Lec1203.06

Foucault Docile Bodies (see Reader)

  • Biopower what talks a lot about in sexuality book, how people are concerned with treating themselves as organisms as to enhance their flourishing
  • Always interested in what types of products can change is to docile bodies – done through means of discipline
  • Common features of biopower and docile bodies are the features that you are optimizing something or another
  • Getting most out of own possibilities – post-modern technicity – some of possibilities is what can do with body and others with mind, biopower is what you can do to yourself as an organism, “what is the right thing to eat in order to flourish”
  • Moments in which practices all switch around, “leap in the wings from central stage”
  • Heidegger and Foucault both think practices around margins
  • Talking about history of the making of docile bodies, of disciplinary powers; “The ‘invention’ of this new political anatomy…produce the blueprint of a general method…”(45, 138)
  • Finally become method for organizing secondary education, military, and so forth  then do this big leap from wings to center stage; until then said these secondary things were developed to address needs rather than general and essential transformations, dominant kinds of power
  • When become subjects, become people of desire
  • Foucault doesn’t like talking about obvious cases that Heidegger likes talking about
  • Could have said the following, how we became people defined by our desires, idea is that “Hebrews had practically nothing like this, people of law and responsible for what you did. If you did something wrong by the law, guilty and punished by the law, and that’s that. Jesus comes along and commits adultery by lusting for a woman in his heart, makes life extremely difficult because makes lots of people guilty. Have to have marginal practices and 10% of Hebrews practices were about their desires and 90% were actions under law. Jesus flips around, issue is not even desiring what the law says not to do, can’t do that until become pure as long as add “if desires are what defines you.” With the other 90% of law, Jesus says that’s okay and goes about healing people on Sabbath; 90% inner on desire and 10% on lawful actions.”
  • Picture of what Foucault and Heidegger think what happens, behind this paragraph where there are minor changes and get into particular domains and then something happens and something emerges that was important that wasn’t before; sudden change, Foucault is famous for thinking there are these radical breaks and switchovers of disciplinary biopowers
  • Central transformation, essential techniques, “These were always meticulous, often minute, …” (45, 139); once it becomes central starts taking in more and more into its practices
  • One of real bad thing about Heidegger is that takes in more and more until everything has to be efficient and what not
  • Everything gets normalized, to normalize have to have sense of normal and where unnomralized falls
  • Modern power, which is monarchal power or nation/legal power, comes from top down, is centralized, intermittent, highly visible, stable; now comes this peculiar power and it’s disciplinary power of technicity, biopower is bottom up, continuous, operating in micro practices, constantly in move colonizing new domains
  • Modern power comes before biopower, modern is like subjects and objects and approaches tipping point where goes other way, state doesn’t really have power, looks like it does but what really has power is practices with efficiency and discipline and so forth, on the level on which our lives are directed, it’s the people like Taylor who are directing our lives
  • For both Heidegger and Foucault, modern covers everything from Descartes on and since Descartes is very different than technicity story, wanted to put subject/object under Descartes and keep this “something new” what called technicity
  • Classical Age is 1 – modern technology, subjects, objects, resources
  • Both Foucault and Heidegger have general notion of modern, but also have notion that something very important happened between subject/object story and next stage what we call “technicity” because its got a whole lot of aspects Cartesian story didn’t have – challenging forth, expediting, hyper-expediting – that’s not modern or post-modern
  • First thing is pre-modern and that’s 0
  • Then came the big switch over to what we call modern, and that could be everything from then on, but we made modern just that one level of just digging up resources, treating world as filling station; impose constraints and prohibitions (44, 136)
  • Looking at the body “wholesale” and switchover comes over when start looking at retail (44, 137); when micro-processes start  part of 1
  • 1 is using objects and coercing subjects and world is gigantic filling station, people are sort of unruly crowd trying to keep under control; call it Classical Age (for Heidegger, before technology it’s just pre-technology)
  • Classical Age has all these new elements that sound like part of new thing, but new thing doesn’t start until top of (44, 137) with outright coercion
  • Top of (45, 138), “What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation…subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies…an ‘aptitude’, a ‘capacity’…” like Taylor or can also be like Heidegger with standing reserve
  • Taylor is mostly in level of discipline, which is 2, called it “controlling”  Taylor with minute calculations, and challenging forth, and regulating
  • 1 is definitely modern, 5 is definitely post-modern, 2-4 is intermediary stage, subtypes of something, calling them all “technicity”
  • Central transformation (45, 139) is technicity/discipline
  • Stages of Technology (Revised)

1)Early Modern / Classical Age

2)Meso Modern

  1. Discipline
  2. ExpeditingTechnicity
  3. Hyper-Expediting

3)Post-Modern

  • Made up difference between controlling, regulating to something which seems further we called expediting, to make most efficient, maximum yield at minimized expense
  • Hyper-expediting is stuff about making agribusiness, making something more than optimal, pushing it past normal, making it do something more than it wanted to do, more than optimal view
  • Three different emphasis in the sub-meso modern, but not as big as three major divisions; Taylor fits under one of the subheaders
  • Technicity fits in across (2) and (3), style of bottom two  big break between constant overcoming and stable aptitude and the one right way, but Heidegger calls them all technicity and says there is one big break and that’s between (1) and (2)
  • No subject in (3) if Nietzsche, all kinds of forces in head with different aptitudes that call upon depending on situation, no unified subject; post-modern subject is an oxymoron
  • For Heidegger, starting with Descartes, want to look at subject/object as real fundamental thing whereas for Foucault, subject/object would be subset, one element of this strategy power called discipline but there are other forms of subjectivity going on, subject dispersed in different practices and technologies
  • Analogy with War Tactics
  • Early Modern: US Forces in WWII (clear front line, could walk across it, top/bottom)
  • Meso Modern: (a) Vietnam (discipline came in where everybody had to be soldiers on their own, no clear front line), (b) Gulf (each commander had idea of war and communication was better, could fight in way where everything was hyper-fast), and (c) Afghanistan (everybody speaks Farce, go and have tea with local commanders, everybody trained with every different kind of fighting)
  • Post-Modern: Al Queda (perfect organization for fighting war today, each individual fighter isn’t very good but in methods overall they end up winning because extremely flexible, and can’t see/invisible)
  • War abstraction is leaky when comes to hyper-expediting and post-modern because of lack of nature, in this case all goal oriented around some Islamic message whereas post-modern distinction is this sort of lack in the belief of nature in whatever is standing reserve
  • Al Queda, what their goal is against modernity, rejecting all of modernity and technology but they are using the most post-modern techniques to achieve them
  • Are sort of these various aspects of the sub-stages and sort of overlap, different emphasis with major things that go in there