#Foucauldian theory

[orngeeeee]

i academia is so STUPID!!!!!! (i like it i think)

[dailyanarchistposts]

III. Toward an Anarchist Film Theory

In his article “What is Anarchist Cultural Studies?” Jesse Cohn argues that anarchist cultural studies (ACS) can be distinguished from critical theory and consumer-agency theory along several trajectories (Cohn, 2009: 403–24). Among other things, he writes, ACS tries “to avoid reducing the politics of popular culture to a simplistic dichotomy of ‘reification’ versus ‘resistance’” (ibid., 412). On the one hand, anarchists have always balked at the pretensions of “high culture” even before these were exposed and demystified by the likes of Bourdieu in his theory of “cultural capital.” On the other hand, we always sought ought and found “spaces of liberty — even momentary, even narrow and compromised — within capitalism and the State” (ibid., 413). At the same time, anarchists have never been content to find “reflections of our desires in the mirror of commercial culture,” nor merely to assert the possibility of finding them (ibid.). Democracy, liberation, revolution, etc. are not already present in a culture; they are among many potentialities which must be actualized through active intervention.

If Cohn’s general view of ACS is correct, and I think it is, we ought to recognize its significant resonance with the Foucauldian tertia via outlined above. When Cohn claims that anarchists are “critical realists and monists, in that we recognize our condition as beings embedded within a single, shared reality” (Cohn, 2009: 413), he acknowledges that power actively affects both internal (subjective) existence as well as external (intersubjective) existence. At the same time, by arguing “that this reality is in a continuous process of change and becoming, and that at any given moment, it includes an infinity — bounded by, situated within, ‘anchored’ to the concrete actuality of the present — of emergent or potential realities” (ibid.), Cohn denies that power (hence, reality) is a single actuality that transcends, or is simply “given to,” whatever it affects or acts upon. On the contrary, power is plural and potential, immanent to whatever it affects because precisely because affected in turn. From the standpoint of ACS and Foucault alike, then, culture is reciprocal and symbiotic — it both produces and is produced by power relations. What implications might this have for contemporary film theory?

At present the global film industry — not to speak of the majority of media — is controlled by six multinational corporate conglomerates: The News Corporation, The Walt Disney Company, Viacom, Time Warner, Sony Corporation of America, and NBC Universal. As of 2005, approximately 85% of box office revenue in the United States was generated by these companies, as compared to a mere 15% by so-called “independent” studios whose films are produced without financing and distribution from major movie studios. Never before has the intimate connection between cinema and capitalism appeared quite as stark.

As Horkheimer and Adorno argued more than fifty years ago, the salient characteristic of “mainstream” Hollywood cinema is its dual role as commodity and ideological mechanism. On the one hand, films not only satisfy but produce various consumer desires. On the other hand, this desire-satisfaction mechanism maintains and strengthens capitalist hegemony by manipulating and distracting the masses. In order to fulfill this role, “mainstream” films must adhere to certain conventions at the level of both form and content. With respect to the former, for example, they must evince a simple plot structure, straightforwardly linear narrative, and easily understandable dialogue. With respect to the latter, they must avoid delving deeply into complicated social, moral, and philosophical issues and should not offend widely-held sensibilities (chief among them the idea that consumer capitalism is an indispensable, if not altogether just, socio-economic system). Far from being arbitrary, these conventions are deliberately chosen and reinforced by the culture industry in order to reach the largest and most diverse audience possible and to maximize the effectiveness of film-as-propaganda.

“Avant garde” or “underground cinema,” in contrast, is marked by its self — conscious attempt to undermine the structures and conventions which have been imposed on cinema by the culture industry — for example, by presenting shocking images, employing unusual narrative structures, or presenting unorthodox political, religious, and philosophical viewpoints. The point in so doing is allegedly to “liberate” cinema from its dual role as commodity and ideological machine (either directly, by using film as a form of radical political critique, or indirectly, by attempting to revitalize film as a serious art form).

Despite its merits, this analysis drastically oversimplifies the complexities of modern cinema. In the first place, the dichotomy between “mainstream” and “avant-garde” has never been particularly clear-cut, especially in non-American cinema. Many of the paradigmatic European “art films” enjoyed considerable popularity and large box office revenues within their own markets, which suggests among other things that “mainstream” and “avant garde” are culturally relative categories. So, too, the question of what counts as “mainstream” versus “avant garde” is inextricably bound up in related questions concerning the aesthetic “value” or “merit” of films. To many, “avant garde” film is remarkable chiefly for its artistic excellence, whereas “mainstream” film is little more than mass-produced pap. But who determines the standards for cinematic excellence, and how? As Dudley Andrews notes,

[...] [C]ulture is not a single thing but a competition among groups. And, competition is organized through power clusters we can think of as institutions. In our own field certain institutions stand out in marble buildings. The NEH is one; but in a different way, so is Hollywood, or at least the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Standard film critics constitute a sub-group of the communication institution, and film professors make up a parallel group, especially as they collect in conferences and in societies (Andrews, 1985: 55).

Andrews’ point here echoes one we made earlier — namely, that film criticism itself is a product of complicated power relations. Theoretical dichotomies such as “mainstream versus avant-garde” or “art versus pap” are manifestations of deeper socio-political conflicts which are subject to analysis in turn.

Even if there is or was such a thing as “avant-garde” cinema, it no longer functions in the way that Horkheimer and Adorno envisaged, if it ever did. As they themselves recognized, one of the most remarkable features of late capitalism is its ability to appropriate and commodify dissent. Friedberg, for example, is right to point out that flaneurie began as a transgressive institution which was subsequently captured by the culture industry; but the same is true even of “avant-garde” film — an idea that its champions frequently fail to acknowledge. Through the use of niche marketing and other such mechanisms, the postmodern culture industry has not only overcome the “threat” of the avant-garde but transformed that threat into one more commodity to be bought and sold. Media conglomerates make more money by establishing faux “independent” production companies (e.g., Sony Pictures Classics, Fox Searchlight Pictures, etc) and re-marketing “art films” (ala the Criterion Collection) than they would by simply ignoring independent, underground, avant-garde, etc. cinema altogether.

All of this is by way of expanding upon an earlier point — namely, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the extent to which particular films or cinematic genres function as instruments of socio-political repression — especially in terms of simple dichotomies such as “mainstream” versus “avant-garde.” In light of our earlier discussion of Foucault, not to speak of Derrida, this ought not to come as a surprise. At the same time, however, we have ample reason to believe that the contemporary film industry is without question one of the preeminent mechanisms of global capitalist cultural hegemony. To see why this is the case, we ought briefly to consider some insights from Gilles Deleuze.

There is a clear parallel between Friedberg’s mobilized flaneurial gaze and what Deleuze calls the “nomadic” — i.e., those social formations which are exterior to repressive modern apparatuses like State and Capital (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 351–423). Like the nomad, the flaneur wanders aimlessly and without a predetermined telos through the striated space of these apparatuses. Her mobility itself, however, belongs to the sphere of non-territorialized smooth space, unconstrained by regimentation or structure, free-flowing, detached. The desire underlying this mobility is productive; it actively avoids satisfaction and seeks only to proliferate and perpetuate its own movement. Apparatuses of repression, in contrast, operate by striating space and routinizing, regimenting, or otherwise constraining mobile desire. They must appropriate the nomadic in order to function as apparatuses of repression.

