ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to conceptualize how ‘spectator’ identities are negotiated within networks of power and resistance (Foucault 1984:93) as a specific group of viewers-ten families in the city of Bombay, India-encounters the discourses of the state, as represented by news from Doordarshan, Indian state television. The authors draw on Foucault’s formulation of the state as a new distribution and organization of an old power technique, originating in the Church, namely, pastoral power (Foucault 1986:213). The state, accordingly, becomes a “structure in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition, that this individuality would be shaped in a new form and submitted to a set of very specific patterns” (ibid.: 214). The state’s power is thus both individualizing and totalizing, and works toward the constitution of subjects as spectators.
