Date: Thu, 01 Dec 1994 12:14:50 -0400 (EDT) From: Stephen Katz <SKATZ-AT-TrentU.ca> To: foucault-AT-world.std.com Subject: Re: Forget Deb. Jones Lynne Alice's question suggests that a more genealogical analysis of photo-power would reveal not just the empirical realities of its use in surveillance, etc., but also how photo-power became affiliated with the exercise of governmentality. Technology alone is only powerful when enfolded into such an exercise. John Berger, for instance, in _About Looking_, has some splendid essays on photography, about its disciplinary role in making uniform and stable through imagery much that was not, for example, "peasant life." For example, in 1900 in France, all the French mayors were invited to Paris, and many of the 30,000 of them who came, realized from other photographs that they had seen, that they had to wear suits, some of them for the first time. The suit, as a standard of "civilized" dress, was important to be seen in within the photograph that would be taken of them. Hence, Berger claims that for the peasant mayors, the combined cultural hegemony of the suit and the photograph worked to unify and class-ify them. Anyway, there's a great deal of theoretization on the uses of photography, video, police tapes, etc. The point would be to map out where power and technology find their greatest investments and mutual enhancements. Why here and not there, why now and not then, in other words. Stephen Katz, Trent University.
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