A Foucauldian Study of Power, Subjectivity, and Control in the Beats’ Literature and Life
In the 1950s and ‘60s, American society operated a rampant panopticism, techniques of coercion, control, and surveillance, to make certain that every individual conformed to society and therefore was not a menace to the establishment. According to Foucault’s ideas, power produces discourses and...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | deu |
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Editura Universităţii Aurel Vlaicu Arad
2017-05-01
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| Series: | Journal of Humanistic and Social Studies |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www.jhss.ro/downloads/vol_8_1_2017.pdf |
| Summary: | In the 1950s and ‘60s, American society operated a rampant panopticism,
techniques of coercion, control, and surveillance, to make certain that every
individual conformed to society and therefore was not a menace to the
establishment. According to Foucault’s ideas, power produces discourses and
the clash of discourses leads to the change of subjectivities or consciousnesses
and also to the internalization of a particular discourse. In other words, it is via
creation of subjectivities that power dominates human beings. The Beats knew
that the subjectivity that people assign to themselves is imaginary and illusory;
it has been given to them by their culture or society and accordingly, they define
themselves and only imagine that they are that sort of persons independently
and take it as ‘truth’. This paper strives to show that the Beats were completely
cognizant of this process and through resisting the power, subjectivity, and
control that society had imposed upon themtried to create new and different
subjectivities, as Foucault had recommended. This imposition was so dangerous
that it threatened to destroy individuality and by the same token, the Beats were
dead set against it.
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| ISSN: | 2067-6557 2247-2371 |