Let's start with a review of what we've already talked about in this unit on "Ideology and Discourse." From Marx, we get the idea that ideology consists of individual beliefs and belief systems that function to mask the "real" conditions of existence. In a strict Marxist view, such belief systems exist as illusions or false consciousness to prevent us from perceiving "reality," which is the economic structure of all social relations. This is the base/superstructure model, where the economic base-the mode of production-determines everything else that happens in a society. In this model, literature is subset of ideological representation; literary texts are illusions supporting particular mode of production and entirely determined by the dominant mode of production.

In more sophisticated marxist thought, literary texts are places where ideologies (still produced "in the last instance" by material conditions, modes of production, economic relations) are debated, transformed, deformed, refigured, where contradictions and conflicts in ideologies become apparent. Literature can thus have a privileged relation to "truth" and "reality" for marxist critics.

Poststructuralist marxists and theorists of ideology mess with this. Althusser says that ideology (and literature as a subset or special locus of forms of ideology) represents our imaginary relations to the real conditions of our existence: ideologies are the stories we tell ourselves that enable us to function. Such ideology exists only through and in practice, when we act on what we believe. This gives us the conception of interpellation, the idea that a text (or an ideology) calls to us, names us, positions us in relation to its belief structure--and we either say Yeah, that's me, and that idea is true, and I believe it and act on it, or we say no, that's not me, I don't believe that, I won't do what that belief system tells me to do.

For Althusser, action-- the material activity of life itself--is always structured by ideology in general, and by specific ideologies as expressed through specific subjects. This starts a reversal of the traditional marxist idea that economic/material reality creates beliefs; rather, we start to see an analysis of how beliefs create material reality. In marxist terms, we see ideology as "relatively autonomous" from the economic realm, rather than entirely determined by it.

Althusser talked about ideology as a structure whose function is to interpellate, to call to, subjects--to say "hey you" and to get somebody to respond. Bakhtin talked about how this works with his notion of heteroglossia--when you employ different languages, or dialects, or sociolects, you not only call a subject, you create some sort of social relationship with that subject. Here's an example: if I wanted to get your attention, I might call "Hey Dude!" and see who responded. But if I wanted to get lots of people to respond, I might call "Hey Dude! Sir! Mister! Gentleman! Hey handsome ! "-- those different descriptors each address a different conception of a "subject," each uses a different "language"--dude, gentleman, mister, handsome--that assumes a different relationship between speaker and the implied subject--peer, younger to elder, class recognition, come-on. And Bakhtin wants to argue that novels, as developments of rhetoric, employ a wider range of languages, thus creating a wider range of social relationships and a greater number of "subject positions" which a reader could inhabit, than does poetry.

Bakhtin also looks at ideology as basis of action-- a text wants you to do something, wants to persuade you to act in a certain way, or to believe something that then you'll act on. This is quite obvious in a political speech, or even in the fix-your-sink manual, but it's also true for literary texts, though they use different rules and mechanisms for that persuasion. (Remember, Bakhtin wants to argue that poetry doesn't have the social action function, because it doesn't create social relationships between speaker and reader the way fiction does--but that's arguable).

Both Althusser and Bakhtin are interested, in largest sense, in examining how ideology (and literature as a specialized subset of ideology) gets you to do things; as marxists, both are interested in questions of why subjects obey the law, why workers don't rebel against exploitation, and why we don't resist any and all kinds of unifying or centralized authority. You might think here about the idea of an "official" language, which you must use or suffer penalties for not using. Such a language is grammatically correct English, which is required for essays in English classes; you can be "punished" if you fail to use it. Althusser, Bakhtin, and Foucault all ask what mechanisms create and enforce your obedience to that kind of authoritative rule.

Althusser's answer is that there are RSAs (Repressive State Apparatuses), mechanisms like the police that have the social power to punish you if you don't behave: if you don't stop at the red light, you get a ticket or go to jail. More effective than RSAs, though, are ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses) which teach you to internalize the belief that it's right to stop at the light.

