Britney and Foucault

This is something I've been thinking about for a while, and it's made me really wish I knew more about Foucault. I know enough about Britney, I think. Please feel free to add elaborating comments, we can build a great theory together! Maybe.

"Overprotected"

[Spoken:]
I need time (time)
Love (love)
Joy (joy)
I need space
I need me
(Action!)

Say hello to the girl that I am!
You're gonna have to see through my perspective

Could be interpreted in the light of Foucault's work on surveillance in Discipline and Punish, and his ideas about the panoptic society in particular.

I need to make mistakes just to learn who I am
And I don't wanna be so damn protected

Clearly Britney, like Foucault, is critical of this panoptical world, and in the light of these lines the lyric about perspective takes on an almost ironic tone - never mind the many perspectives of an optical society, you can survey, but it's my point of view that you'll have to use. The use of 'see through' my perspective, as opposed to something like 'put things in my perspective' is telling. The focus is emphatically visual. We're being invited not only to share her point of view (the strange grammar implies its correction) but also to occupy her space. It's a peculiar way of phrasing the request and the peculiarity, like Barthes' punctum, is the thing that evidences it as deliberate. Because as well as asking us to see things from her perspective, Britney's grammatical 'mistake' asks us to see 'through' her empathetically, maybe even perceive her 'perspective' in the sense of a one-way 'view' of her structural composition in pop culture.

In the lyric about mistakes it's as if Britney is saying "it is through my error that I reach knowledge", and the conjunction 'and' ties the idea to her next line about independence. The connection of these two lines strongly implies an affiliation with Foucault's structural thesis 'power-knowledge'. Another song on the same album, 'I'm a slave 4 u' has similar implications.

There must be another way
Cause I believe in taking chances
But who am I to say
What a girl is to do
God, I need some answers

What am I to do with my life
(You will find it out don't worry)
How Am I supposed to know what's right?
(You just got to do it your way)
I can't help the way I feel
But my life has been so overprotected

In the first five lines, Britney articulates the despair of those who feel their choices have been removed - those oppressed by systems of micro-power enforced by the Bourgoise. The second section is a curious schizoid conversation between two Britneys, a kind of pre-knowledge one and a post-knowledge one. An alternate, related reading would see the artist dividing in two - but that this is positive and even essential - as in something like The Order Of Things which covers the irreconcilability of attempts to portray individual perspective - or even the book about madness. The division of Britney in this verse is a parallel to Foucault's division; his difficult location between structuralism and post-structuralism and often paradoxical status as an external (objective?) narrator on 'objective' power.

I tell 'em what I like
What I want
What I don't
But every time I do I stand corrected
Things that I've been told
I can't believe what I hear about the world, I realize
I'm overprotected

More bounding from desire to refusal, correction and disappointment. Again the verse ends with a revelation or awakening, and again the parallel with Foucault - Britney the philosopher's objective look at herself just drives her into an imprisonment of knowledge.

It carries on in much the same way, infinitely. I don't know anything about Foucault really, although I have read The Order of Things.