FOUCAULDIAN REFLECTIONS OF AUTHORITY IN SOFTCOPS AND CLEANSED

This paper discusses how Churchill’s Softcops and Kane’s Cleansed delve deeply into Michel Foucault’s ideas about power and authority by exploring literature’s challenges towards authority, how society enforces control, and its impact on dehumanisation. With this purpose, it tries to analyse Foucault’s ideas regarding authority and power intertwining with the themes of punishment and violence in these plays. In Softcops, Churchill dramatises the absurdities of authority and its more insidious way of punishment by turning public punishment into more invisible control through surveillance and normalisation that resembles Foucault’s panopticon. Cleansed, meanwhile, is a sensory examination of the extreme violence that lies at the heart of contemporary discipline systems with its institution. It presents a microcosm of social control where authority is not just everywhere but in you too. Softcops and Cleansed become important critiques of the processes whereby contemporary societies exercise control over their human populations, highlighting these systems’ dehumanising effects as well as how such authority builds up progressively within society. This paper emphasises how these plays continue to have such enduring significance of power, demonstrating their applicability, and reliability according to Foucauldian ideas in contemporary literature. It also encourages deeper reflection upon themselves within systems of governed powers by hinting at why they challenge audiences long afterwards.