Michel Foucault is fundamentally interested in that same question: why do people behave? Why and how do we internalize the rules and orders of whatever social situation we're in and (generally) respond appropriately? Unlike Althusser or Bakhtin, Foucault is not a marxist, structuralist, deconstructionist, psychoanalyst, feminist, or any other "ist," though he's familiar with developments in all of these; as a poststructrualist theorist, he is in category all his own. Foucault is FOUCAULT the way Freud is FREUD: the founder of a school of thought, a way of thinking about how the world (and literary texts which are part of the world) operate.

Foucault is primarily interested in examining how DISCOURSE, which is his particular version of Althusser's IDEOLOGY, creates relationships of POWER/KNOWLEDGE which then become the framework within which human thought and action are possible.

Now to unpack that. In Althusser's theory, ideology can determine practice; no beliefs exists without people who believe in them and show that belief by acting on them. For Foucault, ideology is always expressed in DISCOURSE, that is, in texts produced as KNOWLEDGE about a certain topic or area. These discourses create the possible ways we can think about a topic, and also create the methods/practices we have for dealing with that topic.

A discourse is the conglomeration of all the kinds of writing, talking, thinking , and acting on or about a certain topic: let's say blindness. Doctors write about it, psychologists, teachers, legal experts (think about the concept of being "legally blind"), poets, novelists, all these people produce writings (texts) that give some definition of blindness, some portrait of it. Some may address what causes it, some may address what cures it, some may address what problems blindness creates for individuals or for institutions, some may give personal histories of blind people or fictional accounts of the symbolic meaning of blindness. . The "discourse" on blindness would consist of all the texts written about the ideas of blindness in our culture, from every possible discipline or perspective. Together, these writings form what we KNOW about blindness, and that knowledge informs what we do and think and say about blindness.

For Foucault, all social practice stems from discourse. Writings about blindness from the 18^th century to the present have insisted that blind people, because they lack sight, have an increased sense of hearing, and that because of that they must be more musically inclined than sighted people. From those writings came the idea, the knowledge, that blindness= musicality, and thus the practice that education for blind people should focus on developing their musical ability, providing job opportunities in music careers (like piano tuning), and allowing blind people to be composers and musicians. The discursive construction of blindness informed what social relationships and possibilities blind people could have.

Foucault is interested in how discourse shapes the relations between POWER and KNOWLEDGE; he sees the two terms as inseperable, as POWER/KNOWLEDGE, arguing that all operations of "power"--all the means by which one entity gets another entity to do, to be, and/or to act a certain way--are based on these discursive forms of knowledge. The best example of this is the freqeuntly-heard phrase "Studies have shown that..." Studies-- that is, knowledge produced by people who have been acknowledged as experts-- show that, i.e. produce some discursive form of knowledge that then becomes the basis for action: as with the legislature, with policy decisions, with institutional practices, etc. If the University of Colorado announced that "studies have shown that kids learn better when they drink Mountain Dew, " then a week later there might be Mountain Dew machines outside every classroom. And yes, of course one then asks who did the study, and were they funded by Mountain Dew? And Foucault would say that's a good example of how power/knowledge operates: Mountain Dew hires its own "experts" to produce the "knowledge" that Mountain Dew has some socially beneficial effect, and then social practices and agents believe that knowledge, are interpellated into that ideology, and thus act on it.

Take a moment to think about how influential that phrase--"studies have shown that"-- is in determining how our world is constructed. And think about the role that the university plays in the production of such power/knowledge.

That's the "knowledge" side of power/knowledge. Now we need to discuss Foucault's idea of power. Power is usually conceived of as form of repression, like Althusser's RSAs--some force that keeps you in line via threat of punishment. But for Foucault, POWER operates much more like Althusser's ISAs--like ideology itself. Power is productive, not repressive; it creates situations, relationships, and subjects, rather than just punishing them. And the goal of power, like Althusser's ideology, is to create subjects who act properly on their own, who don't need the police or other enforcement agencies to use physical forms of restraint or punishment to get them to behave. Foucault, like Althusser, is interested in the creation of "good" subjects who obey the rules (whatever they are) because they've internalized a belief in the truth of those rules, and "bad" subjects who disobey because they don't believe them. And Foucault says that discourse, like ideology, and like a literary text, indeed like any text, produces subject positions which then govern any individual's choices, understanding of reality, actions, beliefs, etc.

