Disciplining the Body*

1. Disciplining the Body* Michel Foucault

2. Biography • Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984) • Studied/integrated philosophy, psychology, and history. • Studied at the prestigious École Normale Supérièure. • Worked in a psych. hospital, and was a critic of psychiatric methods. • Participated in the Paris student riots as a professor (1968), and helped students occupy admin. buildings as well as battle police. • A rebel against social mores, he was openly gay (his life-long partner was Daniel Defert) and into bondage, BDSM, and drugs. • Became a famous academic and traveled to other countries, including the U.S. (especially Berkeley). • Participated in gay culture in San Francisco, and ultimately died of an AIDS-related illness in 1984. • Foucault is famous for his critiques of various social institutions (prisons and schools) and concepts (madness and sexuality). • Key figure in the philosophies of as structuralism and post-structuralism (which turn away from the subject-/ consciousness- centered thought of phenomenology/existentialism).

3. Discipline and Punish • “Long ago, historians started describing the history of the body…They have shown the extent to which historical processes have been implicated in what could be seen as the purely biological base of existence.” • Here, Foucault is introducing what he calls the “genealogy of the body” or “bio-politics.” Given your understanding of genealogy, what might this mean: a genealogy of the body? • The study of how bodies are created, shaped, controlled, and disciplined by society/culture throughout history. Indeed, how social surveillance and punishment create who we are. • This might include taking account of anything from how a government provides its citizen’s bodies with medicine (to help them survive and remain instruments of commercial production), to how different societies have constructed (i.e., described) the body differently and used various concepts/discourses to create what the body “is.” • Let us first, then, do a little genealogy of genealogy…

4. Discipline and Punish • Genealogy (as a philosophical method) is traceable to Nietzsche. Indeed, Foucault said unequivocally: “I am a Nietzschean…” • Nietzsche argued that certain concepts and practices, which seem to have naturalistic or divine origins, are actually human creations constructed throughout history—people have just forgotten this (or purposely effaced this fact). • In his On the Genealogy of Morals, for example, Nietzsche argues that the concepts of conscience, guilt, and Judeo-Christian morality have a human origin and a human history. • For example, Nietzsche counters the historical-religious supposition that conscience and guilt are the voice of God, claiming rather that these concepts are the by-products of ancient notions about debt. • He also argues that Judeo-Christian morality (which values meekness, pity, and turning the other cheek) is the product of slaves who were too powerless to operate by an ethic of strength. • What do you think about these arguments or this historical method?

5. Discipline and Punish • Political Technology of the Body: • “[T]he body is directly immersed in a political field; relationships of power have an immediate grip on it.” • “[I]t is, for the most part, as a force of production [i.e., labor-power] that the body is invested with relationships of power and domination.” • Which philosopher is Foucault likely influenced by here? • The body’s “constitution as a force of labor is possible only if it is caught in a system of subjugation…” • “This subjugation is not obtained solely by…violence or ideology…It maybe calculated/[subtle]…[T]here may be a ‘knowledge’ of the body that is not exactly the science of its functioning…[A] political technology of the body.” • What does Foucault mean by “political technology?” What types of violent, ideological, or “subtle” forces control our bodies?

6. Discipline and Punish • The Microphysics of Power: • Technologies that control the body are “diffuse,” “rarely systematic,” “one cannot localize [them],” but they have “coherent results.” • It seems therefore, rather than arguing that an evil corporate machine is responsible for the subjugation of our bodies (for labor-production), this subjugation originates from multiple sites and is disorganized, but still is successful. • “[O]ne must acknowledge that this power is exercised rather than possessed, that it is not the acquired or preserved ‘privilege’ of the dominant class…this power is not enforced purely and simply…on those who ‘do not have it’… it invests them, passes by them and through them.” • What does Foucault mean here? What kind of distinction does he wish to draw between a Marxist conception of power/subjugation that is only “top-down” versus one that is multiple, disorganized, yet all-pervasive? • “Juridical” Conception of Power: power is used by the strong, rich, etc… • Nietzschean “Will to Power”: power-relations permeate all reality… • What do you think of Foucault’s description? Is it accurate/useful?

7. Discipline and Punish • “Power-Knowledge”-Discourse: • “Perhaps we should also entirely renounce a tradition which lets us imagine that knowledge can only exist where the relations of power are suspended and that knowledge can only develop outside of its injunctions, requirements, and interests.” • What does Foucault mean here? • “Power and knowledge directly implicate one another.” • All fields of inquiry: religion, science, philosophy, etc, are governed not by disinterested viewers/”objective pursuits.” There are always interests, agendas, desires (power) at work. • Consider this classroom: 1.) The instructor relates knowledgeto the students. 2.) The instructor is a site of powerin disseminating this knowledge because it is “his” interpretations, “his” choice of texts, etc. 3.) This “power-knowledge” is disseminated in the form of discourse: textbooks, assignments, films, lectures, exams, etc… • Do you agree with Foucault’s model? Why or why not?

