A Foucauldian Study of Power, Subjectivity, and Control in the Beats’ Literature and Life

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• Beats
• control
• Foucault
• power
• resistance