Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

Calvin

Week One

e-Corpus #2

         I find Foucault’s ideas about confession vary interesting, especially how it interacts with the power-knowledge structure in society.  Though when Foucault talks about confession, he is most often talking about it in terms of the Catholic Church, an institution that I, at least, don’t see as having that much power now as it once did.  So, I started thinking if confession was still around in our society.  Which of course, it is, and not just in the obvious way of confessing all to a sociologist, but it is still all over our culture.  One of the ways that people confess is on daytime television, Morrie, Dr. Fill, Jerry Springer, The Steve Wilkos show. Theses shows are built on peoples desire to confess, and be on television.  Realizing that it is still around I also realized that I have recently become a beneficiary of the system of confession and knowledge-to-power system.  My father owns a video prediction company and they recently won the editing contracted for the Jerry Springer show and the Steve Wilkos show, which brings in over a million dollars into the company.  This means that because people are so keen to confess and others are so keen to watch them do it, that they are in a vary real way paying for my education here.  It brings up an interesting idea of class, and who confess and who reaps the benefits.  Because they are willing to spend there time doing that I’m allowed to be here learning and pushing my self further up in society.  I’m not sure if it is a good or bad system, but it is one I find myself benefiting from, so does that have any thing to do with whether I am good or bad for being part of the system?