F’s concepts in Humphreys:
Individuation : Power produces the individual through disciplining
Dividuation: the body is not held as the locus of consciousness but is decentered –
the body is not determined by discursive practices
e.g.: The corporation is a body that is a databank of categories that stores
dispositions of identities, i.e., various categories of IDs
Right to take life or let live is Juridical power: King’s Power over death from the
period of Enlightenment
• Used by official institutions: e.g. govt.
• Prohibits and punishes: Subtraction of freedom of the individual – gain of
ones power and loss of another’s
• Transgressions are punished
• Individual as subject and as object of power
F’s disciplinary and biopolitical power: Power over Life
• To make one follow the norm: quantify, measure, appraise and hierarchize
• Power to take charge of life: does not separate the state from the citizens
• Law operates as the Normalizing instrument
• F differentiates between life and norm
• Power Is productive and positive – investment and valorization of the body
• Power administers, optimizes and multiplies and implements the norm
• Individual bodies are micromanaged in producing them as normalized
bodies
• Body politic of the population is similarly normalized
• Power is neither inhibiting nor permitting
• Unofficial institutions regulate through normative power
e.g.: peer pressure, unwritten rules of social norms
• Law cannot regulate the way unofficial opinion can over life: e.g.:
• Body size; gender and other social organizational aspects
• The aim of biopower is that the society must be stabilized and normalized
• Opinion regulates such issues that affect others in the society through reward
and and negative reinforcements
Power over life:
• Means: production of power
• Location: everywhere and micromanaged
• Source: unofficial
• Works through positive/ negative reinforcements
Disciplinary power:
• Normalizes the individual body
• Centered on the body as the anatomic politics of the body
• Optimizes and micromanages the body to make it efficient: e.g.,
• Diet, beauty regimen, new language learning
• Discipline is enforced through surveillance
• Biopower: manages and normalizes the body politic
• Collect data, categorize and classify, average or normalize to attain
• even distribution around the bell curve (norm)
1
Manage instances that do not fit the bell curve, i.e., pull in the outliers: e.g.:
child being measured by doctors (h/w); BMI; population trend of what is
normal; monitor the bell curve to enforce the normal for security: the “society
must be defended”
• Discipline is literal
• Biopower is metaphorical
• Right to death: subtraction of one’s power
• Right to life: production of power
• In juridical power liberation is fight against subtraction and disobedience
does not work
• In biopower, resistance and oppositional activities augment the resisters’
power
e.g. sexual revolution of the 60s
• When we think we are resisting, we are increasing our access to power – this
complements power – can’t get rid of power
• How then can you resist power?
• Micro-subvert it and not being governed by the system by playing the system
The care (and practice) of the self
• Right to death: subtraction of one’s power
• Right to life: production of power
• In juridical power liberation is fight against subtraction and disobedience
does not work
• In biopower, resistance and oppositional activities augment the resisters’
power
e.g. sexual revolution of the 60s
• When we think we are resisting, we are increasing our access to power – this
complements power – can’t get rid of power
• How then can you resist power?
• Micro-subvert it and not being governed by the system by playing the system
The care (and practice) of the self
• Right to death: subtraction of one’s power
• Right to life: production of power
• In juridical power liberation is fight against subtraction and disobedience
does not work
• In biopower, resistance and oppositional activities augment the resisters’
power
e.g. sexual revolution of the 60s
• When we think we are resisting, we are increasing our access to power – this
complements power – can’t get rid of power
• How then can you resist power?
• Micro-subvert it and not being governed by the system by playing the system
The care (and practice) of the self
Judith Butler:
• Resist normative power
• Gender Trouble: normalization is repeated performance – normative is
repetition of the norm
•
2
• Resist hierarchal binarism
e.g.: drag queens- better women (high normative feminism) compared to women
• Subversion by changing a little each time you represent through disruption
Repetitions often fail to perfectly conform to the norms that inspire/require them.
• How many of us fail to perform ideal (hetero, white, able-bodied, middleclass) masculinity or femininity? Even most hetero white able-bodied
middle-class women fail to perform ideal femininity
• In the potential for (intentionally or unintentionally) imperfect repetitions,
that disciplinary power produces its own resistances.
Judith Butler:
• Resist normative power
• Gender Trouble: normalization is repeated performance – normative is
repetition of the norm
• Resist hierarchal binarism
e.g.: drag queens- better women (high normative feminism) compared to women
• Subversion by changing a little each time you represent through disruption
Repetitions often fail to perfectly conform to the norms that inspire/require them.
• How many of us fail to perform ideal (hetero, white, able-bodied, middleclass) masculinity or femininity? Even most hetero white able-bodied
middle-class women fail to perform ideal femininity
• In the potential for (intentionally or unintentionally) imperfect repetitions,
that disciplinary power produces its own resistances.
Foucault:
• Constructing the Docile Bodies through Disciplines, the new political
technology of the body (137) :
Cellular (located bodies in (spatial Enclosures)
Organic (Specified Repetitive activities)
Genetic (Trained and Timed in hard work of production)
Combinatory :Division of labour and organizing ranks & classes as units of
production- Marx, Capital, vol. 1. 311-12) (Hierarchical Isolation)
COG-D of L
THIERS
Disciplined bodies, e.g., in prisons, the military, the corporate world and in schools.
Modern Times (Chaplin US 1936), …Gattaca (Niccol US 1997),
• Spatial division of individuals
• Control of their activities,
• Organization of individuals into groups
• Coordination of these different groups
Morrison (2000): How to resist docility:
(Cellular) University must teach students to examine their own values and those of
society. spatial Enclosures
(Organic) Process: Interrogation of U’s purpose: Specified Repetitive
(Genetic) Students/ profs. must be encouraged to: Trained and Timed
• do public volunteer service
• debate readings and their political implications
• do research for public good not private profit
3
• interrogate complex ethical problems
(D of L): University’s role: Hierarchical Isolation
• Guard civic freedoms through ensuring democratic practices
• Examine social problems and individual responsibilities in
establishing ethics/truth in behaviour
Giroux:
Higher education
• is seen as a commodity (C spatial Enclosures)
• embodies value of market driven self interest (G Trained and Timed )
• promotes consumer life styles (O Specified Repetitive activities)
• produces market identity (G Trained and Timed )
• lacks accountability & social responsibility (D of L Hierarchical Isolation)
Giroux: Corporate funding of and corporate culture in higher education:
• Corporate control over what and how we learn/research in univ.
reduces ability of the state and civil society spatial Enclosures (univ.
not open to shape one’s self or social values)
• Driven by profit motive - ‘applied’ (vs. ‘pure’) research Trained and
Timed
• Experiments at the cost of ethics Specified Repetitive activities
• Advances vocational learning vs. pure knowledge Trained and Timed
• Olivieri:
• Corporate profit vs. ethical research Exercise of Disciplinary power by
Hierarchical Isolation
4