Foucault is particularly interested in how discourse creates relations of power/knowledge concerning human bodies; such discourse then works to regulate how bodies function, how we think of them, how we understand our own bodies, etc. He particularly focuses on questions of health and illness, sanity and madness, law-abiding and criminal actions/bodies, and normal and deviant sexualities. To go back to discourse on blindness, the producers of knowledge about blindness, such as the directors of schools and institutions for the blind and doctors who specialized in blindness, argued in the 19^th century that lack of sight produced lack of physical motion, and lack of motion produced physically weak bodies, (bodies described specifically as pale, thin, twisted, and immobile) which meant bodies that were not fit for any kind of physical labor. The bodies of the blind --not just their eyesight, but their whole bodies--were thus defined as weak and inferior and unproductive, and schools and institutions put together curricula and programs designed to "correct" the weaknesses of the blind body and to train blind people in trades which would minimize the deficiencies of their bodies. Hence again these schools emphasized musical education as not requiring a strong body, and as work that blind bodies could thus perform for pay.

Another version of this, to follow the Mountain Dew line of thought, appears in the history of caffeine, which, in the form of coffee, became an important part of the diet at the time of the industrial revolution, as the new requirements of labor-- getting up early, being in a factory for eight hours, etc--placed new demands on the human body, requiring more uniform alertness. The importation of coffee skyrockets at the exact same time that industrialization occurs, and precisely because of it: a new kind of laboring body was needed, and coffee provided the jolt that produced that body. It's possible that cocaine might have replaced coffee as the desired stimulant, and we'd all start the day by doing lines at Starbucks, except that cocaine also had a cognitive effect which was less desirable than its energizing effect.

So the big question for Foucault is : how do discourses create subjects, and particularly bodies, that behave well, that are "good" and follow the rules? Why do you all sit here for 50 minutes with your butts going numb? What power/knowledge creates you as good subjects in the classroom?

One of thre reasons you are "good", according to what Foucault talks about in Discipline and Punish, is that you think you might be caught not being good, and thus punished. Foucault talks about a society based on surveillance--a kind of power/knowledge--which he says is typified by the PANOPTICON. He talks about the way that prisons were designed in the 18th century: rather than having individual cells where each prisoner was locked away from everyone else, like in a dungeon, the new model of prison featured cells that were highly visible, and a central tower from which guards or authorities watched the prisoners. The central tower is the PANOPTICON, the position from which every prisoner in every cell can constantly be watched. The prisoner in a cell, meanwhile, can only see the Panopticon, not any of the other cells; further, the prisoner can't see into the Panopticon to see whether anyone is watching him or not. The prisoner's behavior is thus regulated, not by guards with guns, but by the prisoner's own awareness that he is always being watched.

We talked about the scenario of coming to a red light at 3 in the morning at a deserted intersection, but this time I said, OK, you run the light, no cop is around, and a week later you get a ticket and a photoradar picture showing you running the red light. That's Foucault's surveillance society; you don't know when you've been "caught" doing something wrong until the punishment comes for you. There's no person behind the ticket; with a real cop you could maybe talk him out of it, or the cop could use subjective judgment to decide whether or not to issue a ticket. With the Panopticon, the surveillance is continual and the punishment for violations is automatic, impersonal. It's a mechanism designed to work without any human characteristics, without the necessity of a human being as operator at all.

We talked also about the ubiquity of surveillance equipment, and I asked you to be aware of where there were surveillance cameras watching you during your everyday life. The idea of surveillance is that you are being watched when you're not aware of it; if you never know when Big Brother is watching, you will always behave. You'll be hearing this repeatedly in a popular song this holiday season: "He sees you when you're sleeping, He knows when you're awake; He knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake!"

Resistance to this continual surveillance can happen with the awareness of when you are being watched, and perhaps in trying to figure out how you might NOT be seen. Lots of adventure movies are premised on, or have great action scenes about, how somebody can outwit even the most sophisticated surveillance/security system--I think about the great scene in Mission Impossible where Tom Cruise has to get at the computer without touching the walls or floor anywhere around it. You can come up with your own favorite "smarter than surveillance" scenario.