Michel Foucault and Literature

In Michel Foucault’s 1975 essay “Discipline and Punish,” Foucault writes “The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally scene, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen” (Foucault 555). There are many different types of literary texts which demonstrate this “disassociation” or all seeing/unseen tower, such as George Orwell’s 1984, and Stephen King’s The Running Man. However, it is in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, where we view Foucault’s philosophy come to fruition. For those who haven’t read the story, here is part of the description on the back cover:
Cloistered inside a neighborhood enclave in a U.S. where the distance between the haves and the have-nots has widened to a gaping chasm, Lauren Olamina lives a protected life. But one night, violence explodes, and the walls of her neighborhood are smashed, annihilating Lauren’s family and friends—all she loves and knows.
The “walls” the above describes is eerily reminiscent of Foucault’s plague model used in his essay. In Sower every house has built a wall around itself. This is the life in the land of the “have-nots.” The government, or what’s left of it, has its own wall along with the bourgeoisie “haves.” In referring to the plague Foucault writes, Rather than the massive, binary division between one set of people and another, it called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and ramification of power” (Foucault 553). Sower displays these traits beautifully in the course of the novel, for when Lauren’s neighborhood walls are torn down, she searches out refuge in the “haves” territory. When she comes across to their wall the reader learns that the wall has a security system in place (be it guards or motion sensors), and through encounters with other characters—that the “haves” have been monitoring the “have-nots.” There is a nice binary between Foucault’s essay and Butler’s Sower, for we see how Lauren is a diseased/contagious leper, and how there is a larger system in place, or in Foucault’s words, “. . . a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference” (Foucault 555).

Work Cited
Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan, Eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Malden: Blackwell, 2004.

Butler, Octavia E. "Parable of the Sower." New York: Aspect, 1993.