Capitalism, however one understands its relationship to other repressive apparatuses, strives to commodify flaneurial desire, or, what comes to the same, to produce artificial desires which appropriate, capture, and ultimately absorb flaneurial desire (ibid., esp. 424–73). Deleuze would agree with Horkheimer and Adorno that the contemporary film industry serves a dual role as capture mechanism and as commodity. It not only functions as an object within capitalist exchange but as an ideological machine that reinforces the production of consumer-subjects. This poses a two-fold threat to freedom, at least as freedom is understood from a Deleuzean perspective: first, it makes nomadic mobility abstract and virtual, trapping it in striated space and marshaling it toward the perpetuation of repressive apparatuses; and second, it replaces the free-flowing desire of the nomadic with social desire — that is, it commodifies desire and appropriates flaneurie as a mode of capitalist production.

The crucial difference is that for Deleuze, as for Foucault and ACS, the relation between the nomadic and the social is always and already reciprocal. In one decidedly aphoristic passage, Deleuze claims there are only forces of desire and social forces (Deleuze & Guattari, [1972] 1977: 29). Although he tends to regard desire as a creative force (in the sense that it produces rather than represses its object) and the social as a force which “dams up, channels, and regulates” the flow of desire (ibid., 33), he does not mean to suggest that there are two distinct kinds of forces which differentially affect objects exterior to themselves. On the contrary, there is only a single, unitary force which manifests itself in particular “assemblages” (ibid.). Each of these assemblages, in turn, contains within itself both desire and various “bureaucratic or fascist pieces” which seek to subjugate and annihilate that desire (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986: 60; Deleuze & Parnet, 1987: 133). Neither force acts or works upon preexistent objects; rather everything that exists is alternately created and/or destroyed in accordance with the particular assemblage which gives rise to it.

There is scarcely any question that the contemporary film industry is subservient to repressive apparatuses such as transnational capital and the government of the United States. The fact that the production of films is overwhelmingly controlled by a handful of media conglomerates, the interests of which are routinely protected by federal institutions at the expense of consumer autonomy, makes this abundantly clear. It also reinforces the naivety of cultural studies, whose valorization of consumer subcultures appears totally impotent in the face of such enormous power. As Richard Hoggart notes,

Studies of this kind habitually ignore or underplay the fact that these groups are almost entirely enclosed from and are refusing even to attempt to cope with the public life of their societies. That rejection cannot reasonably be given some idealistic ideological foundation. It is a rejection, certainly, and in that rejection may be making some implicit criticisms of the ‘hegemony,’ and those criticisms need to be understood. But such groups are doing nothing about it except to retreat (Hoggart, 1995: 186).

Even if we overlook the Deleuzean/Foucauldian/ACS critique — viz., that cultural studies relies on a theoretically problematic notion of consumer “agency” — such agency appears largely impotent at the level of praxis as well.

Nor is there any question that the global proliferation of Hollywood cinema is part of a broader imperialist movement in geopolitics. Whether consciously or unconsciously, American films reflect and reinforce uniquely capitalist values and to this extent pose a threat to the political, economic, and cultural sovereignty of other nations and peoples. It is for the most part naïve of cultural studies critics to assign “agency” to non-American consumers who are not only saturated with alien commodities but increasingly denied the ability to produce and consume native commodities. At the same time, none of this entails that competing film industries are by definition “liberatory.” Global capitalism is not the sole or even the principal locus of repressive power; it is merely one manifestation of such power among many. Ostensibly anti-capitalist or counter-hegemonic movements at the level of culture can and often do become repressive in their own right — as, for example, in the case of nationalist cinemas which advocate terrorism, religious fundamentalism, and the subjugation of women under the banner of “anti-imperialism.”

The point here, which reinforces several ideas already introduced, is that neither the American film industry nor film industries as such are intrinsically reducible to a unitary source of repressive power. As a social formation or assemblage, cinema is a product of a complex array of forces. To this extent it always and already contains both potentially liberatory and potentially repressive components. In other words, a genuinely nomadic cinema — one which deterritorializes itself and escapes the overcoding of repressive state apparatuses — is not only possible but in some sense inevitable. Such a cinema, moreover, will emerge neither on the side of the producer nor of the consumer, but rather in the complex interstices that exist between them. I therefore agree with Cohn that anarchist cultural studies (and, by extension, anarchist film theory) has as one of its chief goals the “extrapolation” of latent revolutionary ideas in cultural practices and products (where “extrapolation” is understood in the sense of actively and creatively realizing possibilities rather than simply “discovering” actualities already present) (Cohn, 2009: 412). At the same time, I believe anarchist film theory must play a role in creating a new and distinctively anarchist cinema — “a cinema of liberation.”

Such a cinema would perforce involve alliances between artists and audiences with a mind to blurring such distinctions altogether. It would be the responsibility neither of an elite “avant-garde” which produces underground films, nor of subaltern consumer “cults” which produce fanzines and organize conventions in an attempt to appropriate and “talk back to” mainstream films. As we have seen, apparatuses of repression easily overcode both such strategies. By effectively dismantling rigid distinctions between producers and consumers, its films would be financed, produced, distributed, and displayed by and for their intended audiences. However, far from being a mere reiteration of the independent or DIY ethic — which, again, has been appropriated time and again by the culture industry — anarchist cinema would be self — consciously political at the level of form and content; its medium and message would be unambiguously anti — authoritarian, unequivocally opposed to all forms of repressive power.

Lastly, anarchist cinema would retain an emphasis on artistic integrity — the putative value of innovative cinematography, say, or compelling narrative. It would, in other words, seek to preserve and expand upon whatever makes cinema powerful as a medium and as an art-form. This refusal to relegate cinema to either a mere commodity form or a mere vehicle of propaganda is itself an act of refusal replete with political potential. The ultimate liberation of cinema from the discourse of political struggle is arguably the one cinematic development that would not, and could not, be appropriated and commodified by repressive social formations.

In this essay I have drawn upon the insights of Foucault and Deleuze to sketch an “anarchist” approach to the analysis of film — on which constitutes a middle ground between the “top-down” theories of the Frankfurt School and the “bottom-up” theories of cultural studies. Though I agree with Horkheimer and Adorno that cinema can be used as an instrument of repression, as is undoubtedly the case with the contemporary film industry, I have argued at length that cinema as such is neither inherently repressive nor inherently liberatory. Furthermore, I have demonstrated that the politics of cinema cannot be situated exclusively in the designs of the culture industry nor in the interpretations and responses of consumer-subjects. An anarchist analysis of cinema must emerge precisely where cinema itself does — at the intersection of mutually reinforcing forces of production and consumption.

[gatheringbones]

[“Under new expert authorities in industrial society, the body becomes an object of knowledge to be monitored, coerced, and controlled in increasingly complex ways. Through these techniques the body is made “docile” so as to be “subjected, used, transformed, and improved” (Foucault, cited in Gastaldo 1997: 114).

