AsToldByGinger, Foucault

In both of Michel Foucault's readings he discusses the notion of power. In the first reading, as related to disciplinary government actions, as well as in his second the notion of sex and power and their origins. The first reading gives a detailed description of what would happen to a plague stricken town sometime near the end of the seventeenth century, and the way in which the government would react and take strict control of the people and their livelihood in the name of the "common good." Foucault states "the plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies - this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city" (96). Foucault then compares this mobilization of power to designs created by Jeremy Bentham in his Panopticon writings that redefines power in incarceration - of criminals, mad men, etc. It is designed so that the captive "is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication" (98). I thought this was particularly interesting because he stresses the importance of visibility and the way people act differently because of it, just how I believe Baudrillard said that nothing is actual reality that we see because the camera immediately changes the actions of people; as soon as those know they are being watched - they act differently.

Foucault then addresses how sexuality came to be constituted in scientific terms, and lays out five different steps that led to the evolvement of sexuality, and the power that was associated with the subject's taboo. At the end of his work he states "as far as sexuality is concerned, we shall attempt to constitute the 'political economy' of a will to knowledge" (107). I would like to discuss this quote more in class and come to a deeper understanding of what his overarching point is in the second reading.