ginger griffin, Foucault

"This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded...in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located..." (95)

Although this was a very tough read, once I got to this quote I immediately thought of one movie, "The Truman Show." This movie is about one man on a reality TV show where everything is fixed and where everyone is watching his every move, only this guy doesn't know any of this. Truman has hidden cameras set up all around him, the people in his life are all fake, everything he does is seen on TV and recorded, just like my quote. After I thought about this I thought about the panopticon, which is mentioned just a few pages later, and realized that these lepers and plague victims feel as if they are constantly being watched, which they are most of the time, but that is the exact use of the panopticon. It is to make you feel as if someone is watching you all the time and you will not know the difference.

This also kind of relates to Horkheimer and Adorno in the sense of "sameness". The lepers and plague victims fell victim to being treated the same and therefore fell into the same category as each other. This also represents power, which Marx talks about with his ruling class. Here, power is represented in a way that the ruling class is the healthy class and the lower class is the infected victims.

Foucault is extremely hard to read, but I hope that I made the right connections with the "Truman Show" and Horheimer and Adorno. I guess I will have to see in class tomorrow.