deep end: police on screen: cinematic representations of police in regards 2 carceral capitalism and necropolitics

Well the title says it all; give it a listen and see below for the films referenced as well as links to all the essays/articles I read for this show!

The Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway

The Cyborg Manifesto is an uncanny text, it never fails to resonate with me day to day. It is particularly exciting in regards to Robocop; Haraway's assertion that cyborgs are always products of the patriarchal, industrial and military systems is real nice for understanding the failures of Verhoeven's critique of the American prison industrial complex (if you use the figure of the cyborg more loosely it also works really well with BlackKklansman; 'the cop itself is technology of the state').

Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe

'This essay assumes that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.'

Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wang - The Cybernetic Cop: RoboCop and the Future of Policing

This essay was amazing and there are many brilliant quotes I discuss in the show;

'RoboCop—naive, quixotic in his belief that the role of the police is to protect the citizenry—represents a certain idea of the police that circulates as a public fact. When RoboCop was programmed, his three primary directives were to serve the public trust, protect the innocent, and uphold the law.The fourth classified directive: No fucking with your creator.'

'What is the future of law enforcement? RoboCop is it. It is the place where the violence and coercion of prisons and police meet soft counterinsurgency. On the one hand, the militarization of the police. On the other, cybernetic forms of control. The old Detroit of RoboCop, devastated by the effects of Reaganomics, becomes the corporation’s testing ground for technologies of war. Nowadays, data mining and predictive analytics work alongside these instruments of brute force.

'RoboCop’s pursuit of the truth of his origin laid bare a technocratic capitalist conspiracy.'

BlacKkKlansman: The liberal blind-spots of a visionary filmmaker by Hamid Dabashi

Flesh and Emptiness: or, 42 Ways of Looking at Paul Verhoeven