Readings for the Winter Term 2016/17: Systematic Observation and Recall

Posted by Christian

Required reading for the Winter Term 2016/17

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, especially the “Docile Bodies” chapter.
English translation freely available online: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=de&q=Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish filetype:pdf
(The German translation: Überwachen und Strafen is in the Semesterapparat, and there is a second copy in the library that you can take home: PHI I.1.2 – 28)

Gilles Deleuze – Postscript on the Societies of Control
Very short essay from 1990, available online, e.g. here or hereGerman translation in the Semesterapparat: PHI C.7 (DEL) – 76

Here’s a 20 minute video explaining the core concepts: https://www.youtube.com/embed/GIus7lm_ZK0 (try to ignore the background music and it’s pretty good)

Giorgo Agamben: What is an Apparatus?
PDF available online: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Giorgio+Agamben+-+What+is+an+Apparatus

German translation: Was ist ein Dispositiv? in the Semesterapparat: PHI I.1.2 – 58

“According to the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, “subjectivity” is the result of an encounter between “living beings” and the “apparatus”—which he defines, following Michel Foucault, as technologies that possess the power “to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings.” Art, according to the approach of Nervous Systems, possesses in turn the power to release life from these apparatuses of capture—even if only for moments and in the imagination—thus undoing the current drift toward ever-greater systemic closure. It is in this realm that we can begin to assemble the fragments of lived experience historically, in order to observe the transformations of “the social” in the present, and the frontiers of its subsumption.
(from the introduction to the Nervous Systems catalogue, see below)

Nervous Systems exhibition 2016 @ HKW, Introductory essay in the catalogue
by Anselm Franke, Stephanie Hankey and Marek Tuszynski
The essay is freely available online from HKW
The entire catalogue is in the Semesterapparat: KUN B.6.14 – 813

WS2016-17-by-Nikolai
poster by Nikolai