Pastoral Power, Liberal Feminism, and the Cosmetic Surgical Body

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Chapter 3: Foucault, Pastoral Power, and ‘Invisible Violence’

Detailed techniques were elaborated for us in seminaries and monasteries, techniques of discursive renditions of daily life, of self – examination, confession, direction of conscience and regulation of the relationship between director and directed. It was this technology which it was sought to inject into society as a whole and it is true that the move was directed from the top downwards.
‐Michel Foucault, qtd. in “The Confession of the Flesh,” 1977
Kristeva’s theory does not elaborate on normalization processes or mechanisms as such nor does she underscore the shaping of the “false self” (Kristeva 1997 [1993]) in the context of individualization techniques that oppress women’s bodies and restrict their voices with emphasis on the developing cosmetic surgical industry. Foucault, however, provides an elaborate means to analyze normalization practices with emphasis on the overwhelming, confining, and violent impact on the body, the conscience, and the voice.
Therefore, I adopt Michel Foucault’s theory on subjection and extend his theory on pastoral power to trace the impact of normalization from its emergence as a new form, according to Foucault, in the eighteenth century through to its culminating impact in the twenty‐first century (Foucault 1990 [1978], 1995 [1975], 2002 [1982]) – the cosmetic surgical industry and its ageist discourses that confine women’s bodies. The aim of this tracing of pastoral power is to both elaborate on and emphasize the underlying workings of power, of subjection, in the context of a mode of oppression that has evolved and developed from the historical past. In Intimate Revolt Kristeva proposes a revolt as a displacement of the past (Kristeva 2002: 5). Although she emphasizes revolt in an intimate and personal context and predominantly in relation to a re‐ activation of semiotic drives, she does briefly discuss revolt in a social context. In her introduction, she argues that revolt has been employed in the context of adopting new ideologies and an “abandonment of retrospective questioning” that results in a mode of nihilism rather than transformation (Kristeva 2002: 6). As a response then to Kristeva’s proposal in the context of a displacement of the past, I turn to Foucault’s theory. Furthermore, by discussing his work, I highlight the overwhelming impact of subjection, thereby underscoring the difficulty in establishing one’s own voice in the context of its violence with emphasis on its culminating impact in the twenty‐first century.
Before continuing with this chapter, I outline Foucault’s theory on pastoral power.
Although Foucault does not elaborate on pastoral power, he does briefly discuss pastoral power in a selection of his works. In “The Subject and Power,” he claims that pastoral power is a “new form of power” that presents a “tricky combination” of individualization techniques and totalization procedures. Its adaptability is evident in that it combines “old power technique which originated in Christian institutions” with new modes of political oppression (Foucault 2000 [1982]: 332). Of further relevance in relation to my argument is his emphasis on pastoral power as finding expression in a variety of institutions (Foucault 2000 [1982]: 332‐333), which promotes an analysis of pastoral power in the context of contemporary consumer society that follows in Chapter 4. In addition, he claims that pastoral power is capable of finding innovative ways to confine the body and subject the normalized self. He writes, “It is certain that the mechanisms of subjection cannot be studied outside their relation to the mechanisms of exploitation and domination. However, they do not merely constitute the ‘terminal’ of more fundamental mechanisms.” They “entertain complex and circular relations with other forms” (Foucault 2000 [1982]: 332). Foucault clearly indicates that the emergence of this new form of pastoral power took place in the eighteenth century (Foucault 2000 [1982]: 334).
This chapter provides the framework for Chapter 4, where I use Foucault’s theory to analyze and elaborate on normalization’s shaping of the cosmetic surgical body. In this chapter, I trace Foucault’s argument in relation to individualization processes and practices with emphasis on a form or strain of subjection that emerged in the late 1700s, which as Foucault suggests in Discipline and Punish, is due to the emergence of a new model for the normalization of the subject (Foucault 1995 [1975]). I then underscore the impact of this subjection in the century that follows, the late 1800s, in the context of Victorian women and Foucault’s theory in The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1990 [1978]). This is followed by demonstrating its connection to the emerging consumer culture at the turn of the 1900s. In addition, I discuss Foucault’s proposal on a new subjectivity and the act of confession. I conclude this chapter by demonstrating a connection between pastoral power, consumer culture and the emergence of female empowerment.

