Encyclopedia of Case Study Research

Docile Bodies

Contributors: Michael Corbett Editors: Albert J. Mills & Gabrielle Durepos & Elden Wiebe Book Title: Encyclopedia of Case Study Research Chapter Title: "Docile Bodies" Pub. Date: 2010 Access Date: February 06, 2014 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc. City: Thousand Oaks Print ISBN: 9781412956703 Online ISBN: 9781412957397 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412957397.n119 Print pages: 316-319

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

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

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's account begins with a case study description of the torture of the criminal Robert-Franois Damiens to illustrate the apparent brutality and ultimately depict the strangeness of these kinds of practices to the modern reader. He then goes on to show how the relatively rapid movement away from these kinds of disciplinary practices toward those of the regulated life is characterized by the 19th-century prison. In other words, the development of humane institutions had less to do with softening the treatment of deviance than with the efficiency and effectiveness of compelling the deviant to develop what Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills called internal whips. There has been considerable misunderstanding of what Foucault meant by docile body. Often this is interpreted to mean that bodies are constrained and restrained in contemporary prisons through a kind of brainwashing. This critique misses the central point that the docile body is a productive body in the sense that it is carefully taught how 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 the docile body in Foucault's analysis is not a body that does not move or that is inactive in any real sense; instead, the docile body is one that is under the control of its possessor in alignment with norms and more or less subtle forms of regulation that are learned and 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, and training 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 healthy appearance of the body that has become an embodiment of an important sign of the power of regulation. Indeed, the regulated body takes on the appearance of what we have come to call healthy to the extent that regulated bodies are understood as representing the way that people are naturally supposed to be. The regulative moves that have [p. 316 ] produced this body are thus obscured as regulation and assigned to nature. Power, then, is applied in multiple and subtle ways by the acting subject rather than through external means of control that Foucault exemplified in his discussion of torture. We come to desire self-regulation, for example, in exercise regimens, health literature and discourses, or through reading gendered men's and women's magazines. Although in Discipline and Punish Foucault used the idea of normalization to describe this general phenomenon of control, he later called this disciplinary power by the name of biopower. Biopower, then, marks an important shift from the application of restrictive force to the production of a reflective self. Power, then, is productive, multiple, and situational rather than coercive, uniform, and centralized. Knowledgeable subjects internalize and reproduce through disciplined, thoughtful, practice constructions of the 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 which he has demonstrated how conceptions of each of these categories of civility, decorum, propriety, and health are generated discursively as containers of power. He did this by documenting the rise of new 18th-century institutions such as prisons, modern schools and hospitals, and asylums as spaces in which individuals could be grouped not for control and repression (although his accounts never sugar-coat the repressive foundation of these institutions) but instead for correct training and internalized discipline. Because of its focus on the multiple ways that power is enacted and negotiated, Foucault's work has generated renewed interest in the social sciences and humanities in microanalysis and in the power of case studies to illustrate the mundane production of power by ordinary social actors.

