ABSTRACT
Members of the postmodern society know themselves through the reflected images and narratives of cinema and television. The cinematic, surveillance society soon became a disciplinary structure filled with subjects who obsessively looked and gazed at one another, as they became, at the same time, obsessive listeners, eavesdroppers, persons whose voices and telephone lines could be tapped, voices that could be dubbed, new versions of the spoken and seen self. The interview society emerges historically as a consequence, in part, of the central place that newspapers and cinema came to occupy in daily life. The cinematic apparatuses of contemporary culture stand in a twofold relationship to critical inquiry. The interview society uses the machinery of the interview methodically to produce situated versions of the self. This machinery works in a systematic and orderly fashion.
