Education moved from master/apprentice to “a learning machine, but also a machine for supervising, hierarchizing, rewarding” (147).
Foucault discusses how discipline makes docile bodies; this discipline exists in institutions ranging from the military to schools. Docility “joins the analysable body to the manipulatable body. A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved” (136). Docility increases the aptitude of the body while simultaneously increasing the domination over the body (138). The discipline associates the body with four characteristics: “it is cellular (by the play of spatial distribution), it is organic (by the coding of activities), it is genetic (by the accumulation of times), it is combinatory (by the composition of forces)” (167). Discipline encloses and partition bodies; typically, the space is “divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed” (143). Each individualized space becomes functional as each body is given a specific task, and this means the body is easily supervised and assessed. This also means that each body is interchangeable within the space/task (i.e. the specific body is unimportant). Discipline assigns the body to complete specific actions at specific times (each action takes precisely a given amount of time), meaning that gestures are used to their utmost efficiency. The day, then, is broken into specific segments of time (down to the minute or second) and each segment is given an action to be completed. In terms of education, discipline ranks bodies, deciding the kinds of knowledge that it has and places the body in a particular rank. Each chunk of knowledge is set linearly, and bodies progress through the chunks, given examinations at the completion of each chunk. Finally, each body must know its command given only a signal: “This carefully measured combination of forces requires a precise system of command. All the activity of the disciplined individual must be punctuated and sustained by injunctions whose efficacy rests on brevity and clarity; the order does not need to be explained or formulated; it must trigger off the required behaviour and that is enough” (166).
Education moved from master/apprentice to “a learning machine, but also a machine for supervising, hierarchizing, rewarding” (147).
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Foucault argues, "Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising the whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, target." In this piece, Foucault discusses the discipline of the panopticon. The panopticon works in all institutions, such as prison, madhouse and school building. It is "a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men." In the panopticon, each watched actor is separated from others: "The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately." He is able to be seen but cannot see those who watch him. This means that the watched actor will discipline himself because he is always under the threat of being watched (whether he actually is at that exact moment or not). This also means that "it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour." The observer is implicated in this surveillance too because he can be observed along with his operation.
More, the mechanism "automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes...Consequently, it matters not who exercises power...Similarly, it does not matter what motive animates him." This method of discipline optimizes its effects while minimizing costs. Haraway argues for a new understanding of (scientific) objectivity based on a feminist understand of situated knowledges. She does this through the metaphor of vision: “Vision can be good for avoiding binary oppositions. I would like to insistent on the embodied nature of all vision and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere” (581). The all-seeing gaze suggests that one does not have to take responsibility for one’s perspective; embodied vision, on the other hand, encourages accountability. Feminist objective, then, “is about limited location and situated knowledge;” it allows us to “elaborate specificity and difference and the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from another’s point of view” (583). Situated knowledges also allow us to make connections among different points of view and acknowledge that all views are partial (because all knowledge comes from a particular position). Because of this, we are able to be more critical about ours and others points of view. Furthermore, “[s]ituated knoweldges are about communities, not about isolated individuals…[They are] the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing infinite embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions – of views from somewhere” (590). Finally, they “require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the mater that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and his authorship of ‘objective’ knowledge” (591). Haraway applies this agency to both the world and to bodies.
Dickinson and Maugh extend what can/should be studied in visual rhetoric: “Grocery stores, supermarkets, super-shopping centers, health- food stores, whole-food markets, and co-ops provide more than food, they materialize consumer culture in tidy, colorful packages. Further, they are material and visual sites in which individuals directly negotiate their relations with globalized consumer culture….In this chapter we want to extend the analysis of visual rhetoric from the visual arts of photography, television, film and print to place. Clearly the visual arts fill our vision on a daily basis. At the same time, the daily visuality of our lives consists of that which fills our everyday spaces. … Yet these places are not simply or primarily visual, they are always material and concrete and they are the sites of our embodied realizations of our selves. A well-rounded understanding of visual rhetoric needs to address the embodiment of visual rhetoric” (259-60).
In terms of the postmodern fragmentation of identity, the authors point to a removal of a stable space/place and time as well as the instability of the body. “Within this context of dislocation, postmodern visual rhetoric can be particularly useful as individuals seek to create coherent and comfortable identities” (252). This is accomplished in two possible ways: intertextuality and harkening to the old (supposedly less complicated) time. “Although the two strategies are different, both serve as ways of thinking about locality in both time and space. Both modes draw on traditional forms—the first through pastiche and hybridization, the second through reverential quoting—as a means of creating a sense of ‘place-in-time.’ In so doing, both modes work to create a sense of geo- graphical place by trying to assert a particular or unique sense of belonging in a particular location” (263). The authors use Wild Oaks Market as an example, should that it “responds to the abstractions and discomforts of globalized postmodern consumer culture with a rhetoric of connection that draws on images of locality and nature, and asserts a particular form of community” (259-60). Wild Oaks Market engages visitors through a concept of locality, nature and community, though each of these acknowledges globalization. The point is that shoppers can locate where food is from and where they are. In addition, the Market engages the whole body of the shopper. “As our subjectivities and our bodies are fragmented and dispersed, we desire more than just a vision or a sight of comfort, we desire a site in which our whole bodies might find comfort. Visual rhetoric in space becomes most compelling not simply when the vision is compelling, but when the rhetoric appeals to the intersections among the five senses. The sight of the peach is made more powerful by the smell and touch and taste” (272). |
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