Wireless Suffocation

The privileged few who reside power over the masses have made it their duty to find new and more efficient ways to rule the land. As a model of a small community the prison system serves as an effective guinea pig for the powerful who wish to obtain rule through the constriction of rights of those who are less fortunate. One of these ideas from the prison system has now made its way into our daily lives, my life in particular. This idea I speak of is the panopticon. The panopticon was a prison built in the 17th century that was centered around the assumption that a “watched” prisoner is more likely to obey the rules than a prisoner who didn't know they were being “watched” . A tower was placed in the center of the cylinder where the cell's were located. The prisoner could not see into but the guards could see out of and into of all the cells at any given time. Thus fear of being watched now could rule the masses. The idea of the panopticon has now found its ally in technology in the form of security cameras.
How this effects me is that I now work for a retail chain who had installed cameras in the store in order to prevent theft. Perfectly fine with me because even though I have many shortcomings being a thief isn't one of them. What I did find strange was that the cameras in the store were not faced towards the merchandise nor other areas in the store where a customer would steal. In fact, the cameras were only face towards the employees. But even this did not bother me. What I found the most devious was that months later corporate headquarters had a technician come out and install a feed from the store's cameras to a loss prevention station in another state that could be watch at any given time. There has been no case where this has become a deterrent of theft in stores. It is becoming evident to me that this feed was not for the problem of theft but more for the reason to gain leverage over its employees by making them fear that they are being watched. Like inmates in the prison system employees now have lost individual identity because they no longer feel as though they are a free people.
Conformity in the workplace is now the only way, and just as prisoners would perpetuate fear among themselves so have the salesman. Even I have said to another employee, “ Be careful what you do in the store because they are watching.” I now look back and realize what a tool I have become. Have we as a society become so weak that we can no longer distinguish what is an imposition on our rights and what is not? Security cameras are a breach of the innocent's right to live as a free citizen whether they are on the job or not, and a person in another state should not have the right to watch nor the right pass judgment of a person they view on a security feed unless an actual crime has taken place.
James Battle

To Be Aware or Not To Be

Phoebe Marie Knox
Blog 4
At the end of my ideal work day, I come home and kick off my shoes. I aimlessly search my bed for the remote; I turn on the TV, get in the shower, bathe then relax on my bed. That is my idea of free time, doing absolutely nothing and procrastinating on the things I need to do. What I actually do in my free time is laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping and going to the gym. My free time is spent organizing my life for work and school.
In the essay Free Time by Theodor W. Adorno, Adorno explains that “free time” is socially constructed and that it doesn’t truly exist. Free time is an illusion created by mass society. It is the “word” used to identify individuals when they are not in a professional setting. Free time is supposed to be the time used for individuals to recuperate before they return to work. Free time can be occupied by reading, sports, and/or hobbies. “Free time” is not really leisure time because society is not free, only followers of mass society. According to Adorno, a mass society is suppose to have a real culture and is autonomous. However, in reality mass society is dead, repetitive, and has no value- autonomy is lost.
Adorno explains, “Unfreedom is expanding within free time, and most of the unfree people are as unconscious of the process as they are of their own freedom.” (168) Adorno discusses that individuals can be set free if they are aware that they are captives of mass society. By becoming aware of their limitations people can attempt to make un-coerced decisions, or live a more self governed life. Although I understand the concept; I disagree, ignorance is bliss. If an individual is not aware that they are a socially constructed zombie, they will think they are an individual and in control of their idea of free time. Adorno’s idea of freedom only reveals a mental prison.
Adorno’s idea of unfreedom is similar to the theme of the major motion picture the Matrix. The Matrix is about a man being exposed and fighting for freedom and control from a computer generated society. Neo, the lead character, has an option to be part of the real world or remain in the computer generated society. Neo is propositioned my Morpheus, the leader of the unplugged, to either take a red pill or a blue pill. The red pill will awake Neo from the computer generated world that he thinks is reality. The blue pill will have Neo remain in his current reality and unaware of the truth around him. This is an excerpt from the movie between Neo and Morpheus,
Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere, it is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, or when go to church or when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind. (long pause, sighs) Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back.
(In his left hand, Morpheus shows a blue pill.)
Morpheus: You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. (a red pill is shown in his other hand) You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. (Long pause; Neo begins to reach for the red pill) Remember -- all I am offering is the truth, nothing more.
(Neo takes the red pill and swallows it with a glass of water)
The rest of the movie consists of Neo and the crew of unplugged fighting for freedom from the computer generated world. The revelation of the truth becomes its own prison and fight. The Alice in Wonderland world that Neo opened himself to is autonomous because it is opposite from the mass society that are controlled. However, Neo was not aware that he was not in control until it was revealed to him that it wasn’t. Neo may be aware to the truth, but his new reality has its own limitations and poverty.
The concepts that are in the mass society: “the pursuit of happiness,” “life is what you make it,” “be all you can be” ECT. make individuals feel although they are in control. Adorno’s idea explains that those with money are more privileged and that concepts of mass society are socially constructed.
To become aware will only make apparent the cages mass society is constrained to.

you gotta fight, for your right, to.... freedom.

In his writing Theodor Adorno discusses the concept of “free time” in which he claims that “in reality, neither in their work nor in their consciousness are people unfreely in charge of themselves.” Thinking about Adorno’s argument that what people may consider being free time is really a social constructed concept, I came to examine my own life and my perception of free time.

While in my professional life I am extremely occupied with work during the day, I am continuously thinking about work when I arrive home at the end of the day. Thoughts of what I need to get done that I have not finished or what I will have to do the next day take up the time where I should be in leisure. Still, when I take time to relax by having something to eat, arrange my home, and do chores, I find my self organizing and preparing myself for the next work day. As Adorno states, “unfreedom is expanding within free time, and most of the unfree people are as unconscious of the process as they are of their own freedom.”

In a social aspect when I take time for leisure to spend time with friends, work is one of the initial topics of conversation. When you meet new people one of the first questions that rise is what your occupation is. Therefore even in my free time I feel myself trapped in my work life.

The perception of what one does as an occupation and how much money they generate dictates how much time one can take for leisure. While in the work place I find myself getting distracted with thoughts of having free time to travel. However, even when considering taking a trip I must take into consideration being available in case I need to work while I am away. This completely defeats the idea of freedom because I am still trapped in work. Also the time I am able to be away is limited and controlled by my employer. Financially in order for me to be able to afford to take a vacation and have free time I need to make money so that I am comfortable and able to take a vacation. Those thoughts of having “free time” are complete function of an industry of profit.

The realization is that even my hobby and my idea of “leisure” is profit driven and a restricting institutionalized industry. I consider dancing salsa my hobby, I find that it relieves my stress, clears my mind and provides me with much enjoyment. However, when examining the process I must go through to enjoy my free time I see that my freedom is constrained. To take dance lessons I have to be at a certain place at a specific time. I have to pay a fee to participate in a class, a class that is framed as a work place. In a dance class structure you need to show up at a certain time, follow the instructions of an instructor that may be seen as an authority figure, a boss. The “boss” provides you with guidance and teaches you a set of dance steps. One needs to learn, memorize, practice and perform in a uniform way an exact task that is given, in order for the end result to be successful. My hobby resembles my work settings more than an activity that is supposed to be liberating.

As a result instead of leisure one finds themselves being confined to the class formation. This becomes what Adorno describes as a “pseudo-activity”. The fact that I have to plan out my day around being on time to take a dance class for my enjoyment eliminates the idea of freedom. “The pseudo-activities are fictions and parodies of the productivity society, on the one hand incessantly demands and on the other hand confines and in fact does not really desire in individuals at all”.

The notion of “free time” is a complete contradiction in our society because of the fact that even when we have free time we conform into some kind of a framed institution, must pay for our enjoyment or be under a time constraint.

