Michel Foucault
Docile Bodies
Context:
A French philosopher, Foucault is known for his critical studies of various social institutions, most
notably psychiatry, medicine, parameters of educational timeframes, and the prison system, and also for
his work on the history of sexuality. His work concerning power and the relation between power and
knowledge, as well as his ideas concerning "discourse" in relation to the history of Western thought, have
been widely discussed and applied. His work is often described as postmodernist or post-structuralist by
commentators and critics; during the 1960s, however, he was more often associated with the structuralist
movement.
Influences on Foucault's work:
Louis Althusser — French structuralist Marxist philosopher and Foucault's sometime teacher and mentor.
Roland Barthes — French (post) structuralist literary critic who was at one time very close to Foucault.
Georges Bataille — French Nietzschean political and aesthetic philosopher.
Maurice Blanchot — Literary critic and novelist whose views on non polemical critique had a strong
impact on Foucault
Georges Canguilhem — French historian of science.
Gilles Deleuze — French philosopher. A great friend and ally of Foucault's in the early 1970s.
Georges Dumézil — French structuralist mythologist, known for his reconstruction of Indo-Aryan
mythology.
Martin Heidegger — German philosopher whose influence was enormous in post-war France. Foucault
rarely referred to him, but called him 'the essential philosopher'.
Immanuel Kant — German philosopher regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern
Europe and the last major philosopher of the Enlightenment.
Karl Marx — Marx's influence in French intellectual life was dominant from 1945 through to the late
1970s. Foucault often opposed unthinking forms of Marxist ideology, but was not adverse to referring to
Marx's own work on occasion.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty — French philosopher. Phenomenologist instrumental in popularising Saussure's
structuralism for a philosophical audience.
Friedrich Nietzsche — German philosopher whose work greatly influenced Foucault's conception of
society and power. Towards the end of his life, Foucault stated quite categorically: "I am a Nietzschean".
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault)1
“Docile Bodies,” comes from the larger work Discipline and Punish, in which Foucault argues that
individuals are under constant surveillance and regulation in ways that are often subtle and thereby
seemingly invisible, leading to normalization and acceptance of such systems.
Claim:
In this essay Foucault focuses on the body specifically as the sight of regulation, or more specifically “as
object and target of power” (136) historically. The notion of ‘docility’—the point at which “the
analyzable body and the manipulable body” are joined—is employed to illustrate how individuals within
their bodies are subjected to institutional regulation (136). He continues by stating that “A body is docile
that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (136). Bodies are spatially enclosed, partitioned,
and ranked so as to maintain “order and discipline.” Foucault illustrates how this subjugation of the body
is ordered, asserting that out of discipline bodies are endowed with four characteristics which utilize four
techniques of disciplinary practice as charted below.
1
Remember that authorship on Wikipedia is questionable and therefore information should be verified from other
sources before taking it at face value.
Characteristics of
Individuality
Cellular—
Spatial manipulation of the
body
Organic—Coded activities
that are temporally established
for the body to follow
Genetic—Accumulation of
time constituting ‘progress.’
Combinatory—Composition
of forces to attain efficiency.
Techniques Employed
Examples
Draw up tables
Cells, places, and ranks
Prescribe movements and
schedules
Time-tables, monastic rituals,
and following recipes
Impose exercises
Dictation, Homework, and
Drills
“Knowledge of men, weapons,
tensions, circumstances...”
Arranges ‘tactics’
Quotes for Consideration
“Discipline is an art of rank, a technique for the transformation of
arrangements. It individualizes bodies by a location that does not give them
a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of
relations.” (146)
“The individual body becomes an element that may be placed, moved,
articulated on others.” (146)
 “Discipline is no longer simply an art of distributing bodies, of extracting time from them and
accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine.” (164)
 “The disciplinary methods revial a linear time whose moments are integrated, one upon another,
and which is oriented towards a terminal, stable point; in short, an ‘evolutive’ time.” (160)
 “These two great ‘discoveries’ of the eighteenth century—the progress of societies and the
geneses of individuals—were perhaps correlative with the new techniques of power, and more
specifically, with a new way of administering time and making it useful, by segmentation,
seriation, synthesis and totalization. “ (160)
Thoughts & Questions:
 How does this relate to trauma studies?
 The strategic spatialization of bodies makes me think of MAUS and how the space, and lack of
space, was used to “control and keep order.” How does the concept of controlling bodies through
spatialization exist in other forms of trauma and violence we are considering?
 Abuses and violence perpetrated on the body can be considered violations of the normalized
personal space a given society has allotted each body, as if to take away a certain amount of space
or dominate and/or enter another’s space forcefully. How do we use Foucault to look at violence
and assault on the body?
 Foucault points to the importance of temporal units in constituting bodies—How does this view
of temporality relate to our previous discussions?