Expert forms of knowledge on the body such as those produced by the psy-professionals become increasingly important in advanced liberal societies as they can regulate individuals beyond the traditional sites of state intervention. This general process of regulation of the population beyond the direct, overt apparatus of the state has been referred to in a Foucauldian sense as modes of “governance.” “Governmentality” was defined by Foucault (cited in Rose et al. 2006: 83) as “techniques and procedures for directing human behaviour.” In Rose’s (1996: 155, emphasis original) words, Governing in a liberal-democratic way means governing through the freedom and aspirations of subjects rather than in spite of them. The possibility of imposing “liberal” limits on the extent and scope of “political” rule has thus been provided by a proliferation of discourses, practices, and techniques through which self-governing capabilities can be installed in free individuals in order to bring their own ways of conducting and evaluating themselves into alignment with political objectives. Rose would disagree, but I believe that these political objectives are to reinforce class rule and facilitate the maximisation of profits for the elites. As the social state has declined, the governance of individuals through neoliberal health and wellness discourses—including psychiatric ideology—has allowed for a more subtle form of social control to emerge, one that governs bodies “at a distance” through the extension of bio-politics. This is the expansion of ruling class hegemony through the spread of psychiatric myths into previously untouched areas of social and economic life. It is a most profound form of social control, as it appears in daily life as if we have consented to this expansion of psychiatric authority. After all, no one forced us to recognise our own unproductiveness because we spend too much time at the computer playing solitaire; rather, we now seem to be proactive in realising we have a “problem”—anything from attention-deficit and work avoidance behaviour to gaming addiction and obsessive behaviour—and require “help.” Thus, an important part of bio-politics in neoliberal society is self-surveillance, with Rose (1999: 11, emphasis added) noting that, Through self-inspection, self-problematization, self-monitoring, and confession, we evaluate ourselves according to the criteria provided for us by others. Through self-reformation, therapy, techniques of body alteration, and calculated reshaping of speech and emotion, we adjust ourselves by means of the techniques propounded by the experts of the soul [meaning, the psy-professionals]. “]

bruce m.z. cohen, from psychiatric hegemony: a marxist theory of mental illness, 2016

[townhulls]

no listen to me. come here i don’t bite (trying to hide 32 pdfs of queer/foucauldian theory behind my back) i just have a few fun articles or like. it’s more like stories really so. yeah. yep. and once you read them you’ll gain nothing except a profound delusion that jrwi is going for an intentional queering arc with chip & his magic

[omegaphilosophia]

Theories on the Philosophy of Power

The philosophy of power encompasses various theories that seek to understand the nature, sources, and implications of power in human societies. Here are some key theories in the philosophy of power:

Pluralist Theory: Pluralist theory posits that power is dispersed among multiple groups and individuals in society, and no single entity holds absolute power. According to this view, power is decentralized, and different groups compete for influence through political, economic, and social channels.

Elite Theory: Elite theory contends that power is concentrated in the hands of a small elite group within society, such as political leaders, business magnates, or cultural elites. According to this perspective, elites wield disproportionate influence over political decisions and societal outcomes, often at the expense of the broader population.

Marxist Theory: Marxist theory emphasizes the role of economic power in shaping society and maintains that power relations are fundamentally determined by class dynamics. According to Marxists, the bourgeoisie (owners of capital) hold power over the proletariat (working class) through the control of economic resources, leading to exploitation and inequality.

Foucauldian Theory: Drawing from the work of Michel Foucault, Foucauldian theory examines power as a diffuse and pervasive force that operates through disciplinary mechanisms and social institutions. Power is not solely held by individuals or groups but is embedded in societal structures and practices, shaping norms, behaviors, and subjectivities.

Feminist Theory: Feminist theories of power highlight the gendered dimensions of power relations and critique patriarchal structures that perpetuate male dominance and female subordination. Feminist scholars analyze how power operates within families, workplaces, and political systems, and advocate for gender equality and social justice.

Poststructuralist Theory: Poststructuralist theorists, such as Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, challenge essentialist notions of power and instead focus on power as performative and discursive. Power is understood as fluid and contingent, constructed through language, discourse, and social practices, rather than being inherent or fixed.

Network Theory: Network theory conceptualizes power as emerging from relational connections and interactions between actors within complex networks. Power is distributed unevenly across network structures, with some nodes or actors exerting greater influence due to their centrality, connectivity, or resource control.

Rational Choice Theory: Rational choice theory models individual behavior as driven by rational calculations of costs and benefits, including the pursuit of power. According to this approach, individuals seek to maximize their utility or achieve their goals by strategically deploying resources and forming alliances to enhance their power position.

Critical Theory: Critical theories of power, influenced by the Frankfurt School and critical social theory, emphasize the role of ideology, culture, and social institutions in perpetuating power inequalities. Critical theorists analyze how power operates through processes of domination, hegemony, and ideological control, and advocate for emancipatory social change.

Intersectional Theory: Intersectional theory considers how power operates at the intersections of multiple axes of identity, including race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability. This approach recognizes that power relations are shaped by intersecting systems of oppression and privilege, and emphasizes the importance of addressing multiple forms of inequality simultaneously.

These theories offer diverse perspectives on the nature and dynamics of power, illuminating its complexities and providing insights into its effects on individuals, groups, and societies.

[gepgep2]

For the first two decades of neoliberalism, the term was almost never used in the academy; instead, the new dispensation was discussed almost exclusively as the advent of a giddy new age of “postmodernism”—just one that, in retrospect, almost precisely reproduced the language and spirit of neoliberal “globalization” being presented in the media at the time. Almost all the emerging theoretical foci of the time—identity, creative consumption, flows and scapes, and so on—turned out to encode a kind of neoliberal cosmology in miniature. Even more, poststructural theory—particularly as enshrined in what might be termed the “vulgar Foucauldianism” that came to dominate so many ostensibly oppositional academic disciplines at the time—came to enshrine the particular class experiences of the professional-managerial class as universal truths: that is, a world of networks and networking, where games of power create social reality itself, all truth-claims are merely stratagems, and where mechanisms of physical coercion are made to seem irrelevant (even as they became ever more omnipresent) because all the real action is assumed to take place within techniques of self-discipline, forms of performance, and an endless variety of dispersed and decentered flows of influence. As a description of academic life, or for that matter professional life in general, such descriptions are often spot on. But it’s not what life is like for most people on earth and never has been. Indeed, the very fact that it was being posed not as a type of class experience but as a universal truth (in fact the only universal truth, since all others are denied) demonstrates just how wrong-headed the tendency, at this time, to dismiss older forms of ideology really was.

Now, how does anthropology fit into all of this? Well, in the 1980s, it did at first appear to be moving in the opposite direction to most disciplines, where “postmodernism” hovered somewhere between toothless mock radicalism, at worst, and a kind of pretentious and aggressively depoliticizing fin-de-siècle despair. In US anthropology, where the term really took off, “postmodernism” seemed anything but depoliticizing. Exponents of the reflexive moment proposed to dissect and challenge the political implications of ethnographic practice on every level, not even ruling out the possibility of rejecting the entire enterprise of anthropology as irredeemably compromised by its history as handmaiden to colonialism.

The postmodern challenge transformed anthropology—most of all, in teaching, where all introductory courses, or histories of the discipline, necessarily begin with a kind of ritual condemnation of anthropological theory and practice from the Victorian era through to at least the 1950s, and often well beyond. It came with all the trappings of radicalism. The very existence of the discipline was called into question. Yet the critique was never quite as radical as it seemed. First of all, one of the main practical effects it had was to blunt the political potential of anthropology—as the bearer of any kind of archive of social possibilities—by providing anyone outside the discipline, daunted by the very kaleidoscopic multiplicity it had documented of possible arrangements of political, economic, or domestic life, with a handy two- or three-line series of catchphrases allowing them to dismiss all forms of anthropological knowledge as inherently illegitimate. This was no doubt highly convenient for those who did not wish to consider themselves Eurocentric, but also did not wish to have to trouble themselves with learning much of anything about non-European perspectives on the world, but it had devastating effects on the ability of anthropologists to take part in a planetary conversation on human possibilities at precisely the moment, one might argue, that we were needed most.

Secondly, the critique of forms of power directed itself overwhelmingly at colonialism and its legacy, and much less—if at all—at economic structures of domination, corporate and financial power, bureaucracy, or structures of state coercion that were not directly related to it.