Teeing Off On Panopticism

During lecture and discussion on Chapter 3 of the Cartwright-Sturken textbook, Foucault’s “panopticon” metaphor was brought forth. This idea, derived from sociologist Jeremy Bentham's “panopticon” design of a prison, where in a guard tower is strategically placed in the center of a prison so that a guard placed in the tower can observe any prisoner at any time, but never vice-versa, is that people behave accordingly without any knowledge or evidence of being surveilled. An example of this in class was the “Homer, Lisa and the 10 Commandments” episode of the Simpsons, wherein Lisa, taking the commandment “thou shalt not steal” to heart, feels guilty about Homer using a black box to get free cable television service. A prime example of the panopticon that I put forward is the game of golf. It is a game traditionally played by the affluent members of society who are expected to conduct themselves as proper ladies and gentlemen.

Golf, a game as old as its traditional participants are wealthy, remains to this day a unique sport due to the traditional way it is conducted. For the over ninety-nine percent of competitive participants who don’t play on television, it is a game where participants are expected to govern themselves accordingly, or in some cases, themselves and a playing partner (usually under the official United States Golf Association’s Rules Of Golf): everything from knowing where and how you can play your ball, to even assessing yourself a penalty of a stroke or more. Ordinarily, especially during competitive play, there are a handful of course rangers or rules officials who drive around the course, usually stopping at higher elevation points on the course or parked in a rather foliage-thick area, to both provide shade and concealment from any ill-intended competitors who seek to take advantage of their situation on the course.

Having played the game competitively myself and with others a number of times, I have run into this struggle on occasion. The desire to post a lower score or to benefit a team oftentimes clashes with the wanting to be an honest and ethical competitor. Upon the moment of beneficial alteration of one’s situation on the course, there is always that signature three-hundred and sixty degree gaze to make sure no one is watching. The possibility of someone discovering the cheating act and the player being labeled with the stigma of a “cheater” is oftentimes too thick of a cloud to escape. It is this fear of discovery that not only keeps Lisa Simpson and prison guards in line, but virtually all people in any structured environment.

Of course, there are ends of the spectrum. These include those who unabashedly cheat while participating in the game (doing whatever it takes to post a lower score), and yet those who carry a copy of the rule book in their golf bag with the objective of playing by rules in the strictest manner, and expecting any playing partner to conduct themselves likewise. These represent vastly different reactions to Foucault's idea of panopticism. One is driven to the most rigid obedience of the rules while the other is driven to disregard authority in exchange for benefit of their score.

Panopticism in the game of golf is a factor that has remained a staple in the game as long as the golf club, golf ball and hole. It is a fascinating glance into a person’s moral fiber, at least in approaching a game that has the potential to be as rewarding as it usually is maddening. There is the age old question: if you just hit a ball in the water - and no one was watching - did it just happen?

Theodore W. Adorno makes a brave claim on the idea of “free time” and what constitutes as such. Once separated from ideological forces and asseverations, he presents his suspicion that “free time is tending toward the opposite of its own concept and is becoming a parody of itself. Unfreedom is expanding within free time, and most of the unfree people are as unconscious of the process as they are of their own unfreedom” (168). If this is true, and what we think of as leisure activity in fact bears no resemblance to its true name, then what can we, the shackled working class venture to say is free time? In the world according to Adorno, true autonomy makes up free time and can only be reached when we’re able to separate ourselves from ideology and our “culture industry”. It is achieved when we do what we actually want to do, rather than what we think we want to do. I liken this idea to playing music, not necessarily writing or composing, or even listening to, but simply playing with the intent of achieving an aesthetic gratification that can be set apart from one induced by a mass culture.

I’m not privileged enough to gain any compensation for my hobby, and I only call it a “hobby” because it is not what I do, meaning only a small portion of my everyday life is allotted to it; playing the piano. This is what I do: I work and I go to school. This is what my world revolves around, not because I want it to, but because it’s what I’m told to do and so I do it. Adorno argues that he is truly privileged because he does what he loves and he gets paid for it. His “work” just so happens to coincide with his free time and autonomy takes place because the polarity between the two does not exist. “My work, the production of philosophical and sociological studies and university teaching so far has been so pleasant to me that I am unable to express it within that opposition to free time that the current razor-sharp classification demands from people” (168). He is ultimately free because of this description of his life. But I would venture to say that although I don’t get paid for doing what I love, and while I’m still bound to the work force that apparently sabotages most of my “free time”, I do have this “hobby” that remains unattached from the constraints of a valueless mass culture, one which I’d like to remain liberated from.

Any effort for myself or other want-to-be dissidents to seek abdication and a sense of disillusionment from the artificial framework of this mass (or commercial) culture will be difficult because, according to Adorno, most people cannot even tell what being free is, even in regards to music, which the culture industry has perverted and pre-digested in order to capture the masses. Adorno argues that Popular music, a product which serves as a sort of respite from work by inducing relaxation, is cheap commercial entertainment that is “patterned and pre-digested” in order to spare the masses the effort of any participation, “without which there can be no receptivity to art” or music, thus serving as only a distraction from what could be free time.

While my musical talents resemble mediocrity at best, regardless, this vehicle I employ to kill time is authentic and meaningful to me. Similar to Adorno’s description, playing music is a “hobby” which is an integral element of my existence, and therefore adequately satiates the space of free time.

The Lucky Few, The Lucky Free

I wish it were easy to list numerous examples of people I have encountered who have a passion for what they do after 25 or 30 years in their field of choice, but sadly it is a rare find to say the least. People are slaves to labor and are consumed by society’s social imposition of what ones free time should be. Adorno’s argument in “Free Time” is that people are not free during their work time or free time even though they consciously believe they do, “people do not notice in what ways they are unfree even in the areas where they feel the most free, because the rule of such unfreedom has been abstracted from them.” (Adorno, 170)

Specifically, my father qualifies for a unique spectrum of Adorno’s argument that breaks through the droll conundrum that many subconsciously endure because his enjoyment from his activities can not be limited to the term hobby.

He is a part of an elite club of individuals in society who get a paycheck for doing what they love, turning a hobby into a career which makes him the envy of many self loathing 9-5ers wishing they were anywhere but sitting behind their desk all day confined to a cubicle. My father is a Golf Course Superintendent for a private 36-hole golf course that he has access to 365 days a year. A part of his job description is “testing the greens” which is outlined in his job requirements meaning he HAS to play golf. If you talk to any middle class, middle age, white suburban male what the ideal job would be you could easily find a commonality within their answers concluding in, “I want to play golf and get paid to do it.”

Similarly, Adorno also categorizes himself in to “someone privileged, with the requisite measure of both fortune and guilt, as one who had the rare opportunity to seek out and arrange his work according to his own intentions.” (Adorno, 169) He states that his work is nothing that qualifies as a “hobby” because they are a part of passions that he occupies his time with, not treating his mind and body like a vegetable in a state of boredom.

Transitioning from my father who I believe to be of the working “Holy Grail” in which he likes his job tremendously to where it is not considered a task nor hobby, but something that has truly satisfied him for the past thirty years, to the norm of individuals who find themselves caught in the confusion of “free time.”

Indeed people are doing work in their unfree time whether they realize it or not and as Adorno mentions the growth of technology doing most of the things that once people had to use manual labor to accomplish; people have more free time on their hands. A trend in our society is to recoup from what people do for work on their downtime to do something that “regenerates labor power.” (Adorno, 169) Many people fill this “free time” with a hobby to occupy themselves outside of work and to give a sense of being well-rounded.

For Examples, DIY projects which are time consuming and never gratifying because no matter how well the average person does the project, it still is a cheaper imitation of what the end product should resemble making it unhappy experience for the worker to take on for a hobby.