8. Discipline and Punish • Political Bodies: • For Foucault, part of what it means to exist within a matrix of power-knowledge-discourse, is that we are surrounded by signs. These signs signify certain relations of power. • For example, the “body of the king” is not simply a human body that is born and dies. It is an “iconography, a political theory of monarchy…the demands of the crown, as well as an entire [set of] ritual[s].” • Moreover, these signs/discourses surrounding the king are not simply “what he symbolizes,” but, indeed, made him what he is. The network of signs and symbols was there prior to the existence of that specific king—he merely assumed their mantle and they operate through him. • The “least body of the condemned man” is no different. He symbolizes the “lack of power” that characterizes the punished. In both cases, though, the discourse/language that surrounds the individual has made him who his is—has created his “soul.” • What questions do you have about Foucault’s argument?

9. Discipline and Punish • Foucault’s Conception of the “Soul”: • Foucault’s understanding of a “soul,” of course, is quite different from the Platonic-Christian understanding of the soul as an immaterial substance that survives death (what Foucault calls “the illusion of the theologians”). • For Foucault, the “soul” is the creation of certain processes of socio-political power. The “soul” is the “correlative of a certain technology of power on the body.” • The “soul” is the element by which individual bodies in society are controlled and made instruments of production, and through which individuals (as psyches, subjectivities, personalities, egos, consciousnesses, etc) are created. • For Foucault, who one is (one’s personality, ego, psyche, etc) is the product of social power as it “surveils” and “disciplines.” • Do you agree or disagree with this characterization?

10. Discipline and Punish • “The soul exists; it has a reality. It is produced permanently—around, on the surface of, and within the interior of the body—by the functioning of a power that is exerted on those who are punished, and, in a more general way, on those who are watched, who are trained, and corrected, on madmen, children, students, the colonized, those who are fastened to the machinery of production and who are supervised for the reminder of their lives.” • Therefore, “[the soul] is born from procedures of punishment, of surveillance, of chastisement and constraint.” • What might Foucault mean by these remarks, and do you agree with his description? • In other words, “the soul” (the self, ego, subject, I, consciousness, mind, etc) is created through a type of generalized punishment. What might this mean, though?

11. Discipline and Punish • The Psychic Life of Power: • How, then, is the “soul” born through a kind of generalized punishment? Consider the following events: • 1.) A young girl’s parents tell her to “always act like a lady.” • 2.) A student is told to keep his eyes on his own exam. • 3.) A factory worker is told that his supervisor is going to fire him if he catches him leaving his post. • 4.) Someone sees a man on television who was dragged to death behind a truck for having a lover of the same sex. • 5.) Your mother slaps your hand, and tells you to put back the item that you took off the shelf and put in your jacket. • Each of these events creates a “psychic life”— and from now on, these individuals will “hear” a voice “inside” his or her head prohibiting certain actions. Eventually, the individual will come to “surveil” themselves… • The sum of this self-surveillance constitutes the “soul.”

12. Discipline and Punish • In the piece, Foucault mentions prisoners specifically (and, indeed, one central argument of Discipline and Punish is that everyone is a “prisoner” of social normativity; thus, consider Foucault’s famous discussion of the Panopticon. • The Panopticon was a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham, where every cell was constantly being watched by a guard tower in the middle of the jail. • Taking into account the examples discussed so far, why would Bentham think that the Panopticon would lead to good prison behavior? What does this have to do with the internalizations (and self-monitoring) that constitute one’s “soul” for Foucault? • What might be other examples of this phenomenon? • An omniscient God (one who knows everything and sees all). • Religious confessions (because it forces a person to scan his or her memory for transgressions—and then future transgressions of the same type are monitored).

13. Discipline and Punish • To sum up, then, our “psychic lives,” i.e., conscience, our personalities, egos, minds, selves, consciousnesses, in short, our “souls” are constructed by (are a product of) social power. For Foucault, everything “you” are has been manufactured/fabricated. • This is why Foucault writes that in reference to this phenomenon of the “soul,” “diverse concepts have been built…psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, and so on.” What we once believed was our ownmost unique essence was merely the by-product of social discipline and normativity. • Moreover, what was once considered the voice of God in one’s soul is now interpreted as “an effect and instrument of a political anatomy, the soul is the prison of the body.” • Note: Because “we” are created by social power, “we” can never escape social power. Otherwise, “we” wouldn’t exist. This is why, for Foucault, to be a “subject” means to be subjectedtopower—not to be a free, autonomous, Enlightenment subject. To be “liberated” from one subjugation means only to find another. • What does Foucault mean by the above Platonic inversion? What do you think about Foucault’s arguments as a whole?

14. Homework • Please answer the following questions in your homework journals: • Page 68: • 2.), 3.), 4.), 5.) • “The man whom we are invited to liberate, is already himself the effect of a subjugation much more profound than him.” – Michel Foucault