...At the risk of being slightly cartoonish, let me evoke a sketch of two different paradigms of academic authority. On the one hand, we have the patriarchal professor, a figure dominant for most of the twentieth century. A figure of absolute self-assurance, whether pedantic or playful, he is on a day-to-day level at least largely oblivious to the forms of privilege and exploitation that make his life possible, and as a result entirely at peace with himself owing to the existence of an institutional structure that guarantees him near-perfect life security. This is a caricature but, still, anyone who has spent much time in academia has encountered someone who fits the description, and there are still a handful, if rapidly decreasing in number, alive and in positions of authority even today. Nevertheless, such characters are no longer being produced. After all, this is precisely the figure whose privilege was so dramatically challenged in the campus turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. In the neoliberal university, this challenge, combined with the dramatic marketization of academic life that began in the 1980s, has ultimately produced a very different sort of figure of authority. Let us imagine him too as a white male, since white males are, still, most likely to win the academic game—but one who, in the place of the self-assurance of the old patriarchal professor, combines a kind of constant nervous self-examination of his own privilege with a determination to nonetheless deploy all advantages—including that very privilege—in any way he can to prevail in an increasingly precarious academic environment; an environment demanding near-continual acts of reinvention and self-marketing.

...In fact, almost all the dominant theoretical trends within anthropology can only be understood in terms of the very context they themselves tend to efface. I have already given the example of what I’ve called vulgar Foucauldianism, which simultaneously developed the subjective experience of professional-managerial work arrangements as the basis for a universal principle of human sociality, and denied the central importance of either capitalism, or the threat of direct physical violence, at exactly the moment the threat of direct physical violence was becoming central to the operation of capitalism.

...Probably the most important thing I’ve learned from radical social movements, particularly those that have emerged from the engagement of anarchism, and other antiauthoritarian traditions, and radical feminism, is the notion of prefiguration. This is a very old idea—you already see it around 1900 in the Industrial Workers of the World’s call to “build a new society in the shell of the old”—but it has taken on a renewed power with the collapse of classical vanguardism: the widespread rejection of the idea of the stoic, humorless revolutionary whose purity can be judged by the degree to which they sacrifice all personal indulgences in the name of an absolute dedication to the cause, seen as a rational, calculated pursuit of power. There has been a general recognition that such a figure will never be able to produce a social order anyone would actually want to live in. Rather, prefigurative politics means making one’s means as far as possible identical with one’s ends, creating social relations and decision-making processes that at least approximate those that might exist in the kind of society we’d like to bring about. It is, as I’ve put it elsewhere, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free (Graeber 2004, 2013). Increasingly, this kind of defiant utopianism—an attendant refusal to operate through those institutional structures dominated by professional-managerial elites and their proceduralist ethic—has become the ground principle of democratic social movements, whether in Tunisia or Egypt, Greece, Spain, Occupy Wall Street, the Idle No More movement in Canada, or more recent outbreaks in Turkey, Bosnia, or Brazil. In fact, it’s everywhere. This is important, because it marks a real transformation in the idea of what a democratic movement would even mean.

What would it mean to apply this prefigurative principle to academic practice? Obviously it would not mean subordinating our passion for knowledge and understanding to the imperatives of activist strategy. It would challenge the very idea that there is, ultimately, any division here. It’s significant that just about every student occupation during the movement of 2010 began with a declaration that education is not an economic good, but a value in itself. But neither is it just a political good. A prefigurative approach, it seems to me, would most of all mean abandoning the nervous defensiveness of the hyperprofessionalized academic entrepreneur, and admitting to ourselves that what drew us to this line of work was mainly a sense of fun, that playing with ideas is a form of pleasure in itself, and that the deal we are tacitly being offered in the process of professionalization, that we must make a ritual sacrifice of everything that most gave us joy about the prospect of undertaking an intellectual life in order to have a chance of achieving even a modicum of life security, is itself violent and unnecessary. In retrospect, it’s hard not to see something deeply appealing about the easy self-confidence of that old patriarchal professor—and this, I note, coming from someone of nonelite class background who never had any chance of becoming that person under any circumstances. After all, in the final analysis, the problem with entitlement and privilege is not that some people have it, it’s that other people don’t. As any anthropologist who has had direct experience of an even moderately egalitarian society can attest, these are not, generally speaking, societies where everyone behaves like we expect a worker or a peasant to behave, but ones where everyone acts like an aristocrat. Call this, if you like, the utopian moment in intellectual practice. Whatever one choose to call it, it seems to me that any genuinely effective transformative practice would have to embrace that sense of confidence and pleasure in a form that would lead to a world where it would be available to absolutely everyone.

[librarycards]

How did you like going to a Women's College as a trans person? I'm curious because I considered applying but didn't

one of the two trans guys in my post-foucauldian theory class freshman year gave me a list of exactly who to go to to get the speediest approval for top surgery. i had a lot of gay sex.

[vasilinaorlova]

In theory, Trump would be able to rule the U.S. from prison. That would be taking the Foucauldian interpretation of the state and society as prison to a different level. We will have the U.S. as the Panopticon, in which the main prisoner is also the main guard, and the entire apparatus guards others from him and guards him at the same time. The main prisoner would also be the ruler. The world will be turning into a prison. The ringing security is everywhere. The US would be a different country. It's one country if the ruler is in Mar-a-Lago, and a different country if the ruler is confined to some Château d'If. Of course it's just a fantasy. The reality is going to be more boring.

[neruomancer]

Essayturgy

aka content creators, telegenics, Ted's Talkers

The Internet is a couple hundred miles wide but it is only about a few feet deep. There is so much content out there now that it is difficult to put the time aside to invest into anything. You want to watch that show that everyone else at work is watching? Well it is several seasons in and by the time you get a moment to watch it you have some homework you need to do. But that is ridiculous isn't it? TV and movies should be something you put on in the background as you relax from your day at work. When you play a video game you shouldn't have to invest time in lore or the miniscule textures of the world, you are still trying to figure out the texture of this world let alone a different world. I can't possibly know the entire history or background of a beef between two celebrities, I just don't have the time for investment. What if there was a way for you to get all the information up front in less than half the time it would take to engage? You go to YouTube (or some other video platform equivalent when YouTube explodes in the future) and you type about the topic you want to learn. Let's say that show your coworkers are talking about and bam, there is a four hour YouTube video about "X show is genius and here's why" or "The Consequences of Y character doing X". Now you can get the ins and outs of the entire show in half the time it would take. You find a couple of videos and you find some people you like and from there you find out they have an entire back catalog of other videos. "A retrospective of a show with 10 seasons" and it is 6 hours, you can watch it in the background while you are cooking dinner and you can chat with your friends about it by tomorrow.

Not only that but these videos also can provide hidden aspects of shows or movies you didn't see before. You can apply an entire philosophy or ideology to the ways and means of random or unconnected things and then create connective tissue between them. If you make a video convincing enough you can make people believe that a children's show is the best way to understand a foucauldian panopticon or you can say that a television personality is secretly part of an unsavory ideology due to hidden hand signals that they present while on live.

The sum total experience of anything can be filtered through one person (or a team of people) but you are going to see the face of one person as you go to source on certain topics. Right now there are media savvy alchemists that are taking the pure lead of time and engagement in learning about something and transmuting it into the gold of pure inexperienced knowledge. 100% pure unfiltered qualia right into your brain. You pour the time and hours in a video editor to create visual-auditory hallucinations of reality. Get a couple thousand views on a video, get a nice plaque for your studio, create a platform for your opinions and now you have become a thought leader for your chosen community whether it is the lore and deep dives of a day time television show or you are devoted to the developing lore of an off screen background character.

The central paradox of this school is that you are presenting your essay as the sum total knowledge on certain subjects without the viewer really experiencing it for themselves. They are fans or experts in fields they have no experience in.

