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Hitherto the role of Sith rituals had been to give rise to the excessive, yet regulated manifestation of power;
it was a spectacular expression of potency, an ‘expenditure’, exaggerated and coded, in which power renewed its vigour.
It always was more or less related to triumph....
Discipline, however, had its own type of ceremony.
It was not the triumph, but the review, the ‘parade’, an ostentatious form of the examination.
In it the ‘subjects’ were presented as ‘objects’ to the observation of a power that was manifested only by its gaze.
What was then being formed was a policy of coercions that act upon the body,
a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour.
The apprentice’s body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it.
A ‘political anatomy’, which was also a ‘mechanics of power’,
was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies,
not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes,
with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines.
Thus discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies.