Video lecture plague and the panopticon PDF

Preview

Summary

Professor Nathan Gorelick. ...

Description

A Journal of the Plague Year i s a work of fiction, but an effective work of fiction. Defoe wrote about what he’d like to see in 1721 within this novel.

What is the relation between community and contagion?

Discipline can be punishment or it can also be academic.

Behind disciplinary mechanisms is the “haunting memory of contagion”. Plague is representative of confusion and disorder.

Power, according to Foucault, is about channeling thoughts and desires, it’s productive. It isn’t just oppressive.

Three basic principles of panopticism: ● The Eye of Power “should be visible and unverified” (201). ○ It’s there, we just don’t know what exactly it’s watching. ○ People are subject to the eye of power ● Power is diffuse. It circulates through an “infinitely minute web of panoptic techniques” (224). ● Panopticism is productive, normative, and mundane ○ It produces people as a certain type of social subject, i.e: good citizen, good parent, good child, etc. ○ It doesn’t operate by being forceful, it is directive. Rather than impose rules, it generates social norms. These social norms are expectations and people usually conform. A social stigma is put in place when they are broken. ○ It is a regular, everyday experience of power. Critique is empowering. Our realities are contingent and historically embedded. They are not essential. They’re ideologically and politically saturated. Not taking critique and appreciate it leads to our own critical faculty, which can be faulty....