Stats

The charging structure for Essayturges is based on a consistent narrative they present in their videos. They must build a platform through any medium of their choice as long as it is a video presented in an essay form. The video must be at least 30 minutes long and must present a topic whether it is a retrospective of a given topic and it must provide a theory or an idea that the topic is addressing. "Bluey is about the nuclear family and here's why" "FNAF is about the fall of/or the corruption of Mascot centered business" etc.

Essayturges can choose multiple topics to address but it is best and easier for an adept to focus on 2-3 topics at hand that way they can spin a constant narrative or idea about a given video. Essayturges cannot gain multiple charges of one video. One charge per video whether it is a minor or a major charge.

Generate a Minor Charge: Make a video that is 30 minutes or longer about a topic. The topic can be informative but it can also present a theory. The video must gain at least 1000 - 10,000 views over a week.

Generate a significant Charge: Make a video that presents a theory or an idea about a subject or a medium. The topic can be informative on the subject but it must present a theory related to the subject invented from whole cloth. The video must gain at least 10,000-100,000 in a month.

Generate a Major Charge: Make a video that casts doubt or upstages another video essayist. You must either provide proof or you must present proof that can be believed beyond doubt even if it is not true. The video must gain at least 500,000-1,000,000 views in two weeks.

Taboo: You can never correct yourself or admit you were wrong about any topic. You can update your theory or you can reword things you have said previously but you can never say that you were incorrect about any subject you presented.

Random Magick Domain: Being a Essayturgist is about changing people's or the audience's perspective to accept your understanding of a certain topic or subject matter. Once you have changed peoples understanding of a certain subject you can change how they think and substance of consensus reality. Reality is at the whims of your editing software.

Charging tips: You can work Essayist magick as a radio show DJ or a podcaster as long as you also film everything you release in tandem with your recording. As long as it is presented in an informative fashion. This goes with Ted talks as well, as long as they are filmed and placed on YouTube. The video you make does not have to be on your channel that you have made you just have to be the one presenting information and it must be on your terms. You can't charge from someone else making a video about you but if an interview you are in goes viral you can charge as long as you are guiding or controlling the narrative.

Essayturgy Minor Formula Spells:

Clout

Cost: 2 minor charge

A Essayturgy can cast this on themselves or anyone and they will appear extremely likeable or at least tolerable for a brief time. If someone is chasing you down wanting to kill you, they suddenly don't feel the desire to hurt or harm you and may just stop in there tracks completely. If someone is indifferent about you, you can turn them into a rabid fan briefly.

Like and subscribe

Cost: 1 minor charge

Have you ever had a thought that didn't feel like your own? Maybe it was a intrusive thought? Maybe a adept is trying to get you to say something you shouldn't or don't want to? With this spell you can make people tell you what is really on there mind. But it will only be exact what is not there mind. You can't extract secrets or interrogate them, they can only tell you what they are thinking at that exact moment.

Copyright strike

Cost: 2 minor charges

You can block something or someone out of view of another person or a group of people. This person for whatever reason will not be registered or viewed by anyone this is effecting. This spell will only work if you or the person under the effect of the spell is playing copyrighted music.

Stats for Nerds

Cost: 2 minor charges

With this effect you can learn specific details about any person. Usually it is only one thing and you typically will not be able to decide what you learn about that person but you will be able to learn about someone's exact date of birth or blood type.

Essayturgy Significant Formula Spells:

Hey Guys!

Cost: 2 significant charges

Essayturgists are strong personalities and have a particular sway over people, this spell enhances that three fold and allows for the adept to implant commands and suggests into a person or into a crowd of choice. If you work the ability on one person or a group of three the suggests are much stronger and last longer while of you where to cast it on a larger crowd it gets diffused and a weak suttle suggest that lasts only a minute or two. Casting the spell on one person you can make them a Manchurian candidate for 24 hours while casting it on a crowd of 15 you can have them look away from you for a brief period of time.

Fix it in post

Cost: 2significant charge

You can change the outcome of a event or a action that happened 5-10 minutes in the past. If your friend gets hit by a car you can go back a minute before it happens and hold them back or redirect the car to crash into a wall.

Major Charge Effects

You can choose one person to retroactively erase from existence. You can pick one day to repeat for 24 hours in a select location, such as a small town or a certain building.

[grandhotelabyss]

Thoughts on Lewis Carroll?

Not sure—will have to revisit. I never quite understood what he was doing, except in some very broad literary-historical sense: exposing the myth of Victorian childhood and helping to create modernist adolescence, deconstructing realism to pave the way for the likes of Kafka and Borges in fiction itself and poststructuralist theories of language and representation, etc. I've also heard rumors there's something mathematical happening in those texts, which would really be unfortunate from my non-mathematical point of view. And the less said about those photographs, the better. I think I only read the first Alice book, to be honest, and as an undergraduate.

Of my usual go-to critics, I believe only Nancy Armstrong has treated his work at any length. I quote from "Sexuality in the Age of Racism: Hungry Alice" in Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (1999), where Armstrong puts the matter in dystopic Foucauldian terms of the kind that make academics say things like "only middle-class white people exercise self-restraint" and think they're being anti-racist, but it's nonetheless a fascinating lens on the novel that puts it rather in something like the Great Tradition:

Childhood according to Carroll turns out to be the condition of lacking the very kind of power that subjects exercise over objects, the power to classify, to evaluate, to consume with discrimination. The acquisition of literacy is what empowers subjects to keep objects in their place. If Alice fails to distinguish herself from working-class and native women whenever she gives way to appetite, then she reestablishes that distinction in a more decisive way as she begins to crave this power more than she craves objects themselves. In bringing us to this conclusion, however, Alice’s misadventures bring us to the very heart of a contradiction. We must recall that objects in the story tend to come engraved with the invitation to consume them. “Eat me” or “drink me,” they say. Her compulsive response to a marmalade label indicates that writing in fact creates the appetite that Alice must control through reading and recitation. How, then, can appetite originate inside her body if it originates in writing? Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland defines the heroine’s development as the acquisition of a peculiar kind of literacy that embraces this self-contradiction. Put another way, Alice herself embodies the fantasmagorical spiral of desire and restraint that women would soon experience in relation to a world made of enticing objects. Alice’s tumble down the rabbit hole reveals an appetite for marmalade. Because she has the literacy of the ruling class, however, Alice has acquired an appetite for rules well before her adventures begin. And even though something that seems more like an aversion to books prompts her adventures in Wonderland, Alice’s story is ultimately a struggle to possess the kind of taste that comes with literacy.

I was never exposed to his work in childhood. It's strange, considering his enormous influence on those Dark Age British Invasion comics I read so avidly: Morrison's Arkham Asylum with its Mad Hatter exposing the whole story as a dream of Batman's, Miracleman with its "Red King Syndrome" doing something similar for that early work of Moore's. Then there was the kid-lit pornotopia of Moore's Lost Girls, which I dislike, but that came later. I conclude with a disturbing page, perhaps the most disturbing page, from Morrison and McKean's Arkham. Unlike Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, I first read this at the age of seven:

[the-greatest-fool]

On the Irony of “Rainbow Capitalism”

Perhaps one day there will be historical investigation, or someone will find it, as to how gay and lesbian studies, an arguably overly narrow set of fields, became queer studies and queer theory. Pick your fighters of Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, or Judith Butler: either way, it seems indisputable that queer theory, which often appears as amorphous and hard to define as the queerness it constructs, is nonetheless possible to describe in some way. I don’t think it matters too much how. The point is that the study of queerness focused on the interplay between gender, sexuality, society, the body, the word, the form…a post-structural articulation of a matter of flesh and performance.

