Disease / Control’, in Pandemic and the Crisis of Capitalism: A Rethinking Marxism Dossier

This visual essay appropriates the aesthetic of Marxist art historian John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), which constructs an image driven argument which is radically open and reader centered. Our visual essay brings the current COVID-19 ‘lockdown’ into alignment with similar historical ‘lockdowns’ in a dialectical image of disciplinary society and disciplinary techniques. Foucault (1977) recognised in the plague village a vision of a perfectly ordered society where each individual is monitored, isolated, self-regulating, and fixed in their proper place. Following Foucault, Deleuze (1992) argued that these disciplinary societies had mutated into anarchic and decentered ‘societies of control’. Yuk Hui (2015) has recently demonstrated the hyper-acceleration of this process following the introduction of new media technologies and new forms of disciplinary ‘modulation’. Our visual essay seeks to map these mutations visually and textually, bringing the authors above into dialogue with found images from the digital commons.

https://www.academia.edu/43898657/_Hudson_Miles_R_...