Foucault at 100: power, surveillance, and the AI moment

by | Jul 10, 2026 | Culture | 0 comments

Culture Brief 2026-07-10

Ideas in Circulation

Foucault at 100: power, surveillance, and the AI moment

The centennial of Michel Foucault’s birth is prompting a reassessment that feels less like anniversary journalism and more like intellectual emergency — his framework for how knowledge produces power now being tested against algorithmic governance, surveillance capitalism, and what the administration calls the “deep state.”

The NYT Books Review devotes unusual space to arguing that Foucault’s concepts — the panopticon, biopower, the production of docile bodies through institutions — have migrated from academic abstraction to lived infrastructure. The interesting tension the piece doesn’t fully resolve: Foucault’s admirers and his critics (who see him as an enabler of relativism) are now both invoking him, from opposite directions, to explain the same phenomena. That convergence is itself a signal worth tracking.

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The live-action remake as cultural symptom

Disney’s Moana remake is being reviewed not as a film but as evidence of something: the franchise machine’s inability to justify its own existence. Both major reviews converge on the same diagnosis — not merely that the film is bad, but that it has nothing to say that the original didn’t already say more efficiently.

The argument circulating underneath the reviews is about what intellectual property has done to the concept of adaptation. A remake used to involve interpretation — a new reading of source material that justified the retelling. The Disney live-action pipeline has severed that logic entirely: these are not reinterpretations but reskins, and critics are increasingly willing to name that structural problem rather than evaluate the films on their own terms.

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The Odyssey moment: myth, cinema, and collective appetite

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey premiered in London to ecstatic early reactions, and the cultural machinery around it is operating at an unusual frequency — the Guardian ranking mythological films in anticipation, the NYT running both an A.O. Scott essay on Homer as genre fiction and a podcast episode about the poem’s contemporary readership.

Something is happening with mythology as a cultural mode — not nostalgia, but a genuine appetite for narrative that carries metaphysical weight without requiring a contemporary setting. Whether Nolan’s film delivers on that appetite remains to be seen, but the pre-release conversation has already shifted the Odyssey back into active cultural circulation in a way that goes beyond film promotion.

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The “Little House” problem: settler mythology and cultural renegotiation

Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie reboot is receiving serious critical attention — not because it’s exceptional television but because it has become a test case for how prestige streaming handles the ideological freight embedded in beloved American source material. Both the NYT and Guardian engage with the question of whether you can update the prairie myth while preserving the emotional register that made people love it.

The Guardian’s framing is sharper: the show was a pandemic comfort object that got absorbed into tradwife aesthetics, and Netflix is now trying to retrofit Indigenous and Black characters into a narrative whose original emotional logic was explicitly about white settlement. That’s a structural problem no amount of progressive casting resolves, and the reviews — even the favorable ones — circle it.

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Ginsberg at 100: how to hold a canonical figure whose ethics are now disqualifying

The centennial of Allen Ginsberg is producing exactly the debate it should: how to weigh the foundational work against Ginsberg’s open advocacy for NAMBLA and his “boy lover” positions. The Guardian’s long piece, anchored by the estate’s keeper, doesn’t dodge the question.

This is the harder version of the “separate the art from the artist” debate because Ginsberg’s transgression was not biographical but programmatic — he argued for it publicly, as a political position. The essay is worth reading as a model for how to hold that tension without either canceling the work or pretending the politics weren’t there. The conversation is also a leading indicator for how the culture will eventually have to reckon with other canonical figures whose life positions are irreconcilable with current ethical frameworks.

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Books, Film, Music, Art Worth Attention

Remake — Ross McElwee (Sherman’s March) returns to his own decades of personal footage after his son’s overdose death; the result is being reviewed as one of the most serious works of autobiographical documentary in years.

Do You Love Me — Lana Daher’s 75-minute found-footage portrait of Beirut, assembling memory and civilian life around and through war; a rare film that treats Lebanese experience on its own terms rather than as backdrop.

A Vast Horizon: Artists and Lovers, Freedom and War — Anna Thomasson on the 1937 Côte d’Azur gathering of Surrealists; reviewed as serious art history that captures the political atmosphere of a Europe about to break, not merely an account of bohemian escapade.

You Won’t Get Free of It — Rachel Aviv’s essay collection on mothers and daughters, reviewed by both the NYT and the Paris Review; the Paris Review piece focuses on Aviv’s methodology of revision and the three essays she cut, which is more revealing than the book coverage.

The Hole — Tsai Ming-liang’s 1998 Taipei apocalypse film, getting its first proper US theatrical run in new 35mm at Film at Lincoln Center and Metrograph; J. Hoberman’s review makes the case that it reads differently now than it did at the end of the last century.

Sabelo Mlangeni photography — South African photographer, winner of the James Barnor prize, whose sustained work inside queer and rural communities produces images that operate in a documentary and intimate register simultaneously; worth knowing if you don’t already.

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Essays Worth the Read

César Aira’s Art of Not Editing — Jeff and Ann VanderMeer on the Argentine novelist whose practice of writing forward without revision produces a specific kind of narrative energy. The piece is less profile than argument: that Aira’s method is not a quirk but a formal position, one that treats the contingent event (a bird flies in, gets written in) as structurally equivalent to intention. For anyone thinking about creative constraint and process, it shifts the frame.

“Worthless Idiot, Donkey Head”: Parodies of Pedantry on the Renaissance Stage — Arnoud Visser on the Renaissance pedante as stock theatrical villain: the humanist whose learning becomes a form of social control and sexual displacement. The essay is genuinely funny in places and arrives at a claim that lands: the satirical tradition that mocked overlearned men was itself a product of the culture that produced them, making the mockery a form of self-regulation rather than dissent. Relevant to any current conversation about expertise, credentials, and their discontents.

Skill nostalgia — Joshua Habgood-Coote in Aeon asks whether the current appetite for beekeeping, sourdough, and leatherwork represents something philosophically serious or merely escapism from cognitive labor. He takes the question further than it usually goes, arguing that what people are reaching for is not premodern simplicity but a form of work in which the relationship between effort and outcome is legible — a condition that algorithmic labor has systematically destroyed.

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One Thing Worth Reading Deeply

Clearly Fake: Zurbarán’s Uncanny Realism — Jackson Arn in the Paris Review, on the occasion of the Zurbarán show at the National Gallery, makes an argument that is genuinely surprising: that the 17th-century Spanish painter’s most admired works succeed precisely because of their visible artificiality, not despite it. Zurbarán’s still lifes and martyrdoms read as hyperreal — objects so intensely present they tip back into fakeness — and Arn connects this to the contemporary condition of deepfakes and AI imagery, where the excess of surface detail produces a similar uncanny effect. This is not a stretch or a strained contemporary hook; it’s a case where looking carefully at an old painting actually changes how you see something new. The essay is short and precise and the argument holds.