Truly Adorno’s argument states a guideline that “free time should in no way whatsoever suggest work” (Adorno, 169) which is where people get the mixed message of what to do with their free time because the ideology of doing something productive makes since yet doing something in the field of boredom is what our culture reinforces for lazy Americans. Adorno says that “time free from labor is supposed to regenerate labor power” yet if you never feel that your working enough to take a break than you avoid the means of boredom or doing useless hobbies that are mindless and accomplish nothing productive to contribute to society or oneself such as sunbathing, like my father is fortunate enough to do.

The American News Media: The New Face of Propaganda

In chapter 6 of the textbook, Practices of Looking, Cartwright and Sturken discuss the restrictions of media content and the media blackout during the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003:

“The U.S. Military has systematically limited the activities of reporters and photojournalists in war zones since the Persian Gulf War of 1991.”

The chapter also explores how the U.S. military was instrumental in restricting reporters by implanting them in certain platoons and patrols among other things. This example shows how media coverage and reports can be used as forms of propaganda and how factual reports of what is really going on in the region can be manipulated to misrepresent information to the American public.

In the past two decades, the news media has become a 24 hour cycle, which made it much easier for the misinformation about the Iraq War to be spread. News channels such as CNN, MSNBC, FOX and others fell under the umbrella of the media blackout. What the media blackout entailed was that all the news channels had to obey the gag order due to “security” concerns. While some of these “security” concerns were legitimate such as protecting the locations of army bases and US and allied soldiers, other concerns have made it difficult for reporters to do their jobs. The video I have analyzed is from CNN, and features Howard Kurtz and CBS News reporter Lara Logan discussing the “negative” coverage of the war in Iraq. In this video, there is no audio to be heard or images to be seen concerning the factual situation of what is going on in Iraq which can be safely said that the gag order was well in effect at the time this interview was conducted.

In this interview with CNN's Howard Kurtz, Lara Logan appeared to defend why she was reporting “negatively” on these stories of the US Army losing control of the region and how the military has been making it increasingly difficult to for her and other reporters to do their jobs due to “security” measures in the region. In the video, Logan does not only criticize CNN and other news outlets for not reporting factually on the war in Iraq; she questions the nature of the restrictions the military has imposed on any news coverage. Logan says that US soldiers and innocent civilians were being killed because of the US military presence trying to control the region.

Logan also revealed that there were so many reconstruction project stories being played over and over on CNN in order to reassure the American public that the war effort has been successful so far and the troops had been successful in stabilizing the region. During this time, CNN's news coverage of the Iraq War consisted mostly of reconstruction efforts and projects located in one or two villages in the region, while there was little to no coverage about Iraqi civilians and US troops being killed in the bombings. CNN is not the only network that has done this, but this video exemplifies the point that Cartwright and Sturken discuss, which is the issue about deceiving the public at large and withholding information. In this video, Howard Kurtz is using a form of propaganda by disagreeing and arguing with Lara Logan in order to “reassure” the American viewer who is watching this video and doing so by discrediting Logan, even if what she was saying was factual.

This media blackout had lasted until 2006 when the public outcry became overwhelming and the public wanted to know what was really happening to the troops and people in Iraq. Not much has changed since the public outcry for factual reporting, but the stories coming from Iraq appear to be more balanced in their “negative” and “positive” coverage. This is propaganda at its purest form. This tactic plays to both sides that people have taken concerning the war and reached a compromise in order to lead the public to believe that the media is not controlled by the government and that what they are seeing is fact.

-Maricruz Gonzalez

Gymkhana, It’s what’s for Dinner

Many times the endeavors individuals undertake in their leisure time are regarded as merely hobbies; a way to get away from the daily grind. This conclusion can be made only of hobbies that are purely relegated to one’s free time and have no professional counterpart, or, as Theodor Adorno states, “free time should in no way suggest work, presumably so that one can work that much more effectively later.” Free time, and the hobbies contained therein, can often develop into obsessions that replace their 9 to 5 jobs as their main motivator for getting up in the morning, rather than the money that they will make at their regular job because of the need for humans to be productive due to the historical teachings of conservative societies.

I have never come across a “pure hobby” that someone, somewhere in the world does not get paid to do in a professional capacity. There is an element of productivity in every hobby. Perceived unproductive hobbies such as shopping and bird watching have the equivalent professions of Mystery Shopping and Ornithologist, respectively. There are also the more obvious hobbies with professional equals like baking and being a pastry chef. Adorno mentions, “The state of dozing in the sun represents the culmination of a decisive element of free time under the present conditions: boredom.” “Dozing in the sun” can also be perceived as a part of a profession when it is liked to, say, a swimsuit model, whose job it is to be tanned and beautiful. Hobbies and their professional doppelgangers many a time look unproductive, but still serve a purpose.

Millions of people have taken a look at Ken Block’s Gymkhana video, along with its sequel, on YouTube and various other video hosting web sites. Upon first look at any of his videos, or even motorsports in general, the activity looks as if there is no point to it other than an entertaining competition. DC Shoe Company blatantly states what might not be obvious to the common viewer of their productions at the beginning of their second Gymkhana video with Block. The video begins with a green screen with black letters telling the viewer that, “WARNING! The following is a product advertisement.” This video, as said by DC Shoes themselves, is an advertisement. What follows is an assault on the senses of “awesome” clothes and “sweet” slow motion. No matter what motorsport one encounters there is going to be some type of selling of a product involved. Even in amateur, or hobbyist, motorsports the competitors do the work of the companies whose products they use for free because when someone asks what they’re using they will inevitably tell them with great pride.

Ken Block may be living what was once a hobby for him, and currently a hobby for many around the world, but DC Shoes is selling his talent. As a rally driver Ken Block doesn’t really need to win another race because he can sell being “cool” for DC Shoes as long as there are still hobbyists who want to be like the guys in the movies and magazines with money to spend.
Adorno postulates that free time is simply an extension of the daily grind; preparing the partaker for the next time they must suffer their occupational obligations. I take contention with this statement and would assert that the use of free time can sometimes, if not often, replace the job that afforded the hobbyist the free time in the first place and contain a great element of productivity. In a motorsports there are companies that are willing to shell out the dough to the most talented drivers to slap their name on their car and race with their products

Tactical Visual Superiority

In the book War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, Paul Virilio addresses several aspects of the relationship between war and visual technology. His prime focuses were on the development of camera technology and its vast military applications both tactical and non-tactical, the advancement of color film, the power of shocking images, and the use of visual technology is public relations and propaganda campaigns. Whilst reading Virilio’s work and pondering the concept of whichever side possesses the visual advantage in a military scenario, that side holds tactical and motivational advantages as well, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the importance of visual technology displayed throughout John McTiernan’s classic 1987 film Predator.

In Predator, an elite force of muscle bound commandos, heroically led by Arnold Schwarzenegger, are dropped into a Central American jungle in search of POW’s only to find themselves being hunted by a brutal alien with advanced weaponry and visual technology. Perhaps the predator’s greatest use of visual technology, and one of his biggest assets, is an advanced form of camouflage which makes him a blur while he literally blends in with the jungle. For most of the film Schwarzenegger and company remain clueless as to what is hunting them. Even the audience isn’t sure what the predator looks like, they just see a fuzzy blur seamlessly jumping through the jungle canopy picking off heavily armed commandos one at a time.

How can you fight something you cannot see? Virilio explains the importance of optical advantages in military scenarios: “Rather like a Western gun duel, where firepower equilibrium is less important than reflex response, eyeshot will then finally get the better of gunshot. It will be an optical confrontation; its likely slogan, “winning is keeping the target in constant sight.” No amount of bullets can help Schwarzenegger’s team when they can’t see what they’re shooting at. This is fabulously illustrated in a pivotal scene where the predator attacks and the team blindly fires hundreds of rounds into the jungle only to realize the futility of their actions when they find their shots hit nothing.

