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

Here are my presentation notes:

We decided that the Capitol is a perfect metaphor for Foucault's imagery of discourse. Where else is juridical power manifested and embodied so clearly? Foucault tells us that beneath our visible centers of power lie "a multiple and mobile field of force relations." (History of Sexuality, 102)

This field is what Julia meant by her "net metaphor": forces of control swoop and cleave and intersect with one another where they are forced into confrontation, and eventually synthesize becoming a node.

Going to the capitol felt like delving directly into a node on the net of discourse. While it is a node it is also a mini-net of its own. 

It was a center where forces of power collide, where they literally gather and converse. 

And not just the people.

In the building we saw the intersections of force relations themselves:
We saw the intersection of the power of:

belonging and strangerliness

observational control and disembodied discourse

of monetary glitz and the representation of law

 Foucault tells us that the juridical system "is that to which all mechanisms of power can conform, and in turn, manipulate."  (pg 88.)

Where else can the priorities of power be more clearly exposed than in a legislative center washed in gold and marble?

I realized this when the inside of our state capitol looked like a picture of a gruff and stately old widow dressed in a pink floral nightie. I say a picture of an old widow because we spent two hours listening to every detail of the flooring and the ceiling, but could gather nothing about the way the building functioned or the ideas that supported it. We saw only the primpings of an external body, a lonely one.

"Whether desire is this or that, in any case one continues to conceive of it in relation to a power that has at its central point the enunciation of law." 

(Foucault, and I still can't find the page.)