Shoot the Projectionist reads Foucault's "What Is An Author?" against one of my favorite novels of the '00s, House of Leaves.

Late night!

* Still more logic puzzles, via the comments.

* My father directs our attention to a disturbing provision in North Carolina state law.

* I mean, we just went from winter to spring. In Missouri when we go from winter to spring, that's a good climate change. I don't want to stop that climate change, you know. Yglesias uses this inanity to try and make a serious point, but man. That's the second-stupidest thing ever said about climate change.

* Michael Pollan or Michel Foucault?

The result is the story Cusset tells about the past 40 years. A bunch of people threatening all kinds of subversion by means that couldn’t possibly produce it, and a bunch on the other side taking them at their word and waging cultural war. Not comedy, not tragedy, more like farce, but farce with consequences. Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax. Read it and laugh or read it and weep.

Stanley Fish tells the story of theory in the New York Times. He tells it all wrong, of course—starting from his strange decision at the outset that the best adjective to put in front of theory is "French," a term that both levels all distinctions between Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze while simultaneously aligning Theory with a geographic location "over there," and then sliding into a bizarrely over-earnest claim that deconstruction can never be political—but as usual he's got a bajillion comments, with still more at MetaFilter.

Another justice system post, as that seems to be the theme of the weekend: Parents Get Two Years in Jail (Each) for Serving Alcohol to 16-Year-Olds. Remarkably, this has been knocked down; originally the sentence was eight years. Via MeFi, where some people actually think this is the right idea.

There are two images, then, of discipline. At one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communication, suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come. The movement from one project to the other, from a scheme of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized surveillance, rests on a historical transformation: the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society.
—Foucault, Discipline & Punish

It's true, as Ezra Klein says, that the release of Paris Hilton from prison after only three days puts the lie to any pretense of class equality in America—but I would hope that we might also take this moment to ask what the point of prison is supposed to be again.

What this debacle really exposes is not unfairness of Hilton "weaseling out" of "serving her time" but the vacuity of prison as a response to nonviolent antisocial behavior. I don't want to send her back, I want to let the others out.

For the observation that prison fails to eliminate crime, one should perhaps substitute the hypothesis that prison has succeeded extremely well in producing delinquency, a specific type, a politically or economically less dangerous—and, on occasion, usable—form of illegality; in producing delinquents, in an apparently marginal, but in fact centrally supervised milieu; in producing the delinquent as a pathologized subject. The success of the prison, in the struggles around the law and illegalities, has been to specify a "delinquency." We have seen how the carceral system substituted the "delinquent" for the offender, and also superimposed upon judicial practice a whole horizon of possible knowledge. Now this process that constitutes delinquency as an object of knowledge is one with the political operation that disassociates illegalities and isolates delinquency from them. The prison is the hinge of these two mechanisms; it enables them to reinforce one another perpetually, to objectify the delinquency behind the offense, to solidify delinquency in the movement of illegalities. So successful has the prison been that, after a century and a half of "failures," the prison still exists, producing the same results, and there is the greatest reluctance to dispose with it.

—Foucault, Discipline & Punish