Date: Sat, 4 Feb 1995 16:54:43 -0500 (EST)
From: GREGORY MCSWEENEY <gregory-AT-alcor.concordia.ca>
Subject: What do you mean - power?



	This debate on Foucault's definition of power is fascinating to 
me; I think that one of the impediments to a consensus is that it's being 
kept at too theoretical a level. 
	Power is of course one of M.F.'s central concerns - but when I 
think of it in relation to his work, I think of his discussion of it in 
"Discipline and Punish", in which he brilliantly analyses Jeremy Bentham's 
concept of the Panopticon. I guess everyone will know about this 
distopian penal facility in which the prisoners are housed in a sort of 
architectural ring that describes a cental watchtower. This to me is the 
focus of Foucault's interest in power: not just its constructive or 
creative effects, which are surely epiphenomenal - but the abuses in its 
wrong-minded application by humans against humans.
	In the panoptical model, the prisoner paces his cell, which is
open to the watchtower and backlit by a rear window (no place to hide,
social transgression not hidden in darkness, but rather accentuated by the
light of day.) He is unable to ascertain whether or not he is being
watched at any specific time, and so he *internalizes* the power that is
being wielded against him, and regulates his own behaviour, for fear of 
the consequences of rebellion. 
	Yes, the prisoner may be a murderer or a rapist, but I think that 
M.F. doesn't concern himself overly with the moral justification of the 
uses of power; he's more interested in its manifestations. Perhaps if we 
apply his theory of power to his more concrete illustrations of that 
force, we can at least define our terms, and know what it is we're 
disagreeing about.

						Greg McSweeney
						Dept. of English
						Concordia University
						Montreal, Canada

					gregory-AT-alcor.concordia.ca


     ------------------