Month / July 2010

by crmayes

C.S. Lewis and MasterChef

You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act – that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?

– C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Collins, 1988: 82.

If the feverish desire for MasterChef and “food porn” in general weren’t enough, it has been announced that the leader’s debate between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott will be moved an hour earlier to make way for the MasterChef final.

by crmayes

The Soul is the Machine

The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.                        Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1991: 30.

The body is shaped, subjected and brought into existence not from within, but without. It is not the soul inside that animates the body subjectifying it, but the soul outside as pedagogy, psychology, and increasingly the electronic machines surrounding, mediating, and broadcasting us as subjects.

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society–not that
machines are determining, but because they express those social forms
capable of generating them and using them. – Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control

From societies of discipline to societies of control; from regulation and segmentation of space, to circulation and speed. No longer is the gaze of the panopticon a feared limitation of conduct, but a desired circulation and production of conduct. To be watched, monitored, surveyed and followed is not the fear of the paranoid schizophrenic, but the desire, hope and need of the subject of control.

iPhone4: ‘This Changes Everything. Again.’
While everyone else was busy trying to keep up with iPhone, we were busy creating amazing new features that make iPhone more powerful, easier to use, and more indispensable than ever. Apple advertising

The soul as machine becomes a powerful affect on the body. Shaping, transforming and enabling certain relations and delimiting others. The soul as machine becomes indispensable to self, and its relation to itself.

I forgot my headphones today and I feel dis-eased.