Docile Bodies

Encyclopedia of CaseStudy Research

Docile Bodies

Contributors: Michael CorbettEditors: Albert J. Mills & Gabrielle Durepos & Elden WiebeBook Title: Encyclopedia of Case Study ResearchChapter Title: "Docile Bodies"Pub. Date: 2010Access Date: February 06, 2014Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.City: Thousand OaksPrint ISBN: 9781412956703Online ISBN: 9781412957397DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412957397.n119Print pages: 316-319

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412957397.n119

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http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412957397.n119The term docile bodies was developed by French social theorist Michel Foucault inhis book Discipline and Punish to help understand a shift in the way that power wasexercised over subjects/citizens beginning at the end of the 17th century. Instead of aviolent taming of what might be called the “wild body” of the deviant, institutions andpractices of social control undertook practices aimed at observing, documenting, andcultivating reflective, penitent, and, most important, self-regulating subjects.

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Foucault's Discipline and Punish is fundamentally an account of the way powershifted in the 17th and 18th centuries away from the external discipline of the body(e.g., torture) toward various forms of internal discipline that involve the complianceand active participation of the subject. Foucault's account begins with a case studydescription of the torture of the criminal Robert-François Damiens to illustrate theapparent brutality and ultimately depict the strangeness of these kinds of practicesto the modern reader. He then goes on to show how the relatively rapid movementaway from these kinds of disciplinary practices toward those of the regulated life ischaracterized by the 19th-century prison. In other words, the development of humaneinstitutions” had less to do with softening the treatment of deviance than with theefficiency and effectiveness of compelling the deviant to develop what Hans Gerth andC. Wright Mills called “internal whips.”

There has been considerable misunderstanding of what Foucault meant by docilebody. Often this is interpreted to mean that bodies are constrained and restrained incontemporary prisons through a kind of brainwashing. This critique misses the centralpoint that the docile body is a productive body in the sense that it is carefully taughthow to appear and how to behave rather than being left in what might be considered a“wild” state only to be brutalized when it gives offense to power. The production of thedocile body in Foucault's analysis is not a body that does not move or that is inactive inany real sense; instead, the docile body is one that is under the control of its possessorin alignment with norms and more or less subtle forms of regulation that are learnedand developed through training rather than through the application of external force.

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The idea of biopower, or control of the body, refers to those knowledges, practices, andtraining regimens that educate the subject about how to appear and act.

The docile body is not marked, broken, or bru-talized; in fact, it is the intact and healthyappearance of the body that has become an embodiment of an important sign of thepower of regulation. Indeed, the regulated body takes on the appearance of whatwe have come to call “healthy” to the extent that regulated bodies are understood asrepresenting the way that people are naturally supposed to be. The regulative movesthat have [p. 316 ↓ ] produced this body are thus obscured as regulation and assignedto nature. Power, then, is applied in multiple and subtle ways by the acting subjectrather than through external means of control that Foucault exemplified in his discussionof torture. We come to desire self-regulation, for example, in exercise regimens, healthliterature and discourses, or through reading gendered men's and women's magazines.Although in Discipline and Punish Foucault used the idea of “normalization” to describethis general phenomenon of control, he later called this disciplinary power by the nameof biopower. Biopower, then, marks an important shift from the application of restrictiveforce to the production of a reflective self. Power, then, is productive, multiple, andsituational rather than coercive, uniform, and centralized. Knowledgeable subjectsinternalize and reproduce through disciplined, thoughtful, practice constructions ofthe self that themselves reflect knowledge about what is proper, correct, educated,sophisticated, and sane.

One of Foucault's most important contributions to social thought is the way in whichhe has demonstrated how conceptions of each of these categories of civility, decorum,propriety, and health are generated discursively as containers of power. He did thisby documenting the rise of new 18th-century institutions such as prisons, modernschools and hospitals, and asylums as spaces in which individuals could be groupednot for control and repression (although his accounts never sugar-coat the repressivefoundation of these institutions) but instead for “correct training” and internalizeddiscipline. Because of its focus on the multiple ways that power is enacted andnegotiated, Foucault's work has generated renewed interest in the social sciences andhumanities in microanalysis and in the power of case studies to illustrate the mundaneproduction of power by ordinary social actors.






Application

Training and surveillance were essential to the process of correct training and theproduction of docile bodies. Although the routines of institutional discipline were keypreoccupations in his early work, Foucault was also very interested in the way thatpower is spatialized. The architectural technology of Bentham's panopticon servedas the principal physical means through which the docile body might be producedand monitored. In this ideal type architecture of control, the inmate of the prison wasremoved from the isolation of the dungeon and placed within the well-lit, totally visiblecell. Each cell in the panopticon was oriented in a circular pattern around the centralguard house in such a way that a single guard could see every part of each individualcell. The body of the prisoner was therefore on display at all times and available forassessment and correction. The ideal prison was renamed penitentiary, a place ofpenitence where the inmate would be taught to reflect and to develop a personalunderstanding of correct behavior and, most important, to adopt the attitude that it ishis or her responsibility to understand and improve. The ultimate goal is an intuitivenormative understanding, not the memorization of rules. This, in a sense, sets the tonefor future humanistic developments such as progressive education that understandschildren as knowledge constructors rather than as receptors, or contemporary visions ofproactive healthcare as the responsibility of each person. Foucault saw each of theseas yet another instance of biopower.

