Docile Bodies & Kafka

The term docile bodies was developed by French social theorist Michel Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish to help understand a shift in the way that power was exercised over subjects/citizens beginning at the end of the 17th century. Instead of a violent taming of what might be called the “wild body” of the deviant, institutions and practices of social control undertook practices aimed at observing, documenting, and cultivating reflective, penitent, and, most important, self-regulating subjects. Foucault's Discipline and Punish is fundamentally an account of the way power shifted 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 compliance and active participation of the subject. 

Foucault uses Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, his design of a jail as a metaphor for the way discipline functions in this way.

See Lecture on Docile Bodies by Fr. Louis David.

Education, Medicine & other disciplines: "In organizing "cells," "places" and "ranks," the disciplines create complex spaces that are at once architectural, functional and heirarchical. . . . They are mixed spaces: real, because they govern the disposition of buildings, rooms, furniture, but also the ideal, because they are projected over the arrangement of characterizations, assessments, heirarchies" (82)

1. Enclosure. "Discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space. To this end it employs several techniques." (78) "Discipline sometimes requires enclosure" (78). 
2. Partitioning. "Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual. Avoid distributions in groups, break up collective dispositions" "Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed"  (79)
   
3. Coding of Space (The rule of functional sites): "Particular places were defined to correspond not only to the need to supervise, to break dangerous communication, but also to create a useful space." (79) It must be a filter, a mechanism that pins down and partitions; it must provide a hold over this whole mobile, swarming mass, by dissipating the confusion of illegality and evil" (80) "Spread out in a perfectly legibile way over the whole series of individual bodies, the work force may be analyzed as individual units. At the emergence of large-scale industry, one finds,. . . the individualizing fragmentation of labor power" (80)
4. "The unit is . . .the rank: the place one occupies in a classification, the point at which a line and a column intersect, the interval in a series of intervals that one may traverse one after another" (80-81).

The control of activity:

1. The time table. "In three great methods--establish rhythms, impose particular occupations, regulate the cycles of repetition--were soon to be found in schools, workshops, and hospitals"  (82).
   
2. The temporal elaboration of the act. There are, for example two ways of controlling marching troups. . ."  --e.g. from the drum to "four types of steps"
   
3. The correlation of the body and the gesture: "it imposes the best relation between a gesture and the overall position fo the body which is its condition o efficiency and speed. . . . nothing must remain idle or useless. . . A well-disciplined body forms the operational context of the slightest gesture. Good handwriting, for example. . ." (84)
   

1. The body-object articulation: Discipline defines each of the relations that the body must have with the object that it manipulates. " (84)
   
2. Exhaustive use: "the principle of non-idleness" (85).
   

"The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power. It is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body--to the body that is manipulate, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces" (76).

"The great book of Man-the-Machine was written simultaneously on two registers: the anatomico-metaphysical register, of which Descartes wrote the first pages and which the physicians and philosophers continued, and the technico-political register, which was constituted by a whole set of regulations and by empirical and calculated methods relating to the army, the school, and the hospital for controlling or correcting the operations of the body" (76)

"These two registers are quite distinct, since it was a question, on the one hand of submission and use and, on the other, of functioning and explanation: there was a useful body and an intelligible body" (76)

For instance, see how to treat menapause, from a 1953 video for doctors

"A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved" (76).

The “production of 'docile bodies' requires coercive attention to be paid to the smallest details of the body's functioning, partitioning its time and space ...

A sort of anatomo-chronological schema of behaviour is defined. The act is broken down into its elements; the position of the body, limbs, articulations is defined; to each movement are assigned a direction, an aptitude, a duration; their order of succession is prescribed. Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power. ( 152)
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Foucault discusses the "subtle coercion" that controls and disciplines the modern body, effectively creating subjects of the disciplinary institutions (schools, armies, hospitals) that  regulate "movements, gestures, attitudes , rapidity: an infinitesimal power over the active body" (76). shaping thought and controlling bodies.  "Discipline," for Foucault refers to a modes of knowledge which utilize coercive, yet hard to see, techniques that control and regulate bodily movements. These techniques are present in such institutions as mental hospitals, schools, military camps, prisons, and factories.


WRITING ASSIGNMENT: Due Wednesday April 2
Requirements: One page single-spaced (plus sketch)

Explore Foucautl's argument about the techniques of bodily control by considering the way specific (institutional) architectural spaces function as an aspect of this kind of institutional discipline, creating "docile bodies".

• Consider specifically how they situate bodies, induce or suggest certain movements, actions, events or practices. 
• What implicit limits do they place on the body and what kind of movements do they induce in its occupants. 
• Pick a place to analyze: Your studio, the classroom, a section of Higgins, your dorm or dorm room, the campus itself, any other space you can observe quickly and easily without too much effort. 
•  Notice how bodies move within these spaces: the paths they follow, the places they go or don't go, the kinds of activities that go on and how they suggest disciplinary mechanisms and docile bodies. 
• What power relations are revealed in the architecture you are analyzing and the way people move/ inhabit it? Do they differ from those described by Foucault? 

Guidelines: In this assignment, you should choose a place to analyze. Examples include: your studio, dorm, a store, some other Pratt building or school, a dining hall, the computing center, an administrative office, a gym, or a library. Whatever you pick, make it easily accessible so you can sketch and observe without much effort.

• To frame your analysis, please  diagram or describe in detail the physical structures of your chosen place: doors, windows, counters, walls, partitions, lights, tables, etc. 
• Then observe how people move through the space. 
•  Are there spaces that are off-limits to some? Why? How does the space imply a way of differentiating between and organizing people? How is access to the space obtained (not just physically, but in terms of privileges, membership in a community, etc.) How are the activities which occur within that space directed? Are individuals working together collectively, in smaller groups, or alone? What are they doing, what kinds of motions are involved, and how do these seem shaped by the space or by the individuals who seem to manage the space? Are there individuals or groups who seem to be doing something different from what the space or its creators intend? Your journal entry should include a rough diagram of the space and a one-page single spaced response analyzing the space in terms of Foucault.