Section I: Confinement, Subjection, and Psychic Idealization

In “The Subject and Power” Foucault writes:
An important phenomenon took place around the eighteenth century – it was a new distribution, a new organization of this kind of individualizing power. I don’t think that we should consider the « modern state » as an entity which was developed above individuals, ignoring what they are and even their very existence, but, on the contrary, as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form and submitted to a set of very specific patterns. In a way, we can see the state as a modern matrix of individualization or a new form of pastoral power.
(Foucault 2000 [1982]: 334)
In the above quoted passage, Foucault suggests that a new form of pastoral power emerged in the eighteenth century that was a new form of individualizing techniques; and that it oppressed individuals in a sophisticated manner by promoting a new form of individuality in the context of the normalized self. However, Foucault does not elaborate on his argument in relation to pastoral power in the context of its adaptability in the confinement of the normalized self, its subjection of the subject through this new form of individuality. In Discipline and Punish, however, Foucault presents a comprehensive analysis on what he refers to as a “new type of control” (Foucault 1995 [1975]: 142) that would result in a most efficient and widespread means to govern subjects – a less visible disciplinary process suggestive of the “internalization” of subjection promoted by the mass scale introduction of confinement. According to Foucault, the Indret factory, 1777, introduced the monastic cell: “The factory was explicitly compared with the monastery, the fortress, a walled town” (Foucault 1995 [1975]: 142). He writes:
Reconstructing Voice
Discipline organizes an analytical space. And there too, it encountered an old architectural and religious method: the monastic cell. Even if the compartments it assigns becomes purely ideal, the disciplinary space is always, basically, cellular. Solitude was necessary to both body and soul, according to a certain asceticism; they must, at certain moments at least, confront temptation and perhaps the severity of God alone …
This disciplinary model extended to hospitals, the military and the navy, as in Rochefort, France, with the confinement of contagious patients where gradually an administrative and political space was articulated upon a therapeutic space that tended to individualize bodies … Out of discipline, a medically useful space was born.
(Foucault 1995 [1975]: 143‐144)
In 1787, Benjamin Rush prompted a shift towards a less visible form of control in the disciplining of criminals in an address to the Society for Promoting Political Enquiries. He remarks, “I can only hope that the time is not far away when gallows, pillory, scaffold, flogging and wheel will, in the history of punishment, be regarded as the marks of the barbarity of the centuries and of countries and as proofs of the feeble influence of reason and religion over the human mind” (Rush qtd in Foucault 1995 [1975]: 10). Foucault suggests that Rush and his supporters promoted the idea that punishing the body through torture or physical pain was an inadequate means to discipline the subject as it merely impacted the body without “curing” the subject, without reforming the mind. In addition, “a technique of improvement represses, in the penalty, the strict expiation of evil‐doing, and relieves the magistrates of the demeaning task of punishing” (Foucault 1995 [1975]: 10).