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Application
Training and surveillance were essential to the process of correct training and the production of docile bodies. Although the routines of institutional discipline were key preoccupations in his early work, Foucault was also very interested in the way that power is spatialized. The architectural technology of Bentham's panopticon served as the principal physical means through which the docile body might be produced and monitored. In this ideal type architecture of control, the inmate of the prison was removed from the isolation of the dungeon and placed within the well-lit, totally visible cell. Each cell in the panopticon was oriented in a circular pattern around the central guard house in such a way that a single guard could see every part of each individual cell. The body of the prisoner was therefore on display at all times and available for assessment and correction. The ideal prison was renamed penitentiary, a place of penitence where the inmate would be taught to reflect and to develop a personal understanding of correct behavior and, most important, to adopt the attitude that it is his or her responsibility to understand and improve. The ultimate goal is an intuitive normative understanding, not the memorization of rules. This, in a sense, sets the tone for future humanistic developments such as progressive education that understands children as knowledge constructors rather than as receptors, or contemporary visions of proactive healthcare as the responsibility of each person. Foucault saw each of these as yet another instance of biopower. These modern institutions also provided study spaces for nascent disciplines and their aligned professional practices, such as psychiatry, psychology, pedagogy, criminology, and social work, to come to know their subjects and generate new and deeper knowledge about them. In this way the disciplines of the human sciences came to construct a vision of humanity while at the same time mapping the multiple ways that individual 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 the instruments of physical violence, restraint, and physical control. Rather than disabling the body through external violence, the body would be controlled from within. In this sense Foucault's work fits in with the work of other social historians, such as the Marxist E. P. Thompson, who studied the cultural changes that were associated with
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the transition to market capitalism in Europe. Within the context of a modern society in which coordinated, productive activity was at the center of the industrial complex, education, broadly understood, became essential to the development of a labor force that 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, and accurately became an important component of industrial production and progress. [p. 317 ] It was also crucial to the production of the modern democratic citizen, whose choices and agency needed to be brought within limits and set toward coordinated ends. The main difference between Foucault and Marxists in their examination of the production of the docile, or disciplined laboring body is the way Foucault conceptualized ideological mechanisms as the locus of power. He saw the production of knowledge as central to social production and reproduction more generally. Foucault paid little attention to the way that large-scale economic forces operate in social space. This opposed the Marxist-inspired vision of the fundamental or infra-structural importance of material forces of production which themselves generate ideological forms. In his later work Foucault became more interested in everyday life practices and the way that power worked as a productive force to delimit and conceptualize core features of modern self-production. There is an obvious connection here between the proliferation of discourses around the production of the self, the multiple locations in which self work is done (from prisons and schools to shopping malls, gyms, and spas), and the need for specific micro-case studies of how power works as a distributed and differentiated rather than a centralized phenomenon. This interest in biopower moved in two directions: (1) toward the constitution and regulation of populations (governmentality) and, simultaneously, (2) toward the intimate self-governance. His interest in biopolitics shifted from the institutional regulation of deviance toward the discursive production of desire and what he called the care of the self. This marked a more fundamental shift inward as Foucault investigated the terrain of normalized human conduct and the persistent resistance that shapes and reshapes discourse around sexuality, intimacy, and self-understanding. The focus, then, is on the more contemporary preoccupation with the production of the body as an object of desire, experience, and cultivation. This shift parallels the transition
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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 the importance of information, the mass media, network society, and other contemporary change forces placed under the rubric of the knowledge society. This general approach to social analysis has been enormously influential in recent decades in a variety of spaces. For instance, Mark Poster analyzed the way that Foucault's work can support understandings of emerging information technologies and the way in which knowledge is a principal instrument of power. Another example is found in the work of urban sociologist Manuel Castells, who has developed a detailed and profound analysis of the way that self-production and identity questions have come to assume a critical importance in contemporary societies.

Critical Summary
In the end, Foucault saw no clear escape from the inevitable play of forces and ideas that 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 nature or 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 social mechanism was revolutionary, and it marked an important turning point in historical studies toward microanalysis and social histories of the details of everyday life and mundane institutional practices. Fundamentally, the body is the location of power, and Foucault's concept of the docile body represents one of the first and most influential ways of theorizing the ways in which biopower operates. An important methodological implication of Foucault's work as well as the work of other poststructural theorists is the idea that structural explanations of social institutions and processes are inherently oppressive. Because of this attention to microsituations we see the way that power operates, not as a structural foreclosure but rather as a dynamic process of dominant strategy and resistance tactics. In this sense, Foucault's own broadly conceived case studies of prisons, asylums, and hospitals demonstrate how the docile body is never perfectly produced. As he pointed out in an interview in which he used the extreme example of the Nazi concentration camps, resistance is always present and always possible, even in the most oppressive social conditions.
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Michael Corbett http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412957397.n119 See also Agency Deconstruction Discourse Analysis Governmentality Poststructuralism Power/Knowledge

Further Readings Castells, M. (2004). The information age: Economy, society and culture: Vol. 2. The power 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: Harcourt Brace. 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 of Foucault 19541984 . 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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Encyclopedia of Case Study Research: Docile Bodies