A Haunt of Fears (Barker, 1992)

Martin Barker. A Haunt of Fears, The Strange Story of The British Horror Comics Campain. Jackson and London: University of Mississipi Press, 1992.

This book is about the campain between 1949 and 1955 which led to the passing of the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publication) Act of 1955. Two people had very important roles in the elaboration of the Act, George Pumphey (British school headmaster) and Frederic Wertham (American critic).

(1) Comics grab children. They have enticing pictures, colours, covers and titles.
(2) children are seduced into reading them without the proper intelectual defence to their 'messages' they identify with characters.
(3) It function as a direct message into the children's world, not just as an imaginary alternative.
(4) the comics invade all the parts of chidren's lives: police are stupid, women sex-objects, power is joy, natives sub-moronic, crime attractive, pain fun.

This conception pressuposes children approach comic books looking for adequate role-models for their behaviour, in order words, seeking figures to emulate. The main characters whose 'heroism' is a model for the reader always bypasse the law. The problem of typicality is central to breakdown this reading. There cannot be a single way in which children 'identify' with different comic strips - then we will become entitled to ask what different relations of reading the different categories of comics offer (crime, sci-fi, superhero, war, horror, space).

To challenge this view on 'effects' is necessarily to challenge the 'perceptions' of the content. Horror comic books contain motifs, formulaic most of the time. The formula can be used well or badly. The motifs can be mixed freely but the more they suceed in involving the readers, (and they agree to be involved), the less we are certain where we stand in relation to the strip.

1) Appearance v Reality
2) Human relatively stories
3) Object come to life stories
4) Parody stories
5) Subversion of stereotypes stories

This pressuposes that we can say how a child could identify with a character in a horror comic book. This fact is impossible unless we revise the notion of identification. Typically the horror comic puts us firmily in a situation. The concept of identification proves inadequate for understanding the process into whic comic strips invites us in. Horror comics are not an exercise in degradation but in doubt. They work on suggestibilities about the supernatural and the like. Of, course there are tremendous variations in what they leave us in doubt about. Not all of them achieve the effect operating only at the level of surprise at the workings of the narrative itself.

Foucault for Beginners (Lydia A. Fillingham, 1993)

Lydia A. Fillingham. Foucault for Beginners. London and New York: Writers and Readers,1993.


Intro
Madness and Civilization
The Birth of the Clinic
The Order of Things
Discipline and Punish
The History of Sexuality

Subsequent to Sartre, contemporary of Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Barthes. Interested in Power and Knowledge and how they work together. The construction of Truth in human sciences are deciding matters that define humanity.On a more specialised level, all the human sciences (psycology, sociology, economics, linguistics, even medicine) define human beings at the same time as they describe them, and work together with such institutions as mental hospitals, prisions factories, schools, and law courts to have secific and serious effects on people.

Foucault studies the categorisation of people into normality and abnormality: Madness, Criminality, Peverted Sexuality, Illness. And he challenges these historical assumptions. Behaviours that got people locked up in hospital at one time was glorified in another. 18th century social sciences tried to regulate behavious by defining normal and abnormal conduct. In earlier times madmen were an accepted part of the community, sick people were treatred at home, disabled or disfigured people were not expected to stay out of sight and criminals were punished as publicly as possible.

Normality is defined in contrast with abnormality. The study of abnormality is one of the main ways power relations are established in society. Institutional power is like a mental police deciding what should and what shouldn't be allowed in society.

Fascination with Madness, Erasmus (Moriae Encomium, 1509) and King Lear (1605) both focus on the dangerous insights a madman may have. Including unemployed people, who you might think were victims of an economic problem, were going to jail in the 17th century as creators of a moral problem.

After the French Revolution, Madness was started to be seen as your own fault, your responsibility, and because other people were watching you, you learned to watch yourself. What good can someonetrained in medicine do to those who are no physically ill? Dissecation of the body comes into play. Death and disease change from purely negative ideas to crucial elements in the process of life.

In The Order of Things (Les Mots et les Choses) Foulcault starts by quoting a passage from JL Borges " a certain Chinese encyclopaedia divides the animals into ..." . The impossible collection of kinds of animals is so funny that it violates the sense of order. By means of the fable the exotic charm of another system of thought points to the limitation of ours. Foucault claimed man was a recent invention and that he might die.

In Discipline and Punish he moves away from Archaeology of Knowledge's structuralism. His interest in prision becomes an inquiry into the origins of prision as a form of punishment. In general his focus will now be the power relations, and how the seeming abstractions of discourse have very concrete material effects on people's bodies. Discipline, spatialisation, Minute control activity, Repetitive Exercises, Detailed Hierarchies, Normalising Judgements. The PANOPTICON (Jeremy Bentham) - the idea is that every person is isolated in a smal room, where they all may be observed at all times by a single person in the centre tower.

Foucault's abstract idea of power is objected by many scholars, particularly some historians. They insist we have to look for a localised 'agency' of power, who is exercising the power? where is the system of power? why are they doing it? However, historian seem to boil down to individual people doing things.

Foucault is not interested in indvidual power ot indvidual will. He would say that our society became an nomalising society, and individual rights becomes the alibi of power. For him there is no resistence outside the system, individual efforts to complain are seem as 'uncooperative behaviour' rather than political resistance.

Critics of Foucault mantain that his analysis of power is simply a dead end that disallows any possibility of political action. But Foucault insisted that political resistance was just not possible, but a necessary part of the equation. "You see, if there was no resistance, there would be no power relations, because it would be simply a matter of obedience. So resistance comes first and resistance remains superior to the forces of the process, power relations are obliged to change with resistance."