Gwatter06, Focault

Our reading assignment on Focault is quite different from anything that we have read so far. He implements his concepts and ideas through the narrative and understanding of the situations created by the epidemic of the Plague of the mid-fourteenth century Focault mainly focuses on the ideas and concepts of discipline, surveillance and power within society and the community. Firstly, he incorporates his understanding of discipline and expresses it’s relation to power. Focault explains that “the plague gave rise to disciplinary projects” (96) and in doing so “it called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and ramification of power” (96). Focault does an impressive job of interlacing his concepts and linking one to the other. Here I believe Focault is explaining that our submission to ideological constructions and surveillance represents our passiveness and discipline in which ultimately relinquishes control to those implementing this concepts. I think that this closely relates to both Marx and Althusser and their concepts of class structure and ideology. Marx explains that those with the ruling ideas are those who make up the ruling class. In Focault’s explanation of the Plague situation and quarantine, the administration running the quarantine and creating the separation in the community through the fear of the Plague, plays the role of the ruling class because they obtain the conforming and ruling ideologies that the community follows. We also covered a secondary piece on Focault that covered the emergence of discourse of sex. This piece was a bit more difficult to comprehend but there were come interesting concepts that I was able to pick up on. One of the main concepts that I was able to grasp from Focault’s piece was his notion of sexuality and its relation to “scientia sexualis.” Focault states, “Sexuality: the correlative of that slowly developed discursive practice which constitutes the scientia sexualis. 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 the truth” (104). Focault originally explained that sex has become an entity of confession through the necessity of discourse, and in this concept above he explains that sex functions on the discourse the provide the truth, that confession now plays hand in hand with sex a notion introduced early on by Christianity.