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The fluidity of the military: a post-structural approach to institutions, power and bodies

The fluidity of the military: a post-structural approach to institutions, power and bodies. Pamela Moss Studies in Policy & Practice and Michael J. Prince Lansdowne Professor of Social Policy April 9, 2010. Our research project. SSHRC study on “weary warriors”

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The fluidity of the military: a post-structural approach to institutions, power and bodies

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  1. The fluidity of the military: a post-structural approach to institutions, power and bodies Pamela Moss Studies in Policy & Practice and Michael J. Prince Lansdowne Professor of Social Policy April 9, 2010

  2. Our research project • SSHRC study on “weary warriors” • Psychologically wounded soldiers during combat • A triad of discourses: psychiatry, the military, and masculinity • Time frame: 19th century to early 21st century • Theoretical entrée: post-structural and feminist • Method: documentary-historical • Sources: medical and military journals, novels, autobiographies, diaries, social science literature, hospital records, policy papers, popular movie genre, unpublished theses

  3. Some of our research questions • How do material bodies and bodily discourses of individual lives constitute the subjectivity of weary warriors? • How is illness taken up by different configurations of power/knowledge over time? • How are distinctions between the well soldier and the ill soldier established and enacted? • How do soldiers find support institutionally within and outside the military as well as collectively as veterans with ill bodies?

  4. Our focus today • How does a post-structural approach look at the military? • What did Foucault say about the military and soldiers? • What in Foucault’s work is useful for our research project and questions? • What may be problematic in his work for our purposes? • In sum, how might we bring into play Foucault?

  5. A post-structural approach to military institutions • Moving off an institutional-centric view • Questioning the conventional image of militaries as stable, closed and formal • Challenging the concept of soldiers as docile bodies • Looking for fluid identities, practices and relationships associated with domains of knowledge

  6. Foucault on militaries • Awesome forces of the sovereign • Large destructive mechanisms • Precise systems of command • Disciplinary institutions • A technique and a body of knowledge • The intermediary between war and civil society

  7. Foucault on soldiers and subjectivity • Militaries invest in bodies, mark them, train and command them • Discipline as composing forces to obtain an efficient machine • Soldiers as “docile bodies” – the object and target of power: manipulated by selection/screening, indoctrination and training, authority practices

  8. Problems with Foucault • Never saw the military as an apparatus in and of itself with people and processes • Heavy emphasis on official practices and systems of discipline • Bodies produced are static and monolithic • Little room for agency or resistance by soldiers who are docile bodies • Distinction between the body and soul/psyche underdeveloped and not applied to military contexts

  9. Possibilities with Foucault • Foucault also wrote of people as living, thinking beings (suggestive of soldiers as active, interpretive subjects) • Normalization as a process of creating and applying knowledge organized around certain standards and types (human sciences) • Subjugated knowledge: the silent, the overlooked, below the surface • Consider wider historical processes within which military institutions and practices actually operate

  10. Fluidity: a post-structural image • Lacking definite shape – not the usual image of a military • Smooth, nimble, graceful – in a ceremonial and spectacle sense, and in covert and strategic operations • Adaptable, flexible – in tension with command and control system, although recognized in part in notion of tactics and contingency plans • Unstable, randomness – the unspoken and ignored meaning as it applies to the military: the weary warriors

  11. Next steps in our project We plan to explore and examine: • Diagnosis as a disciplining process via categorization of bodily sensations • Treatment as the regulation of bodies by attempting the return to normal • Militarization and psychiatrization as processes that produce soldiers’ bodies as ill • Life after the military

  12. Thank you • Questions? • Comments? • Suggestions?

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