This always happens to me. Once I hear about something or it finally piques my interest, I’m suddenly inundated with references to it. Yesterday I happened across the novel “Foucault’s Pendulum” and today, while leafing through Erik Davis’s Techgnosis, I came across a connective link between Foucault and Philip K. Dick:

Just as William Blake condensed the coming horrors of industrialism into his image of “Satanic mills,” Dick’s Black Iron Prison imaginatively captured the “disciplinary apparatus” of power analyzed by historian Michel Foucault. Demonstrating that prisons, mental institutions, schools, and military establishments all share similar organizations of space and time, Foucault argued that a “technology of power” was distributed throughout social space, enmeshing human subjects at every turn. Foucault argued that liberal social reforms are only cosmetic brush-ups of an underlying mechanism of control. As Dick put it, “The Empire never ended.”

Nabbed that transcription off a blog called Letters Never Sent, which has some other interesting links in that post. Here’s the Wikipedia entry for Foucault himself. If anybody’s got other good links or recommendations on him (especially in relation to the “disciplinary apparatus” mentioned above), lay em on me.