Practicing Academic Writing - Triangulation

"Different types of paragraph demonstrate that you can analyse, research. paraphrase etc. But the most important type of writing is one that demonstrates that you can support your arrangements with a demonstrable knowledge of appropriate academic texts."

"Ability to write a paragraph that shows breadth of research and ability to triangulate is therefore very important."

I used Panopticism as an example as I feel more comfortable with the text and I work work this paragraph into my essay?

A number of authors have considered how panoptic methods can make individuals and groups of people self-censor, example Chinese Internet users conforming and regulating their online activities.  Mason (2002), Foucault (1975) and Farivar, Cerf (2011) commented on the fact that if people think they are being monitored constantly they will adjust their behaviour to the ideal idea of the authoritative power. For instance Mason (2002) commenting on Foucault’s idea of people being aware that they are visible to an external body and that  “The fact that the inmates know that the supervisors can see what they are doing, that enables the panoptic institution to effectively control a large mass of people.” Supported by Cyrus Farivar and Vintong Cerf (2011) who talks about the methodology of the enforcement by the Chinese Internet Police “There’s a randomness to their enforcement, and that creates a sense that they’re looking at everything.”

This analysis is further supported by Foucault (1975) himslef who also said “The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same be the constitution of a file that was never closed”

It is no mystery to the Chinese people that the Internet they use is heavily censored and monitored rigorously. The government doesn’t hide the fact that they penetrate every aspect of the PRC’s Internet but instead seeks the opposite, they rely on the PRC knowing they are being constantly analysed and studied with nowhere to hide online, as it is a far more productive method of administration.

Censorship and truth

Censorship and ‘Truth”

This lecture considers notions of „truth‟ in the context of Fine Art and the Media, and in 

particular photography.  It will consider the indexical qualities associated with photography 

and the rendering of „truth‟, which has led to the oft-quoted but flawed cliché that „the camera 

never lies‟, which has to a large degree been undermined by the possibilities of digital 

manipulation, however the lecture will show that this is in fact nothing new and has long 

been possible with analogue (film) photography.

Thus the „truth‟ shown in photography has often been manipulated for a particular purpose, 

and perhaps most importantly for political propaganda.  Within this, it will also consider the 

versions of the „truth‟ we are allowed to see in the media, i.e. what is kept hidden from us for 

political reasons.

Jean Baudrillard has considered that in contemporary history, this has gone even further, or 

almost been reversed to the extent that wars are not as they have been in the past, but are 

in fact timed and organised in order to be viewed as media events.

Jean Baudrillard and The Gulf War did not take place, It is a masquerade of Information: branded faces delivered over to the prostitution of the 

image” Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did not Take Place, 1995, p.40

„It is the de-intensified state of war, that of the right to war under the green light of the UN 

and with an abundance of precautions and concessions.  It is the bellicose equivalent of safe 

sex: make war like love with a condom!  On the Richter scale, the Gulf War would not even 

reach two or three.  The build up is unreal, as though the fiction of an earthquake were 

created by manipulating the measuring instruments‟. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not 

Take Place, 1995, in Poster, M. (ed.) (1988), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, 

Cambridge, Polity Press, page 233

Two intense images, two or perhaps three which all concern disfigured forms or costumes 

which correspond to the masquerade of this war: the CNN journalists with their gas masks in 

the Jerusalem studios; the drugged and beaten prisoners repenting on the screen of Iraqi

TV; and perhaps that seabird covered in oil and pointing its blind eyes to the Gulf sky.  It is a 

masquerade of information: branded faces delivered over to the prostitution of the image, the 

image of an unintelligible distress. No images of the field of battle, but images of masks, of 

blind or defeated faces, images of falsification. It is not war taking place over there but the 

disfiguration of the world‟ Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 1995, in 

Poster, M. (ed.) (1988), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Cambridge, Polity Press, page 

241

The claim that the Gulf War of 1990 would not take place (1991), followed by the assertion 

that it did not take place, seems to defy all logic.  Such statements are anticipated by the 

earlier claim (1983) that the only future war would be a hyperreal and dissuasive war in 

which no events would take place because there was no more space for actual warfare.  The

underlying argument is that the Gulf War was a simulated war or a reproduction of a war.  

Whatever its human consequences, this was, for Baudrillard, a war which consisted largely 

of its self-representation in the real time of media coverage‟  Macey, D. (2000), The Penguin 

Dictionary of Critical Theory, London, Penguin, page 34

Baudrillard on Simulacra and Simulations

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept.  

Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance.  It is the 

generation by models of a real without origin or relativity: a hyperreal.  The territory no longer 

precedes the map, nor survives it.  Henceforth it is the map that precedes the territory –

precession of simulacra‟Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, 

simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum. These would 

be the succesive phases of the image:

1. It is the reflection of a basic reality.

2. It masks and perverts a basic reality.

3. It masks the absence of a basic reality.

4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever : it is its own pure simulacrum.‟

„In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of the 

sacrament.  In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice.  In the third, it 

plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery.  In the fourth, it is no longer in the 

order of appearance at all, but of simulation‟.

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 1981, in Poster, M. (ed.) (1988), Jean 

Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Cambridge, Polity Press

Censorship in Art

Amy Adler – The Folly of Defining ‘Serious’ Art

Adler is a Professor of Law at New York University and recognises „an irreconcilable conflict 

between legal rules and artistic practice‟

She suggests that the requirement that protected artworks have „serious artistic value‟ is the 

very thing contemporary art and postmodernism itself attempt to defy

The Miller Test (1973) asks three questions to determine whether a given work should be 

labelled „obscene‟, and hence denied constitutional protection: 

1. Whether „the average person, applying contemporary community standards‟ would 

find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest

2. Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct

3. Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or 

scientific value

Obscenity law can be seen to have three roles to play:

1. „To protect art whilst prohibiting trash‟

2. „The dividing line between speech and non-speech‟

3. „The dividing line between prison and freedom‟

Bibliography

Aronson, E. and Pratkanis, A., 1992, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use 

and Abuse of Persuasion, New York, Henry Holt & Co.

Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, 1981, in Poster, M. (ed.) (1988), Jean 

Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Cambridge, Polity Press

Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 1995, in Poster, M. (ed.) 

(1988), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Cambridge, Polity Press

Hawthorne C. and Szanto, A. (eds.) (2003) The New Gatekeepers: Emerging 

Challenges to free expression in the Arts, New York, Columbia University Arts 

Journalism Program

Naas M. (2010) The Truth in Photography, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University 

Press

James Beighton, December 2012

An-My Le documents photographs of war. Fine art photography? Is this being represented as beauty.

No gruesomeness, making art out of conflict.