The mystery and violence surrounding the Predator causes “moral shock” in the commandos. They become panicked and frightened, therefore less deliberate and effective on the battlefield. Virilio quotes General F Gambiez when addressing the effects of fear on the battlefield: “The search for psychological factors – whether depressive or tonic – helps to restore the true countenance of battle.” The Predator’s mystery increasingly becomes more terrifying to the commandos and the audience as well, while the Predator’s appearance and location remain unknown. Virilio also discusses this phenomenon: “To fell the enemy is not so much to capture as to “captivate” him, to instill the fear of death before he actually dies.”

Such as the case in the classic film Jaws. During the filming of Jaws, the mechanical shark built for the film kept malfunctioning and the result was not being able to shoot that much of “the shark” for integral scenes. The unintended result however was fantastic. Not seeing the shark very much in the film, even in scenes where the shark is attacking people, actually enhanced the terror and suspense, making the film more frightening. Throughout Predator the characters’ fear is illustrated in the action scenes and in conversational scenes where they attempt to figure out what kind of sinister villain is after them.

Just as the predator makes use of visual technology for defense, he also employs his advanced visual technology offensively. The predator sees in infra-red thus rendering Schwarzenegger and his team’s camouflage and any attempts to hide virtually useless. To his supreme advantage, the predator maintains this visual superiority throughout the film until the third act when Schwarzenegger recognizes that the predator’s vision is based on heat. While our hero is covered in mud, the Predator’s infra-red vision is rendered impotent. As Schwarzenegger gains visual superiority, he is then able to deliver to the audience a final battle for the ages.




Author Does Not Exist

GREAT WAVE

The picture shown is one of many woodblocks created by Japanese artists in the early 19th century. This particular painting was done by Katsushika Hokusai in 1831 representing a seascape with Mt. Fuji. The waves form a frame through which we see Mt. Fuji. Hokusai loved to depict water in motion; the foam of the wave is breaking into claws which grasp for the fishermen. The large wave forms a massive yin to the yang of empty space under it. However there is one primal aspect about this painting, similar to most Japanese art, in which I am going to discuss. That is the paintings ability to direct the eyes towards the edges of the image. Theodore Adorno would love this painting due to its enticement to imagine what is going on outside of the image. In Adorno’s article about free time he points out the lack of imagination people are rendered since their leisure is heteronomously determined. Adorno writes, “The lack of imagination that is instilled and inculcated by society renders people helpless in their free time. The impudent question of what the people are supposed to do with the abundant free time they now supposedly have – as though free time were a charity and not a human right – is based on this helplessness.”

As oppose to modern pop art, this painting does not wish for the audience to focus on a central element and exploit it. Rather it is a captured moment of mobility in space which leads you to ponder on certain questions and imagine their outcome. Such as “Where is the wave heading?” or, “How many people are at that location?” Instead of keeping your attention, which is what television advertisement successfully does, the painting invokes you to drift away from the central object and encourages a plethora of thoughts. Ardono argues that people are not free during their free time because of the rigid placements of our culture industry. Unfree people have no autonomy in an economy filled with advertisement and propaganda. As an example, Adorno points out that boredom need not exist in this world of labor, and its counterpart free time. “If people were able to make their own decisions about themselves and their lives, if they were not harnessed to the eternal sameness, then they would not have to be bored.”

In conclusion, Adorno would definitely have a lot of optimistic comments to give to Hokusai’s painting “Great Wave.” The notion to think outside of the “box” is where Adorno and Hokusai coincide with one another. Adorno’s writing about free time brings forth that people are under a spell; a spell which is driven by profit and continues to sublimate our desires into bogus consumption. Hokusai’s painting carries that of which a sense of freedom. A quaint depiction of Mother Nature at its peak of glory, this painting has the ability to release your psyche from political agendas. Adorno would appreciate all the awesome qualities of this painting and its significance on people.

Today’s Digital Reproduction of the Individual

The digital image along with the Internet has opened up this world of reproduction and alteration to the middle class consumer which has intern changed how images are produced and how authentic they truly are. In today’s society with the Internet and technology continuing to expand the ideas behind the “original” and its “authenticity” are slowly depleting. According to Marxist theory, the term reproduction is used to describe the ways that cultural practices and their forms of expression reproduce the ideologies and interest of the ruling class. With Internet sites like My Space, Facebook, and even many dating sites the reproduction of our own image is numerous. These sites along with the constant reproduction of our own images, brings with it the loss of individual identity. I believe Marx’s theory applies today because, with these sites comes free expression. This free expression is actually not free at all, the majority or ruling class of these social sites are the ones calling the shots. It’s who has the cutest, sexiest, or most interesting pictures and who has the most friends or comments from people about their page. If you are not a part of this social network your considered old, boring or not cool. This type of behavior proves Marx’s theory correct.

Some people choose to separate themselves from this social sphere completely and blame the Internet or even the producer of the site for its unruly or pornographic content. But according to the authors of Practices of Looking an Introduction to Visual Society Cartwright and Sturken, it can be argued that technologies have some agency- that is, that they have important and influential effects on society and that they are also themselves the product of their particular societies and times and the ideologies that exist within them and within which they are used. So to blame someone else for how these new sites are being used is not accurate. Individuals often say that these sites may not be to blame but the mass reproduction of identities even false ones could become a huge problem. Cartwright and Sturken note that reproducibility itself is a deeply inherent characteristic of digital technology. Meaning trying to control the reproduction of images on such technology as the Internet is almost impossible.
With all of these identical images of people one might ask where is this person’s authenticity, meaning their genuineness or their legitimacy. Sociologist Walter Benjamin believes authenticity of the aura means the value of an image or art work derived from its uniqueness and its role in ritual This aura according to Benjamin cannot be reproduced. A person’s aura is their unique individuality and to copy and reproduce the ideologies presented by the majority is to lose your individuality or our value in Benjamin’s thoughts.
The Internet has provided many avenues where one could lose themselves to the digital majority, so to speak. With this lack in control over the reproducibility of images and the Internet we should ask ourselves if these technologies are useful or harmful to the idea of expressing ones individuality.

Free Time... What's That?

As an avid sports fanatic and someone who has played softball seventeen years of her life, “free time” does not exist in the life of a dedicated athlete. I have spent hundreds of hours devoting my life to a sport that I love. However, once I got to college… softball became a job. Free time did not exist in my college life. I did not live that “college life” of party all day every day, or getting to pick my classes whenever I wanted to, or skip class because I was too hung over. My weekdays consisted of getting up early for class, going to workouts, off to get shoulder treatment, back to class, and then off to three hours of practice, and back to class, and my night (which I would like to say was my "free time") ended in bed doing homework, and waking up early to do the schedule all over again. According to Adorno, "free time should in no way whatsoever suggest work..." I had no free time during winter break; that consisted of working out everyday to stay in shape for season. Oh, and once season started, I had no weekends and we traveled for weeks at a time to different states.

On the other hand, this thing we call a “hobby” doesn’t exist for my self, I call it my profession, and as Theodor Adorno says, “not that I’m a workaholic who wouldn’t know how to do anything else but get down to business and do what has to be done. But rather I take the activities with which I occupy myself beyond the bounds of my official profession, without exception, so seriously that I would be shocked by the idea that they have anything to with hobbies.” I once thought softball was a hobby... ya, that was from the ages six to eighteen. But once I got to college, this sport became a profession. It's more a job than anything. No one really understands the time and dedication and strain we put on bodies to make us a better player and a better team. In college, athletics is a whole different world. Sports are to be take so serious, it almost takes the fun out of it. And to me, a "hobby" was fun. I believe that most athletes are so wrapped up in athletics that they don't even realize how unfree their life really is. "Unfreedom is expanding within free time, and most people are as unconscious of the process as they are of their own unfreedom."

