Body reflects racist exclusivity
Nur Mursidi, Contributor, Jakarta
The human body in its various forms is indeed a mere mass of flesh and bones. But when the body is combined with the spirit, the existence of man as an individual is promptly associated with diverse situations.
As indicated by Michel Foucault (1926-1984), a renowned French philosopher of the 20th century, the body is not just an anatomy of cellular tissues containing infinite splendor and (sexual) ecstasy, but in Europe's history of civilization it is also linked to the advancement of certain engineering techniques inseparable from political, economic and medical power, which later brought about European racism.
Foucault's thoughts can, in fact, be traced to his two books, The Discipline and Punishment and The History of Sexuality, Volume I.
However, Foucault's elaboration of the shaping of Europe's middle-class individuals by means of new clinical narration or discourse in the context of history of prison and sexuality in these books is a bit knotty.
Seno Joko Suyono, a journalist from Tempo magazine and ex- student of philosophy at the Yogyakarta-based Gadjah Mada University, attempts to examine Foucault's concept on the process of individualization of the European middle-class bourgeoisie and show the reader that Europe's individuals as they are today have the background of substantial health policy control in Europe taking place at the end of the 18th century.
As Seno points out in his book, Foucault, in revealing the core of his thoughts, has an interesting technique to approach a subject. By blending Baudelaire's irony with Nietzsche's methodology (genealogy), Foucault explores the fields of history buried by power and untouched by social sciences within the framework of a blood-related approach to modernity.
Foucault's inquiry obviously was not meant to unveil past events in history, but rather to analyze power on the plane where the discourse of truth or the regime of knowledge produced by power had a major role in shaping individuals. In Seno's survey, Foucault's individualization analysis has its origin in the clinical narration that led to advancement in European civilization. On the other hand, Foucault also assumes that through the body, Europe's middle-class individualization can be approached.
Seno follows Foucault's unique analysis along with his thoughts about a historical reality that Europe's middle-class identity turns out to have been formed or confirmed through a process of the removal of social classes stigmatized as sufferers of leprosy. Moreover, in the 18th century, large-scale operations were launched to gather destitute people, lunatics, criminals and the like to implement a health policy decree out of epidemic fear, as a political and economic ideal to create a new and sterile European society.
As far as the health policy implementation assumed a dimension that determined the formation of the modern European individual body, Seno, based on Foucault's view, sees the emergence of two poles of global engineering of the human body. The first is regarded as a decisive factor for the shaping of external expression, physical movement and human kinetic force of modern Europe.
Foucault's research on prison history revealed how clinical narration pervaded daily punitive methods with the epistemological matrix of the science of anatomy and the new doctor-patient relationship finally constructed the human body's external expression. With the prison system, in which discipline constitutes a derivative of the interest in anatomical control, a new clinical discourse later caused European individuals to possess the attitude of obedience and uniformity.
The second pole, according to Seno, formed the internal expression of Europe's modern human body as a result of sexual engineering early in the 19th century. Foucault's study of sexuality uncovered this engineering with population control as a clinical discourse that produced some racist attitudes among European individuals. Europe's racism is for Seno none other than a bio-political implication.
The two poles of power construction in the process of Europe's individual formation as a technological series of clinical narration control were at first operating separately. But in the 19th century they were undoubtedly unified into power over life or a whole individual engineering unit.
The writer is a philosophy student of the Sunan Kalijaga Institute of Islamic Studies (IAIN), Yogyakarta, and the best reviewer of Yogya's IAIN, 2002