In the 90s and 2000s, pessimism was in vogue. Part of it came from a lineage of what really could be put more in a “gay studies” camp, meaning Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman. But another bite of the apple surely came from the Foucauldian, Deleuzian, Derridean, etc analysis championed by the likes of Judith Butler (gender is performance, but assignment of gender is socially imposed gender which subjects interpellate, etc). After all, some read Foucault’s statement that power is everywhere to mean that the gendering and sexualization of bodies in cisheteronormative ways is inescapable in modernity. And after Clinton was impeached by Christian moralists (though, nowadays we’d say what he did to to his intern was not in any way okay) who voted to ban gay marriage (kinda—read the wiki page for DoMA) and then retook the White House, one could see why.

A partiularly interesting text from this period comes from the early days of the War On Terror. Jasbin Puar argued that the “gay rights” movement was a rhetorical move that reified Western modernity and whiteness while sharpening the nationalist drum beat against the terroristic threat in the Middle East. This analysis of “homonationalism” is echoed today in our use of the term “pinkwashing.” As an aside, I personally disagree with a large swath of analysis from the 2000s (and even today) that saw terrorism as a dialectical grand reversal of modernity that could break down capitalism. You could say that makes me a reactionary, but I despised Abu-Ghraib and Gitmo as much as any liberal could. I hate warmongering and torture. But, for the same reason, I cannot justify in my mind such senseless violence. Suffice it to say that I simply cannot sympathize with those who seek liberation in the “queer assemblages” of terrorism. There is nothing liberating about a car bomb, only the thrill of the bomber.

But that aside, I can stomach the premise that the march to gay legal rights in the US—from the Defense of Marriage Act/DoMA to Obergefell (and more recently the Respect for Marriage Act! Yay!!! No seriously yay!)—should be read with some suspicion. Did gay rights succeed because of the power of persuading the hearts and minds of America? Or did it have to do with political economy: special interests, economics, and nationalism? Now people apply the same suspicion to signs of LGBTQ acceptance by companies. As such, there is an accusation of “pinkwashing” by corporations, namely “rainbow capitalism.”

One could argue that in some way, this cynicism is because of the state of the queer theory academy in a post Obergefell world. While trans rights are coming slowly into the spotlight of politics, the gay dimension has left it. Gay people in the US have equal protection under the law. They can marry. What else is left to critique about gay rights, but to critique its operationalization and celebration? Does queer theory suffer from over negativity?

And so we have the accusation, while Bud Light and SEGA and Gilette put up LGBTQ ads and logos, that this is cynical. It’s for profit. Here there’s an unholy alliance between leftists and conservatives, who both say: There’s no way REAL Americans put up with this gay and trans stuff! It’s the gay agenda—they’re doing it to milk more money out of us. Thus, the leftists and conservatives supply different terms to critique the same thing. Rainbow capitalism. Wokeness.

Of course, reactionaries’ concerns are different. Here, we should pay attention. They fear corporations want to normalize queerness. So they oppose it. Leftists? They don’t like the platforms normalizing it. It is with a weary sigh here that I object that, although no one should feel content with how we regulate corporations in America, nor even with how diversity initiatives happen, we should still at least be glad that for a moment, companies felt they had to do this. We were winning, almost.

I use the past tense because today, some corporations think that no one’s buying this. Conservatives backlash, as they did before the gay rights movement solidified its victories, and leftists object anyways. Then what’s the point? We are seeing a new rejection of corporate social responsibility/environmental social governance (CSR, ESG). We could see a decline of the types of ads that were common (but triggered culture war fights) in the 2010s up to now.

In the end, it seems perhaps the pessimists were right. Bigotry can decline, but it can come back. But perhaps the biggest lesson to learn of all is that “capitalism” is not one big monolithic engine. LGBT-targeted messaging and tolerance branding was not some giant ploy by The Capitalists. And LGBT acceptance was certainly not an intrinsic or inevitable feature of modernity. It happened piecemeal in response to how culture was changing—to consumer preference. So it can increase and decrease in response to what people want and how they express it, as well as political moves by reactionaries who want to shut it all down. In short, the acceptance, rights, and security queer people have are not some structurally determined phenomena by Global Capital, and we are not Corporate Puppets falling for some trap when we fight for it. They are determined in the social, economic, and political arena. Have pride in your own power.

As such, we may conclude that, as the sun sets, the skies clear, and the rainbows leave the sky, that rainbow capitalism never truly existed as such.

[dailyanarchistposts]

III. Toward an Anarchist Film Theory

In his article “What is Anarchist Cultural Studies?” Jesse Cohn argues that anarchist cultural studies (ACS) can be distinguished from critical theory and consumer-agency theory along several trajectories (Cohn, 2009: 403–24). Among other things, he writes, ACS tries “to avoid reducing the politics of popular culture to a simplistic dichotomy of ‘reification’ versus ‘resistance’” (ibid., 412). On the one hand, anarchists have always balked at the pretensions of “high culture” even before these were exposed and demystified by the likes of Bourdieu in his theory of “cultural capital.” On the other hand, we always sought ought and found “spaces of liberty — even momentary, even narrow and compromised — within capitalism and the State” (ibid., 413). At the same time, anarchists have never been content to find “reflections of our desires in the mirror of commercial culture,” nor merely to assert the possibility of finding them (ibid.). Democracy, liberation, revolution, etc. are not already present in a culture; they are among many potentialities which must be actualized through active intervention.

If Cohn’s general view of ACS is correct, and I think it is, we ought to recognize its significant resonance with the Foucauldian tertia via outlined above. When Cohn claims that anarchists are “critical realists and monists, in that we recognize our condition as beings embedded within a single, shared reality” (Cohn, 2009: 413), he acknowledges that power actively affects both internal (subjective) existence as well as external (intersubjective) existence. At the same time, by arguing “that this reality is in a continuous process of change and becoming, and that at any given moment, it includes an infinity — bounded by, situated within, ‘anchored’ to the concrete actuality of the present — of emergent or potential realities” (ibid.), Cohn denies that power (hence, reality) is a single actuality that transcends, or is simply “given to,” whatever it affects or acts upon. On the contrary, power is plural and potential, immanent to whatever it affects because precisely because affected in turn. From the standpoint of ACS and Foucault alike, then, culture is reciprocal and symbiotic — it both produces and is produced by power relations. What implications might this have for contemporary film theory?

At present the global film industry — not to speak of the majority of media — is controlled by six multinational corporate conglomerates: The News Corporation, The Walt Disney Company, Viacom, Time Warner, Sony Corporation of America, and NBC Universal. As of 2005, approximately 85% of box office revenue in the United States was generated by these companies, as compared to a mere 15% by so-called “independent” studios whose films are produced without financing and distribution from major movie studios. Never before has the intimate connection between cinema and capitalism appeared quite as stark.

As Horkheimer and Adorno argued more than fifty years ago, the salient characteristic of “mainstream” Hollywood cinema is its dual role as commodity and ideological mechanism. On the one hand, films not only satisfy but produce various consumer desires. On the other hand, this desire-satisfaction mechanism maintains and strengthens capitalist hegemony by manipulating and distracting the masses. In order to fulfill this role, “mainstream” films must adhere to certain conventions at the level of both form and content. With respect to the former, for example, they must evince a simple plot structure, straightforwardly linear narrative, and easily understandable dialogue. With respect to the latter, they must avoid delving deeply into complicated social, moral, and philosophical issues and should not offend widely-held sensibilities (chief among them the idea that consumer capitalism is an indispensable, if not altogether just, socio-economic system). Far from being arbitrary, these conventions are deliberately chosen and reinforced by the culture industry in order to reach the largest and most diverse audience possible and to maximize the effectiveness of film-as-propaganda.