You never realize how much you learn from playing a team sport, but for those of you that have played any type of sport; you would know that it’s the dedication and hard work that made you who you are today. There is no I in team, and what you learn from that, is how to become a team player, which then you take those qualities into the real world and the work place. “Some insight nevertheless is furnished by the hypothesis that the physical exertion required by sports, the functionalization of the body within the team, that occurs precisely in the most popular sports, trains people, in ways unknown to them, in the behavioral techniques that, sublimated to a greater or lesser degree, are expected from them in the labor process,” Adorno states. As you grow as a player and a person, you gain these qualities that you never really paid attention too, but you are expected from your coaches and players to have these qualities, in which make you a better player.

Athletes give up their free time because we know that there is a job to be done and that is to win. So in the end, even though we work our asses off all year around, non-stop, it's all well worth it in the end. This thing we call a "hobby" or more like a "profession," only makes us better players and people for the moment and in the future.

"real" media coverage

In the writing Satellite Panoramas, Lisa parks discusses the media documentation of the shoe-maker-levy 9 comet’s collision with Jupiter to emphasis her concept that the images captured are connotative to the occurrences. The images captured by the Hubble Telescope of the collision and star formation offer the citizens of planet earth a window to another cosmic world.

While this astronomical view enabled us to see what was happening in outer space, the media dispersed the images and information to show the world as it was happening in “real” time. The media portrays the truth as “real” and the audience accepts it, though, it goes through the process of media agenda, the demand for viewer ship and generating money.

Media coverage of an event such as this one generated to believe that the images and footage taken are of immediate exposure. Though, while the footage was shown on the media outlets the event has already happened, time has passed by, and real time was already the past. Through the process the media engages in to produce news the truth gets reconstructed.

The media gains from people wanting to watch the material they produce; they make the agenda suitable to attract viewers. Parks states that these still images taken by the Hubble telescope don’t have meaning and the news media built a story around them. As a story is constructed based on social events, they get over dramatized and details get added, it’s not necessarily what happened if one was physically present. Thus making the fact that real time connotation does not exist.

In a worldlier example we can examined the images shown on the news media outlets to the public about the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Thought the United States is far from these locations, the public does want to gain knowledge about what is happening. The media uses images that have been taken in the past and reuses them to create meaning of what is happening right now on the grounds. When the news covers what is happening in the war, they will not show you images of the soldiers as they fight in the desert, images of sand, or in the middle of an operation. This is because of the fact that in “real” time the audience who is watching the television coverage would not be able to make out what is really happening, as they would see sand, unclear sound, and blurry images.

In their coverage of war affairs the media will use an already written story, with edited footage of soldiers on the field, or weapons or any images that relate to the story. These images are clear and enforce the message that the media wants to speak about. Also this footage is also accompanied by audio and commentaries from an individual who has some sort of authority and credibility on the subject. However even the commentary is preplanned and produced because the individual got the topic, the questions, and the information he was going to discuss ahead of time. Thus proving the point that even though the media portrays their coverage as in “real time”, the content of the coverage has been prewritten and preplanned to air.

In their interest to gain audience, get high ratings, and make money, news media outlets take the coverage of the war and shows what they think will draw audience. They do not necessarily show what is the most important, or what would be most important for citizens to watch. Rather, a producer who wants to draw people to watch, constructs a story line, that may have facts, but is not actually what happened in “real” time. These kinds of events had to be filmed; a story line had to be written, then edited a number of times, and finally broadcasted through the media. The story it self went through a process to have meaning and importance for our world to have an understanding of what was happening.

The media incorporates images, raw footages, audio, and commentaries to try and make the situation comprehensive to people. Reality does not always make sense; the media constructs an explanation based on what society values to create an understanding that makes sense. By doing so the media is not really showing real time footage of what is happening, rather they are exploiting the occurrences and creating their own description to the public.

The war footage as well as the Hubble satellite images was purely connotative as they both were being used as a discursive narrative dictated by the media to reveal this phenomenon that never occurred before. The news media could tell the audience many events and occurrences that are happening at war in many different ways. Though, these things are told to the audience using arguments and stories that are socially familiar to us. News media coverage in “real” time does not exist; rather a given discourse of what is happening is produced for the audience.

The Gathering Storm

Throughout the chapter “Satellite Panoramas” in the book Cultures In Orbit, Lisa Parks reinforces the idea of the media utilizing satellite-captured imagery to exact 'remote control' over the audience. The application of both imagery and “expert” interpretation through television broadcasts reinforces unsubstantiated fears and long-held ideologies in American popular culture. The same way in which interspace satellite imagery is applied to the media can also be observed through the months of the year known across the southeastern United States as 'hurricane season'.

Hurricane season is a time that is characterized by obsession and, at times, hysteria. Such states of consciousness are primarily media-driven, leading the American populace to become rabidly consumed with statistics and facts about a storm, despite the facts that they are virtually all incomprehensible to their audience and that the storm is merely a tropical depression just forming off the northwestern coast of Africa. However, this is a crucial time for the media to beging to recondition the American psyche, and it begins with this barrage of incomprehensible facts and statistics, which leads people into a state of worry and concern, thus constantly tuned in to their trusted station for weather news. As the storm initially progresses on a path in the general direction of the southeastern United States (as it typically does), the next phase of the media's assault is engaged. The media transitions into treating the storm as if it is an invading army gaining momentum as it destroyes anything and everything in its path. Statistics to show its increase in size and strength are plastered all over television screens. Then, right on cue, visual evidence in the form of third world countries being devastated (which harkens back to previous class discussions on “shock” photos), which acts as a warning to Americans to either prepare accordingly or end up like a third world country (infrastructure and building sturdiness aside, of course). As Parks wrote in regards to the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet crashing into Jupiter, “this practice of presenting live coverage of catastrophic events happening elsewhere has become one of the dominant television news conventions of our time”(p. 145).

If the storm should happen to impact the Caribbean, then the imagery is taken to another level, aided by NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) and transmitted by every news outlet across the country (and especially so by the weather stations and local television news in the southeastern US). First is the classification of a storm into a category (1-5) which are repeated as if it is a reverse DEFCON level. Next is the implementation of what is referred to as the “cone of uncertainty”. It is essentially a standard deviation of a hurricane's projected path, but more importantly, it serves to maximize the range of potentially impacted citizens, thereby maximizing the base of the audience. It is at this time that anywhere within the “cone of uncertainty” that even capitalism begins to kick in. What were once the bare necessities known as a “hurricane preparedness kit” has now ballooned into a “hurricane survival kit” (implying of course, that you need everything on this list to merely survive). What is coincidental (or not) is that the list requires you shop in virtually every kind of department store (grocery, hardware, electronics, clothing, etc). Never has there been a more combined influential mechanism over such a large group of people than that of fear and capitalist consumerism.

The calculated media, and eventually capitalist consumer, campaign based on fear in the form of tracking a hurricane is one that is as formulaic as it is effective. The efforts to paralyze an entire region's psyche with just a handful of words and images behind the basis of a governmental agency and the transmission by every news outlet is, year in and year out, roundly successful. From the outset of grabbing the citizenry's attention with what could potentially down the road have a chance of turning yoru city into a third world to the ultimatum of “buy or die”, the non-stop assault on the fearful American and the American consumer is exemplified by that of a hurricane's path. It is not just the hurricane that is the gathering storm.

- William Jennings

Limitless Connotation

the Great Eye of Sauron


After reading Lisa Parks’s chapter on “Satellite Panoramas,” which focused heavily on the Hubble Telescope and discourses surrounding it, a class discussion of the text ensued. During this discussion, William Jennings, a classmate of mine, had an excellent point. He said “all satellite images are pure connotation.” Since our class examined Barthes’s “The photographic message,” connotation and denotation have been the subjects of analysis and William had excellently and eloquently brought that knowledge into our discussion of Park’s work. But what Parks’s writing omits is not only images from distant space are subject to these varied connotations, but really any image that appears “alien” to the audience could be subject to a seemingly endless range of connotations personal to that individual.

