media essay 2
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1 Name: Lv Chen Library card number: 08274363 Tutor: Imogen Robertson Submission Date: 11/12/2009 Course module: CULT 201 Title: „A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved‟ (Foucault 1977:136). Using contemporary media examples, explain Foucault‟s notion of docile bodies.
Introduction The “body” is a unique and significant concept in the Foucault‟s philosophy. Besides, it‟s the basic point and central idea in all of our historical and cultural development (McNay, 1992: 13). Foucault regarded the “body” as an eye to observe our world, and made his philosophy into a new standard which our descendant can not surpass by the “body”. Therefore, in one sense our knowing of the “body” reflects a level of knowing this world as a whole. When discussing the relationship between power and body, Foucault (1977) pointed out that the operation of any of the powers is inseparable from the control and exploitation of bodies. In contemporary consumer society with the condition of material abundance, body is still unable to get rid of the situation of being controlled, dominated and docile. In this essay, I will firstly try to illustrate the relationship between power and body in the eyes of Foucault, that is to say I will directly explain what Foucault (1977:136) said „A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved‟ from the theoretical point of view. Then I will go on to discuss the way in which the consumer society control bodies by combining power control of the consumer society with mass media. Finally I am going to critically analyse the bodies‟ situation of being controlled and docile through two media examples, the manufacturing of body image and false aesthetic needs.
The body, as the object and target of power 2
Based on the content of Foucault‟s study „Discipline and Punish‟ (1977), this section will be followed by an explanation of the relationship between power and body in the eyes of Foucault. „A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved. The celebrated automata, on the other hand, were not only a way of illustrating an organism, they were also political puppets, small-scale models of power.‟ (Foucault, 1977:136) For Foucault, the notion of body was regarded as a category in his studies and given a really special focus. He broke through the traditional sense of body and placed it into the context of power, politics and knowledge for the purpose of reflecting how bodies were controlled, influenced and tamed by them. Here about the prison, Foucault‟s view is quite distinctive and clear:
„It (prison) gives almost total power over the prisoners; it has its internal mechanisms of repression and punishment: a despotic discipline. It carries to their greatest intensity all the procedures to be found in the other disciplinary mechanisms. It must be the most powerful machinery for imposing a new form on the perverted individual‟ (1977:236)
The power makes its effects released to the extreme and gets the bodies completely tamed under its strategy and system. At the same time, by achieving a new kind of revolution, power and bodies reach to a seemingly harmonious state. But for Foucault, he realized that this new revolution of penal justice system will greatly complicate the control of bodies by using the way of diversifying the corporal punishment, and this is just what Foucault called the “infinitesimal power”.
„It was a question not of treating the body, en masse, ‘wholesale’, as if it were an indissociable unity, but of working it ‘retail’, individually; of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of the mechanism itself- movement, gesture, attitude, rapidity: an infinitesimal power over the active body.’ (1977: 137) 3
This kind of power control makes bodies have no place to hide and thereby bodies are always being monitored and controlled in such situation. Besides, this power will penetrate into all levels of society as well as every aspect of people‟s life. According to Foucault (1977: 298), ‘In penal justice, the prison transformed the punitive procedure into a penitentiary technique; the carceral archipelago transported this technique from the penal institution to the entire social body. With several important results.’ Thus,under this legitimate supervision all kinds of people‟s behaviors should be carry out in the disciplines and regulations. Otherwise, it will be the crime.