“Avant garde” or “underground cinema,” in contrast, is marked by its self — conscious attempt to undermine the structures and conventions which have been imposed on cinema by the culture industry — for example, by presenting shocking images, employing unusual narrative structures, or presenting unorthodox political, religious, and philosophical viewpoints. The point in so doing is allegedly to “liberate” cinema from its dual role as commodity and ideological machine (either directly, by using film as a form of radical political critique, or indirectly, by attempting to revitalize film as a serious art form).

Despite its merits, this analysis drastically oversimplifies the complexities of modern cinema. In the first place, the dichotomy between “mainstream” and “avant-garde” has never been particularly clear-cut, especially in non-American cinema. Many of the paradigmatic European “art films” enjoyed considerable popularity and large box office revenues within their own markets, which suggests among other things that “mainstream” and “avant garde” are culturally relative categories. So, too, the question of what counts as “mainstream” versus “avant garde” is inextricably bound up in related questions concerning the aesthetic “value” or “merit” of films. To many, “avant garde” film is remarkable chiefly for its artistic excellence, whereas “mainstream” film is little more than mass-produced pap. But who determines the standards for cinematic excellence, and how? As Dudley Andrews notes,

[...] [C]ulture is not a single thing but a competition among groups. And, competition is organized through power clusters we can think of as institutions. In our own field certain institutions stand out in marble buildings. The NEH is one; but in a different way, so is Hollywood, or at least the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Standard film critics constitute a sub-group of the communication institution, and film professors make up a parallel group, especially as they collect in conferences and in societies (Andrews, 1985: 55).

Andrews’ point here echoes one we made earlier — namely, that film criticism itself is a product of complicated power relations. Theoretical dichotomies such as “mainstream versus avant-garde” or “art versus pap” are manifestations of deeper socio-political conflicts which are subject to analysis in turn.

Even if there is or was such a thing as “avant-garde” cinema, it no longer functions in the way that Horkheimer and Adorno envisaged, if it ever did. As they themselves recognized, one of the most remarkable features of late capitalism is its ability to appropriate and commodify dissent. Friedberg, for example, is right to point out that flaneurie began as a transgressive institution which was subsequently captured by the culture industry; but the same is true even of “avant-garde” film — an idea that its champions frequently fail to acknowledge. Through the use of niche marketing and other such mechanisms, the postmodern culture industry has not only overcome the “threat” of the avant-garde but transformed that threat into one more commodity to be bought and sold. Media conglomerates make more money by establishing faux “independent” production companies (e.g., Sony Pictures Classics, Fox Searchlight Pictures, etc) and re-marketing “art films” (ala the Criterion Collection) than they would by simply ignoring independent, underground, avant-garde, etc. cinema altogether.

All of this is by way of expanding upon an earlier point — namely, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the extent to which particular films or cinematic genres function as instruments of socio-political repression — especially in terms of simple dichotomies such as “mainstream” versus “avant-garde.” In light of our earlier discussion of Foucault, not to speak of Derrida, this ought not to come as a surprise. At the same time, however, we have ample reason to believe that the contemporary film industry is without question one of the preeminent mechanisms of global capitalist cultural hegemony. To see why this is the case, we ought briefly to consider some insights from Gilles Deleuze.

There is a clear parallel between Friedberg’s mobilized flaneurial gaze and what Deleuze calls the “nomadic” — i.e., those social formations which are exterior to repressive modern apparatuses like State and Capital (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 351–423). Like the nomad, the flaneur wanders aimlessly and without a predetermined telos through the striated space of these apparatuses. Her mobility itself, however, belongs to the sphere of non-territorialized smooth space, unconstrained by regimentation or structure, free-flowing, detached. The desire underlying this mobility is productive; it actively avoids satisfaction and seeks only to proliferate and perpetuate its own movement. Apparatuses of repression, in contrast, operate by striating space and routinizing, regimenting, or otherwise constraining mobile desire. They must appropriate the nomadic in order to function as apparatuses of repression.

Capitalism, however one understands its relationship to other repressive apparatuses, strives to commodify flaneurial desire, or, what comes to the same, to produce artificial desires which appropriate, capture, and ultimately absorb flaneurial desire (ibid., esp. 424–73). Deleuze would agree with Horkheimer and Adorno that the contemporary film industry serves a dual role as capture mechanism and as commodity. It not only functions as an object within capitalist exchange but as an ideological machine that reinforces the production of consumer-subjects. This poses a two-fold threat to freedom, at least as freedom is understood from a Deleuzean perspective: first, it makes nomadic mobility abstract and virtual, trapping it in striated space and marshaling it toward the perpetuation of repressive apparatuses; and second, it replaces the free-flowing desire of the nomadic with social desire — that is, it commodifies desire and appropriates flaneurie as a mode of capitalist production.

The crucial difference is that for Deleuze, as for Foucault and ACS, the relation between the nomadic and the social is always and already reciprocal. In one decidedly aphoristic passage, Deleuze claims there are only forces of desire and social forces (Deleuze & Guattari, [1972] 1977: 29). Although he tends to regard desire as a creative force (in the sense that it produces rather than represses its object) and the social as a force which “dams up, channels, and regulates” the flow of desire (ibid., 33), he does not mean to suggest that there are two distinct kinds of forces which differentially affect objects exterior to themselves. On the contrary, there is only a single, unitary force which manifests itself in particular “assemblages” (ibid.). Each of these assemblages, in turn, contains within itself both desire and various “bureaucratic or fascist pieces” which seek to subjugate and annihilate that desire (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986: 60; Deleuze & Parnet, 1987: 133). Neither force acts or works upon preexistent objects; rather everything that exists is alternately created and/or destroyed in accordance with the particular assemblage which gives rise to it.

There is scarcely any question that the contemporary film industry is subservient to repressive apparatuses such as transnational capital and the government of the United States. The fact that the production of films is overwhelmingly controlled by a handful of media conglomerates, the interests of which are routinely protected by federal institutions at the expense of consumer autonomy, makes this abundantly clear. It also reinforces the naivety of cultural studies, whose valorization of consumer subcultures appears totally impotent in the face of such enormous power. As Richard Hoggart notes,

Studies of this kind habitually ignore or underplay the fact that these groups are almost entirely enclosed from and are refusing even to attempt to cope with the public life of their societies. That rejection cannot reasonably be given some idealistic ideological foundation. It is a rejection, certainly, and in that rejection may be making some implicit criticisms of the ‘hegemony,’ and those criticisms need to be understood. But such groups are doing nothing about it except to retreat (Hoggart, 1995: 186).

Even if we overlook the Deleuzean/Foucauldian/ACS critique — viz., that cultural studies relies on a theoretically problematic notion of consumer “agency” — such agency appears largely impotent at the level of praxis as well.

Nor is there any question that the global proliferation of Hollywood cinema is part of a broader imperialist movement in geopolitics. Whether consciously or unconsciously, American films reflect and reinforce uniquely capitalist values and to this extent pose a threat to the political, economic, and cultural sovereignty of other nations and peoples. It is for the most part naïve of cultural studies critics to assign “agency” to non-American consumers who are not only saturated with alien commodities but increasingly denied the ability to produce and consume native commodities. At the same time, none of this entails that competing film industries are by definition “liberatory.” Global capitalism is not the sole or even the principal locus of repressive power; it is merely one manifestation of such power among many. Ostensibly anti-capitalist or counter-hegemonic movements at the level of culture can and often do become repressive in their own right — as, for example, in the case of nationalist cinemas which advocate terrorism, religious fundamentalism, and the subjugation of women under the banner of “anti-imperialism.”