While discussing Hubble telescope images, Parks claims, “These [satellite] panoramas are not tranquil vistas of outer space; rather, they are contested discursive terrains that are activated as the conventions of astronomical observation, digital imaging, broadcasting, and filmmaking are combined and brought to bear in their production, circulation, and interpretation.” These images are not just merely pictures from space but rather images that spawn various connotations and discourses among humans here on Earth. They are not simple snap shots of the far reaches of space, but an amalgamation of a telescopic image married with media techniques such as digital effects enhancement and broadcasting promotion. What we see through the television are rendered images, prepared for human eyes by scientists, and then re-prepared by television producers and the audience is left to decode and make sense of these images. So much goes into the preparation, for example the enhancing of the thermal part of the images so the human eye can witness gamma ray bursts that customarily we wouldn’t be able to see.

As it is for obscure satellite photos, the same could be asserted for images gathered from the darkest depths of Earth’s oceans or down inside a volcano or the bottom of an ant hill buried in a tropical jungle to even images carefully gathered during a routine colonoscopy. Any one of these images being unfamiliar to a viewer, seeming as alien as the dark reaches of the universe, would then be subjected to the vast associations in that persons mind. Just as the picture included in this blog entry of a ring of cosmic dust around star Fomalhaut can appear to be an image from the film Lord of the Rings. Park’s says “although Hubble images document outer space phenomena they can only be interpreted at all in relation to what we more intimately know, that is histories, societies, and cultures on Earth.”

What appears to one audience member as a dark corner of space may look like an image of Jesus Christ illuminating from starlight. Occasionally humans can see what they want. Humans insist images of the Virgin Mary have appeared under highway overpasses, clouds, fireworks displays, and in even in grilled cheese sandwiches. Some audience members can look at satellite images and see what might be the beginning of human time, while others look at it and see the end of human time. Amateur speculation could be as endless as the human brain’s capacity for imagination. Some images can appear so foreign to an audience, literally and figuratively, it becomes rather easy to find limitless connotations within them. We see them and make sense of them with our human eyes and in our Earthly mind sets.


-Author Does Not Exist

Deja Vu

The film, Déjà Vu starring Denzel Washington, is an exceptional film to demonstrate the concept of the televisual described by Lisa Parks in her essay titled “Satellite Panoramas”. Parks explains the integration of technology as an epistemological system. She uses the satellite images captured by the Hubble telescope to exemplify her argument of technological observation. “Televisual epistemologies are the specific knowledges and knowledge practices that form around technological acts of distant observation.” The observation of outer space brings about different interpretations and meanings that can be constructed from such observation. The parallel between the Hubble telescope and the mechanism device to control the past in Déjà Vu is the topic of discussion in my essay and its use of technology as a means of epistemological systems.

In the film, Déjà Vu, Washington is playing a detective to solve a murder case and embarks on a journey to locate a secular group that operates a technological device that displays moving images of the past. They are watching the victim in her final days of living through satellite imagery on a large screen as an attempt to solve the murder. The panoramic view of the past is what allows Washington to solve the case. This is the same type of observation Parks argues in her essay: “When Hubble images move beyond the ground station and into the mediascape, they become satellite panoramas. These panoramas are not tranquil vistas of outer space; rather, they are contested discursive terrains that are activated as the conventions of astronomical observation, digital imaging, broadcasting, and filmmaking are combined and brought to bear in their production, circulation, and interpretation.”

Another aspect relating to Parks essay is the remote control. In Déjà Vu, Washington discovers that the panoramic view of the past is not just an observational mechanism, but an active engagement that can be communicative to the subject within the image. He is able to send signals of warning to the victim prior to her death in an attempt to save her life. The technological mechanism is a live broadcast of the past which can be manipulated to enable a different future. “Embedded within Hubble’s capacity for distant vision is a discursive strategy of remote control.” It can be said that the possibilities of outer space as well as the operation of the past are infinite, making us wonder how we would like to construct it.

The visual aspect as well as the discursive strategy of remote control is what make the film, Déjà Vu, relevant to Parks’ essay. The film demonstrates that our use of technology as an objective observational device cannot be used as such due to the manipulative discourses that are allowed through the televisual. The significance of the televisual in the film comes from its use of technology as a mode of observation to engage in epistemological systems. The device in Déjà Vu and the Hubble telescope are modes of observation, which are presented as objective televisual technologies, but rather are visual displays of images left up to subjective interpretations which are malleable.

The Midnight Ride of Israel Bissell

History will be what it is taught to be. Who decides who gets notoriety? American history is filled with omissions and false information that many interpret as truth. Michel Foucault comes to mind when discussing these falsehoods. Foucault mentions the idea of “authorship,” that no one is truly an individual and there is no original work. One aspect of authorship is that an author is assigned for legal reasons such as copy right. History is filled with certain individuals that are given credit in history for the legality of it, not the significance.
Most history books discuss the American Revolution and key players in the success of the American colonist. The start of the American Revolution began when the British (Red Coats) were drawing near the Massachusetts shore. Paul Revere is noted as being the man that warned the American colonist that the British were coming.
The role Paul Revere as the messenger in the battles of Lexington and Concord is considered common knowledge. However this is not complete truth. Revere’s role was not popular until after his death. In the poem Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Ladsworth Longfellow, written 40 years after Revere’s death, Longfellow credits Revere with the ride from Boston to Philadelphia. Many historians and history book believe this to be true and Israel Bissell is not mentioned at all,
Israel Bissell was a post rider who also alerted the American colonist that the British were coming. Bissell covered the 365 mile journey four over four days with his warning. However, Bissell is rarely mentioned or seen in many history books. Unlike Revere, Bissell received much recognition during his life and was featured in newspaper articles. Revere only rode in Concord and did not make the complete journey to Lexington. The reasoning behind giving Revere the credit for the ride is that Longfellow thought more rhymed with Paul Revere than Israel Bissell.

'Tis all very well for the children to hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere;
But why should my name be quite forgot,
Who rode as boldly and well, God wot?
Why should I ask? The reason is clear—
My name was Dawes and his Revere.

Furthermore, the rides of Paul Revere and Israel Bissell are journeys that many others took that night but there names have fallen into obscurity.
As a result of the significance of the poem, fiction was transformed into fact and new history created. The copy right and the mass production of the poem allowed it to become history. In effect to the poem, a respected author was established. The name Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s name has significance. His name is published in history books and his false poem is regurgitated to youths as truth. He was not original he just happened to become popular.

Apocalypse How?

In Lisa Parks’s essay, Satellite Panoramas, she examines the Shoemaker-Levy 9 collision with Jupiter, and how this kind of “catastrophe coverage” functioned to reassure our feelings safety, good fortune, and even gratitude and luck that this is isn’t happening to us. Not to say, though, that it never will. This kind of news coverage is comparable to the overwhelming coverage of the Haiti and Chili earthquakes, as well as anxiety about tsunami warnings, and how this is just another harbor for the ubiquitous human fear of the imminence of end days and the possibilities of 2012.

Lisa parks makes a reference to Susan Buck-Morss: “The air is full of rumours and announcements of various terminations, of the end of humanity, of the end of history, of the end of the planet.” (144) And then Parks goes on to describe the collision as becoming an icon for an “imagined end to civilization at the end of the twentieth century”. People are somewhat obsessed with this apocalyptic notion. While news media has not explicitly related this to the 2012 apocalyptic prophesy, there are plenty of blogs, articles, and public opinion to be said about the relationship of these recent catastrophes to future prophecies. And the idea of opinion driven information has become just as popular as actual, objective news. People trust in Glenn Beck and O’Riley like they would C-SPAN reports.

