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Foucault Docile Bodies Summary
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Foucault Docile Bodies Summary Required Reading for CS 5181v4CSY
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Power and Space in Political Geography
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Reading: Foucault - Docile BodiesPage 179:
He begins by contrasting two ideals of the soldier in different historical periods. At the
beginning of the seventeenth century, under the Ancien Régime, an excellent soldier was
someone who could display his superior, martial physique as an immovable object. A soldier
could be recognised from miles away by widely shared characteristics, as they could not fail
to be strong and aggressive.
At the time of the Enlightenment, the individual body was discovered as an object and target
of power; the body could be made more skilful and effective. This technically mutable body
was considered more important than one of unprepared 'natural' strength and good 'blood'.
Page 180:
Returning to the example of de La Mettrie’s Man-the-Machine (L’Homme-machine),
Foucault argues that the body can be manufactured, meaning that the body is an object that
can be ‘manipulated, shaped, trained, and which obeys, responds, becomes skilful and
increases its forces’. This works through two registers:
1. The anatomico-metaphysical register: Seeks to detail the body’s functions.
2. Technico-political register: Which uses calculations and quantifications, mainly
gathered from armies, schools and hospitals, to make bodies submissive and
controllable.
These two registers of the body as object of study (= an analysable body) on the one hand,
and the manipulable body on the other hand form the project of ‘docility’. These two
registers explain that the body must first be made submissive and docile before it can be
‘subjected, used, transformed and improved’.
Page 181:
Discipline is made up by various methods, which combine the practical and theoretical
attempts to make the body both docile and more useful:
1. The scale of control: Instead of trying to make large groups, or populations
submissive (as a conquering nation might with a colonized one), ‘docility’ works on
the smaller scale of individuals.
2. The object of control: Not the body’s messages or representations, but its forces and
dynamics.
a. The body is not meant to ‘signify’, as it was in the age of punishment, but to be
‘economic’; it must be made efficient and trained through exercise.
3. Modality: Docility creates a mode of total supervision, where the individual faces an
‘uninterrupted, constant coercion’ through the new use of ‘time, space, movement’,
which are segmented into smaller units, and ‘the processes of the activity’ are even
more important than ‘its result’.
Discipline is not like the traditional form of slavery, because the latter takes violent command
of the whole body: discipline works more subtly; it does not appropriate the entire body (as
would torture) and consequently does not require as much muscular force as a slave-owner
must dispense.
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