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1

Kelly O and Ari Spool give Charles Mudede can of Rize, Charles Mudede drink Rize, freak out, Hulk out, CHARLES MUDEDE BECOME HULK!

HULK WILL SMASH CAPITALISM!

And no, I'm not letting it go.

Posted by The Incredible Sulk | June 16, 2008 12:56 PM
2

Institutionalization on the Internet is carried out by the shift to centralized, server-side communities such as Facebook or The Slog in place of decentralized client-side email lists or independently-hosted personal web pages and private blogs. They took birth, education, death and funerals out of the private home and put them under one large roof. The formerly individualized activity was now only a slight deviation from a standard template. Similarly, your online presence today takes place within the bounds of a "template" given for your convenience, ease, and of course, security.

Posted by elenchos | June 16, 2008 1:06 PM
3

Who has what invested in success? In the self control example it appears that control is gradually being lost to debt and the corporation. As souless as it is.

Posted by Vince | June 16, 2008 1:26 PM
4

Hey, thanks for the heads-up on this Charles. I was busy paying attention to the US Open playoff.

Posted by Joe M | June 16, 2008 1:53 PM
5

Thank you Charles. I like this part of Slog. Foucault, whom Deleuze is quoting, did cite Haussmann's Paris boulevards as an instrument of “discipline society" -- an ideology of rational planning and control that organized people and cities as sites of discipline. In Paris, the boulevards arranged the city into a collection of holding tanks, accessible to armies and police.

But Foucault also lived to witness the chaos of sprawl, which dissolves the rational clarity of “discipline society.” The robust outward view of the boulevards gives way to cul de sacs, parking lots, and highway-fed malls. And here “flow,” which had been stymied by Haussmann, returned, as a new kind of prison.

Foucault saw the fractured confusion of sprawl as an instrument of a new regime that he termed “bio power.” Bio power (very much like what Rem Koolhaas has called “Junkspace”) enlists us in an endless series of disconnected encounters, a sequence of pleasures, each eclipsed by the next. Bio power positions us as parasites, passing blindly through an intestine.

The sine qua non of bio power, Foucault says, is ceaseless flow. Within the constantly moving, amnesiac arrangements of “bio power,” the individual is no more free than before, but imprisoned in service to “growth, circulation, and trade, rather than glory, harmony, or hierarchical order.”

I learned most of this from two geographers, Henning Fuller and Nadine Marquardt. Their paper discussing these two very different regimes, "discipline society" and "bio power" is online at http://www.staff.uni-mainz.de/glasze/Abstracts_Papers_Paris_2007/Fueller.pdf.

Posted by Matthew Stadler | June 16, 2008 2:02 PM
6

Oh, scheiße! The right address for the essay is http://www.staff.uni-mainz.de/glasze/Abstracts_Papers_Paris_2007/Fueller.pdf

Posted by Matthew Stadler | June 16, 2008 2:08 PM
7

Interesting that in a time of "soft" control society there are myriad examples of "temporary autonomous zones" springing up hither and yon. Short-lived situations in remote (and sometimes urban) areas where the only standing rule is "Do no harm"(to others), and where one is free to act on one's will and conscience.
They've got the debt-notes, but we've got the numbers...

Posted by treacle | June 16, 2008 3:55 PM
8


Ponder: Did Foucault's parents give him Ritalin to control ADHD?

Posted by jackseattle | June 16, 2008 5:00 PM
9

Too little, too late, with too few listening, too many now incapable of
caring, and the remainder whose interests are served best simply and too easily by yawning at the spectacle of the Stranger deriding the spectacle.

Posted by Roger Weaver | June 17, 2008 1:04 PM

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