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Right to death: subtraction of one’s power Right to life: production of power

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

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Right to death: subtraction of one’s power Right to life: production of power

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  1. 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

  2. Judith Butler: • http://www.egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/articles/foucault-and-the-paradox-of-bodily-inscriptions/ • 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, middle-class) 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.

  3. Truth is produced by institutions and by scientific discourses formulated in relation to these institutions • The state’s (or any organized) dominant economic and political structures control the production and transmission of the truth • We assume it is truth when it becomes ‘hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history’ • http://jamintoo.multiply.com/recipes/item/70?&show_interstitial=1&u=%2Frecipes%2Fitem • F’s Genealogy’s role: • to connect different events according to ‘the emergence of different interpretations’ • to explain these different interpretations as a ‘perspective’ rather than a universal or transcendental truth. • Foucault utilizes genealogy to figure out the various practices applied on the body and the dominating powers that produce such practices.

  4. 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 labourand organizing ranks & classes as units of production- Marx, Capital, vol. 1. 311-12) (Hierarchical Isolation) • COG-D of L THIERS • http://www.firstpost.com/topic/person/michel-foucault-docile-bodies-vs-college-soccer-video-FERxP_8qmJU-9332-3.html

  5. Source: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/docile-bodies see examples on blogs • 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…”

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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 LHierarchical Isolation)

  9. How media makes you a commodity: Graduates ‘essentialized’ as earning machines September 22, 2011

  10. 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

  11. Olivieri: Corporate profit vs. ethical research Exercise of Disciplinary power by Hierarchical Isolation

  12. 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

  13. 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)

  14. F’ s Savoir and Connaissance : • Savoir: (what we call real knowledge) • To know or to be known – to know as well as knowledge • e.g., a theorem, a continent, an atom, • It can be quite abstract or concrete • Such knowledge is not genuine if its object is nonexistent or false • It need not be the product of a reliable method or pedagogy • It need not be precise or fully justified • It can fall short of proof—a domain not of things known but of things to be known • Connaissance: relatively superficial mode of knowledge, • Grounded in incomplete information or incomplete research or knowledge of minimal degree • It could only be translated as cognition or learning or a body of learning or expertise • Tied to highly developed apparatuses of justification , modes of competence supported by well-crystallized apparatuses of background training. • A cognitive state is an effect of power

  15. 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).

  16. Humphreys, A (2007): • Foucault’s examples of power/knowledge at work in mechanisms of discipline cf. in the science of marketing. Marketers’ use Internet tools to discipline consumers by individuating, surveying, and legitimizing their preferences • Documentation of every individual • Essentialize them using their past and present preferences to diagnosing future tendencies (psychoanalyst has expertise, “knowledge claim”, and thus power over his patient) • Mechanism of individuation by “wish list” i.e., consumer identity (classifying, organizing, and labeling them) for marketing analysis • Consumers living in our narcissistic culture want to be watched. Not paranoids as being seen in the Panopticon • In image culture, the embeddedness of the gaze i.e., gaze is internalized by controlling how consumers themselves see • Consumer insists that he then can reason and resist, e.g. Illegalities: Pilfering Versus File Sharing these forms of resistance from within occur in the form of practice, i.e.,ethics rather than morals.

  17. Foucault: Biopower constructs a Docile Body • Objectified Body • Controlled Body • Disciplined body • Discipline is the Technology of Power that turns the body docile. • Repetitive, trained: • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfFhuj1VONw

  18. Power shapes bodies into : (Foucault, Michel (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.) • 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’ .

  19. 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 • 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, )

  20. 2. Controlled Body: (Foucault) • 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

  21. 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)

  22. 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.

  23. 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

  24. Kelly, P. et al (2007): Individualization, Normalization & Body shaped by knowledge/power • F’s ethical self formation through diversity of conduct: • Determination of ethical substance • Mode of subjection • Ethical work • Purpose of the ethical subject • A ‘Corporate Athlete’: normalized body; health of the body over the role of the mind; profile score of body fitness; corporate health is linked to employees’ health; freedom/ethics of self is practiced in pursuit of management devised (outsourced) goals; one becomes such a person through the discursive practices: being balanced, effective, regular.

  25. F’s Ethical self: F’s themes for Plagiarism/cheating Advanced Capitalist society: cut-throat competition, insecurities and uncertainties in the workplace. ‘Individualized’ worker/citizen: They have to exercise/practice their freedom in specific ways that conforms to the expectation of the market place F’s term ‘Conduct’: equivocal in nature- is it conformity to power as it suits one’s purpose or is it questioned as unethical Character (Sennett, R. (1998) cited in Kelly (2007)): loyalty, mutual commitment, ethical value of our desires and of our relations with others. How do we decide what is of lasting value in ourselves in a society that pushes immediate gratification? F’s process of formation of an ethical self.

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