These modern institutions also provided study spaces for nascent disciplines andtheir aligned professional practices, such as psychiatry, psychology, pedagogy,criminology, and social work, to come to know their subjects and generate new anddeeper knowledge about them. In this way the disciplines of the human sciences cameto construct a vision of humanity while at the same time mapping the multiple ways thatindividual social actors could deviate from the idealized human condition.

The new locus of power was thus in the body of the prisoner rather than in theinstruments of physical violence, restraint, and physical control. Rather than disablingthe body through external violence, the body would be controlled from within. In thissense Foucault's work fits in with the work of other social historians, such as theMarxist E. P. Thompson, who studied the cultural changes that were associated with






the transition to market capitalism in Europe. Within the context of a modern societyin which coordinated, productive activity was at the center of the industrial complex,education, broadly understood, became essential to the development of a labor forcethat could be counted on to work regular hours and in tandem with other participants in,for example, factories. The training of the body to work repetitively, automatically, andaccurately became an important component of industrial production and progress. [p.317 ↓ ] It was also crucial to the production of the modern democratic citizen, whosechoices and agency needed to be brought within limits and set toward coordinatedends.

The main difference between Foucault and Marxists in their examination of theproduction of the docile, or disciplined laboring body is the way Foucault conceptualizedideological mechanisms as the locus of power. He saw the production of knowledgeas central to social production and reproduction more generally. Foucault paid littleattention to the way that large-scale economic forces operate in social space. Thisopposed the Marxist-inspired vision of the fundamental or infra-structural importance ofmaterial forces of production which themselves generate ideological forms.

In his later work Foucault became more interested in everyday life practices andthe way that power worked as a productive force to delimit and conceptualize corefeatures of modern self-production. There is an obvious connection here betweenthe proliferation of discourses around the production of the self, the multiple locationsin which self work is done (from prisons and schools to shopping malls, gyms, andspas), and the need for specific micro-case studies of how power works as a distributedand differentiated rather than a centralized phenomenon. This interest in biopowermoved in two directions: (1) toward the constitution and regulation of populations(governmentality) and, simultaneously, (2) toward the intimate self-governance. Hisinterest in biopolitics shifted from the institutional regulation of deviance toward thediscursive production of desire and what he called the “care of the self.” This marked amore fundamental shift inward as Foucault investigated the terrain of normalized humanconduct and the persistent resistance that shapes and reshapes discourse aroundsexuality, intimacy, and self-understanding.

The focus, then, is on the more contemporary preoccupation with the production of thebody as an object of desire, experience, and cultivation. This shift parallels the transition






from the institutional density and power of the state and the productive enterprise(industrial capitalism) that began in the latter part of the 19th century toward theimportance of information, the mass media, network society, and other contemporarychange forces placed under the rubric of the knowledge society. This general approachto social analysis has been enormously influential in recent decades in a variety ofspaces. For instance, Mark Poster analyzed the way that Foucault's work can supportunderstandings of emerging information technologies and the way in which knowledgeis a principal instrument of power. Another example is found in the work of urbansociologist Manuel Castells, who has developed a detailed and profound analysis ofthe way that self-production and identity questions have come to assume a criticalimportance in contemporary societies.

Critical Summary

In the end, Foucault saw no clear escape from the inevitable play of forces and ideasthat institute power at the very center of all social life. Every utopia, every solution,becomes yet another vision that constructs an idealized picture of human natureor correct conduct and at the same time a new set of others, monsters, criminals,and deviants. The idea that power can and should be seen as a productive socialmechanism was revolutionary, and it marked an important turning point in historicalstudies toward microanalysis and social histories of the details of everyday life andmundane institutional practices. Fundamentally, the body is the location of power, andFoucault's concept of the docile body represents one of the first and most influentialways of theorizing the ways in which biopower operates.

An important methodological implication of Foucault's work as well as the work of otherpoststructural theorists is the idea that structural explanations of social institutions andprocesses are inherently oppressive. Because of this attention to microsituations wesee the way that power operates, not as a structural foreclosure but rather as a dynamicprocess of dominant strategy and resistance tactics. In this sense, Foucault's ownbroadly conceived case studies of prisons, asylums, and hospitals demonstrate howthe docile body is never perfectly produced. As he pointed out in an interview in whichhe used the extreme example of the Nazi concentration camps, resistance is alwayspresent and always possible, even in the most oppressive social conditions.






Michael Corbett

http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412957397.n119See also

• Agency• Deconstruction• Discourse Analysis• Governmentality• Poststructuralism• Power/Knowledge

Further Readings

Castells, M. (2004). The information age: Economy, society and culture: Vol. 2. Thepower of identity: Economy, society and culture (2nd ed.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish . New York: Vintage Books.

Gerth, H., & Mills, C. W. (1954). Character and social structure . New York: HarcourtBrace.

Poster, M. (1990). The mode of information: Poststructuralism and social context .Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rabinow, P. (1997). Michel Foucault: Ethics subjectivity and truth. Essential works ofFoucault 1954–1984 . New York: New Press.

Thompson, E. P. (1968). The making of the English working class . Harmondsworth,UK: Penguin. (Original work published 1963)



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