The fluidity of the military: a post-structural approach to institutions, power and bodies

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The fluidity of the military a post-structural
approach to institutions, power and bodies

• Pamela Moss
• Studies in Policy Practice
• and
• Michael J. Prince
• Lansdowne Professor of Social Policy
• April 9, 2010

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Our research project

• SSHRC study on weary warriors
• Psychologically wounded soldiers during combat
• A triad of discourses psychiatry, the military,
  and masculinity
• Time frame 19th century to early 21st century
• Theoretical entrée post-structural and feminist
• Method documentary-historical
• Sources medical and military journals, novels,
  autobiographies, diaries, social science
  literature, hospital records, policy papers,
  popular movie genre, unpublished theses

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Some of our research questions

• How do material bodies and bodily discourses of
  individual lives constitute the subjectivity of
  weary warriors?
• How is illness taken up by different
  configurations of power/knowledge over time?
• How are distinctions between the well soldier and
  the ill soldier established and enacted?
• How do soldiers find support institutionally
  within and outside the military as well as
  collectively as veterans with ill bodies?

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Our focus today

• How does a post-structural approach look at the
  military?
• What did Foucault say about the military and
  soldiers?
• What in Foucaults work is useful for our
  research project and questions?
• What may be problematic in his work for our
  purposes?
• In sum, how might we bring into play Foucault?

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A post-structural approach to military
institutions

• Moving off an institutional-centric view
• Questioning the conventional image of militaries
  as stable, closed and formal
• Challenging the concept of soldiers as docile
  bodies
• Looking for fluid identities, practices and
  relationships associated with domains of
  knowledge

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Foucault on militaries

• Awesome forces of the sovereign
• Large destructive mechanisms
• Precise systems of command
• Disciplinary institutions
• A technique and a body of knowledge
• The intermediary between war and civil society

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Foucault on soldiers and subjectivity

• Militaries invest in bodies, mark them, train and
  command them
• Discipline as composing forces to obtain an
  efficient machine
• Soldiers as docile bodies the object and
  target of power manipulated by
  selection/screening, indoctrination and training,
  authority practices

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Problems with Foucault

• Never saw the military as an apparatus in and of
  itself with people and processes
• Heavy emphasis on official practices and systems
  of discipline
• Bodies produced are static and monolithic
• Little room for agency or resistance by soldiers
  who are docile bodies
• Distinction between the body and soul/psyche
  underdeveloped and not applied to military
  contexts

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Possibilities with Foucault

• Foucault also wrote of people as living, thinking
  beings (suggestive of soldiers as active,
  interpretive subjects)
• Normalization as a process of creating and
  applying knowledge organized around certain
  standards and types (human sciences)
• Subjugated knowledge the silent, the overlooked,
  below the surface
• Consider wider historical processes within which
  military institutions and practices actually
  operate

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Fluidity a post-structural image

1. Lacking definite shape not the usual image of a
   military
2. Smooth, nimble, graceful in a ceremonial and
   spectacle sense, and in covert and strategic
   operations
3. Adaptable, flexible in tension with command and
   control system, although recognized in part in
   notion of tactics and contingency plans
4. Unstable, randomness the unspoken and ignored
   meaning as it applies to the military the weary
   warriors

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Next steps in our project

• We plan to explore and examine
• Diagnosis as a disciplining process via
  categorization of bodily sensations
• Treatment as the regulation of bodies by
  attempting the return to normal
• Militarization and psychiatrization as processes
  that produce soldiers bodies as ill
• Life after the military

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Thank you

• Questions?
• Comments?
• Suggestions?