Foucault’s ‘Docile Body’
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
THRS
http://www.firstpost.com/topic/person/michel-foucault-docile-bodies-vs-college-soccer-video-FERxP_8qmJU-9332-3.html
Cellular—Spatial manipulation of the body
Draw up tables
Cells, places, and ranks
Organic—Coded activities that are temporally established for
the body to follow
Prescribe movements and schedules
Time-tables, monastic rituals, and following recipes
Genetic—Accumulation of time constituting ‘progress.’
Impose exercises
Dictation, Homework, and Drills
Combinatory—Composition of forces to attain efficiency.
Arranges ‘tactics’
“Knowledge of men, weapons, tensions, circumstances…”
Explained another way:
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
• 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
Foucauldian conceptual frameworks on:
•Docile bodies: Why do bodies become docile ?
•Consumers as Prisoners: Why do consumers totally
lose their freedom?
•Facebook, Reality shows & Confessions : Why do
people confess on public media?
•Why and how do you willingly become docile as a
user of Web 1 and 2 albeit you live in a democratic
society?
•http://www.firstpost.com/topic/person/michel-foucault-docile-bodies-vs-college-soccer-video-FERxP_8qmJU-9332-3.html
•9.5 min
Power is no longer the conventional power of
institutions and leaders, but instead the capillary
modes of power that controls individuals and their
knowledge, the mechanism by which power
“reaches into the very grain of individuals,
touches their bodies and inserts itself into their
actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning
processes and everyday lives.” (Foucault,
Power/Knowledge, p. 30)
Foucault ‘s biopower
•It is a technology which appeared in the late eighteenth century for
managing populations.
•It incorporates disciplinary power.
•Disciplinary power is about training the actions of individuals (their
bodies)
•Biopower is that of official organizations (the state or government)
managing the society: births, deaths, reproduction and illnesses of a
population.
•Refer to the practice of modern states and their regulation of their
subjects through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques
for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of
populations.” (Foucault).
Foucault (Discipline and Punish)
Disciplining is the technology of Power:
• Body is monitored in its individual movements for the
economy of motion through constant coercion
To dominate and keep it docile, formal rules are implemented:
• Forcing obedience dissociates power from the body, which
ensures an increasing spiral of obedience and utility (Discipline
& Punish, p.138)
Disciplinary blueprint is established through:
• Controlling a multiplicity of often minor body operations
• Collectively the above continual operations produce a
disciplining blueprint.
Mechanisms of normalization through ‘disciplining the body’:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Surveillance
Surveyed and legitimized
Described, judged, measured
Essentialized
Classified, organized, and labeled
Power/knowledge created by this ‘science’ comes
from statistical analysis and qualitative groupings
made by experts
• Viewed and scrutinized, itemized, measured and
enumerated in data banks
• Very different relationship to space and time and to
existential experience
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Foucault: Biopower constructs a Docile Body
1. Objectified Body
2. Controlled Body
3. Disciplined body
Discipline is the Technology of Power that turns
the body docile.
Repetitive, trained:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfFhuj1VONw
Power shapes bodies into : (Foucault, Michel (1995). Discipline
and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.)
1.Objectified Body
From the Classical age : the body as object, a target of
power - body is manipulated, shaped trained, made to
obey and learn skills & rules - body is used, subjected and
analyzed and manipulated
2. Controlled Body:
Works individually in retail - Coercion is used to shape/
‘improve’ movement, attitudes, gestures; Body’s modes
and economy are tailored for efficient control through
uninterrupted coercion
3. Disciplined body:
The body is disciplined through surveillance and control in
all aspects as to turn it docile. Discipline produces
‘pracitised bodies’ .
1.Objectified Body
From the Classical age : the body as object, a target of power body is manipulated, shaped trained, made to obey and learn
skills & rules - body is used, subjected and analyzed and
manipulated http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdwAoiH7z8c 1 min body tech
Keller (2005):Ab/Normal Looking: Voyeurism and surveillance in lesbian pulp novels and US
Cold War culture, Feminist Media Studies, 5 (2):177-195.
• Popular culture is the space of homogenization - Stereotyping
objectifies the matter, person and experience
• Voyeurism controls the private, the sexual – Surveillance
controls the public, the criminal, and political.
• Bond & Playboy - Gaze, the voyeuristic eye, coding woman as
its object
[Popular culture is] the space of homogenization where stereotyping and the formulaic
mercilessly process the material and experiences it draws into its web ... It is rooted in
popular experience and available for expropriation at one and the same time ... [A]ll
popular cultures ... are] bound to be contradictory ... site[s] (pp. 469-70) of strategic
contestation. (Stuart Hall 1996, )
2. Controlled Body: (Foucault) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkOo7uJ9Y-s
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Works individually in retail - Coercion is used to shape/
‘improve’ movement, attitudes, gestures; Body’s modes and
economy are tailored for efficient control through
uninterrupted coercion
Keller (2005):
Coercion through voyeurism:
• Voyeurism in popular culture serves as a method for the
dominant culture to control the Other
• Voyeurism is also a desire to identify with the Other while
simultaneously desiring to guard the boundary between self
and Other
• Inscribing the self : The gaze controls and punishes: We
“come to know how we are constituted and who we are“
through the way we represent and imagine ourselves
• Desires are both satiated and punished
3. Disciplined body:
The body is disciplined through surveillance and control
in all aspects as to turn it docile. Discipline produces
‘pracitised bodies’
Disciplining a result of :
Media systematically objectifies bodies – the public are
socialized to assume an outsider’s view of their body.
They learn to objectify themselves. Thus, surveillance
and monitoring their appearance becomes a habit (“body
Surveillance”) (Aubrey, 2006)
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