Opening Pandora's Box

Since the latter part of the twentieth century,the body has been the focus of increaseing attention in a wide range of disciplines and media. The emergence of the problem of the body and its growing urgency have come about through the unfolding of a political struggle. In fact nothing is more material, physical, corporal than the exercise of power. What mode of investment of the body is necessary and adequate for the functioning of a capitalist society like ours? Hence the formidable disciplinary regimes in the schools, hospitals, barracks, factories, cities, lodgings, families. And then, it began to be realised that such a cumbersome form of power was no longer as indispensable as had been thought and that industrial societies could content themselves with a much looser form of power over the body.According to Michel Foucault ,the operations of power of inseparable form the daynamics of the gaze. The concept of the gaze describes a form of power associated with the eye and with the sense of sight. The gaze probes and masters. The power of the gaze is implicitly acknowledged by the injunction not to stare at others, it t turn against itself is encapsulated. It penetrates and objectifies the body. Central to the modern setup is the structure of the Panoptiocon,where each inmate is subjected to an unrelenting gazewithout being able to see his observe. The body is subjected to a merely external analysis of its surfaces,the body's inner functionings become availabe to the scientific gaze.Modern societies rely on surveillance rather than spectacle. No longer anchored to traditional notions of community and identity ,and gives rise to modern discipling practices centred on a technology of the body that makes people useful and docile by subjecting them to visual control. As always with relations of power, one is faced with complex phenomena which don't obey the Hegelian form os the dialectic. Mastery and awareness of one's own body can be acquired only through the effect of an investment of power in the body: gymnastics, exercises, muscle-building, nudism, glorification of the body beautiful. All of this belongs to the pathway leading to the desire of one's own body, by way of the insistent, persistent, meticulous work of power on the bodies of children or soldiers, the healthy bodies. But once power produces this effect, there inevitably emerge the responding claims and affirmations, those of one's own body against power, of health against the economic system, of pleasure against the moral norms of sexuality, marriage, decency. Suddenly, what had made power strong becomes used to attack it. Power, after investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed to a counter-attack in that same body. But the impression that power weakens and vacillates here is in fact mistaken; power can retreat here, re-organise its forces, invest itself elsewhere and so the battle continues.Then is was discovered that control of sexuality could be attenuated and given new forms.Lacan tells us, that the human child is born prematurely. The fact that human beings, unlike animals, recognize themselves in the reflected images of their bodies forms .Its experience, based on its uncoordinated motor skills, is of a world in bits and pieces. Born with senseless senses, unorganized organs, and disjointed joints, the child makes no delineation between inside and outside, between self and (m)other. We imagine the "I" formed in the mirror stage as a kind of internal fortification against the forces of the id, on the one hand, and, on the other, as the defensive suit of armor in which the subject ventures into the world, we can understand what Lacan means by the "inertia" that is characteristic of this 'I'.Before one poses the question of ideology, it wouldn't be more materialist to study first the question of the body and the effects of power on it. The great fantasy is the idea of a social body constituted by the universality of wills. Now the phenomenon of the social body is the effect not of a consensus but of the materiality of power operating on the very...