Week 6



§Church Confession
§Personal Confessions
§Reality TV Confessional Camera
§ #Metoo
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§Wrote on eccentric subjects: Sex, Madness, Prisons, Clinics, Categorization
§Knowledge
§Organization
§Power
§Power is brought more broadly into being in play of relationships; classifications
§Discourse/Discursive Formations
§Enables, constrains, constitutes (Language)
§Normal/Abnormal – naming brings disciplinary mechanisms into play
§Gaze
§Surveillance
§Prison, Panopticon = order, body, discipline (professions); marking of subjects
§Technologies
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§Culture = Discursive formation of power relations
§Torture; Prison, Power, Discourse,  Discipline
§Discipline creates "docile bodies", ideal for the new economics, politics and warfare of the
modern industrial age - bodies that function in factories, ordered military regiments, and school
classrooms
§Modalities of Control/New Technologies of Power
§Communism; the incredible becomes credible and the credible becomes incredible
§Today?
§Truthiness; Post-Truth Moment
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§All approximations of truth, science as much as any fable or religion, are mere stories devised to
serve people’s needs or interests. Reality itself is a purely social construction, a tableau of
useful or wishful myths that members of a society or tribe have been persuaded to believe. The
borders between fiction and nonfiction are permeable, maybe nonexistent. The delusions of the
insane, superstitions, and magical thinking? Any of those may be as legitimate as the supposed
truths contrived by Western reason and science. The takeaway: Believe whatever you want, because
pretty much everything is equally true and false.
§These ideas percolated across multiple academic fields. In 1965, the French philosopher Michel
Foucault published Madness and Civilization in America, echoing Laing’s skepticism of the concept
of mental illness; by the 1970s, he was arguing that rationality itself is a coercive “regime of
truth”—oppression by other means. Foucault’s suspicion of reason became deeply and widely embedded
in American academi
§Today, each of us is freer than ever to custom-make reality, to believe whatever and pretend to be
whoever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more
easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, personal, subjective.
§Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of the ideological and religious and scientific
kinds.
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§Poststructuralist/Postmodernist;
§IDEAS:
§Culture is a discursive formation
§Structure/Agency
§A relationship of power is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others
but instead it acts upon their actions on existing actions and on those which may arise in the
present or in the future; Power requires that the person upon whom it is exercised be thoroughly
recognized and maintained to the very end as  a person who acts so that a whole field of responses,
reactions, results and possible interventions may open up; resistance to power is always possible.
§Extrapolations:
§Education (Marshall)
§Power as it operates systemically
§Sex Education; What is “Normal”
§Media: (Self) Surveillance
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Image result for british surveillance cameras many Image result for social media sharing

§Film as evolving technology
§Film within economic structures/cultural articulations
§Film as narrative/genre
§Film as ideological/political
§Consensus narratives
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§Whiplash
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§System; Narratives, Images,
§European Film/American Film tropes
§Logics of film production = logics of self-production (Blurring of Film/Reality)
§What structures our understanding of our self-representations?
§Film: As Discourse/Discursive Formation
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§Film as Culture/Cultural Moment:  #Metoo
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