Park Grill
Park Grill, Chicago
The structure of the web favors simplicity. Looking at things on a screen is a lot different than dealing with a paper artifact. I can understand the criticisms regarding attention span and resolution. I try to print things and look at them when I can. Sometimes the details give you a lot to think about.
Structures
Last week, I started reading Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. A casual survey of other students in the same class suggests that they don’t really see its utility; it seems hopelessly vague, for one thing. There are also problems with the terminology used—relatively “normal” words like strategy and tactics are repurposed to different ends. But the term that troubles me most is the use of “panoptic” or “panopticon”— this term is name-dropped by critics all the time to signify so many different things that it has really lost its luster. Though de Certeau really traces a twisted path from this keyword compared to most, I really wonder if it is a meaningful point of departure for the sort of experiences that he tries to group around it.
The worst case for “just not getting it,” however, was something I heard on an Art: 21 program, Structures, last week. While the introduction to the program by Sam Waterston was excellent, the first artist up really made my head explode—and not in a good way. I have nothing against the artwork of Mathew Ritchie, it was his description of the odd continuum without boundaries experienced by a young child as a “panoptic synergy” that baked my noodle. It sounds like a plausible combination of words, but it really isn’t. It’s a total misunderstanding of what “panoptic” (at least in the meaning suggested by Bentham or Foucault) signifies. Panopticism is all about the avoidance of synergy by isolating the individuals into bounded cells which can be viewed from a singular perspective.
