Theory Quote Of The Day: Foucault

Stumbling around in the post-vacation haze, I spent today alternately sending pleasant interview-request emails and poking through my well-worn copy of The Foucault Reader. I rather love reading theory, but I get sad that I have no one to talk it through with, the nature of the scholarly endeavor (when not in the classroom) being what it is.

Do other folks like reading/talking about theory/philosophy/etc? If so, I may occasionally post evocative lines from what I'm working through, for discussion.

Today's line of the day was:

But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs....[T]he body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relationship of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labor power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection....[T]he body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body." (from Discipline and Punish; on page 173 of The Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow)

My thought, when reading it (and this should tip my hand with what I'm working on at the moment) is this: well, that's a masculinist way of thinking about it. Because it's not only productive value that bodies are used for, but reproductive value. And not just its reproductive value in the sense of producing children, but its value in reproducing society, culture, ethnicity, and meaning. Our bodies are disciplined and constrained by power because it is through our bodies--in their appearances, consumption, performances.

(Haven't had a chance to read Foucault? Foucault.info has a reasonable collection of his texts, in English and French, online. I'm partial to Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations, myself.)