Chapter 1: Introduction
Thesis Statement
Outline of the Argument
Overview of the Argument
Background to the Problem
Methodology
1. A Discussion of the Case Study of Cosmetic Surgery
2. A Critical Interrogation and Articulation of Various Related Theories
3. An Analysis of Krog’s Poetry
Theoretical Framework and Review of the Literature
Plato
Hegel
Psychoanalytic Theory
Structuralism and Psychoanalytic Theory
Psychodynamic Theory
Post‐structuralism and Psychoanalytic Theory
Social Constructionism
Feminist Theory
Recent Research
Overview of the Chapters .
Chapter 2: An Elaboration of the Theoretical Framework
Chapter 3: Foucault, Pastoral Power, and ‘Invisible Violence’
Chapter 4: Pastoral Power, Liberal Feminism, and the Cosmetic Surgical Body
Chapter 5: Butler, the Shaping of the Conscience, and an “Originary Loss”
Chapter 6: Loss, Butler’s “Passionate Attachment,” and an “Originary attachment”
Chapter 7: Lacan’s Pre‐Mirror Stage Affects and Kristeva’s Semiotic Drives
Chapter 8: Antjie Krog and a Reconstruction of an Authentic Feminist Voice
Chapter 9: Krog, Subversion, and Pastoral Power
Chapter 10: Conclusion
Diagram 1: A Depiction of the Psychic Position of the “I” and the Inaugural Moment
Chapter 2: An Elaboration of the Theoretical Framework 
Reconstructing Voice
Outline of this chapter
Section I: The Paternal Realm, the Super‐Ego, and the Speaking Subject
Section II: The Mirror Stage and the “Self”
Section III: The Ego‐Ideal and Ideal Image
Section IV: The Maternal Image as an “Originary Ideal”
Section V: The “forgotten” Maternal Realm that Exceeds the Paternal Realm
Chapter 3: Foucault, Pastoral Power, and ‘Invisible Violence’ .
Section I: Confinement, Subjection, and Psychic Idealization
Section II: The Act of Confession and the New Subjectivity
Section III: Pastoral Power, Consumer Culture and the Emergence of Female Empowerment
Chapter 4: Pastoral Power, Liberal Feminism, and the Cosmetic Surgical Body 
Section I: Liberal Feminist Ideals, Empowerment and Pastoral Power
Section II: Advertisements, Confinement and the Ego‐Ideal
Section III: The “Authentic Self,” Confession and the Cosmetic Surgical Body
Section IV: The Cosmetic Surgical Body, Confession, a Return to The Mirror Stage, and an “Originary Ideal.”
Chapter 5: Butler, the Shaping of the Conscience, and an “Originary loss” 
Section I: The Confinement of the Subject – No ‘Outside’ of Subjection and the Present
Section II: Emancipation Equals Self‐Enslavement
Section III: Morality and the Conscience
Section IV: Guilt and the Origins of the Conscience
Section V: Conclusion: Loss and an “Originary Attachment”
Chapter 6: Loss, Butler’s “Passionate Attachment,” and an “Originary Attachment” 
Section I: Butler’s Originary Loss, Althusser’s Interpellation, and a Basis for an Authentic Feminist
Voice
Section II: An Outline of Butler’s “Passionate Attachment” to Subjection at the Infant Stage
Section III: A Passionate Attachment to the Presence of Subjection
Section IV: Suttie, the Presence of Love and an “Originary Attachment”
Section V: Denial, Klein, an “Originary Attachment,” and an “Originary Ideal”
Section VI: Love, Hate, and Myth
Chapter 7: Lacan’s Pre‐Mirror Stage Affects and Kristeva’s Semiotic Drives
Section I: Lacan’s Pre‐Mirror Stage Affects
Section II: The Chora, an Originary Attachment, and the Thetic
Reconstructing Voice 6
Section III: Kristeva’s Semiotic Drives and a Theoretical Basis for an Authentic Feminist Voice
Section IV: A “Desire to Survive” and a “Drive to Survive”
Section V: The Inaugural Moment, Choice, and an “Originary Desire”
Section VI: Writing and a Reconnection to Semiotic Drives
Chapter 8: Antjie Krog and a Reconstruction of an Authentic Feminist Voice
Section I: Krog’s Confrontation with the Thetic Boundary/Border in “writing ode”
Section II: Semanalysis part I – Disturbance from the Semantic/Formalist Layer of “writing ode”
Section III: Semanalysis part II – Extending Disturbance; Hyperkinesis
Section IV: Semanalysis part III – A Phonetic Layer in “writing ode”
Section V: Semanalysis part IV – Displacement in “writing ode”
Section VI: Semanalysis part V – Bold Colour
Section VII: Krog, a Challenge to Kristeva, Semanalysis, and Male Poets
Section VIII: The Maternal and Love in Krog’s “ode vir ‘n ander lewe” and “letter‐poem lullaby for
Ntombizana Atoo”
Section IX: Revolt in “colonialism of a special kind,” “farewell” and “Every day I treat you as if you are mine”
Section X: Reclaiming the Metaphor in “Four seasonal observations of Table Mountain”
Diagram 2: A Depiction of Semanalysis, The Paragrammatic Network, and the Principle of Negativity
Chapter 9: Krog, Pastoral Power, and Revolt
Section I: Krog, Viljoen, and a Counter Discourse to the Cosmetic Surgical Industry
Section II: Establishing Contradiction or Paradox as Support for Polyvocality
Section III: Using Ideology to ‘Make Visible’ in “leave me a lonely began” .
Part 1. Krog uses repetition to establish a framework
Part 2. A use of tension to initiate the “paradoxical woman”
Part 3. The Gaze and ‘Lack of’ the Gaze to Extend Tension in the Poetic text
Part 4. The semic level contracts the paragram
Section IV: Krog and the Act of Confession
Section V: Krog, Revolt, and the Principle of Negativity
Section VI: Aggressive Revolt, Male Poets, and Krog’s Feminist Voice
Chapter 10: Conclusion 
Limitations of My Thesis
Contributions to the Fields
Kristevean Theory
Reconstructing Voice 7
Poetics
Feminist Theory
Foucauldian Theory
Psychoanalytic Theory
Possible Future Research
Bibliography
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A return to Kristeva: reconstructing female voice in contemporary consumer society