BITSG539

Sushant Kishore

Dated: November 15, 2014

Agenda 10: Michel Foucaults Docile Bodies

By the late eighteenth century, the soldier has become something that
can be made . . . a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of
the body, mastering it. (Foucault 135)

Foucault describes the changes that the military has gone through from seventeenth to eighteenth
century. While in the seventeenth century soldiers had to be identified by careful observation of
skills attitudes and strength, the martial system discovered a new way of creating a soldier out of
any one. A science of discipline, through which any body could be made useful, productive and
docile, was discovered. Discipline was a mechanism of power which regulates the
behavior of individuals in the social body without the use of violence as in ancient
regime. This was done by regulating the organization of space (distribution), of time
(timetables), the body's activity and behavior (gesture, posture and movement) and
the synchronization of the body as a component in the larger system. It was
enforced with the aid of complex systems of surveillance. He also uses the term
'disciplinary society', discussing its history and the origins and disciplinary
institutions such as prisons, hospitals, asylums, schools and army barracks. This

mechanism was not just restricted to the army and slowly infiltrated other social and political
sections.
The need, discipline must be made national(quoted in Foucault 169), to establish a simple and
smooth state administration and the tactics of discipline were incorporated in military, schools,
hospitals and industries. Foucault uses the military as an example to what was going on in the
society as a whole and how a pervasive technology of discipline was evolving everywhere.
.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. Docile Bodies. Discipline and Punish. London: Penguin, 1991.
Print.