Comm 842 Seminar in Performance and Cultural Studies: Surveillance, Simulation, Spectacle

In this course we will be studying surveillance, simulation, and spectacle as modalities of performance. While Foucault defined disciplinary society in opposition to Debord's society of the spectacle: "Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance," and Baudrillard famously told us to "forget Foucault," how might we think these as three distinct but intertwined elements of a performance assemblage? If we are, as Deleuze suggests, in a "society of control," then what can we make of how we are differently positioned as (not) performers: in surveillance, where we are cast as the coerced performer, in a society of the spectacle where are positioned as the entranced audience, and in the culture of simulation where there is only the second order of reality of the theatrical occasion? In addition to the core texts by Baudrillard, Debord, and Foucault, we will look at a broad range of sites where these technologies operate as fundamental elements of daily life, as well as how performance as a mode of "rupture" provides a possibility of thinking their destabilization as operations of power.

Required Readings to Include:
Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control
Hartman, Scenes of Subject: Slavery and Self-making in 19th Century America
Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched
Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War
Ngai, Made In China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace
Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture
McDonough, Guy Debord and the Situationist International (selections)
Levin, Frohne, and Weibel, CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (selections)
Duncombe, Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy


Tony Perucci, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication Studies
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill