Gavin
booty bass intellectual
Foucault's suggestion audaciously reverses the Cartesian and existentialist doctrine that interiority and subjectivity are 'authentic', irreducible and asocial. For Foucault, on the contrary, it is social institutions which give rise to 'pysche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness.' In the History of Sexuality Volume 1, Foucault expands this analysis: power works by inducing us to identify with these allegedly interior states, to understand them as the 'truth' of our being. Moreover, we are everywhere encouraged to 'confess' - not any more to the priest, but to a secular psychological power, whose emissaries one can see everywhere, from psychiatric professionals to Oprah Winfrey, who insistently parrot power's demands: 'Tell us who you are, confide in us the truth of your self.'
We were discussing Foucault in a seminar and a girl, attempting to refute the panopticon thesis, said she liked being a "girly-girl" just because. Not to satisfy the expectations of others looking at her, as she's a liberated pomo-feminist, and anyway, she does her hair and makeup while home alone so how could it be for the Gaze? I told her that the Patriarchal Father is always watching her and everyone laughed.
Moment #4342 of depressing gradskool alienation