The point here, which reinforces several ideas already introduced, is that neither the American film industry nor film industries as such are intrinsically reducible to a unitary source of repressive power. As a social formation or assemblage, cinema is a product of a complex array of forces. To this extent it always and already contains both potentially liberatory and potentially repressive components. In other words, a genuinely nomadic cinema — one which deterritorializes itself and escapes the overcoding of repressive state apparatuses — is not only possible but in some sense inevitable. Such a cinema, moreover, will emerge neither on the side of the producer nor of the consumer, but rather in the complex interstices that exist between them. I therefore agree with Cohn that anarchist cultural studies (and, by extension, anarchist film theory) has as one of its chief goals the “extrapolation” of latent revolutionary ideas in cultural practices and products (where “extrapolation” is understood in the sense of actively and creatively realizing possibilities rather than simply “discovering” actualities already present) (Cohn, 2009: 412). At the same time, I believe anarchist film theory must play a role in creating a new and distinctively anarchist cinema — “a cinema of liberation.”

Such a cinema would perforce involve alliances between artists and audiences with a mind to blurring such distinctions altogether. It would be the responsibility neither of an elite “avant-garde” which produces underground films, nor of subaltern consumer “cults” which produce fanzines and organize conventions in an attempt to appropriate and “talk back to” mainstream films. As we have seen, apparatuses of repression easily overcode both such strategies. By effectively dismantling rigid distinctions between producers and consumers, its films would be financed, produced, distributed, and displayed by and for their intended audiences. However, far from being a mere reiteration of the independent or DIY ethic — which, again, has been appropriated time and again by the culture industry — anarchist cinema would be self — consciously political at the level of form and content; its medium and message would be unambiguously anti — authoritarian, unequivocally opposed to all forms of repressive power.

Lastly, anarchist cinema would retain an emphasis on artistic integrity — the putative value of innovative cinematography, say, or compelling narrative. It would, in other words, seek to preserve and expand upon whatever makes cinema powerful as a medium and as an art-form. This refusal to relegate cinema to either a mere commodity form or a mere vehicle of propaganda is itself an act of refusal replete with political potential. The ultimate liberation of cinema from the discourse of political struggle is arguably the one cinematic development that would not, and could not, be appropriated and commodified by repressive social formations.

In this essay I have drawn upon the insights of Foucault and Deleuze to sketch an “anarchist” approach to the analysis of film — on which constitutes a middle ground between the “top-down” theories of the Frankfurt School and the “bottom-up” theories of cultural studies. Though I agree with Horkheimer and Adorno that cinema can be used as an instrument of repression, as is undoubtedly the case with the contemporary film industry, I have argued at length that cinema as such is neither inherently repressive nor inherently liberatory. Furthermore, I have demonstrated that the politics of cinema cannot be situated exclusively in the designs of the culture industry nor in the interpretations and responses of consumer-subjects. An anarchist analysis of cinema must emerge precisely where cinema itself does — at the intersection of mutually reinforcing forces of production and consumption.

[partly-hueman]

In case ya don't know:

A French philosopher named Michel Foucault, who was alleged to have abused young boys in Tunisia, was primarily responsible for a theory that came to be known as postmodernism. This theory was adopted by mediocre academics who were unable to do any serious thinking. These academics came up with a number of bizarre ideas, including but not limited to, that sex was not binary and was on a "spectrum," that sex was not immutable and could be changed, that sex was irrelevant and only gender mattered, that everyone had an "innate" sense of gender even though gender is a cultural construct, and that men could be women and had a right to use women's toilets and other facilities, and to play on their sports teams. The Foucauldians rejected the idea that we should all just live and let live and, instead, demanded that, although there was no truth, everyone had to accept their metaphysical, quasi-religious beliefs as literally true and had to do whatever the Foucauldians wanted or they would be called lots of horrible names and be subjected to endless repetitions of slogans such as "trans women are women" and "trans rights are human rights" until they wept from boredom. Liberal, pluralistic society disappeared, virulent misogyny was given free reign, everyone had more pronouns than anyone could remember, and the only music permitted was that of Billy Bragg. Everyone remotely interesting was canceled. Universities abolished all departments except for gender studies because all other areas of study, especially all biological sciences, were deemed “transphobic.” Everyone was absolutely miserable, especially those who had surgery and took hormones and regretted it. Remember! John Money destroyed the lives of twin boys, and he and Focault are pervs and dangerous to children and the LGB.

[snic93]

What Is An Author?

Michel Foucault’s essay “What is an Author?” challenges traditional ideas about authorship, arguing that the name of an author functions less as a simple label and more as a classification system within discourse (Foucault, 1977). In his piece, Foucault proposes that the “author” is not simply the person who creates a work, but a construct shaped by culture, institutions, and systems of knowledge - his theory is especially compelling when applied to the work of Banksy, the anonymous street artist whose public anonymity obscures traditional understandings of authorship, ownership, and value in art. Banksy’s Girl with Balloon exemplifies how Foucault’s “author function” plays out in contemporary visual culture, making it a great subject for debate.

Foucault argues that the concept of an author is not purely biographical in nature but rather a cultural and institutional category that shapes how a work is received and interpreted. The “author function”, he explains, is a way of organizing meaning and discourse - “The name of an author is not a simple element in a discourse... it performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function” (Foucault, 1977). In this way, authorship contributes to how texts are circulated and how their meanings are established. When the identity of an author is unknown, as in Banksy’s case, the viewer is left to navigate the meaning of the artwork without the standard guidelines of biography or intention. This invites a new process of interpretation, aligned with Foucault’s vision of shifting focus away from the author as the origin of meaning and toward the work itself and its cultural context.

Banksy’s Girl with Balloon depicts a small child reaching out toward a heart-shaped balloon being carried away by the wind. Though visually simple, the image evokes themes of innocence, loss, and hope. In 2018, during a Sotheby’s auction, the piece partially shredded itself just moments after being sold for over £1 million, an event orchestrated by Banksy that intensified the artwork’s meaning and public fascination (Kennedy, 2018). This self-destruction highlighted not only the exploitation of art but also the role of authorship in assigning value. Under Foucault’s framework, the author function in Banksy’s case becomes amplified by anonymity. The mystery of Banksy’s identity does not diminish public interest in the art itself but rather enhances it, transforming the anonymity into a form of authorship itself. As art historian John A. Tyson argues, “Banksy’s rejection of the traditional art world while simultaneously participating in it creates a tension that is deeply Foucauldian in its interrogation of institutional power and authorship” (Tyson, 2020). The absence of an identifiable author draws attention not only to the artwork’s message but also to the social structures that influence artistic validity and value.

Foucault viewed discourse and knowledge as inherently tied to systems of power. Banksy’s street art, including Girl with Balloon, resists established boundaries and are often politically charged, aligning with Foucault’s broader critiques of authority. The shredding of the artwork at auction, for instance, functions as a performative account of the art market, much like Foucault criticizes the institution of the author as a means of control. The democratization of art echoes Foucault’s call to examine the systems that give the “author” its power, rather than accepting it as a natural or necessary presence. By examining this work through Foucault’s point-of-view, we not only understand the evolving nature of authorship but also how art continues to serve as a vehicle for questioning power and authority in contemporary society.

References

Foucault, M. (1977). What is an author? In D. F. Bouchard (Ed.), Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews (pp. 113–138). Cornell University Press.

Kennedy, M. (2018, October 6). Banksy artwork self-destructs after selling for £1m at auction. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/oct/06/banksy-artwork-shreds-itself-after-fetching-1m-at-auction

Tyson, J. A. (2020). Street art, authorship, and the politics of anonymity: Reconsidering Banksy through Foucault. Visual Culture in Britain, 21(1), 89–104. https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2020.1713856

[erving-goffman]

beau travail 1999 is the sexiest movie ever if you're really into male bodies + foucauldian theories + total institutions (as described by erving goffman). and i'm 3 for 3 😌