Foucault’s ‘Docile Body’

1. Foucault’s ‘Docile Body’

2. 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 THRS • http://www.firstpost.com/topic/person/michel-foucault-docile-bodies-vs-college-soccer-video-FERxP_8qmJU-9332-3.html

3. 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…”

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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)

7. 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

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

9. 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

10. 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)

11. 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).

12. 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.

13. 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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzV-kebFtAo- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAZqEQigPXE 1.Teen (7 min) and 2. Child plastic surg gift card (5min)

14. 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

15. 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’ .

16. 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, )

17. 2. Controlled Body: (Foucault) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkOo7uJ9Y-s • Total Body Makeover with Dr. Grant Stevens 5 min • 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

18. 3. Disciplined body: The body is disciplined through surveillance and control in all aspects as to turn it docile. Discipline produces ‘pracitisedbodies’ 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) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8D-6Xm6RTA plastic surg extreme makeover 9 min