Foucault

I found Michel Foucaults reading to be particularly interesting. It seems he completely disregards authority and government and uses his interests in postmodernism to project an entire different way of looking at ideologies of society. For example, His piece called “The History of Sexuality” gives readers a look into the way the nineteenth century has created this sexual ideology that society has adapted into our culture. He addresses the fact that our whole society’s sexual nature has been repressed in a way that sexuality is now portrayed negatively or discreetly. “The essential features of this sexuality are not the expression of a representation that is more or less distorted by ideology, or of a misunderstanding caused by taboos; they correspond to the functional requirements of a discourse that must produce its truth” (104). Foucault touches on the idea that there is this bigger force, known as an ideology, that has been established that controls a persons behavior (in this sense, sexually).
The second thing Foucault touches on is this construction of Panopticon. This building makes it possible for an overseer to see everything that happens in the smaller vessels. This building reiterates the notion that “visibility is a trap” (97). Foucault goes on to discuss how power is upheld when there is a sense that everything is visible “All that is needed then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy” (97). This idea reinforces class and power through visibility and the lack of freedom of the condemned. Foucault points out that our society is one of surveillance. He states that we are constantly training other useful forces to replace those who enforce power. For example the overseer, “Any individual taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants (Bentham, 45) (99).