On Sun, 10 May 1998, John Ransom wrote:
> You'll remember that the protagonist in 1984 questions, then hates, then
> loves Big Brother. This excessive focus on the leader consigns 1984 to a
> kind of "passe" status from a Foucaultian perspective, I would imagine.
> For one thing, opposition is made too easy, too "traditional."
Except that there's never any indication that Big Brother is anything but
a myth. Goldstein fairly clearly *is* a myth, created by the party. Is
there really a leader of the party? Maybe even O'Brien doesn't know for
sure. (A bit of Borges, there).
A very Foucauldian theme: an anachronistically irrelevant opposition
between a sovereign and classically rebellious subjects, played up so that
it masks the "real" operations of power occurring elsewhere; disciplinary
mechanisms coming unhooked from and then colonizing the sovereignty that
spawned them.
(It seems to me, btw, that there is far more going on in 1984 than Orwell
typically is given credit for).
--Matthew A. King--------Department of Philosophy--------McMaster University--
"The border is often narrow between a permanent temptation to commit
suicide and the birth of a certain form of political consciousness."
-----------------------------(Michel Foucault)--------------------------------