By watching the comet hit Jupiter in 1994, people were essentially watching what could have been a disaster if it hit us, just like with the massive earthquakes in Haiti and Chili, but it didn’t happen to us. Parks says, “This practice of presenting live coverage of catastrophic events happening elsewhere has become one of the dominant television news conventions of our time” (145). But this isn’t surprising, because subconsciously, people know the world isn’t going to end. Time and time again, we watch the world be slated to end, and then breathe a sigh of relief when it doesn’t. And 2012 is another doomsday date that we are set to watch. Unlike Y2K, which had a more objective, pseudo scientific undertone (with computers thought to crash and all that), 2012 is more of a mystical thing where news outlets are able to perpetuate people’s fears by spreading why people are afraid. So, again, 2012 is generating the 2nd round of premillenial anxiety, and people will be there to watch the date come and go, so that it may further ensure our civilization’s feelings of permanence and well-being.

Science and Culture Interrelate

In Practices of Looking, science and culture are discussed as interrelated subjects that “are always mutually emerged.” As time passes, more knowledge is gained and helps culture grow to embrace new concepts that become the basis of ideologies for that time period. The use of photography is a significant tool that has benefited the changes made in the science field and has shaped what we know as the norm. Photography utilizes the separate entities of science and culture and is combined within Michel Foucalt’s term of biopower to regulate individuals. “Images help to shape the meaning of the body in ways that tell us a great deal about ideology, gender, identity and concepts of disease.” Images, beginning with photos are the clues to the giant puzzle of science and the more they are evaluated, the more they are engrained into culture. In this blog I will discuss Foucalt’s ideology of biopower and how photography has been used to monitor social organization.

The art and use of photography in the nineteenth century started the modern developments found within science and medicine. To visually document medical findings and experiments, photography enhanced what the human eye couldn’t see and improved accuracy into what was being observed in the medical field. With its widespread growth in popularity in the medical field, Foucalt explains how photography also became a tool set to classify people in systems in his term, biopower.

According to Foucalt, the use of biopower, or the practice of modern states and their regulation of their subjects, “could be used as a means of social organization and control.” With the documentation and classification of the individuals who were permanently or temporarily staying in the public space, the camera was and is still used today to capture different cases and classify residents “into groups on the basis of empirically visible features thought to signify features that marked common identity characteristics.”

Specifically, photographs were popularly used to help identify the cases and residents who had visible features of a mental illness. Prison managers used photos to classify the physical features of criminal types as well as having individual records for repeat offenders. Hospitals and prisons looked for similar characteristics in cataloguing subjects by their visual appearance to compare signs of what was perceived as abnormal physical features that put them in the categories of being crazy or a criminal. The inaccuracies in classifying a person based on observation of his physical characteristics is a part of the ignorant ideologies of the time.

Today, doctors look not solely on the outside but have the technology to see activity within the brain that can be a way to detect chemical imbalances in individuals who may be mentally ill or monitor brain wave activity to explain ones neurological reasons for behaving a certain way. What was catalogued and stereotyped then to be crazy or harmful about a person is still a misconception we bare in our society. We know it is very common for one to have a mental illness therefore our tolerance has increased in knowing that many people can cope with the disease with help of medicine and therapy. Still, due to the nineteenth century practice of separating “crazy” people from society and studying them based on their mannerisms, people associate mainly negative connotations behind hearing about the mentally ill still to this day.

Foucalt's practice of biopower is still seen in today’s society and the use of photography in science has only grown to what seems to be limitless opportunities within the unknown boundaries of technology. In a society with more knowledge and more technology at our fingertips, people are still classified into groups and systems that manage humans. The reason behind separating the mentally ill or prisoners for instance has surpassed the surface of racial profiling yet we rely on past meanings to claim the universal truths that have been culturally interrelated.

Science and culture do intersect and biopower is Foucalt’s description of how social cataloguing is seen today. It is hard to unlearn something that is taught to be true for society and with the help of photography, images have become a favorable key into learning the surface of what can be learned about an individual. Now in the digital era science is learning more about the genetic makeup of the internal picture teaching us new and accurate “truths” about the social classifications discussed in this blog.


~Tiffani Wilshire

Is it a boy or a girl?

"Is it a boy or girl?" is usually the first question the couple will ask when their baby is born, but sometimes the answer is not so clear-cut. Sometimes a baby is born with ambiguous genitalia that are difficult to classify as male or female. Or the baby's chromosomes may indicate one sex, but its genitalia and reproductive organs indicate the opposite. In such cases, the baby is not exclusively male or female, but intersex.

A broad definition of an intersex person is someone whose sex chromosomes, internal reproductive organs, genitalia, and/or secondary sex characteristics are a combination of male and female. There is this huge societal issue that intersex individuals will not be socially accepted. There s only space for two genders in this world: female and male. In Practices of Looking, it is explains that we the people “make meanings of the world around us only through systems of representation, and they, in effect, help to construct our experience of the material world for us.” This is the prime example of class, gender, ideology, and work practice.

Just because a person may have both chromosomes does not mean he or she is weird. So when a child is born, the parents automatically want to change their child’s gender to be one or the other, not both. But why? It is not like their child is in any danger of being physically hurt. But in today’s society a parent wants their child to be socially accepted by their teachers, friends, acquaintances, business partners, and etc. We live in this socially constructed world where discrimination is still among us and a person must be accepted by others. Its not like an intersex person has the choice of being “different,” but it’s just not traditional. According to the Practices of Looking, “the identification of visible and measureable differences in skin tone and color and body shape and gender (and still are) means through which stereotypes are constructed and discriminatory practices are carried out and justified.”

In any case, our society has trouble understanding that these differences of gender may be part of our diversity as a human species; like sexual orientation or even other human characteristics that differ in biological gender. Of course we accept that hair and eye color varies and that those characteristics have no implied meaning yet we can’t seem to do the same for biological gender.

Sociologically, seeing how the cultural norms favor one category over another for specific types of traits, demonstrates not only who has power in this society but also how we attribute meaning of society. If we don’t allow ourselves to acknowledge that there may be more than two types of sex categories, then what does that mean to us as a culture and to people as individuals?

USA Wuz Here

American Imperialism is a term that the United States has been trying to shake for over a century now. It became popular after the Spanish-American War and has subtly lived on for decades through the United States' national egotism and "Holier than thou" attitude towards the rest of the world. It is known that America is the first country to step in when controversy arises, whether it is a global skirmish or a disaster area in need of rescue and as long as it is for the right reasons stepping in is correctly justified. While I agree that sometimes it is necessary to help fellow man I do have a problem with the United States NASA program discovering the “new frontier” for only the benefit of boosting its own national pride. Ever since the late 60's when J.F.K. announced we were going to land a man on the moon, America found refuge in an otherwise problematic time in history for the relatively new country. But while we were gaining new ground in civil rights here in the states we could not adopt these ideas into a secular notion. Rather, we reverted back to our capitalist ideologies when venturing into space. It then became a race to the moon with only two countries in the race, the USA and the Soviets. To the “winner” gets the spoils of national acclaim and newspaper headlines.

Never have I seen addressed the irony in the famous quote," One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" spoken by Neil Armstrong. The first man on the moon then place a giant American flag on the surface like a space-age Spanish Conquistador landing on the Americas for the first time. If this achievement truly belongs to the human race why would we find it necessary to nationally tag a world only visited by twelve Americans. Our idea of ownership should not be brought onto other worlds. Earth is our planet good or bad, and while I think it’s necessary to explore space through national programs (for funding), I believe it should be for the benefit of knowledge and understanding our own planet as a whole not for the benefit of a singular country. Have we not learned our lesson of claiming land that truly does not belong to us, and are we doomed to repeat history yet again? If we are fortunate to discover some other life form on a distant planet, are we going to learn from their culture, wine them, dine them, just to ultimately destroy their land just as Europeans slaughtered the Native Americans?

