Structured Visions

We’re still on Michel Foucault’s book, Discipline and Punish: what kinds of punitive techniques are needed to keep in place different social structures? I use the Penelope Soto story to illustrate Foucault’s comments about punishment under a feudal system. And reflections on Wal-Mart and shoplifting give us insights about punishment under a capitalist system. The image we’re working with is of a social body that bullies human bodies in order to keep threats at bay. In a feudal system, a big threat is the loss of authority. In a capitalist system, the biggest threat is the loss of money and/or exchangeable goods.

Read my forthcoming book with Palgrave to learn more about what I’ve taken from Discipline and Punish: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.

Download Episode 41: Discipline and Punish, part 2.

The first few pages of Michel Foucault’s book, Discipline and Punish, describe (in gory detail) a ritual execution from pre-Revolutionary France. I tend to be very squeamish about these things, so it’s a miracle I kept reading. Somehow I did, and in this episode I describe what it is in this book that inspires me. It’s not just that Foucault uses what has become my favourite metaphor – the image of social structure as a body – but also that he makes it possible to conceive of the social body as in relationship with human bodies. This image has been a springboard for my own ideas – a jumping off place where I can start imagining new social structures – more open, inviting, welcoming ones.

That said, there’s an important difference between Foucault’s views and mine. Foucault’s image of the social body shows it as antagonistic toward the human body. The social body is always the bully, scaring the lights out of the human body in the same way that Tiffany Wood terrified me when I was five. In pre-Revolutionary France, for instance, the social body took the form of the reigning monarch, and it displayed its power over human bodies through ritual torture and execution.

Luckily, Tiffany never went to those kinds of extremes.

It’s hard to disagree with the idea that the social body bullies the human body. If you’ve ever felt guilty about something you should be doing, you have a good idea of one way that type of bullying operates – it’s an example of what Foucault calls ‘disciplinary techniques’ of power.

However, I have a new way of thinking about the relationship between the social body and the human body. I propose that the human body has the power to transform the social body. Yes, the social body might understand the human body as a threat. But the human body only need be a threat if the social body is averse to transformation. My idea it that if the social body were ready to change, the human body has the power to transform it.

Anybody wanna play with that idea for a while?

Read my forthcoming book with Palgrave to learn more about what I’ve taken from Discipline and Punish: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.

Download Episode 40: Discipline and Punish, part 1.

Tumble dryers, the musical beat, computers, bodies, black holes, hairy black holes, information, desire, French laundromats, homeless soothsayers and Maya Angelou. Welcoming, adapting, embodied social structures. What more could you want from a Structured Visions podcast?

Download Episode 39: The path of least relevance

Picture the scene: my nephew, Lane, at four years old, at Christmas, playing with his new racetrack, shouting ‘You’re outta the game!’ to anyone whose car comes off the track. Now let’s imagine that Lane is the personification of a social structure. He is, in fact, doing what social structures seem to do – classifying (by setting up a binary opposition between in the game and out of the game) and inclusion/exclusion (by determining which constituents are in and which are out).

Now let’s take this personification and turn it into metaphor. First let’s use the metaphor I’ve been drawing upon in several past episodes: social structure as computer programme. The computer programme that is my nephew is setting up the IF-THEN statements that serve as parameters for inclusion: to be in the game, a constituent must (a) play by certain rules and (b) achieve certain demonstrable outcomes. Failure to fit within these criteria results in expulsion from the game. Nothing personal. (Or, as my nephew would say, ‘No offense’.)

But I promised that for this week’s podcast I’d try out a new metaphor. So this time let’s not see Lane, the Social Structure, as a computer, but as a squirming, four-year-old body. Here are some of the ways bodies aren’t like computer programmes:

I could go on, but Social Structure – this time personified as my latte-drinking buddy, no longer as my nephew, tells me it’s not particularly comfortable with the new metaphor. It doesn’t want to be a smelly, farting, yawning  body. It wants to keep on being those cool characters from The Matrix.

But seeing social structure as a body has its benefits, as I try to explain through the grammatical analysis of an another account of exclusion, shown in the transcript below. Here Chrissy’s explaining the difference between inexperienced and experienced field hockey players:

Close attention to how the selves are construed in this transcript – particularly the two different roles played by the generic second-person (you) – shows social structure becoming embodied. In fact, it seems to take on a body that is remarkably similar in shape to Foucault’s Panopticon.

My analysis of this extract comes from my forthcoming book with Palgrave: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.

Download Episode 38: You’re outta the game!

I’m still dreaming, in this episode, of a society in which unique selves are possible. Such a dream goes beyond ideas about social inclusion. Inclusion is about fitting in to a pre-existing system – with all the rules and prescriptions such a system holds. My vision is of a social structure that welcomes uniqueness, indeed, one that expects uniqueness, that allows itself to be transformed by each expression of a unique self.

Such a vision makes me dubious about all the imagery that’s been showing up in these podcasts. Comparing social structure to computer codes and choose-your-own-adventure novels makes it seem like the selves society constructs are all decided in advance, which furthers the idea of social structure as a closed system.

I also start to become a bit suspicious of the personified Society I keep talking to. Despite its claims to the contrary, I’m certain Society is perfectly capable of making space for unique selves. If I’m going to keep this dialogue going, I’m going to have to be more cunning in my cross-examination. I draw inspiration from – where else? – Reese Witherspoon’s performance  in the court scene of Legally Blonde. Like Witherspoon’s character, Elle, I’m going to have to catch Society in the act of making space for a unique self, even when making space takes the form of an attempt at exclusion.

I get my chance through an analysis of a conversation between three first-year university students, teammates on a field hockey team. Read the transcript and see if you notice anything about the selves that show up in the grammar of Sammy’s story:

Now have a look at the clauses of the narrative that are only Sammy’s:

Did you notice the shifts in Sammy’s story between the impersonal selves (the generic second person in clause 5, the impersonal dummy subject in clause 6), and the individual selves (such as the first-person singular and the third-person female singular in clauses 3 and 10)? What I find so interesting here is that the unique, individual selves show up – because they have to – whenever the body comes into the picture. It’s not possible, in other words, to throw sand into an impersonal, non-individualised face. It’s also pretty hard to imagine impersonal, non-individualised sandy teeth.

When unique selves show up, they’re represented as embodied.

It’s no good, then, thinking of social structure in terms of something disembodied, like computer code. We need a new metaphor for social structure. Maybe by next podcast we’ll have one.

My analysis of this extract comes from my forthcoming book with Palgrave: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.

Download Episode 37: Sand in my teeth