ABSTRACT
This chapter explores three paradoxes of choice that appropriates Foucault's analysis of the diffusion of power in order to understand forms of power that are potentially more personally invasive than are more obvious, publicly identifiable aspects of power. 'Docile Bodies' in Discipline and Punish, Foucault highlights three features of what he calls disciplinary power: The scale of the control, in disciplinary power the body is treated individually and in a coercive way because the body itself is the active and hence apparently free body that is being controlled through movements, gestures, attitudes, and degrees of rapidity; The object of the control, which involves meticulous control over the efficiency of movements and forces; The modality of the control, which involves constant, uninterrupted coercion. The chapter discusses two very different sorts of responses that strike the author as having certain plausibility: the response of refusal and the response of appropriation that both are regarded as utopian in nature.