America is one of the best countries in the world when it comes to opportunity and equality and nothing can change that. I celebrate my freedoms everyday and I am a proud American and it is not my intention to down patriotism. In fact, I would like to further a global patriotism especially when it comes to space travel, we should be joined together in the cause of pursuing knowledge and resources in order to make everyone's life a better one. If we succeeded in this we could finally shake our imperialist title in at least one facet of our countries' history.
-James Battle

Ferrell Cool-Aid

In her book, Cultures in Orbit, Lisa Parks discusses the use of space exploration photography and how it has been utilized to reinforce a western view of, well, everything. Capitalism, western philosophy, supremacy of the white male, up and down are all notions that have been promulgated either on purpose or inadvertently by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) through stellar photographs disseminated through the popular media. Modern science has developed a tendency, with the aid of American media outlets, to discourage dissent by marginalizing those scientific opinions that differ from theirs bringing all existence to a human level. This belittling of dissenting opinion is accomplished, in many instances, through the use of comedy.

Will Ferrell as George Bush is a prime use of comedy as a political/scientific tool. (See embedded video) Global warming has been an issue of heated debate, with most of the debate presented on news channels like Fox News that are obviously right leaning. Lisa Parks when speaking about pictures coming from the Hubble space telescope suggests that, “embedded within Hubble’s capacity for distant vision is a discursive strategy of remote control.” She goes on to discuss popular media needing to position extraterrestrial images and science in a terrestrial manner to make it more digestible for the masses. This need by popular media to chop science into little bits that “regular” people can understand is what breeds bits like the one Will Ferrell starred in on Saturday Night Live.

Although there are many things throughout existence that humans have no control over there seems to still be a need by many news agencies to rationalize natural occurrences to a level that gives humans the power to control them. Lisa Park, again discussing images from Hubble, says, “they have also been used to represent extremely distant matter as if it were part of us.” This example citing Hubble photographs is further evidence that media, in addition to other opinion leaders, finds a need to cap all science at an altitude that does not exceed human inference and control.

A discussion, with specific regard to global warming, would not be complete without mentioning Al Gore’s, An Inconvenient Truth. It shouldn’t be expected that a movie supposed to be a proponent of the effects of man-made global warming would present both sides of an issue but the methods employed by Gore’s film take the audience as elementary students, as exemplified by the use of Simpsons-esque cartoons. All of these elements

Control has been exerted through the use of space media that is disseminated throughout the population of the Earth by mostly American, i.e. industrialized nations, that enforces the paradigm that only the learned enough to go out and receive knowledge to be relayed to other, more unintelligent human beings. The smartest people in the room coming from well funded government agencies are the gatekeepers to “up and down” that tell the rest of us, albeit subliminally, what our values are and how we should approach the rest of our reality.

Joel Engles

District 9: South Africa's Best Kept Secret

Alien invasion texts often reinforce or criticize immigration policies and anxieties that are a part of a society's cultural politics. Lisa Parks acknowledges in her article “Satellite Panoramas,” the idea that technology and ideology are often used to reinforce Eurocentric ideals, citing the film The Arrival as her example:

“The Arrival is a highly symptomatic text in that it recombines and concretizes discourses alluded to throughout this chapter. Moreover, it clarifies the way astronomical observation and technologies are embedded within a broader system of cultural politics.”

In The Arrival, the alien race in the film are depicted as “Hispanic-looking” and had retrofitted defunct power plants in Central and South America that pump out quantities of greenhouse gases which is being “attributed” to causing global warming. The main message The Arrival reinforces is that immigrants and South and Central America are responsible for global warming and that white Americans should fear the “alien” civilization that is coming into the United States. While The Arrival reinforces the anxieties and Eurocentric beliefs regarding immigration and global warming, District 9 criticizes the immigration policies and the cultural politics of South Africa rather than reinforce them.

District 9 alludes to the South African government's mishandling and mistreatment of the immigrants and refugees that enter the country. The film also appears to support immigration reform and rights for the immigrants and refugees. The immigrants and refugees in District 9 are represented as “prawns,” a race of insect-like creatures which are similar to the Parktown prawn, a king cricket species native to South Africa.

The prawns in the film serve as a mirror of the people that were abused under the system of Apartheid; unfortunately some of the practices that have carried over from its dissolution continue to this day. The MNU is given the task to move the prawns from District 9 into District 10 by either asking them to leave their homes or evicting them by brutal force. This can be interpreted by many as a reference to the treatment resident black South Africans and refugees were given by their government during apartheid. The scene in which Wikus (Sharlto Copley) visits the home of a prawn family, he explains to them that they need to vacate District 9 and move into District 10, though Wikus later on acknowledges that District 10 is a much worse than District 9. This has a historical significance since in 1966 during Apartheid era, an area known as District 6 was declared a “whites only” zone by the South African government, forcibly removing 60,000 black South Africans into Cape Flats.

The Arrival and District 9 are discourses that deal with the cultural politics of immigration and its policies. The Arrival reinforces white America's anxiety about immigrants and immigration policies, which encourages white America to fear the “arrival” of Mexicans and other immigrants. District 9 criticizes South Africa's cultural politics by saying that its culture should show more compassion to the refugees and immigrants by welcoming and by supporting immigration reform. Though these films contain one aspect of interpretation, which is using an alien race as an allegory to immigration there are many others that people discover in both films.

-Maricruz

Author determined, Not meaning

In the writing “What is an author?” Michal Foucault illlustrates the concept of the author to reinforce the belief of social constructed ideologies and connotated meanings. He strongly urges that the role of an author goes to set connotation that are not objective, rather from his own empirical thinking. Foucalt also suggests that our definition of authorship did not always exist. Society created it as a set of ideas that what someone wrote, is owned and attached to them for social economical order and organization.

The ideology of an author is engraved in the concept of “authorship” to reinforce identity in a cultural sense. It brings forth the individual conciseness to an idea that supports individualism ideology. Foucault states, “the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, exludes, and chooses; by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition,decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.” The author’s connotative meaning becomes ideological to the readers because their understanding of the text is agreed and they do not question it.

The author’s discourse restricts meaning to the readers due to the fact that most readers won’t read a text and create their own concept of what the reading was about. Rather, they would accept the author’s meaning as the reliable truth. As foucault states “in writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor it is to pin a subject within a language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly dissapears.” It is the the fundemental set of assumtion that are socially constructed to determine the author as the one who predetermined the discourse.

This strengthens the idea that though the credibility society gives to the author of written works; the author’s meaning of the works is not necessarily what should and could mean to all of its readers. Nothing that the author has written is original in the sense that they have taken and written text that through their discourse, their own social experience in the world. In which sense the fact that the author wrote the text does not imply that their own connotative meaning is strict to their definition. As foucault states “it is a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator, and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse.

Though the ideology of an author was socially and ideologically constructed, it also serves a socio-economic use to society. The term author serves an important role in the existance of our society in which it assigns an author the identity of who wrote the works for legal and economic purposes. The ideology of the author’s function, who has written the works owns the text, is enforced especially when liability, copy, distribution and licensing rights need to be stated. These are important to the author in order to receive credibility, to be held liable for their works, as well as to receive monetary compensation. As foucault mentions “the modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each.”

In our capitalistic society and for the sake of social and legal order the author’s function serves a purpose. However, as an example one can look at ancient times where cultures did not yet have complex economical and judicial systems. People used to tell stories to each other and in that manner stories were told from one generation to the next. There was no importance as to who invented the story nor was it claimed as truly theirs. The story constantly evolved from one person to the next with their own experience of the world, giving the people the oppurtunity to be creative and inventive to create their own meaning.

The definition of an author was given by society as an ideological set of assumtions. Although the term authorship serves various purposes in our society it subsequently deprives readers from creating their own individual connotative meaning.