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It is what it is

Truth. What is it? It is what it is. That is my answer, at least for the moment, although I’m sure that’s not going to cut it for most people. I can imagine serious scientists and scholars being up in arms about such ‘one liners’. I find nothing to get angry about that though. I […]

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Essays

My liege

I recently wrote on biopower, an important concept alongside discipline. There’s a third concept created by Michel Foucault that I want to address. The primary text used in this essay is the aptly titled ‘Governmentality’, the chapter four of ‘The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault’. […]

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A matter of life and death

I’ve already written an essay on discipline and explained how it functions, giving a more than usual personal account on it. This essay is dedicated to another concept created by Michel Foucault. It is a related concept and while it may not pop up in my own research or in the research of others, I […]

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Faces, landscapes and territories

I wanted to address or attempt to address ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari before continuing with the line of thought presented by the combination of Michel Foucault and Deleuze. I don’t know how I fared with my attempt to explain rhizome and multiplicity, in absence of most of […]

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Subject to change

If my previous essay on the subject didn’t go down well, well then this is going to even worse. Anyway, as an alternative to Michel Foucault, I’ll be looking at how Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari handle the subject. The previous essay drew in part from Deleuze, but that had more to do with his […]

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You missed a spot there!

I realized that I’ve been discussing institutions here and there, namely to exemplify things, but I haven’t covered discipline really at all, despite contrasting disciplinary societies with societies of control. So, I’ll get on with it. For those of you familiar with Michel Foucault, it shouldn’t surprise you that this is going to revolve around […]

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Where’s the pilot?

My previous essay drew in part from Gilles Deleuze, but it had actually more to do with his view on Michel Foucault than his own views. Before I move on to discuss how Deleuze and Félix Guattari view the subject (among other things), I’ll carry on with Foucault and Deleuze, with focus on discourse, discursive […]

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Light it up!

Before I carry on to cover discourse, formations, diagrams and abstract machines as discussed by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, I’ll address something even more, I’m not fond of the word but whatever, fundamental. In his ‘Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel’, Foucault (110-111) writes of light: “[T]here is a sovereign white […]

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Wow, that’s acidic!

My previous post, or rather essay, got sidetracked quite a bit, yet it touched on the issue I wanted to cover, more or less, even though my intention was not to examine passports. Somehow I managed to be unaware of the new expanded edition of ‘Landscape and Englishness’ by David Matless that came out in […]

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Getting carded

In his book simply titled ‘Landscape’ John Wylie (117) characterizes understanding of landscape as discussed by David Matless concisely not as a matter of property, but propriety, more specifically “as a matter of conduct and forms of ‘proper’ bodily display and performance.” It is not that the ownership of land and its connection to landscape […]