been stirring in the Philippines. The current President, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (also referred to as GMA), is being challenged by a string of protests to step down from the post. Arroyo ascended to the Presidency in 2001 (same day as George…
[Ideology, the strategy game] To take the term literally, a system (-logy) of ideas (ideo-). That is to say, a collection of ideas (either about different things/aspects, e.g. on the economy, on social issues, on political power, etc. or as more or less similar positions (i.e. variants) on a given issue (whose differences are not…
[Title page of Hobbes' Leviathan] In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Louis Althusser contributes to the Marxist discourse on the relationship between the base and the superstructure in order (as implied by his rhetoric) to go beyond it. Recounting the basic framework of what he calls a “metaphor of topography,” Althusser explains that “Marx conceived…
[Alexander at the Battle of Issos; from a mosaic in Pompeii] Antonio Gramsci (as is apparent in this collection of his writings) makes more nuanced and dynamic the base-superstructure model described by Karl Marx (and Friedrich Engels) in The German Ideology and the Preface to A Critique of Political Economy. In doing this, he turns…
